Some Observations On Cis By Default Identification

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

As the inventor of the word “cis by default” and a person who occasionally checks who’s linking to my blog, I get to see quite a lot of people using the word “cis by default.” My estimate is that about half are using it wrong.

There are two equal and opposite errors. First, many people identify as cis by default when they are in fact gender dysphoric people who don’t want to transition. I certainly understand why gender dysphoric non-transitioning people relate to “there’s no part of their brain that says “I’m a guy!”, they just look around and people are calling them “he” and they go with the flow”, since there is in fact no part of their brain saying “I’m a guy” and they are in fact going with the flow of how other people refer to them. But not having a gender identity is a quite different thing from having a gender identity and choosing to present differently from what your gender identity is. I see people write things like “I really wish I was a woman. It would make me so happy to wake up one day and everyone is calling me ‘she’. It’s so weird to look at myself in the mirror and see a man. Female bodies are just inherently softer and better and more beautiful. I don’t like sex because having a dick disgusts me. I spend hours carefully removing all my facial hair because having a beard makes me want to cry. But I’m worried about facing transphobia and that I wouldn’t be attractive if I transitioned, so I guess I’m cis by default.”

In general, if you can write an entire paragraph about all your emotions about your gender, you are probably not cis by default.

Second, many people identify as cis by default when they are in fact regular cisgender people who are bad at introspection. I suspect this is part of what’s up with the Less Wrong survey finding that half of cis people are cis by default (the other part is that rationalists are pretty genderweird in general). It makes sense that cisgender people, particularly ones with relatively weak gender identities, have a hard time noticing their gender identities: in most cases, cisgender people have a body that is aligned with their gender and are very rarely misgendered, so there’s no reason for the issue to come up.

I also think that people’s ability to notice their gender identity is affected by what community they’re in. For instance, evangelical Christian books are full of passages like this:

Sometime between the dreams of your youth and yesterday, something precious has been lost. And that treasure is your heart, your priceless feminine heart. God has set within you a femininity that is powerful and tender, fierce and alluring. No doubt it has been misunderstood. Surely it has been assaulted. But it is there, your true heart, and it is worth recovering. You are captivating.

And New-Agey books are full of passages like this:

To answer these questions, we need to understand the nature of sexual passion and spiritual openness. Sexual attraction is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles. All natural forces flow between two poles. The North and South Poles of the Earth create a force of magnetism. The positive and negative poles of your electrical outlet or car battery create an electrical flow. In the same way, masculine and feminine poles between people create the flow of sexual feeling. This is sexual polarity.

This force of attraction, which flows between the two different poles of masculine and feminine, is the dynamism that often disappears in modern relationships. If you want real passion, you need a ravisher and a ravishee; otherwise, you just have two buddies who decide to rub genitals in bed.

Each of us, man or woman, possesses both inner masculine and inner feminine qualities. Men can wear earrings, tenderly hug each other, and dance ecstatically in the woods. Women can change the oil in the car, accumulate political and financial power, and box in the ring. Men can take care of their children. Women can fight for their country. We have proven these things. Just about anyone can animate either masculine or feminine energy in any particular moment. (Although they still might have a strong preference to do one or the other, which we will get to in a moment.)

The bottom line of today’s newly emerging 50/50, or “second stage,” relationship is this: If men and women are clinging to a politically correct sameness even in moments of intimacy, then sexual attraction disappears. I don’t mean just the desire for intercourse, but the juice of the entire relationship begins to dry up. The love may still be strong, the friendship may still be strong, but the sexual polarity fades, unless in moments of intimacy one partner is willing to play the masculine pole and one partner is willing to play the feminine. You have to animate the masculine and feminine differences if you want to play in the field of sexual passion.

(After having read The Way Of The Superior Man, I never want to hear complaints about trans people’s autogenderphilia again. At least we don’t claim that sexual attraction is literally impossible unless you’re an autogenderphile.)

There are lots of reasons to object to these passages! For one thing, they assume that everyone has a gender, which is not true: my guess is that a sizeable minority of cis people are cis by default. For another thing, they assume that the way that the author happens to feel gender is the way that every other person in the whole entire world happens to feel gender. If you’re a man who feels deeply affirmed in your masculinity by cherishing and loving your romantic partner and prioritizing him over your work, The Way of the Superior Man doesn’t want to hear from you. If you’re a woman who finds that being fought over by men makes you feel awkward and uncomfortable rather than assured in your femininity, Captivating has nothing to say to you. And they erase people who understand their genders in a nonbinary or gender-non-conforming way.

But I think it’s also possible to recognize the human experience described in those passages. For the author of Captivating, feeling feminine is a real thing and very important to her– a source of pleasure, a way of connection, an aspect of herself. For the author of The Way of the Superior Man, sexuality is fundamentally connected to gender. They might not frame their experiences in the same way I do, but I think in a certain sense they’re feeling the same thing I’m feeling.

However, I think a lot of liberal communities tend to stigmatize the open expression of cisgender people’s genders. Interestingly, feminists don’t. For instance, radical feminists have a framework for gender in the form of Adrienne Rich’s thoughts about lesbianism, Janice Raymond’s work on female friendship, or Mary Daly’s… Mary Daly-ness. Queers incessantly navel-gaze about gender.

But when you venture out from the weeds of feminist theory into the way normal liberals live their day-to-day lives, I can’t help but feel that a lot of liberals feel like the open expression of cisgender people’s genders is somewhat… déclassé. Not at all what our sort of people does.

(Transgender people’s genders don’t seem to be as stigmatized, because the popular sort of feminism that filters through liberal communities tends to believe that Trans Women Are Women. Consistency is not the strong point of shallow feminist analysis. That said, I think a large number of trans-exclusive radical feminists are not really radical feminists, but instead shallow pop libfems who are clever enough to notice that trans people’s existence contradicts their ideology.)

I want to emphasize that I’m not limiting this argument to people who actively identify as feminist, or even to people who don’t identify as anti-feminist. You can identify as anti-feminist and have a framework for gender which is influenced by your culture (as everyone’s is). If you grew up in any sort of vaguely liberal community, one of the things that influences it is the feminism– often oversimplified and misunderstood– which filters down to you.

But if you don’t read theory books, and your feminist thoughts are mostly along the lines of Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do and Feminism Is The Radical Notion That Women Are People and Look At This Badass Woman Breaking Through The Glass Ceiling, it’s easy to be leery about cis people’s gender identities. If you say that you have such-and-such a trait or do such-and-such a thing because you are a woman, isn’t that sort of like saying that women have to have that trait or do that thing? That is kind of suspicious! Men and women are the same except for their genitals! You can’t just go around saying you like wearing suits because you’re a man, I literally just posted on Facebook this Buzzfeed listicle of Fourteen Hottest Women In Suits.

And if you’re in that sort of situation, and you feel like it’s sort of shameful to go around having feelings about your gender, and you’re cisgender and don’t have particularly strong feelings about your gender in the first place… it’s easy to just sort of not notice them.

Like, that’s not even on the top twenty list of the weirdest contortions people get into about their gender.

And thus you get the situation that happened on one of the links into me, where a person said they were cis-by-default and then was asked whether they would crossdress if they knew that no one would think less of them for it and said “obviously not, I’m a man.”

Unfortunately, it is somewhat difficult to police these uses of the term, particularly since there’s no such thing as an objective measurement of whether or not someone has a gender identity. But this is why I am very skeptical about getting any sort of population estimate of how many people are cis-by-default.

The Cluster Structure of Genderspace

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not feminism go away, ozy blog post, sex positivity, speshul snowflake trans

Categories are usually fuzzy. That is, when humans use a category, there are usually some members of the category who have all the traits you associate with that category, some members that have many of the traits, and some members where you have to make a judgment call about whether it counts or not.

The Cluster Structure of Thingspace provides several excellent and uncontroversial examples. For instance, think about birds. Robins and sparrows are very typical birds. Eagles are less typical than robins, but still very typical. Penguins are really fucking weird birds. And you have to make a judgment call about bats: for purposes of biology, a bat is not a bird, whereas for purposes of trying to decide which animals are kosher, a bat is a bird. You make the decision based on whether the more important bird trait is “related to dinosaurs” or “flies.”

Or think about mothers. A typical mother gives birth to and raises a baby who is genetically related to her. Less typical mothers include birth mothers, adoptive mothers, surrogate mothers, genetic mothers, lesbian partners of the mother who gave birth, and so on. A baby’s egg donor is still her mother in some ways– for instance, you’d want to look at the egg donor rather than the adoptive mother to figure out what the baby’s risk of getting a rare disease is– but she’s missing some very common mother traits like being pregnant with the child or raising it.

Gender is a very politicized topic. So it makes sense that while some people agree that whether bats are birds depends on whether you’re doing biology or theology, and that while penguins are birds you shouldn’t assume that they’re able to fly, this common sense goes out the window when you’re talking about gender. I am going to address two issues where poor reasoning about more and less central members of categories makes people deeply confused: biological sex and gender differences.

