If you want to convince someone that flying is safer than driving, one of the things you will have to say is, "Yes, you will take action, but your actions will not save you, your actions may in fact be what kills you." That's a tough sell. Action is our whole thing.

This was the problem with COVID lockdown orders, telling people that the best thing they could do was do nothing, don't go to work, don't go to school, don't shop, don't go to the movies. --- I don't want to relitigate the wisdom or necessity of lockdowns, but the deep resistance some people felt, the revulsion for having their freedom curtailed, was accompanied by this message that they had much less agency than they wanted to believe, that if they went about their regular lives they would get sick and make others sick and it would just happen, not up to you, not a matter of choice.

We understand the story of being oppressed directly because we can relate (we think we can), we've all been told to do stuff we don't want to do, we've all been to school. — Isaac

That's quite good. I think my point was actually a little garbled, but another way to say it might be that we have a prejudice in favor of situations where we perceive ourselves as free to act, or, better, that we filter out predictions that we interpret as curtailing our freedom to act. Such situations are just unacceptable.

--- I'm struggling with getting this right because you could imagine this realizing as a preference for political oppression over poverty -- at least you can fight the bastards but how do you fight being hungry. So it is a matter of narrative, that if the story begins "Suppose you have no freedom," that one's automatically binned. (The most appalling gulf war anthem, "Proud to be an American" or whatever it's called features the peculiar line "Where at least I know I'm free." At least? Seems like a lot of injustice is being allowed in by that little "at least".)

Maybe you're right that we prefer the one we think we understand to the one we're clueless about.

But I still think there's some prejudice for perceived agency, and maybe it's just that people think "poverty doesn't take my freedom" because they don't understand it.

You're right that none of this economic pressure amounts to direct threats to life, but life expectancy reduction due to poverty kills more people than any authoritarian regime could ever muster. — Isaac

Okay, that is roughly where I thought you were.

People think driving is safer than flying, simply because they give too much weight to their perception of control, or at least to the chance of having control. (I can at least try to avoid a collision, but if my plane is going down I just sit there doing nothing until I die.)

Maybe there's a similar mistake here: under an authoritarian regime, you have no freedom, no opportunity to control your fate; if you're poor but free, at least there's a chance you can do something. People do across the board refuse to believe that great, impersonal, historical forces affect them, so they reject the idea that poverty would be as deadly for them as a bullet.

This is why removing "bad people," and putting "good people," in doesn't fix systemic issues in more complex organizations. The organization's have their own priorities and are adapted to their own survival. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Certainly, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. But that observation will strike American libertarian conservatives as being at odds with this:

The state is so important because it is (one of) the most evolved systems out there, but even moreso because its survival needs line up with those of its citizens in the way a corporations' won't. A state will tend to evolve systems that promote the welfare of its citizens for the same reason that bodies will tend to evolve capacities that meet the needs of their cells (although this doesn't stop things like cancer from existing in particular instances). — Count Timothy von Icarus

They see the state as an institution bent on preserving and increasing its own power.

The state does have power, and corporations are mindful of this fact, hence their continual efforts to capture the state. This is @Isaac's "it's just a tool" view.

But I would say the state is one sector of the entire political system, and fights over the use of state power don't end once the votes in elections are counted, but continue within government. So I see government as, in part, a battlefield, where interests vie with one another, and even though money wields tremendous influence in these contests, it is not the source of the power in play and cannot completely control the process. Even Amazon gets sued. Even Microsoft gets regulated. There is always a chance of government rising to the occasion, if pushed hard enough the right way.

Ukraine's sovereignty is like the handbag. It's not worth fighting for — Isaac

Ukrainian's freedom... that might be worth sacrificing a generation for, that's not just a handbag. But fighting for freedom is not a matter of changing borders, it's a matter of changing systems, and even then not just exchanging one form of exploitation for another. — Isaac

I share your gut-level disbelief in borders -- though I'm sure your disbelief is better grounded -- but I suspect this skepticism is a luxury. The sovereignty of my nation is not in question. For some, achieving sovereignty is the necessary first step to securing freedom.

