"Misgendering," Arrests, and the UK

[Darth Wedgius]

Characterizing someone's sense of gender as an opinion is misinformed to start with. Trans people reliably report responding to hormones and psychoactive medication in accordance with their gender rather than their assigned sex. It's about as much of an "opinion" as depression.

In the event you see all psychological medicine as an opinion, because much of the discipline must rely on self-reported information, we'll use another example.

Pain.

How people experience pain is subjective. While there are obvious physiological reactions to pain, some pretty obvious, there's no objective answer to the question "how much pain are you in". Sensitivity to pain varies from person to person, and there's no outside device you can hook up to someone and assess "yup your nerves are showing an 55% increase in signals, you're at about a 5.5 on the pain scale".

But the answer to the question "how much pain are you in" is awfully important to medical care.
To be sure, if you have acute appendicitis, you are in some pretty intense pain. But without an MRI or cutting you open, the only indication that you have an immediate life threatening condition is that subjective experience of pain.
Under the thesis that all things subjective are an opinion, when you go to the ER for your (again, immediately life-threatening) pain, the doctors would tell you to take a seat, you'll be treated after other patients with obvious signs of injury like bleeding, lack of breathing, dislocated limbs, what have you.
And in fact, at particular conditions of understaffed, this has happened in real life! But precisely because of this, doctors and other medical professionals look for signs of pain, ask where it is, and if it's in certain locations and at certain intensities, the possibility of appendicitis means you jump up front because, again, it can fucking kill you.
Because, y'know, while pain is a subjective experience, the underlying causes were a physical phenomenon within your body. Pain was just the outward, identifiable experience signalling that there was something wrong.

What strange mix of genetics, biochemistry, brain structure, endocrine nonsense, whoever the fuck knows causes someone to experience gender differently from their assigned sex? We don't know. But it's persistent, exists throughout human history, and treatments based on transition have reliably shown positive outcomes, increasingly better ones as transition has more medical augmentation beyond simply living and being accepted as your gender.
Dismissing this as "an opinion" is at best uninformed, and more likely a self-rationalization for being an asshole to people and not feeling guilty about it.

That's not bad, though I would need some sources, and it goes against the "gender is a social construct" narrative I was using as a starting point. I'm willing to discard "gender is a social construct" if science doesn't point that way, though.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Interesting take.

Now, just following through with this, it's kinda reminiscent about the issue of assessing suspected cases of ADD (or ADHD?) where a lot of people speculate that the signs that professionals look for are, say, nebulous?

Not really wanting to challenge the consideration for transgenderism or anything, and I'm not sure that respectable social consideration needs to be challenged by medical consensus, but yeah I guess I'll ask how would you deconstruct that comparison.

I'm not as well versed on ADHD as I'd like, but just off the cuff.

Anecdotally it's reasonable to conclude that ADHD is over-diagnosed in children and under-diagnosed in adults. As best as people can figure, the diagnosis criteria aren't calibrated for how turbo-fucked our current approach to public schooling is, but because of various cultural attitudes most adults that display diagnosable symptoms don't get checked out and thus just struggle on.
So definitely it seems like we do need to fine tune the criteria (I think the DSM5 has done so to some degree? That'd require more research/specialized knowledge than I have), and hopefully if we can untangle the knots that are public schooling and medical coverage in the world we'll make that job easier.

I do hate to draw parallels between being trans and psychological conditions in a way though, because while we're only a few years removed from that being how it's medically understood (Gender Identity Disorder WAS retired for the DSM5, most psychological organizations are adopting the WPATH standards of care) that is traditionally how transition was treated and understood. And even as we move away from that, there will always be that degree of overlap because gender identity, like mental health issues, rely in large part on self-reported information. But while trans folk do generally have one form or another of dysphoria, which is best understood and treated as a psychological condition, there are absolutely a percentage of people who discover their gender identity via euphoria in their gender rather than dysphoria at their assigned sex.

Rephrasing for simplicity, it's more accurate to say that being trans is not a mental disorder, but that trans people typically (though not always) do develop psychological symptoms when forced to live as their assigned sex. Additionally, there seem to be different intensities (and indeed it is entirely likely that 'trans' will one day be understood as an umbrella term for multiple distinct variations that cause mismatch between assigned sex and gender identity) for this dysphoria, where some are sufficiently debilitating that medical intervention in the form of surgeries or hormone replacement are required, while milder forms may simply elect to have these things for comfort or safety.

I'd also want to draw another distinction between most mental health conditions and being trans. Setting aside the multi-faceted beast that is dysphoria (which aside from being difficult to describe to a cis person even in the most clear-cut cases, also tends to manifest as other mental disorders without having a clear, definable cause), in simplest terms because trans people are so rare, and because information about them was systematically destroyed so often, and because history often misreports clearly trans persons as crossdressers or gay or several other things, until the rise of the internet many people simply had no access to the information they'd need to realize their own experiences weren't matching their assigned sex. And indeed only in the past few years, as an actual trans community has grown, has the public understanding of what being trans is like advanced enough for many trans people to figure themselves out.
And with that in mind, the distinction here is that most forms of mental disorders are pretty clearly disordered. Depression, anxiety, ADHD, ASD, day to day interactions with people will generally cue you in that oh, what I'm experiencing is not typical, perhaps I should see someone. And if you don't pick up on it, someone else eventually will.
But unless you talk to a lot of trans people, you aren't typically going to realize that actually, cis people *don't* frequently wish they'd been born another gender, or have persistent daydreams or fantasies about living as another gender over a period of years. So if someone reaches the point where they actually say "I am/want to be [gender different from assigned sex]", they are pretty goddamned sure about it. We culturally don't really make that distinction between sex and gender y'know.

