This is a very very scary experiment, inspired by my recent therapy session. Perhaps I have come to this point now. I’ve gone cursively over my list of brooding topics, my memory palace of suffering which I have been imprisoned in for so very long, my oubliette. I’ve tried to check for each point which major theme describes it, to see if I can summarize and understand why it matters. If this works, then perhaps I might not go back in, because I may be able somehow to accept and live with some uncertainty or even not to be fully right or justified in every one of these regards. Then I might not need to brood. I don’t know yet if this is going to work, nor do I know if this change would somehow make me unacceptable to myself, or even to others. I don’t know yet if I dare let these thoughts and fears go. If I do, I still don’t stop having an opinion on the topics, nor do I stop caring about them, I do not cease my activism. But letting go means reducing my identity needs, the burdens of feeding my identity, getting to a state where I don’t need to have certain knowledge on these levels as a prerequisite for feeling that I can live with myself and the world. Below is some summary then, for the first time presented in a way that maybe even non-me people can understand, of the core topics of my habitual angst. Each summarizes many different instances, and I leave out indirect subtrees of this thinkspace, those ones which just follow by formalism (essentially: concerns on logical implications, paradoxes and their patches through ad hoc or revision measures, of the way in which I’d create a moral system from axioms and personal subjectivity – these blocks are huge but they collapse if the system itself is not needed).
First and major theme of my broodings, to what extent are there biologically caused cognitive and behavioural human sex differences? More specifically, are they large enough that without biological modification, society will always have them? That is to say, will it be possible by social change alone to create a society where there exists no context such that I (by virtue of biology) would have to feel that I belong to a group that is different in behaviour and cognition from the sex of women? To this end I would fear various research results on prenatal hormones (e.g. Hines’s work, or various intelligence studies including SMPY concluding even small IQ variance differences impact life outcomes), or the non-association between culture globally with other attributes (e.g. Lippa’s work, contrasting to that of Nosek). Related to this is the question of whether social outcomes derive from culture (discrimination, stereotype threat, minority stress…) or mostly just reflects biology, as the libertarians claim. Thus the inconsistent studies on discrimination (stockbroker compensation predicted fully by circulating testosterone, Ceci and others swapping CV labels…), the studies on overall high heritability/low environmental impact (e.g. meta-analysis of Postuma et al.) all come in, impacting how often we should expect culturally driven change to work. Moreover, I have relied in my moral system on scaling up utility costs of anything traceable to alterable human action. If these differential outcomes are more rarely anyone’s fault, I would have a harder time arguing that it is worth any cost, no matter how high, in reduced efficiency to combat them, making it harder to argue that regardless of the state of the world and our biologies, one should still change these things (and thus create that future Utopia where I would not have to perceive myself as being different from women by virtue of being assigned male). So this boils down to a core fundament still: To what extent are sexual dimorphies of mind culturally malleable? (An honest answer: We really don’t know. To some extent, I don’t doubt. Are they so to the largest extent? I don’t know yet.)