Here's one thing about your position that puzzles me: you argue that war is the worst option because of the loss of life and destruction it entails, and military defeat plus political resistance is a better option. Let's grant that. Why do you also think there's little to choose between being under Putin's boot and the IMF? Surely there's more room to maneuver against an enemy that puts you in debt than one that assassinates or imprisons you.

Louisiana wasn't bombed into submission. Corporate assassination is exceptionally rare. (Karen Silkwood?) There may have been actual corruption among regulators and inspectors, I don't know, but often even that is unnecessary. It would have been difficult to organize against the petrochemical industry or to hold government's feet to the fire, perhaps as difficult as organizing against Putin, but no one would be risking their life or their freedom by speaking at a meeting or going to a rally. With the right resources and effective oversight from the federal level, Louisiana might have gotten the jobs without the cancer and environmental destruction. The key would be for other communities to make the same demands, else the jobs will just go there instead. (Although geography is leverage and ports matter; this whole war is about ports.)

I don't share your broad cynicism, but I'm cynical enough to believe that anything I say in response will be met with some variation on "All is vanity," so I think I'll leave you to it.

I recently reread Beowulf, and one of the peculiar features of that society is that there seems to be a prize for honor and heroism and this is why they are good: fame. Over and over again, we are told that the point of slaying monsters and gaining treasure is future generations singing of your deeds, and I don't recall any hint that an explanation is required for why you would, in turn, want that. The highest praise is that your fame will never die.

It's a companion to the point Conrad makes:

You can't understand. How could you?--with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums--how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man's untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude--utter solitude without a policeman--by the way of silence, utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. — Heart of Darkness

Conrad's neighbor speaks to you, but only of what people would say about you, not of Heaven and Hell, not of the Categorical Imperative.

And as the individual must keep in mind what others will say, so each generation must keep in mind what future generations will say. It is the same dynamic, arranged across time rather than space.

That P. D. James quote is brilliant.

Unfortunately, this not the universal practice of humankind, and hasn't been for some 6000 years. — Vera Mont

I think we can do better, and I suppose one reason for believing that is that some people do better by their descendants. Whether it will be enough to save us, I don't know. It's hard for me to believe we have, in such a short span, already exhausted the possibilities for humanity.

This is an impressive performance, but the force of it comes from your audience recognizing that

Kids have been bought and sold, beaten and exploited and browbeaten since long before the industrial age. — Vera Mont

is wrong, which means we are expected to recognize there is an alternative. I have not sold, beaten, exploited or browbeaten any of my children, nor have I forced my religion onto them or sent them to die in a pointless war. Am I doing it wrong?

You do have an argument here -- I'm not saying it's just rhetoric -- that there are pressures, there are interests that drive the exploitation of the young. I don't deny that. But those interests are not the whole story, and it is not impossible -- or at least not shown here -- that those interests will not always be decisive.

Lack of international law. — Isaac

Certainly. What I had in mind before talking about government.

But I was also thinking about the other side.

just give them your handbag, it's not worth your life — Isaac

I'm not sure "teaching them a lesson" is the only other possible goal in refusing. I think there are times when people acknowledge that you might be able to take what you want from them, but you're going to have to take it, they're not going to give it to you just on the threat that you'll take it.

Think of the inquisition or other uses of torture. Of course resistance is irrational, on a first reading, but so is altruism. For torture to be efficient as a means of controlling a population, it has to be used sparingly. You don't want to have to torture everyone individually to secure compliance. So if a population could sustain a strategy of not complying, they raise the cost of control for the would-be boss, and that's rational, even if you can't be sure you're raising the cost enough to deter him.