Biological Sex

Biological sex is actually a remarkably good classification system: something like 98% of humanity can be easily and unambiguously placed into one of two discrete categories, which has to be some kind of record. Of course, not everyone is a metaphorical robin. Eagles are quite common: men with gynecomastia and noticeable hip fat; women who can grow beards; women who have had hysterectomies; men who have had their testicles removed.

However, it all runs into trouble when we’re talking about transgender people (as well as intersex people, but I’m mostly going to focus on transness). People really, really want to insist that there is a single biological sex that we really are. They usually pick chromosomes as the deciding factor, perhaps because medical science is not currently able to change a person’s chromosomes. (I have seen people attempt to be intersex-inclusive by declaring “males” to be the ones with at least one Y chromosome and “females” the ones with no Y chromosome.) They then point out that you have to know what a person’s biological sex is for medical reasons and therefore we trans people are running around being special snowflakes by putting down our identified genders on medical forms.

Except there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes: for instance, whether you are XX or XY affects your risk of hemophilia or colorblindness; if your sex chromosomes are something other than XX or XY, you may be at risk of various health problems, depending on what your sex chromosomes are. It is usually possible to infer many traits from the fact that a person has XX chromosomes (well, in reality, we usually infer the fact that a person has XX chromosomes from their traits, because most people are not karyotyped). But trans people get biomedical interventions all the time.

For instance, a doctor might be concerned about prescribing a teratogen to someone who might be pregnant. In that case, what matters is whether the person is capable of getting pregnant (many trans men and some cis women are not). A doctor may need to decide whether to screen someone for breast cancer, in which case what matters is whether a person has breasts. Testosterone increases a trans man’s risk of high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, although probably not to the level that cisgender men have. And, of course, our unusual sexes present unique health issues: for instance, testosterone is a teratogen, which means that trans men who take testosterone have to be particularly careful about birth control use.

These are not theoretical issues. Trans people have been routinely denied sex-specific medical care, because insurance companies believe that there are men and there are women, and therefore there don’t exist any people who need both a prostate screening and breast cancer screenings. Intersex people even today receive cosmetic genital surgery as infants so that people don’t have to be disturbed by a person who doesn’t fit the categories very well.

The obvious solution to this issue is to say that whether a trans person’s sex is male or female depends on what question you’re asking. A trans woman on estrogen is male for the purpose of whether she should get prostate cancer screenings and female for the purpose of whether she should get breast cancer screenings. When thinking about his risk of high cholesterol, a trans man is probably best considered neither male nor female. We are bats, and you don’t have to have a firm position on whether or not we are birds.

Gender Differences

Men are more likely to use an ethic of justice, which emphasizes universal standards and impartiality. Women are more likely to use an ethic of care, which emphasizes a specific obligation to those you have interpersonal relationships with or those who are vulnerable to the consequences of your choices. The Cohen’s d of this difference (which is a measure of how different the two groups are from each other) is about 0.2.

This is a picture of a Cohen’s d of 0.2. (Picture comes from this excellent website.) It is genuinely difficult to tell that this is a picture of two bell curves instead of one. If you know someone is a man or a woman, it doesn’t tell you much of anything about whether they use an ethic of justice or an ethic of care.

Has that stopped anyone? No, it has not.

For instance, look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on feminist ethics, which includes an entire section on care-focused ethics which includes paragraphs like this:

Gilligan believes that Kohlberg’s methodology is male-biased. Its ears are tuned to male, not female, moral voices. Thus, it fails to register the different voice Gilligan claims to have heard in her study of twenty-nine women reflecting on their abortion decisions. This distinctive moral voice, says Gilligan, speaks a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities. Seemingly, this language is largely unintelligible to Kohlbergian researchers who speak the dominant moral language of traditional ethics—namely, a language of justice that stresses rights and rules.

Ah, yes, the distinctive moral voice of women. The one that sounds almost fucking exactly like the voice of men. That distinctive moral voice of women?

Putting known gender differences into the Cohen’s d chart generator is an instructive experience. For instance, here’s gender differences in masturbation and casual sex, respectively:

And here’s neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness/extroversion (the latter two have the same effect size), again in the order I listed:

Now, there are in fact some effect size charts that look like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Here’s an example:

This is a picture of the difference in toy preferences at age three. I am not sure how useful this is for anyone who isn’t a toy marketer, but there you go. (Note that one-year-olds and five-year-olds both have less stark gendered toy preferences. Presumably male toddlers are from Mars, female toddlers are from Venus, and everyone else is from Earth.)

So what’s the takeaway here? (Besides “Ozy is fascinated with their new stats discovery,” of course.) The answer is that people are bad at categories. We learn facts about the typical man: for instance, he uses an ethic of justice, masturbates more, is okay with casual sex, is more introverted, is less neurotic, is more disagreeable, is less conscientious, and played with trucks but not dolls as a child. We then conclude from this that everyone we stick in the category “man” uses an ethic of justice and therefore we are perfectly justified in creating an entire subfield of ethics complaining about how the ethics of care is excluded because of sexism.

But that isn’t true! It is possible that people in a category are more likely to have a particular trait, but the size of this effect is not actually large enough for this to be useful information. In fact, in studies of gender differences, this is quite common!

While I’ve been picking on Carol Gilligan (and god is she an easy target to pick on), I think this kind of thought is actually more common among anti-feminists than it is among feminists.

Think about gender differences in permissive attitudes about casual sex. This is actually a fairly striking difference: about four-fifths of men have a more permissive attitude towards casual sex than the average woman does. (Of course, this might be caused by inborn tendencies, by cultural influence, or by a combination of both; you shouldn’t assume that a difference existing means it is biological.) You can see the effects of this difference clearly: for instance, it is generally easier for heterosexual women to have casual sex than it is for heterosexual men to have casual sex; gay men are more likely to have casual sex than lesbians are; there are essentially no full-service sex workers who target a solely female audience, presumably because women who want no-strings-attached casual sex rarely have to pay for it.

But there’s also a considerable amount of overlap: about seven-tenths of the two groups overlap. And that matters too! For instance, many people assume that casual sex must be a rapacious man taking advantage of an innocent woman who just wants love. But there are lots of women who like casual sex. Perhaps the women who have casual sex disproportionately come from the 20% of the female population who have more permissive attitudes about casual sex than the average man. In that case, we don’t have to be worried that hookup culture is harming women; it is merely catering to the desires of women who are a little unusual (eagles, not robins).

And I’m using a relatively stark gender difference, which would bias my case. Looking at something like neuroticism– where 65% of men are above the female mean, and there’s an 84% overlap– it’s hard to see much justification for an “essential masculine nature” or an “essential feminine nature.” Such reason is merely looking at robins and then assuming, in defiance of all the evidence, that they are the only kind of bird.

Against Blanchardianism

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[content warning: mentions of transphobic violence, slurs]

My understanding of transness bears certain similarities to those of the Blanchardians I know. I suspect that trans people fall broadly into two types, although as always sharp binaries erase the experiences of many people. However, I think that their proposed etiologies are absurdly incorrect. I believe that HSTS-subtype trans people experience gender dysphoria and are not simply transitioning as part of a rational decision, and I believe that autogenderphile-subtype trans people do not primarily transition because of a sexual fetish.

My true rejection of Blanchardian etiologies is that they don’t describe my experiences at all. Of course, I don’t expect this to convince people who aren’t me.

Regarding the HSTS subtype: I agree that it is likely that HSTS-subtype trans people are on a continuum with gender-non-conforming gay people. I too am struck by the similarity between stone butches and trans men, and by the similarity between drag queens (particularly historically) and trans women. The sharp divisions between these groups seem to me to be as much a political construct as an accurate description of empirical reality (read David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender for more). There is an incentive for both trans people and gay people to support this separation. It is far easier to advocate for trans people’s rights if transness is disconnected from icky sex stuff. And gay people (particularly gay men) have a lot to gain from distancing themselves from the victims of transmisogyny.

Of course, people currently understand themselves as either a trans woman or a gender-non-conforming gay man, either a butch lesbian or a trans man. The categories we have available influence our behavior and self-understandings, and lead to a very real difference between butch lesbians and trans men in present-day queer culture. However, this is not true historically. Either we or the people forty years ago have to be wrong, and it seems quite likely to me that the answer is “us”.

That said, it seems to me that the HSTS theory– which generally implies that transition is a rational decision made because it is easier to get through life as a passing straight trans woman than as a flamboyant gay man– neglects the reality of gender dysphoria. It’s true that it’s hard to draw a firm line where a strong desire to be gender-non-conforming transforms into gender dysphoria. And it’s true that many people, particularly historically, chose to manage their dysphoria through being a drag queen, stone butch, etc., and that whether one becomes a stone butch or a trans man probably depends in part on which one gives you the best other life outcomes. But nevertheless there are many teenagers thrown out of homes whose parents would be fine with a faggot but not a tranny. And while “no fats no fems” is a trend in gay culture, gay men are mostly not going to straight-up assault or murder you for having sex with them as a feminine gay guy, while many straight men will. Conversely, there exist feminine gay men in Iran who have not transitioned, even though it is clearly better to be a straight trans woman in Iran than a feminine gay man. It seems to me that the only way to explain this is that “desire to live as a particular gender and/or sex for its own sake” is an actual thing which puts its thumb on the scales.

