Oddbean

Most people have identity issues of one form or another. I'm OK with classifying gender dysphoria as delusion but only in so much that all identity issues are. People's identities are complex emotional and mental constructs built around a persons subjective experience. If it's reality you're looking for, actual ultimate reality not a persons subjective reality, you're not going to find it in the mental/personality constructs of a trans identifying person or any other kind of person.

Basic things like what is a man & a woman. It's just the modern version if Orwell's 2+2=5 and a lot of people have fallen for it. You get people to deny something as fundamental as our own biology & they will believe any nonsense you feed them. I think society is being primed for total tyranny & how many already openly supported hospitals & grocery stores refusing access to the unvaxxed? What will the deluded support in the next go around? The crazier things get the more painful it is for the deluded to let go of their investment so the more they will do to protect the irrational world they have built for themselves. This is how cult behavior works.

Which is more real, consciousness or form? Is a persons identity more or less real than their physical self? A person with gender dysphoria can either deny or try to change one or the other, their identity or their body. I don't presume to know what is best for them.

Libertarians don't care what pronouns a person calls themselves or anyone else. They're not missing any point. The point of freedom of speech is that freedom of speech includes the right to say things others may consider offensive. Furthermore . . . Queer Theory = Queer Marxism Queer Marxism is more about abolishing normalcy, and indoctrinating and awakening people to a communist "critical consciousness," than it is about LGBT. "Awakening" to a communist critical consciousness is where the term "woke" came from. LGBT is not really about gay/transvestite. It's about destroying everything normal, hence the gazzillion sex categories into infinity. Pronouns sanctioned by queer Marxists offend some people, just like refusal to use the Marxist queer theory pronouns offend others. One group doesn't get to take control of the other group's speech.

If your "identity" contradicts physical reality then it is an error you have imagined. The way to be a healthy person is to integrate your identity with reality, not deny reality or take a knife to it. Some people have things seriously inverted.

Do you believe in bodily autonomy? And to be clear I'm not talking about children, I'm talking about adults. Do they have the right to do what they want with there own bodies? Also, all identity is basically imagined. Personalities are cloaks that we wear. I certainly can't deny there's a contradiction going on in that person's reality, I'm just saying it's not really my business how they go about resolving that but i wish them the best. Further, should they ask me to refer to them by some pronoun or other it's not really any skin off my nose to be polite and respect that. I suppose you think that's enabling and encouraging their delusion, to me it's just polite.

Sure, but if someone wanted you to cut off their perfectly healthy arm, or jump off a ledge, would you help them do that or would your try to talk them out of such self destructive things? Do you understand that genital mutilation doesn't change a person's biology & that the drugs & surgeries lead to serious health complications & a completely & permanently disfuctional life going forward? You should look into the horrible things that "doctors" are doing to these people to the tune of millions of dollars, and govt policy is socializing the costs... why? The crazy suicide rate among these people is really not surprising.

If somebody came to me asking for advice on their gender dysphoria and what to do about it I wouldn't be comfortable either encouraging or discouraging any action, definitely not surgery or hormones, but would more likely help them find support from communities and professionals that understand what they're going through better than I can. If someone was attempting to mutilate or kill themselves I'd obviously try to talk them out of whatever stressed state they were in. It's a different situation. I understand there can be all kinds of complications with gender reassignment, and some people even strongly regret it later. Again, it's not my business to say what's right for any individual. For some people it seems to have helped them. Good for them. That government socialises the costs isn't a problem unique to this specific kind of care, that's a problem across the board. I don't really like that I have to cover costs of people that live unhealthy lifestyles either, but it's still their own business if they want to drink, or smoke, or eat cake, or whatever.

The actual neurobiology here, how a trans person’s brain chemistry is organized, introduces a lot of nuance here. 150 years ago, the idea that there were invisible waves in the air that can carry information would get you institutionalized. Now we measure radio and use Bluetooth every day. Don’t risk the arrogance of assuming it’s black and white, just because it seems like it should be simple and because the ultraconservative “Christians” fund the message that it’s a certain way and it’s made its way into the culture war. (Quotation marks because they’re a poor example of Christian values and fail bitterly at compassion).

My beliefs have nothing to do with any sort of "Christian" influence, while I do loosely consider myself to be one now (after a decade or so of atheism) my interpretation of things is completely non-traditional, & the majority of boomer "Christians" that I interact with would call me a heretic. I don't think brain chemistry is some sort of fixed thing & people are not just their brain separate from everything else. I think the entire framing comes from a completely fallacious view of who & what we are. It's the same view that allows people to believe we will transcend our bodies & exist in computers or something, but I don't think that is how any of this works. I think this view mostly comes from people who are doing & promoting horrible things because they are afraid of their own mortality... which might actually have something to do with their rejection of spirituality or religion in some form or fashion.