Things like 'gay', 'woman', 'trans', 'geek', 'leader', 'hippy',... are pretty much needed as almost fully built units because the cost of building from scratch is just too high. — Isaac

That's a nice idea, but as you say below, we might also kind of know these are only useful approximations -- even when they're descriptive not of a person but of a role we need them to play.

The construction of something as complex as a selfhood is really difficult, I don't believe it's even possible outside of a social context where key parts are available to build from. — Isaac

Fair. I'd like to be distinguishing here and there between 'cultural' and 'social' but without doing that I've been giving short shrift to the necessary social context. -- Sexuality is obviously a social thing even when it's not cultural (among other mammals, say).

It's like the police always say to mugging victims "just give them your handbag, it's not worth your life". It doesn't somehow become less sensible advice at different scales. International legal action is the way to deal with criminal acts of invasion, not utterly devastating your country to somehow 'teach them a lesson'. — Isaac

That's a nice analogy, so what's wrong with it?

Sure, but there's rules for that too. Like how all neologisms evolve, I suppose someone started them, but "I declare 'bobby' is now a type of cake!" isn't going to make it so, it's not a legal move in the game

So, sure, we ought to add some dynamics to the model, but dynamics isn't anarchy. — Isaac

I don't really have much to go on here. I think the structuralist phase of linguistics and anthropology was so thrilled to be able to make sense of things at all that they accidentally created these static 'cultures' and 'languages', and that's a necessary first step, but we also know both of these literally evolve. The rules of these games are in play. I don't have a model for that to offer.

choosing involves more than just a good fit, and there's no denying these other motivators. — Isaac

Oh I agree. I would never suggest there's just a biological layer that's inherently right or even striving to be right. The lowest level I'm thinking of is still inferential and it's just trying to find something that works, for some definition of 'works'. What that layer comes up with might be puzzling sometimes, not just to others but to ourselves, and obviously that's an opportunity for culture to step in and offer to tell you what you actually think or feel, since you're evidently confused.

but at that level it's just axons firing, nothing of the sort we could categorise into natural kinds — Isaac

Natural kinds would be both a simplification and an exaggeration of our intuitive inferences about sex and gender, or rather about our behavior and the behavior of others, codified as sex and gender. Those inferences might be in some ways more nuanced and in some ways less -- they don't care how elegant or comprehensive or consistent the taxonomy we make out of them is.

I just don't believe in this notion of a 'true self'. People tell themselves stories and usually these stories are ones they pick from those society offers, or construct from parts thereof. I don't think these are true (nor false either). They just more or less provide a way of understanding the sometimes contradictory mental goings on they have. — Isaac

Which I think amounts to saying that there's a sense in which individuals don't own these stories, or the words they use to tell them; 'society' does. Which is fine so far as it goes because nobody wants to argue for Humpty-Dumpty-ism. And you're highlighting the fact that claiming an identity is a move in a language-game.

So, if a reasonably explanatory story offers good social capital, it's a selling point. Truth doesn't enter into it. — Isaac

But here's the problem, and it's the reaction everyone has to the language-game analysis: it all seems too static, as if 'society' has a list of acceptable moves and you have to pick from those else you're speaking nonsense.

But exactly what we're talking about is creating the social capital you acquire by changing the rules of the game.

For my part, I'm assuming our sense of our own sexuality and that of others is partially innate, but the machinery for making these inferences may be optimized for stereotypes of cis male and cis female,. The stories we tell and the social moves we make may have to work with conflicting intuitions. I'm not going to be on board with sexuality being purely social, that just seems crazy to me.

That's a plausible story. I guess I would still say it's an innovation that by and large you no longer need to bring armed guards with you to the marketplace because there are police to take over that role for everyone, buyers and sellers alike. Yes, there's a cost savings there for merchants but protection also for you on your way home with your bag of turnips, which means you can make purchases without fear some big guy will just take it from you. A system of ordered liberty such as this has the potential to benefit everyone, not just the merchants.

building Russia into something better so that it's less likely to break the armistice over time — Isaac

Yeah, that's the thing.

