Evolving wrote:Look at us, wondering what THWOTH meant. Is this what theology feels like?

Excuse me, that's THW-TH!

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:What medical treatments aside from surgery are there for gender dysphoria? Hormone therapy.

The treatments are to prohibit and/or promote certain biological changes. The feeling of being another gender is already there prior to treatment. The question is whether people with those feelings already have irregular hormone levels prior to any treatment and whether the hormones themselves are the agents for those feelings.

But you've got it the wrong way round. What produces hormones?

Watch the video jamest. It's less than 50 minutes long, by a leading expert in a highly specialist, cutting edge field and you will come away better informed.

I'll be very surprised if the questions I have asked in this thread are addressed in that video?

Do you enjoy being willfully ignorant?

I tell you what - don't bother answering cos I don't care.

Do you enjoy avoiding difficult questions?

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:What medical treatments aside from surgery are there for gender dysphoria? Hormone therapy.

The treatments are to prohibit and/or promote certain biological changes. The feeling of being another gender is already there prior to treatment. The question is whether people with those feelings already have irregular hormone levels prior to any treatment and whether the hormones themselves are the agents for those feelings.

But you've got it the wrong way round. What produces hormones?

Watch the video jamest. It's less than 50 minutes long, by a leading expert in a highly specialist, cutting edge field and you will come away better informed.

I'll be very surprised if the questions I have asked in this thread are addressed in that video?

Do you enjoy being willfully ignorant?

I tell you what - don't bother answering cos I don't care.

Do you enjoy avoiding difficult questions?

Why have you spent more time responding to a thread about a video than you're prepared to spend watching the video that the thread's about?

Are you too lazy/arrogant to learn, or just willfully close-minded?

Emote at it some more. No skin off anyone's nose if you insist on remaining ignorant. But if you want me to answer questions, then go watch the video first to inform yourself about the topic matter - this should be considered a perfectly reasonable elementary requisite for participating.

I finally got around to it, and it blew my mind. The part about parents/mothers and babies transferring stem cells to each other.

I called my partner a mutant, but sadly she didn't understand that I was being cheeky. Language barriers really deprive you of entertainment at times!

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:Of course, feeling hot or cold is dramatically simpler than feeling something relative to a social arena, but how can an exothermic organism understand feeling cold without experiencing an external calibration? Our thermoregulatory systems keep us at 'body temperature' unless we are in an environment that causes us to increase or decrease in heat. Had you been born and raised in Dallol in northern Ethiopia, for example, you'd never have experienced a sensation of cold previously so would not be clear about such a sensation if it happened. There is a layer of socio-cultural reference too, but of course, it's nowhere near as complicated as an explicitly social reference.

You can feel hot or cold without knowing or understanding what's happening to you externally. Even in places such as the one that you mention, there are varying degrees of heat or 'hotness' such that the concept could be understood in isolation of coldness, which might later yield definitions ranging from warm to extremely hot.

I don't think that you can feel male or female without having any external knowledge to the extent that acquiring external understanding and definitions must come prior to any such feeling.

So, this is the only interesting discussion still worth having IMO, when talking about trans issues, in 2023. All the other ones have been resolved, and unless you're trying to educate people (if they actually want to be educated, that is), I think it's a waste of time, especially in the UK and US, very polarized on this topic.

It seems that jamest hasn't watched the video before commenting, which is always a mistake. Because what you believe is irrelevant. It's also wrong, in that case. Babies don't go around saying I feel like a female (for example). They just feel different from the rest of the "male" population, and growing up, this feeling comes more and more at odds with what society expects from them. You think that those labels (man, woman) are some kind of fixed, material thing that we are or are not. They're in fact just lazy and simplistic binary labels we impose on a fluid concept. Just like our definition of species for example.
Claiming that children can't feel like the opposite sex before they understand what sex is sounds like saying "you can't feel left handed until you realize there are right handed people". The feeling comes first, the label comes after.
Sapolsky proves it in his video that trans people are born trans. It's only when their identity starts conflicting with how society says they should behave that gender dysphoria appears.

