[skissane]

> The forcible third-gendering of trans women is one of the greatest crimes of the culture I grew up in, so I'd rather we move past all traditionalism entirely.

I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?

That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.

But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.

Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.

Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is. Progressives like to imagine that conservative/traditionalist viewpoints will eventually wither away and disappear, but looking at trends in the real world, it seems unlikely that dream will be fulfilled, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Finding a way to peacefully coexist seems preferable to interminable cultural and political conflict over the issue.

[sunshowers]

> I think one issue is – do "man" and "woman" have some objective essence? I think most progressives would say "no" – that kind of essentialism is more associated with conservatives and traditionalists. But if "man" and "woman" don't have an objective essence, their definition is ultimately conventional – which means if different people want to define those terms differently, how can we say one definition is ultimately more right than the other?

So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology. There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered. The traditionalists are somewhat correct about this!

A lot of traditionalist freaking out about gender is extrapolating their own internal experiences onto everyone. Many cis people feel quite bad when they are misgendered! This is a commonality with trans people, not a difference.

> That has a benefit for transgender people – if transgender people and their allies want to adopt trans-inclusive definitions of "man" and "woman", nobody can say they are objectively wrong to do so, if we accept these concepts are ultimately cultural constructs.

But I am saying that the traditional model of gender is objectively wrong! Gender is not just a cultural construct, there is clearly an inherent aspect to it.

"Gender is binary and immutably assigned at birth" and "gender is entirely social" are two positions that are both incorrect in their own ways. The truth, as expressed in the modern scientific model of gender, is more complex. Gender is not binary, but there is quite clearly an inherent (likely biological) component to it -- otherwise HRT wouldn't have the psychological effects it does on trans people. There is also a social component: we are a social species, and our biologies and sociologies are intertwined.

> But then comes the downside – if conservatives and traditionalists (and various others, such as a significant number of radical feminists) want to adopt trans-exclusive definitions of those terms, how can we say they are wrong to do so? If these are cultural constructs and conventional definitions, as opposed to naming objective realities which exist independently of culture and language, how can one say their definition is objectively incorrect? It's just different.

Right. This is the downside of the kind of "model relativism" that you're describing. This is very explicitly not my position, and I think the progressives who have promoted this position have done a bad job. I'm saying that the traditional definition is objectively incorrect, in the sense that the traditional model doesn't describe reality nearly as well as the modern scientific model of gender. It's as incorrect as a belief that the sun revolves around the earth.

> Maybe the answer is a form of "live and let live": let progressive people have their spaces governed by their definitions, let conservative/traditionalist people have their spaces governed by theirs, and where the two have to overlap or intersect or coexist, try to find a way to be neutral between the competing definitions.

That is fine when the two definitions are equally correct. They're not! One is more correct than the other.

> Of course, if you are growing up in one of those conservative/traditionalist spaces, and end up identifying as LGBT, that solution isn't exactly pleasant, at least until you become old enough to cross over to a space more welcoming to your identity. But I don't know what the alternative is.

The alternative is to use objective reality, as determined by evidence and study using modern methods, to determine public policy. Traditional and religious beliefs should have no role here.

edit: I want to add that at a meta level, I believe relativism destroys credibility. One of my big issues with the left has been that people intuitively feel certain things are true, and if progressives show up saying "oh neither of us really are correct, live and let live," it's easy to stay attracted to traditionalism -- or even worse, descend into far-right paranoia. I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset. Inculcating that is a generational challenge, though one that must be done for society to survive.

[skissane]

> So "essence" isn't the right word, but there absolutely are affinities and anti-affinities towards gender in brain wiring, as reflected in people's internal psychology.

I have some scepticism about all this. There is evidence for some group differences in neurobiology between men and women, but they are group differences, they don’t operate at the individual level-meaning, for some brain features, there is a statistically significant difference in the male average and the female average, but the distributions are overlapping, so there are some males with brains at or near the female average, and vice versa.

There’s also some evidence that LGBT people are more likely to belong to those “overlapping” groups (males with brains closer to the female average in certain respects, and vice versa). But, again, it is a group rather than individual difference: not every person who has such an “overlapping” brain is LGBT, and not every LGBT person has such an “overlapping” brain-and we still can’t explain why. Plus, I don’t believe we have found any reliable biological difference between different LGBT subgroups (e.g. some gay cismen have rather ‘female’ neuroanatomy, as do some transwomen, but I’m not aware of any high quality evidence for distinguishing those two groups at a neurobiological level)

For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.

Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.

> There is no better explanation for the vast majority of people being cisgender, and having gender dysphoria when misgendered.

Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?

I’ve personally experienced being misgendered more than once, and my reactions have varied from amusement to irritation to equanimity, depending on how I was feeling at the time. But I don’t think those varied reactions convey any deep fact about “who I am”, and I’m not convinced any of those reactions had anything to do with gender dysphoria

> I think a much more robust response is "your intuitions aren't completely incorrect, but reality is more complicated -- our views are more correct than yours, because we have modern methods of learning on our side which are better than traditional ones." But this response really implies a scientific, evidence-based mindset.