I think of this whole thing as giving the lie to the libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist) worldview that trade and commerce and markets are natural and self-sustaining. They're not. They must be enabled by institutions that keep the peace and enforce property rights. If they are not, some warlord will just take your grain and sell it as his own, or just blockade your ports so you can't sell it, or bomb them into rubble.

In this case, since the warlord wants your land permanently -- your future grain and the ports through which it can be traded -- there's an additional incentive for him to interrupt your trade, because denying you income degrades your ability to fight him off.

You can see a different sort of invasion in Louisiana. There's reason to think the petrochemical industry actually sought out communities that were not only low-tax and pro-business, but with high levels of religiosity and low levels of education. They know what the threats to their business model are and what factors are predictive of a community that will let them do what they want. So Louisiana got some jobs, but nobody told these people they would never again be able to fish or swim in the waters they grew up around, that their land and water would be poisoned forever and their way of life gone, that they would start getting sick. But to this day, Louisianans stand up for the petrochemical companies because they brought jobs.

We are not forced to choose between these two different sorts of warlords; the answer to both is robust government. Government that does not allow force of arms to dictate terms and does not allow private interest to destroy our common inheritance for its own gain. The United States should have been able to stop the exploitation of Louisiana, but it didn't because of regulatory capture. There is no world government to stop Russia just taking Crimea and attempting to take the rest of Ukraine, but even if there were, who's to say it would have? Government failed in Louisiana and might have failed there too.

It's all so depressing, men with power who want more, men with money who want more. The sheer narrowmindedness and shortsightedness of these avatars of destruction is breathtaking. All to rule over a smoking ruin. So long as you have more than anyone else, even if there's almost nothing left.

Yeah that was part of the motivation here. I was acknowledging my historical preference for Anglo-American philosophy, with its rejection of historical approaches, and inviting arguments from a more continental approach. It's right there in the OP.

There ended up being no clash of schools but it became clearer for me what norms of discussion, or perhaps reason, were being violated, so that's something.

I think that just as we seem to have specialized modules for recognizing faces, for noticing mood, for guessing at intent, all these sorts of things, it would make sense for us to have a module for making gender determinations, and since we are as a rule binary, it makes sense for this module just to provide intuitions of the form 'same gender as me' or 'the other one', since our sexual behavior is what natural selection is going to be most interested in, and that means the gender module also implicitly provides the intuition about our gender.

And I think what we've all been struggling with in trying to classify statements like "I am a woman" spoken by anyone -- what is this identity it supposedly expresses? -- is best approached by recognizing to start with that the right word here is 'intuition'. In retrospect, it looks obvious to me, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. (Not least because I've just finished reading a book about intuitive inference.)

Too open and personal? — Amity

It's one thing to share my own private life, but it's uncool to share someone else's. Pretty simple.

I responded to what I felt was a real struggle in understanding and coping. — Amity

Which was kind of you.

On the other hand -- and we've all glancingly noted this -- you don't have to have a philosophically or scientifically rigorous understanding of someone to treat them decently, so the analytical challenge I've been dealing with here is a whole separate thing from just being as good a dad as I can.

Negotiation about what, though? It's relatively easy to use the pronouns someone wants you to. It's a bit harder to see someone as the gender on a gut level if they identify with if they look or act stereotypically otherwise. I think those are behavioural commitments though. — fdrake

Sure. People push back on the pronouns, but the real flashpoints have been spaces and sports, and that's clearly a matter of negotiation.

I do think it's very unlikely that we could get, even in principle, a list that boils down who counts as a man or a woman without also constructing an incomplete stereotype of the role - in terms of behaviour, attitudes, social standings etc. And we'd already know that behaving in accord with a stereotype is neither necessary nor sufficient for being the type of being that stereotype is associated with. — fdrake

After many, many drafts, here's where I am at the moment.

