shovel

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / notes / trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md

diff --git a/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md b/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md
index 3b57dce..72a573f 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md
+++ b/notes/trans-kids-on-the-margin-sections.md
@@ -237,3 +237,8 @@ As we've seen from many of our friends, MtF transitions in the teens or twenties
 ### A.1. The Story About My Name
 
 [TODO: tell the story about how I tried using "Z.M." as if it were a first name because I wanted a gender-neutral byline (never mind that "Zachary" is an order of magnitude more common than "Zoë" and "Zelda" put together; I didn't really think it through) and I wanted my byline to be the same as what people called me in real life, but it didn't "stick", in part because "Z. M." doesn't feel like a name, and in part because a lot of people were still trained on calling me Zack, and the whole affair was really traumatizing for me. Moral: switching costs are not trivial—not having to pay the mundane, practical costs turned out to be _far more important_ to me-as-a-whole-person than my conscious verbal ideological whim of "It would be cool to have a gender-neutral name".]
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+Apparently, it's not hard for subtle social incentives to nudge an ordinary male child into self-reporting "I'm a girl", not because of any underlying trans disposition, but for the lack of information to determine an answer on the basis of anything other than subtle social incentives: if no one can say, "You're a boy because boys are the ones with penises" (because that's not what people in Berkeley are supposed to believe in 2020), it's not obvious how the child is supposed to figure that out independently.