Just like our definition of species for example.

Boom! Another example of the tyranny of the discontinuous mind!

aban57 wrote:
So, this is the only interesting discussion still worth having IMO, when talking about trans issues, in 2023. All the other ones have been resolved, and unless you're trying to educate people (if they actually want to be educated, that is), I think it's a waste of time, especially in the UK and US, very polarized on this topic.

It seems that jamest hasn't watched the video before commenting, which is always a mistake. Because what you believe is irrelevant. It's also wrong, in that case. Babies don't go around saying I feel like a female (for example). They just feel different from the rest of the "male" population, and growing up, this feeling comes more and more at odds with what society expects from them. You think that those labels (man, woman) are some kind of fixed, material thing that we are or are not. They're in fact just lazy and simplistic binary labels we impose on a fluid concept. Just like our definition of species for example.
Claiming that children can't feel like the opposite sex before they understand what sex is sounds like saying "you can't feel left handed until you realize there are right handed people". The feeling comes first, the label comes after.
Sapolsky proves it in his video that trans people are born trans. It's only when their identity starts conflicting with how society says they should behave that gender dysphoria appears.

You can't feel different until after you've learnt enough about males/females, to differentiate. You can't feel different at birth if you don't understand the external world at birth, which we don't. You can't even identify as (feel like) a male/female at birth because similarly you wouldn't know what those concepts meant. That was the point I was making.

Whether we're born a certain way which will inevitably lead to a trans identity is arguable though perhaps true, but there are many social influences to consider as has been mentioned.

I remember that you have lived this experience, so I apologise if anything I've said has irritated you. I was just applying reason to the issue as best I could.

jamest wrote:

aban57 wrote:
So, this is the only interesting discussion still worth having IMO, when talking about trans issues, in 2023. All the other ones have been resolved, and unless you're trying to educate people (if they actually want to be educated, that is), I think it's a waste of time, especially in the UK and US, very polarized on this topic.

It seems that jamest hasn't watched the video before commenting, which is always a mistake. Because what you believe is irrelevant. It's also wrong, in that case. Babies don't go around saying I feel like a female (for example). They just feel different from the rest of the "male" population, and growing up, this feeling comes more and more at odds with what society expects from them. You think that those labels (man, woman) are some kind of fixed, material thing that we are or are not. They're in fact just lazy and simplistic binary labels we impose on a fluid concept. Just like our definition of species for example.
Claiming that children can't feel like the opposite sex before they understand what sex is sounds like saying "you can't feel left handed until you realize there are right handed people". The feeling comes first, the label comes after.
Sapolsky proves it in his video that trans people are born trans. It's only when their identity starts conflicting with how society says they should behave that gender dysphoria appears.

You can't feel different until after you've learnt enough about males/females, to differentiate. You can't feel different at birth if you don't understand the external world at birth, which we don't. You can't even identify as (feel like) a male/female at birth because similarly you wouldn't know what those concepts meant. That was the point I was making.

Whether we're born a certain way which will inevitably lead to a trans identity is arguable though perhaps true, but there are many social influences to consider as has been mentioned.

I remember that you have lived this experience, so I apologise if anything I've said has irritated you. I was just applying reason to the issue as best I could.

No you're fine, don't worry. Your position just doesn't make any sense. The feelings are just a by-product of the brain's "wiring". So the feeling predates everything, by definition. If there is indeed gender dysmorphia in certain regions of the brain (as shown by the most recent studies), and this is indeed the reason of the difference in "feeling" (which is where the results of those studies seem to lead), then it logically follows that this feeling will predate any social norm the child will encounter.

Society is the calibration, and as the child grows as part of that society and becomes more engaged with and subordinated by societal expectations, so the sense of an incongruity grows. If society didn't impose gendered pigeonholes and thus there was never a need for calibration, then there'd be no dysphoria between what's expected and what is felt.