A related theme is: Should we change society so that we eliminate those group differences in behaviour and cognition? This again has been a conclusion I have needed absolutely to reach, because unless I can know with certainty that we should (meaning: that ultimately we will make it happen, because I am Utopian), so that – again – in some hypothetical future I would not need to feel that behaviour/cognition made me any different from women, then I am faced with that immense dark cloud of panic which I am suspecting is my dysphoria. This makes any question relevant on whether we can conclude with absolute certainty that this is the desirable path forward under a consistent system of morality derived from the world and from my own subjectivity, regarding which no-one could ever show me anything which would force me to come to another conclusion. This then would require me to identify – and find that I truly feel according to – a system for weighting utility of outcomes under which those same conclusions would remain under all configurations of reality that cannot be excluded outright. So if there, for example, would be less discrimination happening than I think there is, to what extent are we then still justified in spending resources (opportunity costs included) combating it? There are the happiness studies suggesting modern society with women in the workforce has those women reporting lower happiness scores on average over time (never mind how this may be all dual work consequences, or social desirability factors reducing over time), including also younger women without families (who, presumably, are under pressure to be desirable and cool, nonetheless). There are inconsistent results on whether or not children benefit from long stays at home with mothers whereas time in day care (or if it does not matter much), breastfeeding versus formula, or parental divorce, which in turn seems more likely if there are mixed-sex workplaces and if pornography is available. That supremely flawed study suggesting woman feminists have elevated prenatal testosterone. The Swedish antiracist activist who after saying he was “done with white feminism” suggested that changing gender roles caused more suffering than it helped because now more women die from lung cancer due to smoking, similar claims made regarding HPV-derived cancers, or Toxoplasma-derived schizophrenia (NB not saying in any way I agree with these conclusions!). Many different claims going in different directions, many of them likely wrong. Taken together the question remains: what does the fairness-weighted utility cost versus gain function look like as we move towards creating equal distributions of life choices across genders? It is clear that it can never be justified to discriminate or hold back individuals, and I remain on the side that we should do away with gendered division of labour like this. But I have thus far desperately needed to always remain absolutely certain of that, also on an existential level, not just a political level, because I would need to rely on that future Utopia being the only defensible future in my own eyes, because anything else is essentially an act of self-misgendering. If I can come to no longer misgender myself without having to use a future world as a stepping stone or safety blanket, then perhaps these things all can be less urgent, and I can work with whatever conclusions we eventually come to, meaning to still want to move us all towards agency and fairness.
Certainly, these questions all matter very deeply. In our wanting to improve life and freedom and access, and eliminate unfairness, of experiences and opportunities and outcomes of all individuals, it matters what our options are, how costly each is, which strategies are likely to help to which extent, and which of them will have which side effects. And all of it is complicated – there really are opinionated and biased studies pointing in opposing directions. I remain basically convinced that my social justice intentions are justified, and that the strategies I myself favour in that arena are worth their costs and such that we should implement them. But if I were by some freak chance to be convinced otherwise, were to find myself outwitted by the libertarian crowd, then so long as I still understand myself as undeniably and fully a woman, then at least I can still live in the resulting world. When I understand myself so, this is no longer an existential fear for me. I’ll be a person either way.
A slightly related, slightly different theme is the question: should we undertake the political journey to queer the world; breaking down expectations of opposite-sex love, nuclear families, sexual restrictions, and gender roles? I feel strongly attuned to this sociopolitical agenda, and I feel that it is important to my identity that I am not mistaken in supporting it. The claims against would something along the lines of, if somehow a large fraction of people needed the conventional ways to stay as happy as they could, would we queerdos form bad examples in living openly as we are? Would we like anglerfish lure young sensitive things into not undergoing proper gender heterosocializing? What could be the costs? Essentially, making a larger fraction of people (because no matter how repressive the society, some fraction of our kind will still emerge, only unhappier for the repression – this despite the anecdotal claim that those growing up under stronger gender role projection would be more relaxed regarding gender later in life, for which I was never given a source anyway) choose difficult life paths – having to do surgery or hormones, having to come out, having to feel out of place or uncommon for being queer, having a harder time finding partners, and a harder time having children. In a less accepting society, would fewer people live queer lives? And if so, would the reduced experienced difficulties from that outweigh the increased difficulties from society being less accepting for those who nevertheless do end up queer? I believe it would be worse, of course, but I cannot actually prove it. But here is the thing: If I know myself as a woman (and a kinky pansexual polyamorous transgender woman at that!) then suddenly I know myself as important to myself. So really? I’m not going to stand suffering from being closeted or excluded, even if there ends up being people making life mistakes in emulating me, even if that would be what things were like. I can feel I matter if I am she. So this too becomes less panicked.
I also leave out the topics added this present year, the ones which concern: am I actually trans, can I actually be a woman, is this actually something instinctual and fundamental and not autogynephilia or internalized misandry or some other explanation which would seem somehow less legitimate. I can leave these out, because, as has been shown, these are not topics I am going to forget about. I am going to return to those issues again and again and not lose touch with the arguments, because I really am doing this, I am in transition, gaining and losing. It will remain part of my life. Which is a life for which there exists an I that is living it. I am she. I withdraw from extended cloud existence to living as a person within a body. My world gains a centre, which it has not had.
Did not brood last two mornings.
lost in transition 