If a small child says, "I like this, more!" about some food, I take that literally, because immediate sensory experieces are something any animal is qualified to have an informed preference about. If a small child _in Berkeley where people talk about gender all the time_ says, "I'm sad about being percieved as a boy", I believe the part about being sad, but I'm _much_ more skeptical about the "about being perceived as a boy" part of the description. _Taken literally_, that's a _really abstract_ preference: absent a compelling theory of where all the trans kids were ten years ago, I'm a lot more inclined to chalk it up to, "I dunno, kids say lots of weird things, including on themes they pick up from their cultural environment." (I'm not _just_ being [age-ist](https://ncc-1776.org/tle1997/le970401-10.html) here; I'm _also_ pretty skeptical of a lot of grown-up verbal self-reports of gender identity and gender dysphoria, for specific reasons that are beyond the scope of this document.)
-### 2.4 Interlude: So what?
-
-It's possible for someone to broadly _agree_ with the theory set forth in this section as to the _etiology_ of the child's self-reports, while still endorsing the social transition. "Sure," says the adherent of this view, "I agree that if [child] had been raised in the culture of ten years earlier, she would still be [deadname]. But that's social progress—it's _better_ that children be able to choose their gender for reasons _less extreme_ than classical EOGD—or any reason at all, even a whim. And _of course_ that [freedom will result in more trans kids than in the old culture.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) Why are you being so cisnormative?"
-
-In the next section, I will attempt to explain why I think some degree of cisnormativity is advisable.
## 3. Potential Harm Scenarios
_(Epistemic status: lit review)_
-[TODO: summarize Reiner's ["Psychosexual development in genetic males assigned female: the cloacal exstrophy experience"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/reiner-psychosexual_development_in_genetic_males.pdf) and the discussion of Reiner's work in Ch. 3 of [_The Man Who Would Be Queen_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/the-man-who-would-be-queen.pdf); basically, it used to be standard practice for boys with a penis-destroying rare birth defect to be raised as girls; it didn't take about half the time, and kids for whom it did take are not obviously happy]
+[TODO: summarize Reiner's ["Psychosexual development in genetic males assigned female: the cloacal exstrophy experience"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/reiner-psychosexual_development_in_genetic_males.pdf) and the discussion of Reiner's work in Ch. 3 of [_The Man Who Would Be Queen_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/the-man-who-would-be-queen.pdf); basically, it used to be standard practice for boys with a penis-destroying rare birth defect to be raised as girls; it didn't take about half the time, and kids for whom it did take are not obviously happy
+
+Bradley, S. J., Oliver, G. D., Chernick, A. B., & Zucker, K. J. (1998). Experiment of nurture: ablatio penis at 2 months, sex reassignment at 7 months, and a psychosexual follow-up in young adulthood. Pediatrics, 102, e9.
+
+Reiner, W. G. & Gearhart, J. P. (2004). Discordant sexual identity in some genetic males with cloacal exstrophy assigned to female sex at birth. New England Journal of Medicine, 350, 333–341
+
+Meyer-Bahlburg, H. F. L. (2005a). Gender identity outcome in female-raised 46,XY persons with penile agenesis, cloacal exstrophy of the bladder, or penile ablation. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34, 423–438.
+
+]
### 3.4 Switching Costs Are Not Obviously Trivial
### 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".]
+
+
+----
+
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff