conversations

Content warning: suicide

Had a conversation a while ago with a person I know is very quick of thought, which made me perhaps biased too much towards giving his ideas serious consideration. I disagree with them, but in a state of some thought fuzziness, so not yet having cleared those ideas. Not that they are new – he suggested primarily that people getting to “choose” their gender creates suffering, based on an underlying idea of people in general becoming unhappy from too much choice.

This was suggested based on anecdotal studies on suicide rates rising in societies where careers-as-choices replaced careers-as-inherited. I have heard similar ideas and anecdata from another very smart person in the past. Of course, I also seem to recall studies saying these rates are correlated with self-assessed happiness ratings. These would then indicate that in a society ripe with happiness and self-actualization, there people who do not feel they reach the expected happinesses, they will feel relatively worse off, and some will take their lives as a result. I suspect strongly these are the same phenomena, and that would suggest the issue is not with choice itself, but with having to make a choice under limited information, with perhaps limits to one’s possibility of realizing one’s choice, fear of failing to, and some trying and failing. That is, a situation of choice one is not given the tools to make well is stressful. This may follow implicitly from some situations of wide choice all on its own, but it need not. Nor do I see so many of us claiming that it would be better to go back to a caste system, or to arranged marriages.

(It makes every sense to give people tools to make decisions easier, give them help in finding paths, realizing them, and in coping with failures including by finding other paths, in many areas of life. But that is tangential.)

Second then concerns how applicable any of this is to gender. That one whom I spoke with wanted to make a case how sexual orientation – being things one does – is easier to have to make choices on than gender identity – things one is. That separation would seem to imply he considered gendered behaviours and roles being something that should not be such a problem having to choose from, leaving the argument remaining only on the more fundamental label/body aspects of gender identity. If we accept that for the moment, then the comparison becomes remote though? Because we are very far from a situation where a person is asked or expected to make a choice of their body/label gender-wise. There are always expectations on that, and they are sometimes very severe – certainly they are at least as pervasive even than those put on a medieval person to follow their parents’ life paths. Making a different choice, if choice it is, entails sustained active decisions against opposition.

Would reducing those pressures cause harm? If we remove those pressures (and that was what he may have been thinking of) by telling young children they get to decide what they want even in this regard, then would worrisome stresses result, or decisions be made which were regretted? Then this ends up in essentially the whole young transitioner question (along with whether or not adult transitioners like myself should stay hidden so we do not influence the young too much…). Here our conversation did end in concluding there is no real data; that is, we have no reason to believe more children from Swedish gender-neutral daycare either will transition, or will experience any sort of stressful confusion. I’m inclined to say there should not be much impact. We don’t “choose” gender of identification by weighing alternatives, nor do we usually stress over making a choice. For most that choice is instinctual and trivial to make, and it becomes an issue only if others do not accept it.

Can I know that a much more progressive society still would not cause decision paralysis and stress over gender identity? I cannot be certain, but I’m highly doubting it would. If it would, I’m quite convinced that when weighing for scale of suffering, the harm done for those who have the wrong decision made for them is higher than the harm done from such stress even inflicted on a larger population. Moreover, there are more than two possible policies – one can provide choice and guidance in making that choice, for example.

Having said all that, I am not sure my company wanted to limit the concept of gender identity to body/label only; he may have thought also of gender roles as something that it is stressful to have to choose. In other words, a model wherein a more strictly gender stereotyped society made for clearer expectations and guidance in choices within those realms, again reducing decision paralysis and stress over having to choose. This is still not a scenario I really am seeing. Young people build identities in larger spaces of variability still, and they do so by modeling peers and elders, preferentially same-sex ones. I have previously said I now believe the latter factor has a biological basis, perturbed in trans people. But given that, it seems like not even breaking down the stereotype blocks would prevent such model learning; children would still learn from same-sex models, only they would learn a more diverse set of behaviours, less stereotyped.

Is there any evidence whatsoever for such a conservative conception that reduced-stereotype societies would have young people more confused, suffering from the decision of a wider variety of gendered role models to follow? Some may believe it, but where would we see this data, and how would we deconfound it from the happiness-vs-suicide model above? Considering the examples of claimed-egalitarian societies like Denmark, there certainly is not an overall clear happiness decrease with this. Perhaps one can find such data somewhere, but from what I have available, I don’t see that breaking down the gender stereotypes would cause relevant suffering in this manner, although plenty of ways in which it would reduce suffering in other regards (including, of course, the experiences of gender non-conforming people). So whether the reasoning is taken for labels/body or for roles, in neither case do I fear significantly that a society taking my progressivism all the way would harm its people more than it would help them.

It ends up being a projection of two types of utility monsters. The one, that person who somehow will become sad and rootless unless being told externally what gender they are, or by having their own claims in the matter overridden, or by seeing the claims of others to be overridden. The other, the person who transitions and regrets, but who would not if their gender had more harshly been denied by those around them. I think that if either exists, they are very rare, and the total impact as I count it of their suffering still less than that of those who would have much sadder lives under conditions that could satisfy the utility monsters. No hints of systematic evidence of the existence of either was offered during the conversation yesterday, only speculation on the hypothetic possbility of the former and two personal anecdotes on the latter. Despite the person saying these things being quick of mind, there then is no real reason to think these things happen enough to matter.

All of that be that further as it may, because I would transition anyway. I do this first and foremost for me, because I need to be someone my brain lets me be happy being. I can let myself matter in this regard. Beyond that, I maintain it is best if we change this world in every way I can. More data may be needed to be absolutely sure, but I don’t think we need to wait for it.