When someone says "I'm a girl" or "I'm a boy," that expresses an intuition.

What we want to know is, what is the source of that intuition? Is there a mental module for gender, perhaps one that produces intuitions about the gender of others as well as yourself? Plausible. There's lots of research on the age at which children begin to distinguish between male and female in various ways, and it is just the sort of thing you'd expect natural selection to take an interest in.

But this is trouble. If there is a gender module, then the most natural thing to say about an anatomical boy having the intuition of being a girl is that the gender module is making a mistake. We would want to know if it's making other mistakes: does it get the genders of others wrong as well? I don't happen to know if there's any research whatsoever on that.

Or perhaps it's not making a mistake but producing the self-gender intuition differently. If -- and it's unclear so far as I can tell -- the brain is gendered, perhaps during development, then the gender module might not even be interested in your sexual anatomy but just report the usually well-aligned gender of the brain hosting it, even if that gender is not the same as your anatomical sex. --- And it's still conceivable for both to be true, that the brain is gendered and the gender module is producing the wrong intuition.

I've been using the word "gender" but we could substitute anatomical sex mostly. On the other hand, if there's always been variation in sexual expression and behavior, it might be worth the trouble for natural selection to classify that. Do gay male gorillas compete with cis male gorillas for female mates? They might, I don't know, but if they don't it seems like that would be worth knowing. Why fight with a guy who's not a threat to your reproductive success? --- Anyway, it seems not crazy that there might be a module for specifically gender intuitions rather than just anatomical sex, because gender might be helpfully predictive of some behavior that matters. In which case, despite it no doubt being mostly culture, there might be something to "gaydar."

parents' observations — Moliere

Honestly there aren't a lot of those and this is probably the only example you're going to get. (Wouldn't have posted what I did except the language is so interesting.) As a dad, I don't even need to understand my kids to support them and love them, so it's a whole different thing. And I don't ask my teenager for explanations, because he's not a research subject.

Anyway, I don't think much of anything I've posted about trans kids reflects my personal experience of the subject -- just not how I'm approaching it.

My personal experience of masculinity is part of my approach, which ought to be obvious.

[ Feel now I shouldn't have posted this at all, so if you missed it, it's too late. ]

correctness conditions — fdrake

If you mean something that could conceivably be negotiated, even if only implicitly, I don't know. Obviously there's something like that going on with words in general, but the problem here is that there seems to be no basis for negotiation: one side says the correctness condition for my claiming womanhood is that I know (feel??) myself to be a woman; the other side scrambles to find something else because whatever the criteria are that's not it. How will negotiation proceed?

If you dial the clock back a hundred years, say, and someone born a woman claims, without being metaphorical or something, to be a man, not to have a preference for presenting as a man, in the culturally standard way, though a woman, but to be a man full-stop, then the likely conclusion would be that this woman is suffering from a delusion.

I would even find that possibility tempting today except it just doesn't look delusional, or not like any delusion I'm at all familiar with. I literally do not know what it's supposed to mean, which suggests to me that people making such identity claims are up to something completely different.

What's not clear is whether my understanding is expected or required. Usually with words people say to me, it is, but I'm honestly not sure here, which is odd. I can think of two explanations for this: it is not a message, say, but a signal; or language is being used in some new way, and I don't just mean in a Humpty Dumpty way.

If it's the latter then the world has changed and maybe this is *real* postmodernism, not the piddly warmups we've been living through but the real thing, a through-the-looking-glass kind of change. All of us on the forum here are suddenly dinosaurs no matter how cool we thought we were.

Either way, negotiating assertibility conditions doesn't seem to be on the table.