Regarding the autogynephile/autoandrophile subtype: I feel like autogynephilia theories, to succeed, must sail very carefully between Scylla and Charybdis, and so far all such theories I’ve seen have wound up being devoured by the monster or drowning in the whirlpool.

Scylla: In general, people do not disrupt their entire lives out of a solely and purely sexual motivation. People who kink on rape might roleplay rape, but they don’t try to get raped themselves. People with a public-use fetish might get tied up for public use at a play party, but they don’t generally do it on a street corner. I’ve met quite a few people with an impregnation fetish, and to my knowledge they have collectively had one unplanned pregnancy, which was a result of attempting to safely indulge the impregnation fetish and screwing it up.

Of course there are exceptions: some people with a rape fetish commit rape; some people with an impregnation fetish deliberately get impregnated; some people with a bimbo fetish get boob jobs. Perhaps many people are secretly autogenderphiles, but most people don’t transition. Let’s Fermi estimate this: 0.3% of people are trans; perhaps 0.15% are autogenderphiles. I’m going to guess that maybe 1% of people are willing to do something as life-changing as transition to satisfy a fetish. (If you are objecting that this is too low, consider that– unlike, say, rape and impregnation– autogenderphilia cannot be indulged on impulse when one is sexually aroused and not thinking straight and– unlike, say, getting a boob job– it involves a major disruption to one’s personal relationships, including perhaps a divorce and parental rejection. I consider this estimate conservative.)

This estimate would imply that 15% of people have an autogenderphilia fetish, making it one of the most common fetishes among men.  A study of the relative frequency of sexual fetishes suggests that this is not the case: “behavior of others”, the largest category into which autogenderphilia could conceivably be put, is less common than “body parts or features” and “objects associated with the body.” In particular, it appears that autogenderphilia is distinctly less common than foot fetishism, and far less than 15% of the population is interested in foot fetishism.

There are certain exceptions to my “people do not generally disrupt their lives out of sexual motivation.” For instance, people may cheat on their spouses, engage in 24/7 BDSM, or become polyamorous. However, these desires are generally not purely and solely sexual in motivation. A person who cheats on their spouse may find their relationship unfulfilling or be looking for a sense of validation. 24/7 subs generally find submission emotionally satisfying or have a romantic desire for a dominant/submissive relationship. Polyamorous people often value the freedom associated with being poly or not having to limit their partners’ sexual choices. While sexual motivation is no doubt one part of these decisions– a person may be more likely to become poly if they’re sexually aroused by their partner having sex with other people, or more likely to cheat if they’re turned on by the person they plan on cheating with– the emotional and interpersonal components play a more primary role.

From a gender-dysphoria perspective, transition makes sense: even if sexual arousal at the idea of being a particular gender is one aspect of why a person transitions, their gender dysphoria is still the primary motivation. From a perspective which does not accept the validity of gender dysphoria, you have to explain why this is the only sexual fetish that motivates people to this extent.

Charybdis: Researchers like Anne Lawrence argue that autogynephilia should be interpreted as a kind of romantic love which has affectional and attachment-based elements. When sexual arousal at the idea of being a woman fades, trans women may still feel an affectional bond to the reality of being women. Trans women may idealize the female body, as lovers idealize their beloved; trans women prioritize transition highly, as lovers prioritize their love; trans women may transition after some adverse life circumstance, as people use a new love affair to cope with some setback in life; people may find meaning and deep personal transformation in their gender, as they do with love.

I will set aside, for a moment, the argument that through an equal series of comparisons one could prove that the average musician experiences romantic attraction to the idea of being a rock star. (They idealize what being a musician is like, they prioritize playing music, they use music to cope with problems, they find a sense of meaning and personal transformation in music… those rock stars keep taking sexy pictures of themselves and they SAY it’s for the fans, but it’s probably a sign of their deep-seated autorockstarphilia.) A stronger question, for me, is: where are all the other people falling in love with themselves?

There exist trans women who are attracted to red-haired women, have a strong desire to be women, and have no particular interest in being redheads. By extension, there must presumably be men who are attracted to red-haired women, have no particular interest in being women, and have a strong desire to be redheads. Since red hair dye is readily available, these men would have no incentive not to admit that they are in love with themselves as redheads. Why aren’t they?

Maybe people are only capable of falling in love with themselves as a particular gender. This seems strange and arbitrary to me: our culture uses gender as the primary way of classifying people’s sexual attractions, but other cultures didn’t, and there’s no reason to assume that biology cares more about our classification system than the Romans’ active/passive system. But fine. Let’s grant that.

Where are the autoandrophiliac gay men? About 3.5% of the American population is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Assuming again that 0.15% of people are autogenderphiliac, by my reckoning there should be 15,750 lesbian, gay, or bisexual Americans who are romantically in love with themselves (7,650 people who are just lesbian or gay). Fortunately, in this age of the Internet, weird people can find each other. Any group of nearly sixteen thousand people (or about seven thousand five hundred people, if you prefer to exclude bisexuals) ought to have a thriving Internet community, with its own Fetlife groups, tiresome discourse, and extremely niche porn. This community does not appear to actually exist; at best, a small number of autoromantics appear to comment on AVEN, but not in sufficient numbers to get their own forum. (To be clear, I’m not claiming there’s no such thing as autoromanticism; human sexuality is very diverse. I am claiming that it seems extraordinarily rare, far rarer than would be required to explain this theory.)

I have occasionally heard speculation that gay male bodybuilders are autoandrophiles. It seems to me that if that were the case it would be commonly known in gay male bodybuilder communities that many gay male bodybuilders are literally in love with themselves. Again, why would they hide it? It’s not like a gatekeeper is going to take away their squat rack if they don’t.

Finally, the autogynephilia hypothesis fails to explain one of the most striking facts about type-two transgender people, their distinctive personalities. The type-two personality could be characterized as “broader autism phenotype”, “nerdy”, or “really really weird”; someone in the Slate Star Codex comments called it “Heinlein protagonists”, which is honestly my favorite characterization. (Right down to the wacky political beliefs!) When I first read about Martine Rothblatt, a highly paid trans lesbian CEO who is trying to make a robot version of her wife so that her wife can live forever, I was like “yeah, that’s the kind of shit queer trans people do”. We’re strange people.

It is very unclear to me why autogynephilia would be the Weird Person Fetish. It’s not that only super-weird people transition: like I said above, autogynephilia is not that common of a fetish. Perhaps all fetishes are more common among super-weird people? Maybe there’s some connection between fetish and personality type? It’s an answerable question in theory, but Blanchardians appear strangely averse to trying to answer it.

Autogynephilia/Autoandrophilia Survey

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

I am interested in collecting information on the correlation between autogynephilia or autoandrophilia and gender identity. Anyone who is interested in contributing to this can take the survey. It is open to people of all genders, both cis and trans.

I will report the results in a few weeks.

ITT Reminder

Tags

ITT, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

We are approaching the end of the Transgender Intellectual Turing Test submission period! Remember that submissions will not be accepted after March 1st. If you’re considering participating, please finish up your submissions soon!

In addition, I’m uncertain about whether the polls should allow the participants to specify whether they believe in gender identity, the Blanchard-Bailey theory, or neither. In the previous ITT, social justice people and anti-social-justice people generally agreed on their assessments of any given post, which is a point in favor of not bothering. In addition, while many of my readers legitimately do not believe in either theory and would be excluded if I didn’t have an “other” option, y’all are a bunch of special snowflakes and whenever I offer an “other” option for anything you will take it even if you are J. Michael Bailey himself. On the other hand, if we don’t divide up the categories, a post might win on the basis of catering to the stereotypes of one particular group, even though it isn’t actually a good impersonation of that point of view. So discuss what I should do in the comments.

Plasticbrains

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

Plasticbrains is a term invented by Promethea to refer to a particular cluster of people who are disproportionately likely to be transgender. “Plastic” is a joking reference to BPAs, an endocrine disruptor in plastics, which some people have hypothesized is linked to transness. (There is no evidence that this is true, and “plasticbrains” is a joke.)

Common Traits of Plasticbrains

Plasticbrains people, as you can guess from the joke in the name, are disproportionately likely to be trans. However, not all plasticbrains people are transgender! While plasticbrains people are much more likely than baseline to be trans, many plasticbrains people are not transgender. It seems likely to me that half to two-thirds of plasticbrains people would not qualify as definitely cis, if you include “would transition in the glorious transhumanist future and but doesn’t want to now”, “happily only out as nonbinary to a few trusted friends”, “girl in the streets and dude in the sheets”, “socially dysphoric in very gendered spaces but otherwise fine”, “on hormones but not socially transitioning”, “I do not want to see or be seen by gender”, “??????”, and so on.

