memoir: one more trans gaslighting anecdote, a couple word tweaks

diff --git a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
index 3fdc772..ab27478 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
+++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
@@ -649,7 +649,7 @@ Similarly, in the case of a reputedly transgender three-year-old, a skeptical fa
 
 From the skeptical family friend's perspective, there are a number of anomalies that cast serious doubt on what the family thinks is the obvious interpretation.
 
-(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically. The following anecdotes are merely illustrative, and may not reflect real events.)
+(Or so I'm imagining how this might go, hypothetically. The following vignettes are merely illustrative, and may not reflect real events.)
 
 For one thing, there may be clues that the child's information environment did not provide instruction on some of the relevant facts. Suppose that, six months before the child's social transition went down, another family friend had reportedly explained to the child that "Some people don't have penises." Apparently, grown-ups in Berkeley in the current year don't feel the need to be more specific. Growing up in such a culture, the child's initial gender statements may reflect mere confusion rather than a deep-set need—and later statements may reflect social reinforcement of earlier confusion. Suppose that after social transition, the same friend reportedly explained to the child, "When you were little, you couldn't talk, so your parents had to guess whether you were a boy or a girl based on your parts." While this claim does convey the lesson that there's a customary default relationship between gender and genitals (in case that hadn't been clear before), it also reinforces the idea that the child is transgender.
 
@@ -657,6 +657,14 @@ For another thing, from the skeptical family friend's perspective, it's striking
 
 Suppose that, around the time of the social transition, the child reportedly responded to "Hey kiddo, I love you" with, "I'm a girl and I'm a vegetarian." In the skeptic's view, both halves of that sentence were probably generated by the same cognitive algorithm—something like, "practice language and be cute to caregivers, making use of themes from the local cultural environment" (where grown-ups in Berkeley talk a lot about gender and animal welfare). In the skeptic's view, if you're not going to change the kid's diet on the basis of the second part, you shouldn't social transition the kid on the basis of the first part.
 
+Perhaps even more striking is the way that the grown-ups seem to interpret the child's conflicting or ambiguous statements about gender.
+
+Suppose that, around the time social transition was being considered, a parent asked the child whether the child would prefer to be addressed as "my son" or "my daughter."
+
+The child replied, "My son. Or you can call me she. Everyone should call me she or her or my son."
+
+The grown-ups seem to interpret exchanges like this as indicating that while the child is trans, she's confused about the gender of the words "son" and "daughter". It doesn't seem to occur to them that one could just as well posit that the child knows he's his parents "son", but is confused about the implications of she/her pronouns.
+
 It's not hard to imagine how differential treatment by grown-ups of gender-related utterances could unintentionally shape outcomes. This may be clearer if we imagine a non-gender case. Suppose the child's father's name is John Smith, and that after a grown-up explains ["Sr."/"Jr." generational suffixes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_(name)#Generational_titles) after it happened to come up in fiction, the child declares that his name is John Smith, Jr. now. Caregivers are likely to treat this as just a cute thing that the kid said, quickly forgotten by all. But if caregivers feared causing psychological harm by denying a declared name change, one could imagine them taking the child's statement as a prompt to ask followup questions. ("Oh, would you like me to call you _John_ or _John Jr._, or just _Junior_?") With enough followup, it seems plausible that a name change to "John Jr." would meet with the child's assent and "stick" socially. The initial suggestion would have come from the child, but most of the [optimization](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/D7EcMhL26zFNbJ3ED/optimization)—the selection that this particular statement should be taken literally and reinforced as a social identity, while others are just treated as a cute but not overly meaningful thing the kid said—would have come from the adults.
 
 Finally, there is the matter of the child's behavior and personality. Suppose that, around the same time that the child's social transition was going down, the father reported the child being captivated by seeing a forklift at Costco. A few months later, another family friend remarked that maybe the child is very competitive, and that "she likes fighting so much because it's the main thing she knows of that you can _win_."
@@ -685,7 +693,7 @@ A parent obliges to ask the child: "Hey kiddo, somebody wants to know how you kn
 
 (When recounting this conversation, the parent helpfully adds that rainbows hadn't come up before, and that the child was looking at a rainbow-patterned item at the time of answering.)
 
-It would seem that the intepretation of this kind of evidence depends on one's prior convictions. If you think that transition is a radical intervention that might pass a cost–benefit analysis for treating rare cases of intractable sex dysphoria, nonsense answers like "because girls like specific things like rainbows" are disqualifying. (A twelve-year-old who could read an informed-consent form would be able to give a more compelling explanation than that, but a three-year-old just isn't ready to make this kind of decision.) Whereas if you think that some children have a gender that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth, you might expect them to express that affinity at age three, without yet having the cognitive or verbal abilities to explain it. Teasing apart where these two views make different predictions seems like it should be possible, but might be beside the point, if the real crux is over [what categories are made for](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/).
+It would seem that the intepretation of this kind of evidence depends on one's prior convictions. If you think that transition is a radical intervention that might pass a cost–benefit analysis for treating rare cases of intractable sex dysphoria, nonsense answers like "because girls like specific things like rainbows" are disqualifying. (A fourteen-year-old who could read an informed-consent form would be able to give a more compelling explanation than that, but a three-year-old just isn't ready to make this kind of decision.) Whereas if you think that some children have a gender that doesn't match their assigned sex at birth, you might expect them to express that affinity at age three, without yet having the cognitive or verbal abilities to explain it. Teasing apart where these two views make different predictions seems like it should be possible, but might be beside the point, if the real crux is over [what categories are made for](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/).
 
 Anyway, that's just a hypothesis that occurred to me in early 2020, about something that _could_ happen in the culture of the current year, hypothetically, as far as I know. I'm not a parent and I'm not an expert on child development. And even if the "Clever Hans" etiological pathway I conjectured is real, the extent to which it might apply to any particular case is complex; you could imagine a kid who _was_ "actually trans" whose social transition merely happened earlier than it otherwise would have due to these dynamics.