I don't think there's anything stopping us each having our own narratives and just thrashing it out when they clash. I just don't think it's a very good idea, and that requires a little stability, some predictability — Isaac

I'll come back to this.

it can't be a one-way system where Bob has a fully formed narrative in his head which he'd like other people to act in accordance with, but in interacting with Bob, Alice's own narrative must be discarded — Isaac

I have the same concerns, and I have additional concern about defining Alice's speech as per se harmful and dangerous. (I've even argued to my ex, who's an anti-fascist activist, that if you tried advocating Nazism in Tel Aviv, it wouldn't be dangerous to anyone but you.)

But if Alice's narrative is racist, we want her to discard it, right?

Or at least presumably Bob does, there being no Arbiter of All Narratives who settles these disputes for us.

And there absolutely are cases of hardcore racists changing their views, but none of those are from somebody just demanding they do so because they're wrong.

This is supposed to be different because what someone is denying is not your views, possibly not even your value as a human being, but your identity -- they don't even see you as what you are. In pushing back against that demand, we are in effect treating this as just another view of yours, maybe one you're very attached to in a number of ways, but still a view. That's going to bother a lot of people, and maybe they have a point that the rules of this sort of game are different.

I'm thinking of Philip Roth's telling his parents not to be drawn into defending him against charges that he's anti-semitic. "That's a losing game," he said, which I took to mean, treating the proposition as possibly true is already giving ground. (Aha! You admit he might be...)

Similar thing here. Maybe it puts the whole discussion on the wrong footing to think of these expressions of gender identity as, you know, opinions more or less. @Moliere for instance does not want discussion about whether someone's expression of their gender identity is "accurate" or something, and I think there's something to do that.

The trouble I have is that I want to get there by seeing those expressions as performance, but the people using these expressions keep talking like they're supposed to be taken as incontrovertible fact, or as witness -- however you do that you're opening yourself to the same types of skepticism and critique as any other expression.

No one would consider 'racist' an identity worthy of the same deference. Why gender specifically?

I'm still caught up in these meta issues, but I hope to write something about the use of words like "man" and "woman" in these conversations. Maybe soon.

The facts underdetermine the theory — Isaac

Hey you got it right this time! Good for you.

to tell that story we have to understand each other, we have to have a shared set of meanings for the words we use, including 'woman'. Otherwise, I can't hear your story because I don't know what you mean by anything you say. — Isaac

I'll preempt @Joshs saying that we creatively 'extend' or re-determine those meanings through this dialogue, rather than them being external to our practice, fixed, and pre-existing, meanings we just use like hammers and screwdrivers.

On the other hand, we don't start from zero, so while dialogue might change our understanding of a word, it doesn't create that understanding ex nihilo.

And that's the sticking point, the off-the-shelf narratives we bring with us to the discussion. Is there a process for rewriting those scripts, how does it work, what is required for that process, and how robust is it?

Also Buber's I and Thou, if memory serves.

listening to another's story — Moliere

Clearly at least listening would be a good start.

Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. — Thoreau

If even responding to such childishness makes me petty too, as you’re implying, so be it. But I don’t initiate these things. — Mikie

"He started it!" Yeah, that's not childish.

What kind of person you are is none of my business. I do think you might consider whether your behavior here is good for the forum -- that's the extent of my interest here, so that's all I'll say. You can put me on the "sanctimonious" list if you like, I won't mind.

Sad to say, you’re as petty a member as they come. — Mikie

You can hear yourself, right?

When I think "taking your word" I guess I mean I believe it. — Moliere

Oh. That's exactly contrary to my linguistic intuitions. (We don't need to argue about this, but if I take your word for it that you'll be at the restaurant at 8, I agree to set aside my judgment about whether you will be and behave as if you will be.)

Okay so this is exactly analogous to "Believe women". It's not that you can't exhort people to hold some belief, but the basis being offered -- and reasons will be required here -- is essentially that you can't be wrong about this, that identity beliefs are special and incorrigible.