Plasticbrains people are most comfortable in situations with clear rules, consistently applied, which one can optimize within. This is probably why plasticbrains people are disproportionately represented in programming and math. Plasticbrains people often come up with clear and consistent rules for situations that don’t have them and then loudly insist that these rules are objectively correct. For instance, plasticbrains people often adhere to a specific philosophical school of ethics (egoism, utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics) instead of relying on intuitive morality. They often have odd political beliefs which they have worked out from first principles. (Anarchocapitalists and communists are both quite common. Even centrist liberal plasticbrains can generally explain to you why centrist liberalism follows from the basic principles of uncertainty and respect for experts.) But plasticbrains rules can apply to everything from programming languages (“Haskell is objectively correct”) to grammar (“prescriptivism is wrong and evil”) to social rules (“it is never morally wrong to make a request of anyone”).

Plasticbrains people often have a strong interest in optimization. Once they come up with a set of rules and goals, they will often try to optimize for their goals within their rules. Again, this probably explains their affinity for programming. This often leads to very strange behavior: for instance, plasticbrains people may adopt a variety of more or less evidence-based strategies for self-improvement, live on Soylent because that is the optimal way to save time and avoid cooking, or believe it is morally wrong to donate to the Red Cross because other charities use that money better.

There is no consensus among plasticbrains people what rules are actually the objectively correct rules. One would think that the fact that other plasticbrains people are going about saying “anarchocapitalism is obviously correct!” would make the plasticbrains communists think a bit, but as far as I know this has never happened. While in general plasticbrains people are pretty self-aware about their mental health issues, plasticbrains people are usually not self-aware about their rules. They can easily recognize that other plasticbrains people are adhering rigidly to their rules even in situations where there is more nuance, but then they will turn around and say “actually, lying is morally wrong and never justified and if you lie to people I will never interact with you again.” Occasional examples of plasticbrains people having nuance about their rules have been observed, but upon closer inspection these universally turn out to be plasticbrains people who have adopted “nuance exists!” as a rule. (I myself as I was typing this attempted to give “people in the developing world are exactly as important as people in the developed world, and the low level of foreign aid from developed countries is probably as bad as the Holocaust” as an example, but then my soul rebelled. Obviously, my own personal rules are just true.)

Plasticbrains people generally have engrossing and obsessive interests. These tend to be fairly intellectual interests, such as programming, linguistics, and history; however, obsessions with particular pieces of media are also common. The happiness of a plasticbrains person is directly correlated with how much time they spend talking about, collecting information about, or participating in their interest. Plasticbrains people often find other people’s interests to be just as interesting as their own interests, which leads to many happy plasticbrains friendships.

Plasticbrains people often have a hard time interacting with people who aren’t plasticbrains, although if they put time into developing the skill they can sometimes get pretty good at it. If a plasticbrains person has not put effort into the skill, then non-plasticbrains people will generally find them strange, off-putting, and uncomfortable to be around. This is possibly because plasticbrains body language tends to be unusual: for instance, they may come off as emotionless or robotic, or flap their hands when they’re happy or distressed. Plasticbrains people generally have a hard time understanding the behavior of non-plasticbrains people, but usually understand each other fairly well. That said, they have two consistent theory of mind failures which apply even to other plasticbrains people: “My Interests Are Interesting To Everyone And If They Aren’t Then I Clearly Have Not Explained Them Well Enough” and “My Rules Are Obviously Correct And If You Do Not Follow Them It Is Because You Are A Bizarre Moral and Intellectual Mutant.” If a plasticbrains person has adopted social rules that don’t work very well, this may also cause social failures.

Plasticbrains people tend to be introverted, but their level of social motivation ranges widely. Some plasticbrains people feel little to no desire to interact with anyone, while others enjoy regular social interaction. Some plasticbrains people may find interacting with certain people stressful and overwhelming in the same way they find loud noises stressful and overwhelming. Many appreciate quietly reading or writing in the same room as other people. Many plasticbrains people are very lonely, because their difficulties interacting with non-plasticbrains people makes it hard for them to fulfill their social needs.

Plasticbrains people usually have unusual sexualities. They are disproportionately likely to be bisexual. They are not disproportionately likely to be attracted the other assigned sex at birth, but the number of trans people means that many are lesbians or gay. Many plasticbrains people are asexual or low-libido or experience periods of asexuality. Plasticbrains people are often kinky. Many plasticbrains people enjoy and seek out casual sex. Some find touch much more rewarding than most people do, while others find it upsetting or painful.

Plasticbrains people typically find text-based interactions easier than verbal interactions. They like books. They are averse to phone calls. They may have entire relationships conducted solely over the Internet. While savant skills seem to be uncommon, hyperlexia is the most common.

Plasticbrains people combine neophilia with a strong aversion to change. Neophilia is the tendency to loathe tradition, easily become bored, and seek out novelty to the point that it becomes an obsession. Common areas for plasticbrains people to experience neophilia include art, literature, science, ideas, drugs, sex, and personal projects.

Interestingly, plasticbrains people also tend to dislike change. The specific ways in which they dislike change are very individual. For instance, one plasticbrains person may eat the same things for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day, while another plasticbrains person may object to working anywhere other than their home office which has been set up to their specifications, and a third plasticbrains person may have a strict daily routine and be distressed by disruptions.

Plasticbrains people typically have difficulties with executive function. However, their difficulties span a wide range. Some may have relatively ordinary problems, such as procrastination, difficulty planning how long tasks will take, constantly forgetting why they walked into this room, and never knowing where they left their cell phone. Others may have deeper executive function problems, such as “sometimes I can’t stand up because standing up has too many steps.”

Plasticbrains people are typically quite smart and do well in academic fields. Many of them are autodidacts.

Plasticbrains people often have sensory issues. For instance, plasticbrains people may have trouble following a conversation that takes place in a noisy room or when the television is on. They may find car alarms, fireworks, the sound of people chewing, or other noises to be viscerally upsetting. They may be easily distracted by small sounds. They often find weighted blankets comforting.

Plasticbrains people fidget. They may chew on their fingers, their clothing, or random objects. They may pace. They often enjoy playing with Rubix cubes, tossing balls hand to hand, or playing with a toy designed for fidgeting. They sometimes move around a lot.

Possible Plasticbrains Traits

A high number of plasticbrains people I know are Jewish, but I am uncertain if Jewish people in general are more likely to be plasticbrains.

Anecdotally, it seems like many plasticbrains people tend to suffer from generalized shame disorder, but this trend may just be because people who have excessive shame tend to talk to me about it.

Plasticbrains people often experience anxiety and depression. It is unclear to me if this is a product of the underlying brain difference or the fact that plasticbrains people often have awful childhoods because children are much more likely to express their discomfort with plasticbrains people through bullying and assault.

I am uncertain whether plasticbrains people are disproportionately likely to have mood disorders other than depression and anxiety. While I certainly know many plasticbrains people who go through hypomania-like episodes, I am not sure if that is a central trait.

Plasticbrains and Autism

It is very common to refer to plasticbrains people as being autistic, and many of us have autism diagnoses. I tend to agree with the excellent Rethinking Autism (piratable here) that it doesn’t make sense to think of autism as a single condition, or even as a bunch of related conditions. Instead, we should think of autism as being something like fever: a symptom cluster with a wide variety of underlying causes, some of which lead to different associated symptoms. While some ways of treating fever work for all fevers, regardless of cause, it wouldn’t make sense to research fever as a single thing with a single etiology or call the flu a “fever spectrum condition”.

Not all plasticbrains people qualify for an autism diagnosis, or even any sort of diagnosis at all. Many autistic people are not plasticbrains. Even so-called high-functioning autistics are often not plasticbrains: for instance, Temple Grandin is definitely not. However, I expect that this cluster will turn out to have a single underlying cause. I expect (in spite of the name) the cause will turn out to be genetic, because it seems to run in families.

Transgender Intellectual Turing Test

Tags

ITT, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

My last intellectual Turing test was quite popular, so I am organizing another one!

The Ideological Turing Test, invented by Bryan Caplan, is a test of how well people understand other people’s viewpoints. The regular Turing test is a test for programmers: can you write a computer program which a human being cannot tell apart from another human being? The Intellectual Turing Test is a test for people who believe things: can you explain your opponent’s viewpoints in such a way that your opponent cannot tell it apart from someone who legitimately believes the opinion? If you can, it shows you understand your opponent’s positions on a deep level.

One of the big criticisms of the last Turing test is that it was hard to judge anti-social-justice entries because anti-social-justice people believe a lot of different things. Therefore, this Turing test will feature two specific groups of people.

The Gender Identity category consists of people who believe trans people are motivated to transition because of their gender identity, gender dysphoria, or both. Gender identity is an inner sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary, which can be separated both from one’s conformity to gender roles and one’s biological sex. Gender dysphoria is a sense of dissonance because either one’s social role or one’s physical sex does not match one’s preferred gender.

