Obviously, the helicopter example is deliberately stupid. But what about so-called ‘Otherkin’? They identify as animals. There aren’t many of them, but they’re out there. You can see them on YouTube and they’re perfectly sincere. Where do we draw the line between respecting identity and recklessly accommodating mental illness?
Shit, “Otherkin” aren’t nearly the weirdest we have to deal with. I’ve met people who identify as “souls,” thinking they’re some sort of immortal being that temporarily occupies a fleshly body, and that after the body dies, they live on. That’s way stranger than thinking you’re a slightly different kind of animal.
So how do I deal with them?
Privately I think whatever I want about them. In public, I deal with them like I’d deal with anyone else. It’s vanishingly rare for me to have to make a decision based on whether someone sees themself as a “soul” or as a normal human being, and when I do, I do my best to show them respect.
It’s worked out in 100% of cases. And if I can deal with these people (locally, the bulk of them call members of their community “Christians”), surely you can handle “otherkin.”
We can’t have a discussion about the rights of the transgendered without discussing the transhelicoptered , the transanimaled , the transtoastered etc.? As I look back on history I see that such “lines” that are being asked about were drawn not out of necessity or a need for clarification-they were drawn by those that thought they were superior to show why they were superior.
Easy. We are not allowed to treat other human beings as non-human animals or mythological beings. They can’t abrogate their human rights by declaring themselves to be non-human or mythological, any more than someone can abrogate their human rights by declaring themselves to be a helicopter.
In fact, AFAICT, Otherkin don’t actually demand to be relegated to the legal status of non-human animals, or claim to possess the sort of elven/dwarvish/faerie/whatever characteristics whose actual manifestation would automatically earn their possessor several months in a federal testing lab at Roswell or somewhere. They don’t want their human rights and limitations denied or disbelieved.
For example, if an Otherkin who identifies as merperson gets stranded in a rapidly rising flood, they are not going to welcome advice to just jump in and take advantage of their merperson submersion capabilities.
Transgender identity is entirely different from this. There is nothing supernatural about a human being having a male or female gender identity, or about said gender identity occasionally not aligning with the individual’s biological sex. Nor do we need to deny a transgender person’s human rights in order to accept their ordinary social manifestations of their preferred gender identity.
Otherkin’s claims of supernatural or mystical partaking of non-human characteristics are more like a religious belief. It’s obviously false in a literal materialist sense to say that an Otherkin is an immortal winged fairy, for example; but then, it’s also obviously false in a literal materialist sense to say that a nun is a bride of Christ or that Christians are washed in the blood of the Lamb. If we don’t submit Christians to biohazard decontamination procedures on the basis of their claim to be washed in lamb’s blood, we don’t have to trap, tag and relocate wolf-Otherkin on the basis of their claim to be wild canids.
I, obviously, disagree.
If they want to mock and denigrate trans people, then calling their bluff by demanding that they live up to their “beliefs” works to reduce their claims to mere idiocy.
Contrarily, asking trans people to live up to their beliefs is what they do every day and in no way mocks them or shows them up.
Obviously what OP describes is intended as a reductio ad absurdum of trans people, of the notion that a man can’t just turn himself into a woman by saying he’s a woman; that sexual identity has objective reality.
The first thing to note is that our mental states have just the same objective reality as our somatic form (I’m using the word “somatic” to refer to the non-brain parts of the body - our arms, legs, penises, ovaries, etc.). Mental states are ultimately physical too - they are defined by a neuron configuration. We already have some crude ways to detect mental states objectively, fMRI etc. But in general, the only way we now have to detect someone’s mental state is to ask them. And, as House famously says, everybody lies.
If somebody says that they are a helicopter, obviously that is not true. They are either joking, or they are mentally ill. I trust that this much is not in dispute. The more common reductio ad absurdum that I’ve heard is the question of otherkin, some of whom claim that they are non-human animals. Again, this simply cannot be objectively true. Human DNA does not contain the design for a cat brain, it contains the design for a human brain. Of course, that’s not to say that if someone strongly identifies with cats, and wants to express this by saying that they are a cat, that we should not treat them with dignity and respect their choices. But it’s not analogous to being trans, there is no “slippery slope” of losing touch with objective reality here.