I'd really love to see a different solution.

when it comes to someone's basic identity that they live with I'd say we take people's word for it almost always — Moliere

Hmmmm. If you want to say that we don't take their word for some things but we do for others, the identity things, then you're back to having to clearly demarcate those identity things even to make your point. Your religion example, for instance -- I could tell you a long story about my second marriage that would undermine claims that self-reported faith is reliable. So maybe sometimes it's an identity thing and sometimes it's not. What are we doing here?

I'm just not sure you can make good on identifying identity such that identity related claims should be treated as incorrigible. I would rather we not even require something that messy become tidy just to make political progress.

Consider this. If I want to be seen as what I feel myself to be, you taking my word for it that I am what I claim to be is just not the same thing, is it? If you truly don't see me as I desire, what does your taking my word for it amount to? Even if you manage to do both, how will you handle the cognitive dissonance?

Seems to me the "taking my word for it" is a cheap substitute for the real thing. And it might be worse than nothing, because one way of handling the cognitive dissonance is to try not to see me at all, so you can continue to endorse my claim without discomfort. That's not what I wanted!

Politically, it looks like the "take my word for it" view is all but openly a stopgap, a kind of expedient compromise. There's something similar in dealing with rape: "Believe women." Well no that's just dumb, but it's a deliberate over-correction to the overwhelming tendency to dismiss women's claims. If there ever comes a day when women's words aren't discounted, no one will think "Believe women" a suitable rallying cry.

I agree with everything you've said there — Janus

Cheers. Let's hope I said what I was trying to say then.

I think what I've found is that it's far too easy to believe you have judged another's self-awareness when there's something missed. — Moliere

Oh but I didn't say we make good, reliable judgements about the self stories of others, only that we do. All of our own biases will certainly be in play when we try to figure out how other people understand themselves.

But to come back to the point @Isaac was making, there seems to be a demand that we all not do what we all do, that we not even consider the possibility that particular sorts of stories people tell about themselves are not perfectly true. You argued that we need to just ask and take people's word for it when they answer, but we don't do that for anything and it's an unreasonable demand.

But we can still recognize that you construct your identity in part by telling these stories -- "We are who we pretend to be" -- and grant this constructive role without acquiescing to the folly that anyone ever simply reports the truth they find within.

I admit that politically this sounds like crap. People want to be told they are seen as who they know themselves to be. But that's not a courtesy we extend to anyone, so if we refuse here it's not singling out these claimants. But on the other hand, no one else makes the demand in so many words, perhaps because they know it's a non-starter. (As I write, I keep thinking of exceptions to these generalities, mostly in arguments among family, close friends, romantic partners.) But for whatever reason, no one else asking means no one else being turned down, so the effect of refusing here on general principles still looks like singling out trans people as not being trustworthy. So yeah, still political dynamite, even if perfectly consonant with psychology and our everyday ways of dealing with each other. The natural thing is to consider the political situation and make an exception. Maybe in time trans people won't have to ask to be seen the way they want, and we can go back to not treating their self-knowledge as uniquely privileged.

self-knowledge isn't exactly history — Moliere

Oh! You should have said the opposite. Identity is precisely an issue of the autobiographical self.

But I don't think that identity-talk relies upon a notion of a private language as much as it relies upon a standpoint of some kind, which is much more defensible than a full-blown Subject. — Moliere

Same.

In terms of how we converse people will know more about themselves than you know about them because they've been around themselves the whole time — Moliere

There's obviously something to this; I know lots of things about my personal history that no one else does. But there's also the Burns Problem: we are biased when it comes to ourselves, and sometimes others can see us more clearly.

the simple fact that people will be better able to construct a story about themselves than strangers who know nothing about them. — Moliere

But it is a story and serves a purpose. It's not just the unvarnished truth.

even though all identity is a kind of performance that doesn't make it false -- or, rather, the truth and falsity isn't as relevant as the significance of one's identity — Moliere

Right. It is just not one of the purposes of the autobiographical self to be a truthful record of your life. So yes truth and falsehood are irrelevant to its function -- for you. Not entirely irrelevant to other people I think. We do tend to make judgements about how self-aware people are, because we need to know how seriously to take what they say about themselves.

