All in the mind
Ok so the solution to my problem a few hours ago is excerpts.
It shall be so.
The hospital had a section for people who suffered severe traumatic brain injury. These people were particularly interesting. As their brains healed and grew new connections, and they learned to do literally everything all over again they became totally different people. They had no memories of their previous lives; those stories and photos which their families and friends showed them might as well have happened to someone else. I’ve had parents crying in my taxi because the son or daughter they thought would die a few years earlier…had returned to them a complete stranger.
Being transgender is not an experience, it is an explanation for what some people experience. It’s a diagnosis, but it’s not based on anything more than a simple idea that can’t be formulated into a testable hypothesis.
I do not deny their experiences, but what I doubt and am skeptical of is their diagnosis, or their explanation for why they have those experiences.
I’ve often wondered why the extreme intensity of the anguish felt by those who are convinced their mental-sex doesn’t fit their body is routinely assumed to support that assumption. A high level of obsessive rumination and fractured sense of self is generally associated with psychological pathologies, not with birth defects.
…
An intense, agonizing, inescapable feeling of an unfilled need for something you rationally reject doesn’t give me a lot of confidence on the self-diagnosis. That supporters don’t seem to notice this doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they’re analyzing it properly, either.
I have done a lot of literature search on these things, partially because students are always coming up with things I need to address as a science teacher. Some of it sounds astonishing to me, that you know there are demons because you woke to one sitting on your chest. Even after I learned about sleep paralysis, it seemed odd that would lead to such an experience.
Then one morning I couldn’t move when I woke up. I had sleep paralysis. I felt fortunate that I knew about it before I experienced it; that allowed me to interpret my experience accurately. I’m sure I would never have jumped to the conclusion that a demon was sitting on me, but I might have thought I had some serious condition. We filter such experiences through our expectations.
It’s vaguely reminiscent of the cosmological argument. Assuming the argument is entirely valid and sound, it still doesn’t establish the existence of any particular deity. Likewise, assuming the absolute sincerity and torture of cross-sex belief doesn’t establish its veridicality. When I’ve pointed this out before, believers have responded that I’m missing the point, immediately pivoting from “therefore it’s true and TWAW” to “therefore we ought to believe that TWAW”. That is, our moral convictions should logically precede and determine our beliefs about the world.
“Gender affirming” “care” is competing with watchful waiting for the minds and bodies of children. Practitioners promoting the “trans” pathway have something to push, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, surgeries, or both. Patients have an excellent chance of becoming lifelong customers, as they are ushered along their “gender journey,” a never-ending chase for a fantasy goal that’s always, and ever will be, out of reach. As I’ve said before, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” In contrast, those going the talk therapy route have little to sell but puberty. The end goal is independence and acceptance, however uneasy, of how things really are.
I keep returning to the the old “what if I see blue the way you see red” problem. If there is no way to describe “ways xyz”, if there is no way to specify what I mean when I claim to feel like a “woman” (apart from “I think or feel like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like etc… etc.. ad Infinitum“), I can’t possibly know that anyone else who claims to feel like a “woman” is talking about the same thing. If Chase Strangio is a “man” then I’m not. If Chase Strangio claims to be what I am, it’s fucking disingenuous to go on talking as if this were all about trans people’s right to be “who they are”.
Don’t eat a jar of hot sauce just before bedtime.
Once again I’m reminded how lucky I am to share this space.
I love the picture you used after mine. And I ALWAYS eat a jar of hot sauce just before bedtime. It makes my dreams spicy.
So iknklast, did you have a terrible crick in your neck after sleeping like that? I’d be a cripple I think.
Eat what you like, when you like, especially if it results in you realising that you make the rules.
LOL @ iknklast (I never eat any hot sauce at all, and my dreams are wild).
Something I quite forgot to mention in my reminiscing about the final decade of the last century; not one single TBI victim ever thought that they were in the wrong body. The wrong life, yes; with zero recollection of any life before the accident which broke their brains, they were in the unenviable position of having to trust complete strangers to describe who they used to be, and they largely couldn’t do it. They’d forgotten how to eat, dress themselves, walk… of course they’d forgotten who they used to be. This, incidentally, might be why we have stories of people dying and going to heaven when it wasn’t their time, and being offered a second chance – but in someone else’s body, because theirs has been cremated. It is a likely a more palatable and plausible scenario, especially to people raised with Christianity, than the fact that brains build a personality out of experiences, and won’t build it the same way again if it has to start over.
Although…really…the fact that brains build a personality out of experiences isn’t at all disconcerting or sad in the absence of having to start over from scratch. It seems quite what-you-would-expect. Of course our experiences make us; what else would do it? But abruptly losing them all would be horrible.
Rob @ 1 – same. I’m glad I thought of the excerpts, because really that collection of replies on this all-important theme needed a spotlight.
So you opted for “Seven, seven, seven mints in one!”
Oh, yes ; it’s perfectly OK that our personalities are made of our experiences. And, indeed, the happiest New People seemed to be those whose families did the least to try to turn them into the people they used to be, but instead took the same approach we take with newborns – let’s find out who this New Person is, and accommodate them in our lives. They didn’t push for an immediate resumption of old relationships, but met the person where they were and let the person decide how fast to adjust to a world which was even newer to them than it is to a newborn baby. After all, the baby has been listening to sounds for months before he or she is actually born, and recognises his or her mother’s voice above all. This is why I formed the opinion that the loved ones of people in a coma should be there every day, and speak to them all the time they are there, helping the brain to rewire itself with what used to be familiar things. It won’t change the probability that a new personality will emerge, but to the patient it might make the difference between feeling some recognition of the other people in their lives, and feeling completely unmoored.
@Mike Haubrich,
It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping and a dandruff shampoo and a motor oil and a drain cleaner and a drink mix and a hot sauce!