The Blanchard-Bailey category consists of people who believe that trans women can be divided into two groups. Homosexual transsexuals are androphilic, feminine, and transitioning because it is easier to be a passing woman than a feminine man. Autogynephilic transsexuals are gynephilic, masculine, and transitioning because of their sexual fetish for and/or romantic attraction to the idea of themselves as women.

(If you have some different viewpoint on trans people, then this is not the ITT for you.)

The questions you have to answer are the following:

1. How do you define woman/man?
2. What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
3. Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
4. a. [If answering for the Gender Identity side] Why do many trans women experience sexual fantasies about being or becoming a woman?
   b. [If answering for the Blanchard-Bailey side] Explain trans people assigned female at birth.

Last time, there was a problem of too many submissions, some of which were boring or low-effort. If you would like to participate, sometime before March 1st you should write and send me your answers to both sides, as well as which side you are actually on. I will read your answers and tell you whether I will run them.

Things that are more likely to get your answers accepted:

• Humor.
• Being clearly well-thought-out.
• Answers longer than a paragraph for each question.
• Unusual or bizarre opinions.
• Being on the side that is unpopular or bad at writing.
• Being sufficiently locally famous that I’m curious how people will respond to you.

As always, I am happy to use a pseudonym for anyone, so you do not have to be afraid that people will disapprove of you for confessing to thinking Blanchard-Bailey is correct. I am also happy to link to any Tumblrs, Twitters, blogs, works of fiction, manifestos, etc. that you would like to promote.

Please email me your submissions at ozyfrantz@gmail.com. Submissions sent in other ways may not be seen.

Seven Troubling Questions About Transgender Theories, Answered

Tags

neurodivergence, speshul snowflake trans

[Note: In this piece, “female sex” and “male sex” are used to refer to the clusters “people who have ovaries, uteruses, vaginas, breasts, no beard, estrogen-dominant hormone systems, XX chromosomes, etc.” and “people who have testicles, prostates, penises, flat chests, beards, testosterone-dominant hormone systems, XY chromosomes, etc.” While I agree that these terms are cissexist, I am unaware of any equally clear terms.]
[Content warning: transphobic violence]

As we all know, I love answering questions, so I thought I would answer some questions asked by the Gospel Coalition about transgender people.

1. Do transgender theories undercut or contradict the idea that sexual orientation is unchangeable?

I don’t think so.

First, while there are many cases of people staying in relationships with their partner even after their partner came out as trans, there are also many cases of such relationships ending in divorce. Even many relationships that stay together become sexless, platonic, yet deeply committed friendships. Among cisgender people, mixed-orientation marriages exist and, even though it’s difficult, some are quite happy. If that doesn’t disprove the fixity of sexual orientation, then the existence of monosexual people who stay with their trans partners should not either.

Second, many heterosexual women– in my experience– are not literally solely attracted to people who identify as men, present as men, and have male primary and secondary sexual characteristics. It is quite common for heterosexual women to be attracted to people with testosterone-dominant hormone systems, regardless of identity, or to people who identify as men, regardless of body type, or people who present as men, regardless of self-identification or sex. If a woman is attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises, she may very well continue to be attracted to her trans female partner. But that doesn’t mean her orientation has changed. She is still orientationally attracted to people with strong jawlines and penises.

Third, many people are Kinsey 1s and Kinsey 5s– that is, they have incidental attraction to people of one gender, but very strong attraction to people of another gender. Kinsey 1s and Kinsey 5s often round themselves to straight or gay (respectively). But if a Kinsey 1 woman dates another woman (whether cisgender or transgender), this doesn’t mean her orientation has changed. Her orientation is as it has always been– “attracted to few women and a lot of men.” If she happens to date one of the few women she’s attracted to, that doesn’t change anything.

Fourth, love is weird. There are many, many women who are not attracted to or even vaguely repulsed by old, fat, and bald men in general, but who find the one specific old, fat, and bald man they love to be the sexiest man alive. Is it that strange to suggest that some people might be not attracted to men in general, but who continue to think the person they love, who came out as a trans man, is the sexiest person alive? That doesn’t mean that sexual orientations typically change in general– although I am now envisioning a trans-positive ex-gay program that revolves around getting gay men to fall in love with self-closeted trans women.

Fifth, yes, some people experience orientation change (although they usually don’t have much volitional control over whether they do– trying to change your orientation yourself is very hard and doesn’t really work). No doubt some people experience orientation change after their partner comes out as trans. That does not change the fundamentals of the pro-LGBT argument, which is that there is nothing wrong with being gay, whether or not you chose to be it.

2. If gender identity is fixed and unchangeable, why do many children who experience gender dysphoria lose these feelings after puberty?

It is very unclear to me how common desistance is. Estimates range from 66% to 88% of gender dysphoric children. However, some trans advocates argue that essentially no truly gender dysphoric children desist; high desistance rates are because, before the DSM-V, the diagnosis of gender identity disorder was given to, say, boys who identified as boys but who liked wearing dresses and playing with dolls, because of sexist ideas about what boys should do. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about a boy with a male gender identity continuing to have that identity as he grows up. I am not sure that given the current state of the evidence one can come up with any firm opinion on how many gender dysphoric children will desist.

But let us assume for the sake of argument that desistance is quite common. Even under the most extreme estimates– if 88% of gender dysphoric children desist– then gender dysphoric children are forty times more likely than the general population to be gender dysphoric adults. In this case, gender dysphoria in children and gender dysphoria in adults are best understood as distinct yet closely related conditions.

It is not surprising that puberty might cause a change in gender dysphoria. Hormone replacement therapy often causes relief of dysphoria even before the hormones have had any physical effect; this suggests that gender dysphoria is linked to sex hormones on some important level. Puberty, of course, is one of the largest changes in sex hormones that a person experiences; it seems quite plausible such a change would ease dysphoria in some people and cause it in others. Some anecdotes suggest that other hormonal changes can ease dysphoria: for instance, Catholic blogger Melinda Selmys finds that her dysphoria lightens when she is pregnant or breastfeeding.

However, this model does not suggest that gender dysphoria is not de facto permanent for post-puberty gender dysphoric people. Male-sexed people will not experience a change in sex hormones as large as that of puberty. Female-sexed people may experience pregnancy, breastfeeding and menopause. However, many female-sexed gender dysphoric people do not want to be pregnant or breastfeeding for the rest of their lives. Even if menopause may get rid of dysphoria for some female-sexed people, that still means a female-sexed gender dysphoric person will be gender dysphoric for half their life with only the faintest hope that menopause will ease their suffering. Therefore, this argument does not imply that transition treatment is a poor choice for most people.

The Gospel Coalition’s article includes a highly speculative comment by Alice Dreger that perhaps affirming a child in their transgender identity decreases the chance that they will desist. Of course, there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case; we can’t even figure out how common desistance is! The potential risk that affirming a child’s transgender identity will cause them to be a happy trans person instead of a happy cis person must be weighed against the certainty of the harm that gender dysphoria causes to gender dysphoric children. I think there should be further research into gender dysphoric children, and in the meantime the most sensible stance is affirming the child’s transgender identity while explicitly embracing the possibility that they may grow up to be a cisgender adult.

3. When a person feels a disjunction between one’s sex at birth and one’s gender identity, why is the only course of action to bring the body into closer conformity with the person’s psychological state, rather than vice versa?

No treatment has yet been developed to change a person’s gender identity. It is somewhat difficult to prescribe a treatment that doesn’t exist.

That said, some people do choose to manage their dysphoria without transition. Melinda Selmys, whom I mentioned above, is one. Angus Grieve-Smith handles his dysphoria through crossdressing. Some detransitioned women are still gender dysphoric, and handle it through exercise, meditation, creative work, and self-acceptance.

Of course, it’s quite common for people to make mistakes about what the best way to handle their own dysphoria is. Many transitioning transgender people spent years or decades trying to manage their dysphoria without transition, and discovered the experience was hellish; they tend to shudder reading about experiences like Melinda’s or Angus’s or 23XX’s, assuming that they are in as much pain as we were in their shoes. Gender dysphoric people who detransitioned often have equal regrets about their transitions and warn transitioning trans people that they’ll experience the same pain the detransitioners did.

There have been no randomized controlled trials of transition for relief of dysphoria. No, the Swedish study— cited in the article– is not a randomized controlled trial of transition. The gender dysphoric people in that study were compared to controls who were not and had never been gender dysphoric. Gender dysphoric people obviously do not have the option to become a person with no history of gender dysphoria.

Of course, there have also been no randomized controlled trials of alternatives to transition for relief of dysphoria.

In the absence of such studies, I think there is no responsible option except carefully and thoughtfully considering your choices, talking with trusted friends, trying out options which are easy to reverse if you don’t like them, being cautious about hard-to-reverse choices, and then making the decision that seems to you like it will be best.