Are people who claim to be trans just lying? I think we can dismiss that possibility immediately. I recall an estimate that there are more trans people in the U.S. than the entire population of Wyoming (…so perhaps trans people deserve two senators?). Trans people are generally consistent and persistent about their identity, despite suffering extreme persecution. Why would such a vast number of people deliberately lie and bring such suffering on themselves?
So are trans people sincere, but objectively mistaken? Essentially - are they mentally ill? Well, it seems to me that to call something a mental illness it must entail some form of mental dysfunction; and that correcting that mental dysfunction should restore happiness. Trans people generally do not fit this description at all. Many trans people are stressed and unhappy early in life, sure. But in general their happiness seems to be correlated with people treating them in accord with their stated mental identity, not the reverse. Trying to “correct” their mental identity to force it to comport with their at-birth somatic sexual characteristics is usually a source of distress, not happiness. To put it crudely and to (over)generalize - trans people don’t usually have a sense that anything in their mind is “wrong”, their mental identity is just who they are, and if anything is “wrong” it’s that their body doesn’t fit with who they feel they are.
So, from a scientific perspective, is it biologically plausible that trans people are neither lying nor mentally ill - that people with typically male DNA (XY), born with a male somatic phenotype (penis etc.), sometimes really do have the “brain of a woman”, or vice versa?
Contrary to people who claim that this notion “contradicts basic biology” (a phrase I’ve heard many times), here’s the actual biology. The 99% of genetic material found on the autosomes and the X chromosome is exactly the same for both sexes; and males and females obviously have a shared evolutionary history - we’re members of the same species, unlike cats and helicopters. All of the common 99% of genetic material is involved in making both males and females. Sexual dimorphism is usually triggered by the presence or absence of part of the tiny ~1% of the genome that’s found on Y. And we already know that the dimorphism trigger doesn’t always work consistently. For example, in the case of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome an XY karyotype (“male DNA”) can lead to a partially or completely female phenotype (phenotype = everything about you except your DNA, including body & brain).
Phenotype is always the result of a complex interplay between genotype and environmental factors, including the intrauterine environment. And sexual dimorphism has both somatic elements (sex organs, body size differences, etc.) and mental elements - a male/female neuron configuration. I don’t have to put my hand between my legs to know that I am male, and if I were castrated I would still feel male - my brain feels “programmed” with some instinctive attitudes and behavioral predispositions that are typically male. So we clearly have both a somatic sexual phenotype - the way our bodies look - and a mental sexual phenotype - the way our brains are programmed, our self-perception, our identity. And, given the 99% shared genetic material, virtually all the information is certainly available for things to turn out either way with a slight difference in environmental factors: from a biological perspective, it’s not surprising if in some cases the mental phenotype might not comport with the somatic phenotype. In other words, it is biologically plausible that humans can develop with a male mind and female body, or vice versa. Once again I’ll emphasize that our mental phenotype is not some casual throwaway “opinion” that can change day to day, it is the fundamental instinctive programming and predisposition of our brains, a neuron configuration with just the same objective physical reality as a penis or a vagina.
So we know that the idea that a trans person has a mental phenotype that differs from their somatic phenotype is scientifically perfectly plausible. Since it’s preposterous to suggest that all trans people are deliberately lying, and since trans people do not fit any sensible definition of mental illness, even before considering our moral values about treating people with respect, it is overwhelmingly scientifically likely that trans people are (a) sincere and (b) objectively correct about the fact that their gender identity (their mental sexual phenotype) is partially or fully not in accord with the body (somatic sexual phenotype) that they were born with.
You’re not “calling their bluff.” “I identify as an attack helicopter,” isn’t a bluff, it’s a deliberately stupid claim designed to serve as an analogy for a different claim that they feel is also stupid. They want you to point out the flaws - that’s the entire point of the argument. They want you to make the anti-trans argument yourself, by attacking their “helicopter” argument.
When you respond like this, you’re letting yourself be outsmarted by bigots.