What I don't believe for a moment, is that a) some constitution of this mental goings on is correct, immutable and sacred, and b) known only to you and not picked off the shelf of publicly available models associated with the word you choose.

I don't believe (a) because we see too much the same mental goings on interpreted as different constructions by the same people at different times. We're wildly unfaithful even to our own models and we've absolutely no better idea what's going on than the person sat next to us.

I don't believe (b) because we don't just pick random words to describe these 'identities', we pick words we've learnt, and we can only have learnt those words from a community of language users, who must, therefore, know what the word means, which means, by definition, you could be wrong. — Isaac

I like this, but I think I'd like it more if you aimed at the level of narratives instead of going all the ways down to words -- though I understand it looks like it's the use of individual words that's at stake, of course it isn't, they're pieces of a larger puzzle.

Somehow this all reminds me of a moment in The Sting, when Redford (I think) is at the apartment of a criminal associate of his. I think it's grandkids sitting on the floor listening to a cops and robbers show on the radio and one of them cheers the cop hero, which elicits from the old guy a "Hey! Who are y'all rootin' for?!" and possibly a gentle smack on the head (it would fit, but I'm not sure I'm not imagining that). Can be tricky to keep your identity fixed.

Here's another one from the criminal world -- so more masculinity stuff here -- that I would have heard on the radio I guess during the crack epidemic. There was a culture clash in America's high security prisons. I remember clearly some old cons who were interviewed who did not understand the new younger cons in their midst. "We were just outlaws," they would say. And there'd be talk of still having some kind of code. "These guys, though, they don't seem to care about anything, shoot anyone, for no reason, kids too." I remember some old guy particularly put off by these younger guys laughing when someone got shot in a cop show on TV. Just couldn't wrap his head around that.

Upshot of these little stories, I guess, is that identity is always something you perform, rather than something that you are, and your ideas about yourself play a part in that performance but are also a reflective simplification of that performance. There's a feedback loop, but I think it starts with the performance and it's the performance that will keep updating the ideas. (My motto these days, is "How can I know what I think till I see what I say.") If that coupling is too loose, you get people whose ideas about themselves and their performance diverge enough to be troublesome, and then we're talking about neurosis, I guess. But it's always a little loose.

It seems we part company here, as I don't believe our interest in sex is entirely down to its reproductive function. — Janus

Fair. That was poorly expressed. With the word "interest" I was trying to point at the physiology of sexual desire, why these arousal effects were selected for in the first place, not to say that we have a specific interest in and desire to reproduce. The way you have an automatic response to someone in your environment who may present a threat, without any awareness of what about them triggered that, without necessarily even being aware that your awareness of them is threat-awareness, that's the kind of thing I was going for, the response to potential sexual partners that you don't experience as voluntary, noticing someone, finding them attractive, etc.

I'm also hungry right now and trying to ignore those signals to finish this post. I'm not forced to act on what my body is encouraging me to be interested in doing.

I agree that the existence of sex in the first place is down to reproductive function, but that is almost tautologically, and hence trivially, true — Janus

I would have thought so, yes.

I think we also agree that sexual desire is in part hormonal and in part conditioned by socio-cultural influences. — Janus

Yes, of course, and obviously culture plays a huge rule in the range of behavior open to us as acting on those desires. But I think of culture primarily as channeling desire, controlling it, leveraging its existence for other purposes (selling things!), and so on. I'm not at all sure culture can reach deep enough to be a source of desire itself, directing your attention without your permission, quickening your pulse, releasing hormones. Your body has its own ideas about who you ought to be interested in right now and why, and I don't think culture is nearly so powerful or reaches so deep into your physiology.

As I've said, I think the big lesson of the last hundred and fifty years is that we're apes that wear clothes.