The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty. Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse

[sunshowers]

> For most transgender people, we can’t point to any specific neurobiological factor as an explanation for why they are transgender. And even for the minority for whom there is something specific to point to, there will be other people who share that factor yet aren’t transgender, so that factor can’t be a complete explanation-and the rest of the explanation we just don’t know. All I think we can confidently say is that biological factors are in the mix, but we can’t rule out the possibility that psychosocial/sociocultural/etc factors also have some role to play-plus, the respective contributions of the biological vs the non-biological may differ from person to person.

I was careful to word that as "as reflected in internal psychology". I don't think we're going to pinpoint any specific pieces of brain wiring any time soon, but there are quite clearly profound internal psychological differences -- since supernatural phenomena don't exist, they must be either due to internal brain wiring or another property of the internal body, or due to social factors, or a mix of both.

A survey I've done of trans people near me is whether they'd still want to transition on a desert island. Some say no, but the vast majority say yes. To me, this demonstrates that there's at least some inherent characteristic at play.

> Also, I don’t know if everyone actually has a “gender identity”. I mean, I don’t think I do. Yes, I have XY chromosomes with a typical male phenotype, a male-coded given name, my legal documents all say M, I’m married to a woman and father of two children with her, and I suppose “male” describes a social role I play. But, I don’t have some internal “identity” as “male”. Maybe this is an autistic trait, but deep down inside I don’t identify as anything at all. Well, maybe as pure consciousness, and everything else about me (including my sex/gender) is just a contingent chance accident of what that consciousness happens to experience.

Strength of internal gender identity does vary -- agender people demonstrate that. But would you be able to transition (especially medically) and live day in and day out as a woman?

Dr Will Powers, a cis male, has a description of how taking an excessive dose of estrogen gave him gender dysphoria for days [1].

David Reimer, another cis male, was forcibly transitioned by his doctor after a botched surgery as an infant [2]. He suffered lifelong dysphoria as a result, and tragically took his own life at a young age.

What trans people go through is quite similar to what these people went through, just in reverse. Reimer was lied to about his gender for years, which led to tremendous distress. Trans people are falsely informed (though not as a lie since this isn't intentional at first) about their gender for years, which also leads to tremendous distress. A lot of people want to openly and proudly lie about it, in a way that is documented to cause distress.

> Do non-trans people have gender dysphoria when they are misgendered? Some of them don’t really care. And even if a person reacts negatively, is that due to gender dysphoria? Or could it be they feel upset because you’ve got a fact about them wrong, and they might be just as upset if you’d got any other fact wrong instead? And even if they experience some special upset at being misgendered, how do we know that isn’t just due to cultural conditioning, as opposed to an innate psychological factor?

Gender culture is created primarily by cis/het people, so it's hard to separate the two out. Being upset at misgendering is a cross-cultural phenomenon -- I've asked cis people across American, European and a couple different Asian cultures about this.

> The problem I see: I think there’s often a substantial gap between what the science actually says, and what people claim the science says (including even many scientists themselves, especially when addressing a lay audience.) I think when you look at the actual research, it is obvious that there are still massive gaps in our knowledge, along with widespread problems with replication, methodology, sample sizes, etc. It is obvious that biology has a significant role to play in issues of gender and sexuality-but saying much more than that involves rather high epistemic uncertainty.

To be clear, we don't actually need to know the causes of some people being trans. There is a vast amount of scientific evidence regarding the efficacy of gender-affirming care (astonishingly low regret rates!) [3], and anthropological evidence that every society with a recorded history has had some notion of gender variance [4]. It also tracks with my own experience transitioning after spending years detached from my body [5].

> Yet a lot of the public discourse on this topic makes the scientific picture sound a lot firmer than it actually is. And I think many scientists think it is more important to publicly present the science as clearly supporting a progressive social agenda, than be completely open and honest about just how much we still don’t know, and how patchy the evidence actually is for some of the conclusions they endorse

What specific conclusions is the evidence patchy for, in a way that distinguishes GAC specifically? The evidence is often observational rather than RCT, but that's because RCTs are impossible when changes are visible within days. There is less evidence for pediatric care than for adult care, but extrapolating from adult to pediatric care is very common across all of medicine. (Some reports like the one by Cass claim otherwise, but they have a number of shockingly incorrect statements which indicate a lack of basic familiarity with the field [6].) The evidence is often based on self-reporting, but that's true for many other interventions as well, like when I fill out a DASS-21.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/fcxboa/the_st.... (This is not an endorsement of the doctor, who has a number of problematic practices. But it's an amusing and enlightening story.)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/154t1qq/my_...

[4] Again, not an endorsement of the particular gender structures of each society -- many of them forcibly third-gendered all trans people, which is a kind of misgendering like any other.

[5] My experiences before transitioning were remarkably similar to https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depersonaliza... -- I used to joke all the time about it. This is not something I feel any longer.

[6] https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/0... -- for example, p. 14 has the statement "medication is binary", which is plainly false. There are several ways to medically transition in a non-binary manner, and every doctor in the field knows about them. The fact that a statement like this made it all the way to publication calls into question the basic competence of the people involved. The statement is quite material as well, since it essentially makes the argument that nonbinary people may not want to medically transition. Maybe, but certainly not based on the false idea that medical transition is binary.