countarthur

It doesn't cause extreme mental anguish, I just... don't have to play along with childish games like pretending someone can be the opposite sex. I just don't! However easy or respectful you think it would be for me to play make believe, or even just pay two-faced lip service.

That seems to really wind people up but since the executive order today (I'm not American incidentally), everyone is going to have to get used to it.

I don't sneer, by the way. Never have, never will! I'm more of a smirker. ;)

I agree with absolutely everything you've said here!

Just my alternative conclusion is: you can't fix anything by compelling people to play along with someone else's delusion, whether the source is social, psychological, biochemical, sexual, whatever.

This is a really thorough reply to what I said and very thoughtful, thanks.

Regarding "liking woman a lot", I was quoting the original author - it seemed like an autogynophilic statement to me, the idea that you are sexually attracted to something so much you want to become it. Maybe I'm misunderstanding!

Yeah it's interesting what you say about Blanchard... the fascinating thing for me about Blanchard is the measurement of groin blood pressure to test for arousal in response (rather than relying on self-reporting), I think his solutions were sexist and backwards and a great example of how blinkered medical professionals can be.

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If we expand the dictionary definition of woman to include some men, we then need a new term to describe... well, actual women. I know a lot of people want to adopt the term "cis woman" for this, but I'm going to stick with "woman". If this is just my personal aesthetic judgement that's fine, the burden of proof is on others to expand it and I don't think the justifications are very good.

Regarding the actress you mentioned, Brian, I can totally see I might mistake her for a man as she's gone out of her way to masculinise her appearance. I wouldn't feel guilt if I used male pronouns then later realised that was incorrect (according to my own rules) - perhaps surprise? I wouldn't even feel temporary embarrassment because she's gone to lengths to look male. I would correct myself to use she/her - even in direct conversation. That might be awkward but it's fine.

If I was in a country, organisation or situation where my livelihood was at risk for using sexed pronouns, I would avoid using pronouns entirely as regrettable prudence. This isn't hypothetical: parts of my social life overlap with these kinds of people and I steer through it, often by saying less, but I won't lie to someone directly.

I don't feel guilty about saying I don't believe in god/heaven to a catholic priest, even if the logical implication is that, from my perspective, they've wasted their life and chances of a happy love and sex life. It's unfortunate but really has nothing to do with me, it's all based on a set of attitudes and beliefs I don't participate in (and personally find regressive).

These are good points and great questions!

Your description of getting surgeries based on a distorted view of what they see in the mirror sounds exactly like gender dysphoria to me.

I have a big nose like you and even having had romantic partners compliment me on it hasn't stopped me feeling bad about it, but I agree it's definitely more trivial than believing you ought to be the other sex, somehow. They usually say "it's handsome" rather than try to convince me it's a normal size, which is perhaps a more merciful lie!

I don't know about CBT, but I know that people can be convinced by others that they should be the other sex: it happens all the time on youtube, tiktok, tumblr and across the web. That's how this became so wide spread in the first place.

So I absolutely believe people can be helped to accept the truth of themselves and their real body and not require hormonal or surgical interventions. Here I'm mostly talking about insecure young people - the very different cohort of older men where there's a sexual element involved might be boned (pardon the pun!) but that's all the more reason not to have the rest of society change laws and social mores to facilitate it.

If I was gender dysphoric (unable to accept the truth and be comfortable in my own body) AND believing in gender identity then I'm sure I would expect people to affirm my delusion and I'd viscerally dislike those that didn't. If I was later cured, I'd hope I'd appreciate those who stuck to their guns and didn't lie to me. Maybe it's impossible to fully accept yourself (like our big noses) and one just has to live with it and cope with it as healthily as they can. I would consider getting my nose carved down to size (regardless of how big it really is) a failure for everyone involved.

What does "such" mean here?

How should I treat someone with body dysmorphia who believes they are 130 kg when they're closer to 50? Should I agree with them and affirm them as fat as they believe they are? Or should I - if it's my place - implore them to go to talking therapy and refuse to be drawn into their self-hating fantasy?

