Yes, but psychologically a trans person is really their psychological gender and also really their biological sex. But I, for example, can't be a trans woman no matter how artistic I feel about it because I identify as a man and that's not something I believe can be willed in and out of existence on a whim any more than sexual preference can. — Baden
I could change my identity from being Jewish — Hanover
There are even today people in the world who do not believe you can, whether you go to temple or not, whether you've ever even seen one. We do not want to be like them, the people who say "what you are is up to us." — Srap Tasmaner
This conflict between what people want to call me versus what I see myself as is the entirety of this gender identify quandary. — Hanover
What you say here though doesn't address the issue of identity from a subjective perspective (which was our gender question), which is what this thread is more interested in. — Hanover
Are there no robust , relatively stable and consistent. aspects of personality style that we carry with us our whole lives? Could we say that Asperger’s is a kind of personality style( as opposed to a disorder or pathology , a characterization many strongly oppose). Or Wilson’s syndrome, which has a cluster of personality traits associated with it, such as extroversion and musicality?↪Hanover The crudest way of putting it, is that identity is one of the many masks of the ego, and illusory. Gender is just one of the many attributes we use to dress up this image of ourselves in our mind. Nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion, favorite football team, etc. All essentially made up, except for perhaps minor biological factors which are generally meaningless. — Tzeentch
Are there no robust , relatively stable and consistent. aspects of personality style that we carry with us our whole lives? Could we say that Asperger’s is a kind of personality style( as opposed to a disorder or pathology , a characterization many strongly oppose). Or Wilson’s syndrome, which has a cluster of personality traits associated with it, such as extroversion and musicality?
So why not look at gender , or at least the inborn brain-wired aspects of gender as robust personality features? — Joshs
What can we really say we now know about this person in regards of who they are as a person?
Nothing! — Tzeentch
We know valuable aspects of their style of approaching the world that allow us to engage with them in more intimate ways than we could have otherwise. This is precisely why, as a gay man , I have always found myself gravitating to other gay men , not because of sexual attraction, but because of a common affective-perceptual ‘style’. — Joshs
This doesn’t deprive me of my ability to to relate to many other kinds of groups, and it is not a narrow pigeonholing of people. — Joshs
Suppose for example that I am going to meet a man, and all I know about them is that they are gay.
What good would it do to assume they have a particular sort of style, as you say, without ever having met the person? — Tzeentch
What good would it do you know that someone is on the Asperger’s spectrum? — Joshs
Gay men and women, myself included , can profoundly benefit from learning that certain ways of acting that alienated us from heterosexual peers when we were growing up , that made us feel different and freakish, were not unique to us, and that there was a community where we could feel normal. — Joshs
Just knowing that the person you are about to meet is gay may not make any difference to you in getting to know them, but what if you have had encounters with men who acted in ways that were extremely flamboyant and effeminate? And let’s say that this made you angry and disgusted , because you assumed that they were putting on a deliberate act that was childish or silly? I know a number of people like this. — Joshs
To understand that there is an inborn perceptual-affective style that can account for hyper-femininity in men can make a huge difference in one’s attitude toward someone who one assumes is ‘putting on an act’. It also makes one really that pen’s own personality involves it’s own gender style. that pervades every aspect of one’s social dealings. Knowing this about oneself can allow one to build a bridge between one’s own style and that of someone with a very different inborn gender. But denying that there is such a thing as inborn perceptual-affective gender style, or insisting that all forms of gender behavior are socially constructed as some do, makes it impossible for one to build that bridge. One misses the overarching pattern organizing the particulars of inborn gender behavior and treats every action as arbitrary and conditioned by peers — Joshs
If through interaction with a person one recognizes patterns, I don't see what that has to do with identity labels and generalizations. Surely it wouldn't be right to assume those patterns exist before one has met the person? Again, it seems to me the true nature of someone can only be explored through real interaction, and not through the generalized images which make up identities. — Tzeentch
What I find odd here is the suggestion that relationships ought to be mediated by, in essence, science.
You count anything not theorized as "arbitrary" but is that more than a nasty way to say "individual" ? — Srap Tasmaner
I didn't address it because I have no idea what a trans woman, say, means when she says, "I am a woman." Literally don't know what that means. It doesn't much matter to me, so I've not read stories or talked to anyone with first-hand knowledge to try to learn what that means, for at least some people. — Srap Tasmaner
You can just ask yourself what it means for you to be a man to answer the gender identity question we've been asking here. — Hanover
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