What's learned by engaging with society is that it expects certain things of you according to the status of your genitals, but that's only relevant in correspondence with what one already feels internally, which is not predicated upon whatever it is society says.

aban57 wrote:The feelings are just a by-product of the brain's "wiring". So the feeling predates everything, by definition.

Any thought or feeling you have is a product of your brain's wiring. The brain doesn't just have one set in stone wiring from the moment you're born. It develops all along your life.

aban57 wrote: then it logically follows that this feeling will predate any social norm the child will encounter.

That actually doesn't logically follow at all. The feeling could in principle have some physiological basis that develops around puberty(like the interest in the opposite sex often does), for example. An age at which most people have already been quite saturated in societal norms.

[quote="jamest";p="2802624"]
... You can't feel different until after you've learnt enough about males/females, to differentiate... [/quote

Yes. Broader social ideas around the proper constituents of social norms and standards offer a range of differentials by which to characterise discrete demographics. Ideas around capacity differentiate the sick-and-disabled from the abled-bodies, ideas around income and class differentiate workers from their betters, and ideas around gender differentiate men from women and transgender people from both. Similarly, within those differentials the status of the abled-bodied, the wealthy, and men is considered to be of higher standing than that of the disabled, the poor, or women and transgender people. These kinds of things are bound to impact our view of ourselves as individuals and in relation to others.

Nonetheless, what we feel is what we feel, and people from a high-status groups gaslighting the experiences and self-awareness of those from low-status groups should be noted for the imposition of conditional double-standards that it is

Discussion: Transphobic Posting.

THWOTH wrote:Similarly, within those differentials the status of men is considered to be of higher standing than that of women .

Typically in some respects yes, in others not. In my experience from arguing with conservatives and religious people, they usually say they consider men and women equal but different, with different strengths and weaknesses. While there's certainly lots of genuine misogynists within those cohorts (and probably comparatively more than in others), I don't think we do anyone any favors by coloring the entire cohort with the views of the most extreme among them.

Rumraket wrote:

THWOTH wrote:Similarly, within those differentials the status of men is considered to be of higher standing than that of women .

Typically in some respects yes, in others not. In my experience from arguing with conservatives and religious people, they usually say they consider men and women equal but different, with different strengths and weaknesses. While there's certainly lots of genuine misogynists within those cohorts (and probably comparatively more than in others), I don't think we do anyone any favors by coloring the entire cohort with the views of the most extreme among them.

Hmmm. Don't know if the "Not all men" argument applies in the broadly social context of my remarks, though I accept what you say about conservatives/the religious. We could take rather benign examples of things like the pay differential between men and women, or the employment differential between disabled people and the non-disabled. Perhaps even point to the disproportionate amount of people from well-off backgrounds and/or privately educated who end up in positions of power - either political or commercial. I'm not talking about whether men or women, disabled or non-disabled, or upper or lower class people, are objectively better or worse at something, but about their status within societies which preference men, the able-bodied and the rich. My point was to use jamest's remark to suggest that gender roles are socially constructed, socially contingent concepts and that the differences between gender roles are not so much about one's feelings but about the level to which one conforms to traditional gender ideals, or the level to which society expects a person to fit into a traditional gender role.

Rumraket wrote:

aban57 wrote:The feelings are just a by-product of the brain's "wiring". So the feeling predates everything, by definition.

Any thought or feeling you have is a product of your brain's wiring. The brain doesn't just have one set in stone wiring from the moment you're born. It develops all along your life.

aban57 wrote: then it logically follows that this feeling will predate any social norm the child will encounter.

That actually doesn't logically follow at all. The feeling could in principle have some physiological basis that develops around puberty(like the interest in the opposite sex often does), for example. An age at which most people have already been quite saturated in societal norms.

Except evidence shows that gender identity doesn't change through the course of one's life. So it does seem that this specific set of information is at the core of our mind.