The claim that 1-2% of the population is intersex is a common myth: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12476264/

"Many reviewers are not aware that this figure includes conditions which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex, such as Klinefelter syndrome, Turner syndrome, and late-onset adrenal hyperplasia." "...the true prevalence of intersex is seen to be about 0.018%, almost 100 times lower than Fausto-Sterling s estimate of 1.7%"

It's often commonly claimed it's as common as red hair, too - it isn't. https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/intersex-is-not-as-commo...

Personally I've always found the "argument from commonality" to be shaky philosophically and morally. A population's degree of minority doesn't make discrimination or mistreatment more acceptable, so why massage stats to make them seem more populous than they really are?

As to your question as to why does "woman" have to mean "adult human female" - because that's the dictionary definition.

I totally agree with you that there are some people whose sex is hard to judge immediately, often, but not always, because they've gone out of their way to make it ambiguous. Everyone else can be clocked at 100 feet in a dark alley - we're evolved that way.

A few awkward social faux pas over people who look or act androgynous - for whatever reason - doesn't justify exploding a category that works and serves everyone well almost all of the time. I don't feel guilty over my use of sexed pronouns even if I occasionally get it wrong and this insistence that I should... isn't convincing.

Notice that arguments about the treatment of "intersex" people (those with disorders/differences of sexual development) are used to buttress the position of people who feel like they're the other sex, but are otherwise biologically completely normal. These groups really have nothing in common but it's useful to conflate them.

It's not unthinkable, but in practise there's usually strong pressure in play: sunk cost fallacy, children to support, the threat of social ostracism. This is mostly true for wives rather than husbands because of female socialisation (this is sadly where gender actually becomes relevant!).

As the author himself says: "It turns out that I like women so much I’d like to be one of them"

That's not how sex works. I like women a lot too: liking them a lot doesn't mean you want to be one, that's called autogynephilia and can be treated with talking therapy.

However if it's a true expression of his attitudes and preferences then perhaps if his wife decided to masculinise her appearance e.g. injecting testosterone to deeper her voice, cause male-associated health growth, have elective surgical interventions like a double mastectomy, he wouldn't receive it as well as his wife seems to have. That's definitely speculation on my part of course!

To answer your original question about how it's supposed to be meant: it won't matter one jot what any investors he once met may think or not think about his lifestyle choices if he's trying to impose a fantasy on his wife.

What you're saying is interesting but I think the causality is backwards here and I can provide some examples to show why.

(By male hormone I'm assuming you mean testosterone, and by female hormone I assume you mean oestrogen.) i in fact If being "more male" came from having more testosterone (and vice versa), then logically when children go through puberty and develop into adults, they would become "more" male or "more" female.

As adults become elderly and naturally produce less sex-associated hormones, they would become "less" male or female.

(Fetuses do not all begin in the womb as female, that's a common misunderstanding. We start off physically undifferentiated, and develop along a genetically predetermined pathway as we grow. Some animals use temperature or other environmental triggers to pick, humans use genes.)

Would that mean a male bodybuilder who injects testosterone is more male than a man that doesn't? His phenotype may become visibly more masculine, but that doesn't change his sex at all. Same for a female bodybuilder that injects testosterone - she may develop stereotypically male physical characteristics like large muscles and a deeper voice, but her sex is unaffected.

The causality is the other way: being male - or - female results in a physiology (adult testicles/ovaries) that produces sex associated hormones in larger or lesser degrees depending on the person (and in some cases very low amounts or not at all).

This makes sense if sex is a binary (with rare differences of sex development - detailed here https://www.theparadoxinstitute.com/read/sex-development-cha... ) that results in different levels of sex hormones in the body and resulting phenotype. So yes, everyone is male or female.

(I'm not referring to gender here - I'm talking only about sex)

If there's a spectrum then some men could be biologically "more male" than others and vice versa for women. I've not seen any evidence of this myself, but I'm happy to be proven wrong!