donathos said:
Thanks for your reply. Trying my best to format sensibly on this forum, and it's a struggle for me. I'll ask your patience. Anyways, I don't feel that I'm not a man, but instead a woman -- I don't feel particularly that I'm a man or a woman, and I don't know how I would recognize either condition. I don't really know what it feels like to "feel like a man" or to "feel like a woman"; I only know what it feels like to be me. I've been told that I'm male, all my life. At least in part, I'm asking you how or why I should either accept or reject that. If I weren't a man, but a woman, how would I know it? (I'll add that I'm aware that there are also "non-binary" gender identities available, but adding more options doesn't help me answer the fundamental question I have as to how I should recognize which one is true of me.)
This is what I feared: that it would come down to a "feeling." Is that all there is to gender -- to being male versus female? Is it nothing more than a feeling? But even so, it doesn't really help me. Even if I had this feeling that I was the opposite gender, and even if that was all that was required to make me of the opposite gender (because that's all that the opposite gender consists of: feeling different), I wouldn't know whether the feeling I was having really was the "feeling of the opposite gender." How would I know that "this is the feeling that the opposite gender experiences"? How would I know I was right? Do you understand my question about this? It's like, imagine that I was trying to tell between two different flavors, apple and orange. Ideally, I could take a bite of an apple, take a bite of an orange, and now, having experienced both flavors, I would be in a position to judge whether any given flavor was "apple" or "orange" (or something else). But now imagine that I've only ever eaten apples. That's the only flavor I know. But someone tells me that the apples I'm eating don't necessarily taste like apples, they might taste like oranges. Fair enough -- I couldn't say that wasn't possible -- but how could I know whether that was true in my own case? How could I decide that the apples I'd eaten didn't really taste like apples, but oranges, if I had tasted no other flavors for comparison? If I couldn't taste any other flavor. As to being "comfortable" with who I am, I don't know that I've ever felt particularly comfortable with anything in the world, and certainly not myself. I don't associate life with comfort, generally speaking. But diagnosing any particular discomforts to some fundamental disconnect between my gender and phenotype, or social categorization? That doesn't seem like something easy or obvious. Honestly, it seems like exactly the sort of thing that would require deep introspection or meditation to even begin to assess honestly. I accept that I might not "feel like" a certain style of shirt on a given day, and not need to dig much more deeply into it before changing my outfit. But to feel as though my body is somehow mismatched with my soul or spirit or mind (or however we conceive of our internal reality)? Imo, that's a profound notion worthy of profound contemplation, especially before taking any irrevocable, life-altering action on its basis.
I agree that feelings are meaningful. Feeling sad is meaningful and the simple fact of feeling sad, over time, may indicate depression (because this is how we understand or define "depression" in the first place; it is tautological). But the divide between "using your feelings to understand your feelings" versus "using your feelings to understand the world" may speak to the crux of this issue. If gender is nothing more than a feeling (and nothing less -- I don't mean to demean feelings themselves, as they are meaningful, and important), then perhaps this is one issue settled (while opening what I believe would be a near infinite number of other cans of worms). But is that true? I guess one way of approaching this question is: can a person ever be mistaken as to their gender identity? Can someone assigned female at birth mistakenly believe that he is female, when the truth of the matter is that he is transgendered, is actually a woman? Can a cisgendered male incorrectly interpret his feelings as meaning that he is really a woman, when he is actually a man? Is there some reality beyond the fact of their feelings and beliefs, which can then be discovered? Or is the only reality, "I feel this way," so "this is what I am." And if that's so, is it something that can change (as, in my experience, feelings can change over time)? Can a man feel like a man, and thus be a man, but later feel like a woman, and thus be a woman, and then, later, a man again?
But wouldn't we agree that not all things are open for this sort of identification? There's the "joke" some people make about identifying as an "attack helicopter," but no, of course not. Of course a person is not an attack helicopter, even if he sees himself that way. Perhaps we would say that a person could not earnestly see himself that way, and that the "attack helicopter" line is just disingenuous rhetoric? Yet people do mistake themselves at times, and see themselves incorrectly, do they not? A person might consider himself highly intelligent, and identify himself as a genius, yet we don't grant that this makes him a genius. Because eventually we believe that "genius" refers to something real, something in the world, and that's what makes a person a genius or not, not the mere fact of identification. Rather, we strive to identify what is real. It's maybe more to the point (while potentially also distracting) to consider the case of Rachel Dolezal. I may be mistaken on the details, but it's my understanding that she identified as black and "passed" as black (to a strikingly successful degree). Yet I've heard many or most (of the progressive voices that usually advocate for transgender theory) dismiss her claim to identity, because: being black is considered something real, and not a matter of how one feels. I may be ignorant on this issue (almost certainly), but it seems to me that gender (or sex, at least) has greater external reality -- a sounder biological basis -- to it than race. Sexual division has the pedigree of hundreds of millions of years of evolution; race appears to mostly be a social fiction of the last few thousand years, at most. Yet between the two we consider race to be the thing immutable, a fact of one's biology, and beyond the power of one's feeling or identification to change? Does this make any kind of sense?
Yet for the purpose of determining one's "gender identity," I don't see what possibility exists apart from "defining yourself based on your relation to other individuals." Before a child can determine whether they're really a "man" or a "woman," male or female, they have to have some idea of what these concepts mean. And how are they to know -- how do they learn it at all, if not by examining external examples of "man" and "woman," and drawing conclusions based on the people they've met? And how are they to subsequently come to an "identification" without comparing themselves against what they've seen? I just don't see how a person is meant to "feel" their way to an identity, without any experiental basis for comparison, and further without defining themselves in relation to the people around them. But if this does happen as a comparison, as I think it must, "naturally at a young age," then isn't there the possibility for error? Suppose a child came to believe that "men" were one specific way, because that is all that they know, all that they have seen, and then proceeded to define themselves in those terms -- either "I am like that" or "I am not like that"; thus "I must be a man" or "I must not be a man." Couldn't that be a mistake, accounting to not understanding the variation we've agreed upon, and that men can actually be many different ways, many different things? |
Honestly, I'm not really sure what you want me to say. You are kind of interweaving a lot of ideas, without really settling on points or arguments. Some of the things you say I don't think are accurate ways of expressing things, others I think are, but at this point, I feel like you are having me read through your abstract essay and strike through all of your typos. I can point out things here and there that I think are imprecise, but to what end? What is your argument here, or otherwise, what role do I play within these philosophical ponderings?