This frames it pretty well. And one thing I kinda want to say, is that I wasn't really trying to bring up disorders as if to frame transgenderism as a disorder, but I do get how you were noting the corresponding issues pertaining to dysphoria and conversely euphoria. Like it's not the easiest to dissociate ADHD as a mal disorder, but mainly I was just trying to ask in terms of medical or just scientific assessment, and that was following your example of subjective pain and how that kinda obscures the role of subjective opinion on matters.

Don't hide behind biological determinism. You CHOOSE to be this way.

Tell me about my terribleness please...

I'll go ahead and start this off, if nobody minds.

[CmdrKing]

That's not bad, though I would need some sources, and it goes against the "gender is a social construct" narrative I was using as a starting point. I'm willing to discard "gender is a social construct" if science doesn't point that way, though.

Disentangling the aspects of gender that are clearly socially constructed and enforced (preferences in clothing, standards of beauty), aspects that are tied to biological function (hair, skin, so forth), aspects tied to reproductive function, and other ineffable qualities is something that's beyond the bounds of research, there's no way to really create experimental conditions to test anything. Over time if we do break these things down we may one day find that breaking down gender norms largely mitigates whatever biochemical/psychological flags are present in trans people? But if so gender would be a lot like Newtonian Gravity; technically not true in a universal sense but extremely useful and adequate in almost all situations.

[clearspira]

That's not bad, though I would need some sources, and it goes against the "gender is a social construct" narrative I was using as a starting point. I'm willing to discard "gender is a social construct" if science doesn't point that way, though.

Disentangling the aspects of gender that are clearly socially constructed and enforced (preferences in clothing, standards of beauty), aspects that are tied to biological function (hair, skin, so forth), aspects tied to reproductive function, and other ineffable qualities is something that's beyond the bounds of research, there's no way to really create experimental conditions to test anything. Over time if we do break these things down we may one day find that breaking down gender norms largely mitigates whatever biochemical/psychological flags are present in trans people? But if so gender would be a lot like Newtonian Gravity; technically not true in a universal sense but extremely useful and adequate in almost all situations.

Make-up and skirts and such have gone in and out of being male and female since the dawn of time. Boys wore skirts as recently as the Victorian era. We can clearly call this nurture as opposed to nature.
The fact is also clear that boys and girls act differently from a very young age and this is despite culture, society and period. Girls will learn to communicate and cooperate earlier and boys will be more physically boisterous. Any teacher of young kids will tell you that.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Is the "beyond the bounds of research," pertaining to social/psycho/neuro implications?

If so I feel we do know a bit about hormones in the form of testosterone and estrogen that lead not only to physical characteristics, but I'd think the more brainy ones listed above as well.

[Karha of Honor]

I'll go ahead and start this off, if nobody minds.

As long as you don't speak like you came out of Left Wing hugbox, go ahead. cast your moral judgement.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I'll go ahead and start this off, if nobody minds.

As long as you don't speak like you came out of Left Wing hugbox, go ahead. cast your moral judgement.

Well if you're expecting me to get all Kristen Stewart about it, then I guess I'll get the dwarves ready and set out to disenfranchise your place on this forum before you know it.

[CmdrKing]

Is the "beyond the bounds of research," pertaining to social/psycho/neuro implications?

If so I feel we do know a bit about hormones in the form of testosterone and estrogen that lead not only to physical characteristics, but I'd think the more brainy ones listed above as well.

Sorry, in the sense of “there’s no way to test a gender-deconstructed human response experimentally because there’s no ethical way to raise someone outside our existing concept of gender and gender norms”.
You can certainly find historical comparisons or study cultural differences for variations but that’s still a very different thing with much more modest findings.

[Karha of Honor]

I'll go ahead and start this off, if nobody minds.

As long as you don't speak like you came out of Left Wing hugbox, go ahead. cast your moral judgement.

Well if you're expecting me to get all Kristen Stewart about it, then I guess I'll get the dwarves ready and set out to disenfranchise your place on this forum before you know it.

I am pretty unbothered about being hated as long as i am not banned.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I'll go ahead and start this off, if nobody minds.

As long as you don't speak like you came out of Left Wing hugbox, go ahead. cast your moral judgement.

Well if you're expecting me to get all Kristen Stewart about it, then I guess I'll get the dwarves ready and set out to disenfranchise your place on this forum before you know it.

I am pretty unbothered about being hated as long as i am not banned.

How can you sit there and lie like that?