There’s a difference between pointing out that the “helicopter” self-identification is stupid, which seemingly supports the bigots’ argument, and pointing out that the analogy itself is stupid, which I think is what Exapno was doing. The analogy is stupid because it can be attacked on obvious grounds that trans identity cannot, since as Riemann points out, trans identity is objectively supportable. The analogy falsely assumes that trans identity is arbitrary or capricious and has never been studied.
Actually the analogy assumes that the person making the analogy rejects the claim that people’s genders can disagree with their primary sexual characteristics. Or to put it another way they reject the idea that ‘gender’ is a separate things at all, and that the primary sexual characteristics are the sole basis of categorization. And they ain’t gonna let no namby pamby liberal ‘science’ tell them otherwise.
It’s a way for them to say that they don’t see the transgender claims as any more sensible than the helicopter claims, and demand that you answer why they should accept claims they find absurd.
Are there any statistics available as to what percentege of these claimants are right wing assholes who don’t actually identify as helicopters?
The latest estimate that I have seen is 103% with a margin of error of 3%.
I get it. My point is that the analogy doesn’t do what bigots think it does. Explaining this to them isn’t falling into their trap, it’s pointing out that they don’t have a trap.
Actually the explanation you provided is just saying a bunch of sciencey words at them that you already know they’re not going to pay any credence to.
Yes, well, they don’t believe in climate change or evolution, either, and that’s not the fault of the “science-y” types. Rehabilitating morons is not one of my strong points.
To be honest, I don’t have a problem with people stating the reductio ad absurdum in some form. Sure, many will be right wing bigots who don’t really have any interest in educating themselves, but there may also always be some decent people lurking who are troubled by this, who perhaps have a misconception that trans people are just men who wake up one day on a whim and decide to put on a dress, and also don’t understand why it’s not “basic biology” that a penis at birth just always means you’re a man. So it’s an opportunity.
If this is going to segue into a discussion about how to dissuade the ignorant from their ignorant and bigoted beliefs, all I can say is that it’s a highly specialized and mostly political skill of which few of us are capable. There were a couple of long articles in New Scientist a couple of years ago – and I think similar commentaries in Nature – on precisely this subject. There are no easy answers, and as society seemingly regresses more and more into a version of C.M. Korbluth’s The Marching Morons, the challenge gets ever more difficult (cite: US politics at the moment).
Except Exapno is doing the opposite of that. He’s not attacking it as an analogy, he’s taking the statement at face value and pointing out why it’s dumb. To actually attack it as an analogy, you have to recognize the things its analogizing, and explain why they’re different.
I’m the odd duck who recognizes that there are people whose brain biology disagrees with their not-brain biology, and still can’t shake the opinion that when people talk about categorizing somebody as a man or woman they’re talking about body biology, not brain biology.
I mean, suppose I encountered somebody who actually did have mental characteristics that inclined them to think of themselves as an attack helicopter. They’re aware their body doesn’t match their mental image, but that doesn’t change their mindset. I can tell them they’re wrong because I know about their body biology, and because I define things as helicopters or not based on their bodies, not their mindsets. And I can’t shake the notion that human sexes are defined the same way. I mean, they are physically different after all (though not as binary as it may initially appear).
Honestly the thing that makes the ‘I identify as an attack helicopter’ types shitty isn’t that they’re being absurd, it’s that they’re lying - and by that implying that trans people are also just liars. That’s shitty both coming and going. But if they genuinely believed themselves to be helicopters, I’d confusedly feel that I needed to give them the same latitude of the their claims that I do people claiming to be one gender or another.
What I always thought was the this “attack helicopter” example lampoons how you can’t change reality no matter what you identify with.
That is, since we clearly don’t have a way to turn a human being into an attack helicopter (arguably, even with advanced technology capable of doing it, we wouldn’t for practical and technical reasons), someone who wishes very badly they were treated as an attack helicopter is just going to have to deal.
People aren’t going to call him/her by their preferred pronoun or comment on what amazing missile bays he/she has because it isn’t real.
Similarly, since we lack the medical technology to really turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man, while it’s understandable that some people wish reality were different, it’s not reality.