Are you saying all identity issues are a delusion? Meaning everyone who identifies as a man or a woman is delusional? I think some would argue that every identity group is a social construct, therefore anyone who identifies with any identity group is delusional. Not sure if that’s what you mean though.

Not only identity issues, all mental constructs are essentially delusions. Whatever ultimate truth or reality is we don't see it because the tools we use to interpret reality by their very nature dissect and filter it through all kinds of complex processes, most of which are themselves beyond our own cognition. Using terms like man or woman are simply labels, people may use them to point to very specific biological patterns within this shared delusion as markers to help them communicate but they are still only labels and don't really have anything to do with what is ultimately true or natural or right. That's all just stuff we make up in our heads. And how we love to make stuff up. If there's one thing humans will always do it's try new things, explore new avenues, and break the rules. Gender reassignment is hardly amongst the most extreme of these. Also in terms of messing with our genes and biology we may well see way crazier things than gender reassignment within our lifetimes! The way some people freak out about trans folk I'm not sure how they'll cope with what's coming! What we mostly call reality is at best a blurred reflection of the real thing on the scratched and torn surfaces of our minds. For that reason I'm always very suspicious of people that are very certain about what reality is because they're generally more lost in their delusion than the rest of us and often have a desire to impose that view on to the rest of the world. As a last note, saying that terms are just labels that we make up is not to say that there's not something biologically distinct that we can point to and say "male" or "female", that can be a useful delusion, or mental model, to participate in for sure.

Our mental models of the universe are inexact, that much is true. But I wonder: do you find yourself following this line of thinking, and making real world decisions accordingly, on issues that are not tribal or politicized? If I say it’s 85 degrees outside do you think to yourself that temperature is a social construct, so it might be freezing out and you should bring warm clothes when you leave the house? If I say the moon is made of cheese, do you think to yourself that the concept of cheese is a social construct, therefore maybe the moon is made of cheese and astronauts will never go hungry on the moon? These strike me as non sequiturs. Just because we can change the words we use to describe reality doesn’t mean we can change reality. And in my experience, almost no one would be thinking those things as they make mundane real world decisions throughout the day. But if I said I identify as an elf, many (in recent years) would say yes, you might be an elf. Why the difference? The only explanation I can think of is that personal identity has been highly politicized, as opposed to something like the composition of moon rocks, which has not.

No, I'm not saying we can just change ultimate reality with our minds and suddenly turn the moon to cheese or anything like that! I'm saying that truth is illusive because we rely on interpretation and models and that people fixed in their view of what it is are suspect. Reality is not to be found in the opinions of men and I don't believe there's any rules passed down from on high that say people mustn't alter their bodies or appearance to suit their identities. If anything it's people that say it is "unnatural" or wrong to live out such desires that are in denial of reality because reality is showing us over and again that it's not particularly unusual for humans to want to do so. But yes, it's all certainly become very politicised and I won't deny that there are difficult social issues around things like trans in sports, which public toilets trans people should use, or what advice should be given to youngsters with dysphoria, that I don't have the answers for. What I don't think is useful is othering trans people, or labelling them as an abonimation to nature, or imagining they can just magically stop being the way the are because a bunch of ultra conservatives object to their existence. Trans people exist, that's just a fact. If you object to that you are not reinforcing reality you are fighting a losing battle against it.

So maybe I didn’t change the composition of the moon. Maybe it was cheese all along. If you say I’m wrong, well that’s just your opinion. Truth is illusive. True story: a girl convinced her doctor to provide her a note for school saying she needs 45 minutes of sunlight twice a day because she identifies as a lizard. Not because sunlight is healthy for people, but because she identifies as a lizard. What do you think about this line of reasoning?

You're not understanding what I'm saying at all. Cheese and moon are conceptual frameworks we build in our minds to navigate the world and communicate with other people. They are not objective reality. Of course someone can decide to build a conceptual framework that is completely out of accordance with what everyone else is agreeing on, like the moon is made of cheese, but it's not going to help them much socially and it obviously doesn't make the thing that everyone else is calling moon become the thing that everyone else is calling cheese. We form social concensus around how we label different patterns that we observe with our minds and through our sense organs and society is currently having a problem reaching concensus on how we classify gender, some saying it's purely biological, others saying it's more complex than that. Neither framework for viewing the world is objectively true because they are just frameworks and it's our job as humans to decide which one fits best. I choose the one that grants the most personal autonomy for individuals.