At this point many people may suggest that gender dysphorics who are uncertain about whether to transition should talk to a therapist. While that would be nice, few therapists have any sort of expertise in transgender issues at all. In my personal experience as a transgender person, my therapists have never consistently passed such low bars as “knows what a nonbinary person is” and “understands the effects of HRT on the human body.” If I have to pay my therapist to spend fifty minutes being her Transgender Continuing Education class, I very much doubt they will be able to have any sort of useful opinion on the merits of crossdressing versus social transition. Therapists who do have expertise in transgender issues sometimes hold to unscientific and unjustified beliefs, such as the idea that if you didn’t like trucks as a four-year-old testosterone can’t possibly be the best choice for you as an adult. Some therapists push people to transition, whether or not it’s the right choice for them. Other therapists view any admission of doubt about transition as a sign that you are not a true transgender person, and will refuse you hormones or surgery.

But I think this question gets at some deeper issues which are highlighted by the article’s objection to people with bodily integrity identity disorder who want surgery to blind them or remove a limb, as well as their description of medicine as a field in which “the purpose of treatment is to restore bodily functions and facilities that are ordered towards certain ends.”

Unlike the author, I am a disability rights advocate and transhumanist. I do not believe the purpose of medicine is to restore bodily functions and facilities that are ordered to certain ends. I believe the purpose of medicine is to allow people to exercise their bodily autonomy. Of course, many people will choose to exercise their bodily autonomy to cure pneumonia, get prosthetic limbs, and get flu shots so they don’t spend a week puking. But if a Deaf person chooses to remain Deaf, an intersex person rejects normalizing surgery, or an autistic person chooses to continue to practice autistic ways of relating, I don’t think medicine has somehow failed; those are all individuals exercising their autonomy. I find nothing strange about a woman seeking birth control when she’s twenty and infertility treatment when she’s thirty; both allow her to choose how her reproductive system will work. I support breast implants and reductions, nose jobs and laser hair removal, as ways of letting people decide what they will look like. And I see nothing wrong with either a trans person seeking bottom surgery or a person with bodily identity integrity disorder seeking to remove a limb.

In addition, I am a utilitarian. As such, I tend to have qualms about treatments intended to change people’s terminal values; I worry this would naturally lead to a sort of wireheading, in which we change people’s terminal values to ones that are easy to fulfill. Of course, sometimes value change is necessary, as when a terminal value causes a great deal of distress to oneself or others. But I think it is something to be approached with care and caution, and I would feel uneasy if value change were the first line of treatment for gender dysphoria. The author no doubt disagrees with me here, as he believes in God and thus an objective grounding for human flourishing outside of human values.

4. Is the higher rate of suicide among transgender persons due primarily to the inner tensions of experiencing gender dysphoria as a disorder, or are these acts motivated primarily by societal rejection? 

According to one of the largest surveys of transgender people ever conducted, experiences of discrimination are correlated with suicide attempts. Participants who experienced discrimination at school, at work, in housing, in health care, or by law enforcement were more likely to have attempted suicide. 69% of transgender people who experienced homelessness due to being transgender have attempted suicide. Those who were sexually assaulted at school due to being transgender are at particularly high risk: 73% of those assaulted in elementary school, 73% of those assaulted in middle school, 69% of those assaulted in high school, and 78% of those assaulted in college. 68% of those physically assaulted in high school, 68% of those physically assaulted in college, and 65% of those physically assaulted at work due to anti-transgender bias have attempted suicide. 65% of those who experienced domestic violence from a family member due to being trans have attempted suicide. 70% of those sexually assaulted by police officers have attempted suicide.

Perhaps we would be less likely to attempt suicide if people stopped assaulting us.

And, sure, maybe we’d still have an elevated rate of suicide, even in a world without transphobia. But I feel like not being assaulted anymore would be a good start.

Of course, “wondering out loud about the significance or meaning of gender” (to quote the article) is not assaulting people. But transphobic beliefs do provide the societal context that eventually results in anti-transgender discrimination and assault. Talking about how transition is harmful is part of what leads a family to decide that screaming at and rejecting their child is the only way to keep them from making a horrible mistake. Talking about how men are just naturally one way and it’s shameful for them to behave differently is part of what leads elementary schoolers to throw rocks at the little boy who wants to watch My Little Pony. Talking about how having sex with a trans woman is basically like having sex with a man, and having sex with a man is the most disgusting thing possible, is part of what leads cis men to resolve their confusion about being attracted to trans women by murdering them after sex.

And social support matters! Trans people who have strong relationships with their families have a below-average rate of suicide attempts (33%). So do transgender people who are neutral to comfortable with reporting assaults to police. Acceptance of transgender people– at least if you’re the family member of a trans person or a police officer– is a clear, practical step towards reducing the transgender suicide rate. Yes, it’s effortful to make sure you use the right pronouns, but the benefit to transgender people’s mental health is clear.

5. Why are the strongest critics of “gender binaries” the most likely to support gender stereotypes on display in transgender celebrities?

For transgender people, particularly transgender women, there’s often an unfair double bind. If a transgender woman goes about in jeans and a T-shirt with no makeup, she’s told that she’s not putting any effort into her transition. If a transgender woman goes about in a dress, heels, and a full face of makeup, she’s told that she’s conforming to gender stereotypes and real women don’t wear dresses all the time.

People have unfair and unrealistic standards for transgender celebrities. Caitlyn Jenner is a Republican reality TV show star. Neither group is particularly known for their deconstruction of patriarchy. When Kylie Jenner dresses like this, no one says shit:

When Ann Coulter dresses like this, no one says shit:

But when Caitlyn Jenner dresses like this:

Suddenly everyone is up in arms about how sexist she’s being. Somebody should go tell Ann Coulter that it’s very wrong to imply that you have to wear dresses to be a woman. She probably just has the long blonde hair because she’s internalized that women are all bimbos! And don’t get me started on Kylie Jenner. Clearly the only possible reason that she could be wearing that top is because she thinks that women are only women if they’re performing for the male gaze. And what’s with that makeup? Lots of women don’t wear makeup, Kylie! You don’t have to prove you’re a woman by drawing on your eyebrows!

Several of the points discussed in the explanation of this question are absurd. Of course some people– both cisgender and transgender– identify strongly with a particular gender, and that is not somehow anti-feminist of them. Of course it is wrong to assume that someone else is not really trans just because they don’t look trans enough to you.

But I want to talk about one point which the quoted feminist, Elinor Burkett, brings up more closely. She questions why Caitlyn Jenner, who presented as a man for most of her life, should be allowed to define womanhood. Presumably only cis women (and perhaps trans women who have presented as female for a long time? it’s unclear) should define womanhood. I am not sure how Burkett plans to do this: opinion poll? That would be unfortunate for her; the vast majority of women in the world have a definition of womanhood which– while not necessarily trans-inclusive– is far more regressive and gender essentialist than Caitlyn Jenner’s. Most women worldwide do think that female brains are inherently different from male brains. The solution, I think, is not to fuss about who is “allowed” to define womanhood, but instead to attempt to come up with a useful definition for the particular purposes we are discussing it.

Burkett argues that “being a woman means having accrued certain experiences, endured certain indignities and relished certain courtesies in a culture that reacted to you as one.” She explicitly rejects a definition of womanhood grounded in breasts and vaginas (and, presumably, in uteruses and XX chromosomes) as reducing women to their bodies. However, her definition opens itself up to two criticisms.

First, exactly how many gendered experiences does Burkett have in common with a subsistence farmer in India? Did Burkett’s father have to pay her a dowry for her to get married? Did she have a sister who was aborted because she was a girl? Was she fed less than her brothers? Did her parents not send her to school because they wanted to protect her virginity? If the answer is “actually, Burkett doesn’t share many gendered experiences other than the purely biological with female subsistence farmers in India”– which I think is probably true– then by her own argument either she or female Indians subsistence farmers are not really women. This seems somewhat silly.

Even in our own culture, experience of womanhood is very diverse, as an intersectional perspective shows. A developmentally disabled woman may find that she is desexualized and degendered, as part of being treated as a child due to her disability; does her desexualization and degendering mean that she is, in reality, not a woman? A butch lesbian may never have experienced the courtesies associated with being read by straight men as an appropriate object of desire; does that mean she is not a woman?

Second, many transgender women do, in fact, accrue the experiences, endure the indignities, and relish the courtesies of being a woman in a culture that reacts to them as one. Any trans woman who passes does, as do non-passing trans women in trans-positive environments in which they are considered to be women. Even non-passing trans women in trans-negative environments are not read as men and given the privileges of men; they are read as weirdo freaks. Why is one’s past experience of gender– often an experience years or decades in the past– prioritized over one’s current lived experience?

Similarly, gender dysphoria impacts many trans people’s experience of gendered socialization. Society says “you are a woman, so you are like this and you should do these things.” Many cisgender girls feel dissonance when they don’t want to do what they are supposed to do or when they aren’t like what society says they are like. But many transgender men feel dissonance about the statement “you are a woman”– even long before they articulate their gender identity to themselves! They want to do the things men do, have the traits men have, cultivate the virtues men cultivate. Many young transgender men feel a sense of pride in how many sexual partners they have, or in their ability to lift heavy things, or other accouterments of masculinity which are stigmatized for women. Trans bros exist! Of course, that isn’t the same as growing up a cisgender man. But it is an experience which is in some ways more similar to growing up a cisgender man than growing up a cisgender woman.

6. Why must one’s self-declared gender identity be accepted without question, while other forms of self-identification can be exist?

The reason that people dismiss ‘transracial’ identity is that every self-identified transracial person has turned out, upon closer inspection, to be either a troll attempting to discredit transgender people or Rachel Dolezal.

Rachel Dolezal herself has a history of lies and fraud: for instance, she faked hate crimes against herself and falsely claimed to have lived in South Africa. It seems to me much more plausible that she, a person who lies about many other things for self-advancement, pretended to be black for career purposes and came up with a transracial identity after she was found out. I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a prospective identity have one representative who is not a con artist.

The article then talks about otherkin and Stefonknee, a trans woman who engages in ageplay in which she is a six-year-old girl, both of whom actually seem to have non-fraudulent reasons for their identities. (Although Stefonknee appears to use ageplay as a coping mechanism for mental illness, rather than actually believing she has a six year old’s soul.)

It is hard for me to get into a state of mind where I’m bothered about opposing otherkin or Stefonknee in the first place. As long as they’re happy, who cares? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my bone. I would certainly never discriminate against an otherkin or Stefonknee and I am happy to do any little courtesies that would make their lives more comfortable, such as referring to an otherkin as a “being” instead of a “human”. If body modifications help otherkin or Stefonknee feel more comfortable in their bodies, I think they should get them. While I don’t have a great knowledge of health-care economics, I see no problem with insurance or government-funded health care covering such body modifications if it is a cost-effective way to achieve more quality-adjusted life years. (And not if it is not, of course.) Life is too short to spend my time sticking my nose in other people’s business.

Psychology is a really confusing field. I don’t think we actually understand it well enough yet to go “in fact, it is completely physically impossible for people to develop dysphoria about being animals.” Maybe they do! And until the day when we understand psychology that well, I’m not going to be invested in “opposing” any particular identity.

7. Without a settled definition in our legal system for transgender, how can we avoid all sorts of problems, including bathroom access?

If someone is harassing others or invading their privacy in the bathroom, then of course they should be removed. But I think that allowing people to use the bathroom of their choice is obviously the correct perspective, even if you only care about cisgender people. Cisgender women have already been mistaken for transgender and harassed. Many people are mistaken about the wide variety of bodies that cisgender women can have. Do you really want a Sikh woman who has a beard due to polycystic ovary syndrome to be excluded from the bathroom because dumbasses don’t know that some cis women can grow beards?

But to address the main point: trans activists are pushing a very clear and concrete definition for transness. It’s “if a person says they’re trans, then they’re trans.” It is hard to be mistaken about this definition!

The author seems confused about how something can be both a medical condition and something a person has if they say they do. But this is actually very common for mental health disorders! For instance, look at one of the standard screening tools for depression. Here are some of the answers that will get you four points for being depressed:

• “I am so sad and unhappy that I can’t stand it.”
• “I feel the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve.”
• “I am dissatisfied and bored with everything.”
• “I hate myself.”

Basically, about half the questions on the Beck Depression Inventory are different ways of phrasing “are you depressed?” and then if you say “yes” the BDI will reveal that you are depressed. Truly a triumph of medical science here.

And it gets worse! In my experience, primary care physicians usually don’t bother with trying to come up with different ways of asking if you’re depressed, they just ask you outright and then write an SSRI prescription.

Of course, depression and transness are treated differently from a medical perspective. Psychiatrists will often say things like “have you considered that the reason you hate yourself and want to die is that you’re depressed?” when the person has not thought of this at all, and they will also say things like “even though you say you’re depressed, based on your history of running off to Reno to take cocaine and gamble away your life savings I think you actually have bipolar disorder”. Conversely, transness is pretty much always self-diagnosed, and it is relatively rare for trans-positive doctors to say that you actually have a different thing unless you are literally a psychotic person with delusions of being male.

The reason that transness and depression work differently is mostly that trans people don’t trust doctors, because doctors went through a long period of trying to figure out who was Really Really Trans based on Science. “Sorry, you wore pants, women don’t wear pants. Denied.” “You admitted being attracted to women and as we all know lesbians don’t exist. Denied.” “You played with trucks as a kid and little girls don’t play with trucks. Denied.” “You’re not hot enough, and as we all know women are all hot. Denied.” “Please tell me all about your sex life. It is very important that we make sure you have a properly feminine sex life after you’ve transitioned. Tell me, what do you think about when you masturbate?”

Probably depressed people would also be suspicious of this whole psychiatry thing if for a couple decades you couldn’t be diagnosed with depression unless you also wore solely black, wrote reams of terrible free-verse poetry, and listened to The Smiths, and also if depression diagnosis regularly involved people asking about your masturbation habits for no reason.

But the main point stands. There is no blood test for the vast majority of mental health conditions. They are diagnosed based on self-report. Either you think all mental health conditions are invalid and unreal, or you accept that gender dysphorics are, in fact, accurately reporting our gender dysphoria. Those are the options.

Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[Epistemic Status: I think my argument in the first half of the post is likely true, and my argument in the second half of the post is highly speculative.]
[Disclaimer: I am using the terms ‘male-sexed’ and ‘female-sexed’ in this post due to the stubborn refusal of the trans community to give me better words. Biomedically transitioning trans people are not female-sexed or male-sexed. Neither are intersex people.]

The Blanchard/Bailey theory is essentially that trans women are divisible into two groups: one group tends to transition early, be solely attracted to men, pass better, be unusually feminine as children, and work in typically feminine professions like hairdresser; one group tends to transition late, not be solely attracted to men, pass less well, be masculine as children, and work in typically masculine professions like programmer. The Blanchard/Bailey theory also comes with explanations for these two groups’ motivation in transitioning. Assuming that Blanchard and Bailey’s research is correct even if their theories are not– that these two clusters exist in the surveys they conducted– what could be the explanation for this?

I feel like the “autogynephilia” and “homosexual transsexual” explanations are very unsatisfactory. Autogynephilia does not work like other sexual fetishes. It is relatively rare for a person to upend their entire life to satisfy a sexual fetish; pretty much the only other example I can think of is 24/7 BDSM, which itself often has a strong nonsexual component. Antiandrogens are a commonly used treatment for sexual fetishism, because they lower libido and thus motivation to engage in fetishistic activity; antiandrogens are also a component of HRT, but we don’t see trans women becoming less motivated to transition after they start HRT.

Autogynephilia’s oddness is often explained by saying that it is a peculiar form of fetish known as an erotic target location error, in which a person is aroused by the idea of becoming the thing they’re turned on by. Other examples of alleged erotic target location errors include arousal at the idea of becoming an amputee, autozoophilia, autoplushophilia, and ageplay. (Ageplay is a bit of a weird example, because as far as I can tell there is no evidence that ageplayers are any more likely than anyone else to want to have sex with children, so maybe it’s actually just three examples.)

First of all, the four specific things that are the subject of erotic target location errors are very strange. Why aren’t redhead fetishists aroused by having red hair or foot fetishists aroused by having particularly desirable feet? Erotic infantilism is common, but given men’s preference for twenty-two-year-old women why aren’t there a bunch of men deeply erotically interested in being twenty-two?

Second of all, it is strange that autogynephilia is the only erotic target location error that causes a significant number of people to wish to transition. There are maybe some people with bodily identity integrity disorder (although far fewer than gender dysphorics) and maybe some otherkin. Why aren’t there a bunch of ageplayers insisting that their soul is really ten years old? Why aren’t there a bunch of people who insist that they really are plushies? Why aren’t foot fetishists demanding attractive-foot surgery?

Furthermore, the autogynephilia theory does not even explain the data it purports to explain. Why are trans women disproportionately engineers and soldiers, instead of being randomly sampled from the male population? Why would a fetish make one transition later? Why would it cause one to not pass as well? Surely fetishizing being an attractive woman would cause one to have a lot of motivation to be an attractive woman.

For some reason, everyone gets outraged at the autogynephile theory, but the homosexual transsexual theory seems to me to be equally offensive: the idea that very feminine gay men transition because gay men are attracted to masculine men and straight men are attracted to feminine women, so by becoming a woman they can get a more desirable sexual partner. While this might make sense as a motivation in relatively trans-positive places, I do not think there are a large number of people who become homeless teenagers doing survival sex work so that they can get laid more easily. In addition, it is unclear to me whether transitioning actually improves trans women’s level of sexual and romantic success. Many straight men who are interested in trans women have homophobic and transphobic beliefs, which make them unlikely to commit to a trans female partner, more likely to freak out after sex, and more prone to committing harassment or violence as a way of resolving their cognitive dissonance.

So if it’s not Blanchard and Bailey’s theory, what is it?

It seems to me that relative level of passability is obviously linked to age at transition. Hormones have effects; a person who has had a testosterone-dominant hormone system for forty years will, all things equal, look more like a man in appearance than a person who has had an estrogen-dominant hormone system for much of that time. So those can be folded into a single factor.

Blanchard’s original studies were conducted in the late eighties and early nineties, long before the current wave of trans awareness. In this context, I think it makes perfect sense that trans women who conform very poorly to their assigned gender and who are solely attracted to men would be more likely to transition young. One of the most important aspects in realizing you’re trans, for many people, is meeting other trans people. It lets you realize that transition is possible, that trans people aren’t the pathetic jokes they’re depicted as in mainstream media but people like you. On a more practical level, knowing trans people helps you DIY hormones or get past gatekeepers.

Trans women who are attracted to men would be far more likely to be connected with the gay community, where they could meet other trans women and wind up transitioning fairly young. The same thing’s true of trans women who conform poorly to manhood, because they might think something along the lines of “oh, I’m a flamer, I guess I’m gay.” The ‘feminine’ professions Blanchard and Bailey discuss are mostly, in fact, stereotypically gay male professions (they include “hairdresser” and “sex worker”, but not “nurse” and “secretary”); this could be explained either by male hairdressers being more likely to meet gay men, or by people in the gay male community being more likely to become hairdressers.

Conversely, a trans women who’s attracted to women and who conforms fairly well to her assigned gender would have far more difficulty meeting other trans people, since she had no community that was disproportionately full of other trans people. (Unless, of course, she found a local crossdressers’ group, but even that is quite difficult, given the shame most crossdressers have about their crossdressing.)

With the rise of public awareness about transition and (especially) the Internet, more people are aware of the existence of trans people. So we should expect trans lesbian programmers to be transitioning younger than they did in the past. Anecdotally, this appears to be the case; trans lesbian programmers of my acquaintance regularly transition as young as nineteen or twenty. I await replications of the Blanchard/Bailey study.

So ignoring social factors, we have one group of feminine straight women, and one group of masculine lesbians, bisexuals, and asexuals. (Of course, these are clusters, and not a binary distinction; there are quite a lot of feminine lesbians and masculine straight women.) Now, there are a couple ways one can respond to this. First, one can point out that this is identical to the pattern among cis women: in general, LGBA women are more likely to be gender-non-conforming than straight women, regardless of birth assignment. There might not be all that much to be explained.

However, my inner Blanchard/Bailey theorist is pointing out that there’s still something to be explained. First of all, trans women are much, much more likely to be lesbians than cis women are. Second of all, trans lesbians’ masculinity is different from cis lesbians’ masculinity: cis lesbians are not bizarrely likely to be programmers or mathematicians, and trans lesbians are not that much more likely than average to have buzzcuts.

(Now we’re getting into the highly speculative bit.)

I’ve long been struck by the correlations between gender-non-conformity, being attracted to members of your assigned sex at birth, and gender dysphoria. As the Genderbread Man points out, there is no necessary relationship between these things. And yet tomboys are more likely to grow up to be lesbians. You could say “maybe they’re signalling that they’re lesbians by being gender-non-conforming!”, but that’s a bit hard to square with the tomboys who weren’t attracted to anyone yet and who fully expected to grow up to be straight.

It is almost as if there are three switches, one of which says Figure Out What People Of Your Sex Are Supposed To Do In Your Culture And Do That, one of which says Be Attracted To People Of The Other Sex, and one of which says Feel Strongly That You Are A Member Of Your Sex. And then some factor– perhaps prenatal?– has something like a 50% chance of flipping over each individual switch. So a minority of the population has all three (that is, they are straight feminine trans women), and a lot of people have one or two, but there’s still a strong correlation between the positions of the three switches.

So that’s our first type of trans woman.

Small but interesting studies suggest a correlation between gender dysphoria and autism, as do the anecdotes of myself and others. Note that when I say “autism” here, I am deliberately being very broad and including people with the broader autism phenotype, as well as so-called “optimal outcome” people who are autistic in childhood but do not meet criteria for autism as adults. With the exception of the military, the specific professions in which trans women are overrepresented are also professions in which autism broadly defined is overrepresented. (Possibly including the military? I am not a military person myself, but I can see the attraction among autistics of clear rules, a chain of command, strict routines, and getting to play with machines.) Perhaps the actual division is between trans women whose transness is caused by autism and trans women whose transness is caused by switch-flipping?

And that’s our second type of trans woman.

Now, the million-dollar question is: where are all the trans male autistics? Why aren’t the trans dudes all programmers too? First, it is very possible that there are more male-sexed autistics than female-sexed autistics; while autism tends to present differently in female-sexed people, leading to their underdiagnosis, it is also possible that some of the difference is that there are legitimately fewer female-sexed autistics. It is also possible that– given that autism is likely to be many many different things— the reason that female-sexed autistics present differently is that they’re likely to have a different kind of autism, which doesn’t happen to be linked to gender dysphoria.

Second, the “people connected to the gay community more likely to transition” argument is even stronger for trans men than for trans women. Until recently, most of the people who transitioned were trans women. Presumably, this is because trans men were less likely to be independent than trans women. In a time period where many gatekeepers required that the trans person cut ties with everyone they knew, trans women would be more likely to have useful skills (engineering!) that could be used to rebuild a career. Trans men would be more likely to be housespouses, which does not teach you very many transferable skills and ends as soon as you cut ties with everyone you know. This might also make trans men more reluctant to e.g. found or join crossdresser groups, because if you’re financially dependent on your spouse it’s much less likely they’ll suck it up and deal with it than if your spouse is financially dependent on you.

Therefore, in historical samples, we should expect the vast majority of trans men to be non-autistic. In present-day samples, if #1 is mostly true, we would expect mostly switch-flipping trans men, while if #2 is mostly true, we would expect a population of autistic trans men. Once again, I await replication.

Truth Matters

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

When I read people talk about the etiology of transness– particularly, but not solely, discussion of the Blanchard/Bailey theory of trans women– I often see a response from cis people that’s along the lines of “Who cares? If you want to transition, I think you should transition. I don’t care whether it’s a fetish or caused by gender-non-conformity or whatever; as long as it makes you happy, it’s fine. You have the right to make decisions about your own body.”

To be clear, this is a really good attitude for people to have! In fact, I think it’s the correct attitude to have about other people’s transitions. It’s really none of your business what people decide to do with their own personal bodies: getting a tattoo, getting cosmetic surgery, not getting cosmetic surgery, or transitioning. Even if Anne Lawrence is a completely and 100% accurate reporter of her own internal experience, I support her right to transition.

But it also matters what’s true.

Even if information about the etiology of transness doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) affect the behavior of cis people, it sure as hell should affect the behavior of trans and gender-questioning people. Transition is a big step; reversing it can be embarrassing (“uh, actually, turns out I’m a girl, sorry about that”), difficult (“welp, time to save up money for my boob job”), or impossible (“I’m never going to be able to get pregnant”). A lot of signs that one might be trans– depression, dissociation, a strong desire to wear clothing associated with a particular gender, glee when you pass– can also be caused by a lot of other things. Right now, really the only way to figure out whether transition is a good idea is trying it and seeing if you like it. If we understood why people are trans, it could provide gender-questioning people more guidance in figuring out whether transition is right for them.

For instance, let’s say that God comes down from on high and says “yep, the Blanchard/Bailey theory of transness is absolutely and 100% accurate, this is definitely how transness works.” In that case, a lot of very feminine gay men and straight men who jerk off to sissification porn should consider transitioning, even if they have no particular desire to be women– empirically, people who are quite similar to them seem to have found transitioning to be the correct choice. Conversely, assigned-male-at-birth people who aren’t solely attracted to men and who find that crossdressing porn leaves them cold should probably not transition: it’s very likely that their condition is actually depression, a dissociative disorder, or similar.

On the other hand, if God comes down from on high and says “actually, gender dysphoria is a neurological intersex condition, and you can identify it through looking at the differences in these six brain regions”, suddenly it becomes very important to get a brain scan before you consider transitioning.

If God says “gender dysphoria is a lifelong condition and if you didn’t have gender dysphoria before puberty you don’t have it now”, it is ill-advised for me to transition. If God says “gender dysphoria in children is linked to but distinct from gender dysphoria in adults, and gender dysphoric children often grow up to be adults without gender dysphoria”, it is ill-advised to put your gender-dysphoric eleven-year-old on HRT.

To be clear, I support the right of any person who wishes to transition to do so (although perhaps not to have their transition covered by insurance). If we knew that transness was a neurological intersex condition, I would support the right of people without that condition to transition; if we knew that the Blanchard/Bailey theory was correct, I would support the right of masculine people without a sexual fetish for being a woman to transition. But that doesn’t mean their decision would be a good one, and people– naturally– want to make good decisions about such an important issue. So the etiology of transness does matter.