GC: What are your arguments against "lesbians and trans men are men in women's bodies" and "gay men and trans women are women in men's bodies"?

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[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (10 children)

It isn't sex-based, but by nature of men being taller than women on average, wouldn't a tall woman experience height in a manner more similarly to men?

Yes, actually, in a very limited way -- barring disease or musculoskeletal disorders, she'd have proprioceptor sensitivity (and density maybe, to an extent) relative to her bone length, joint size, and anti-gravity muscle function. This would be hardwired to her brain and inform her senses of balance, range of motion, and position in space (in averaged terms) more in line with what men of her height experience.

But that would be functioning almost entirely below the level of conscious awareness. Could she make that awareness conscious and assign some cognitive meaning or emotional values to it ("This is me experiencing the outer world at average-man-height")? Possibly. 🤔

[–]MarkTwainiac 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

barring disease or musculoskeletal disorders, she'd have proprioceptor sensitivity (and density maybe, to an extent) relative to her bone length, joint size, and anti-gravity muscle function. This would be hardwired to her brain and inform her senses of balance, range of motion, and position in space (in averaged terms) more in line with what men of her height experience.

Thinking more about this, I'd wager that men and women of the same exact height would always have different perceptions of their bodies & themselves based on the measures you mention.

Since men and women have a different center of gravity, wouldn't we have a different sense of balance too? https://youtu.be/_YEmYqziusg https://youtu.be/sZbrVxcvIyE

Not only do we have a different range of motion in certain body parts - the hips & pelvis especially but also the legs and feet - but the female & male thigh bones are angled differently, & thus relate to the knees differently, which causes the two sexes to walk, run, jump, kick, move in water, pedal a bike, ski and so on differently - and to have different rates of lower limb injuries too.

Also, wouldn't males and females have somewhat different anti-gravity muscle function coz of the difference in the amount of overall muscle each sex has, women's generally greater natural elasticity & flexibility, and the impact of the menstrual cycle on women's core muscles, ligaments & other connective tissues?

When comparing the perceptions of self & the world of males & females of the same height in an effort to figure out if being of the same height really would mean having similar or the same perceptions of self & the world as was proposed earlier on this thread, pregnancy would have to be factored in too. After all, 85% of the world's women will have at least one child - many will have several, and some will have a whole bunch. Over the course of pregnancy, women's balance, range of motion, position in space, center of gravity, spine curvature, amount of pelvic tilt, gait pattern all change enormously so our sense of these things has to change too. And certainly, our awareness of the amount of space we take up horizontally is radically altered, and that's something we always have to be aware of - or if for a moment we forget, we get reminded of it when we try to fit our big bellies behind the steering wheel of an auto, into a booth in a restaurant or inside a cramped stall shower.

Now pregnancy is a relatively short-term experience in life, but it is one of those experiences that really does tend to alter women's perceptions of our bodies as well as of the world and our place in it.

(Tangent: This got me thinking about the impact of a woman's height on pregnancy & her perceptions of her body during pregnancy. It's been proven that the taller a woman is, the more likely that her pregnancy will go full-term or past-term, the less likely she will have a premature labor & birth, and the less likely she will have labor & birth complications resulting in the need for an emergency C-section as well as such adverse outcomes as stillbirth, a baby with low birth weight and/or low APGAR scores, and her own death in labor or in the post-partum period. From what women report, there's also evidence that taller women are less likely less likely to experience pregnancy-related chronic heartburn, constipation, urinary incontinence, piles and lower backache. But I've never come across any literature about whether a woman's height has any measurable impact on the mechanics of her pregnant body in terms of balance, range of motion, center of gravity, changes in gait and so on - and whether that, in turn, might cause her to experience her pregnant body in the way a woman of a different height would.)

Back to the matter of height alone, another difference between males & females of the same height is that girls develop breasts at 10-12, and many girls' & women's breasts are quite large. The size of girls' & women's breasts definitely affect our sense of balance, range of motion & our perceptions of our bodies - and other people's perceptions of us & our bodies too. As soon as girls start developing breasts, the world becomes a minefield in which being catcalled, perved on, groped, hit on & treated like a piece of meat by boys & men are part of our everyday experience as we make our way in the world. Trans-identified males who go on PBs & CSH early might experience this. But those who adopt a trans identity later in life won't.

I know slight, pretty boys, androgynous boys and young gay male "twinks" get sexually preyed upon & harassed by boys & men too. But not to the extent that girls do. Coz compared to the proportion of the male populace who are sexually attracted to females, the number of boys & men who are sexually attracted to males is much smaller.

Of course, with CSH, many males who identify as trans in adulthood develop breasts, but usually their breasts are not nearly as large as female breasts often naturally are. Nor would their breasts have the same characteristics, coz being female & going through female puberty is necessary to develop all the milk glands, ducts & lobes that women have. (If Jazz Jennings' tubular breasts are any indication, the breasts of males put on PBs at 10 & CSHs at 11 might differ from female breasts in significant ways.) Similarly, whilst many trans-identified adult males have augmentation surgeries so as to obtain what appear to be quite large breasts, there's a world of difference between how it feels to have female breasts grown naturally since the start of female puberty and having silicone sacs of fluid or gel surgically attached in adulthood. Moreover, when augmentation surgeries are done on males, the silicone sacs are attached to a torso with male shoulders and male chest muscles.

Women who've had breast reconstruction following mastectomies for cancer report that they experience their new surgically-constructed breasts very differently to their original, natural breasts. So I don't see how a male person who gets a factory-made breast facsimiles would have any idea what it's like to have genuine female breasts.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352587815000522

But I've strayed far afield, LOL. Sorry!

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Now pregnancy is a relatively short-term experience in life, but it is one of those experiences that really does tend to alter women's perceptions of our bodies as well as of the world and our place in it.

Just using this as a jumping-off point -- it completely alters perception. You alluded to relaxin, and that fluctuates with the menstrual cycle as well as its big role in pregnancy and childbirth -- and frankly, parts (pubic symphysis, SI joints, the rectus abdominis in diastasis) don't always go back into place . . . if ligaments go into any degree of sprain, even in the knees, for instance, for adjusting to balance a pregnant belly, it may damage or up/down-regulate the proprioceptors around the joint in a way that won't fully reset, so post-partum balance, gait, ROM, etc. may be very different from pre-pregnancy.

That really surprises me about tall women and pregnancy -- I would have guessed the opposite, since connective tissue diseases seem to correlate with height (no data, just an observation). You see it more in self-selected populations like professional dancers and basketball players -- I don't know if they've looked at female leagues, but male basketball players have a high incidence of arrhythmias that commonly feature in valvular disease, which is very common in connective tissue disorders. Clearly something else is going on with height that's advantageous for birth. Huh.

I'm a woman and as tall as the average man in North America, so I do get the "taking up vertical space" and having eye-level interaction aspects of what it may be like in a man's body of comparable height, and I'll own I've used that to hold my ground with men in assertive-but-nonviolent situations before (education and work in male-dominated environments). It has been useful. But all the intrinsic details -- relaxin, pelvic shape, Q-angles, lower numbers of fibers per muscle -- those are uniquely female, and I don't see how they could be "imagined."

And yes to the sexed differences in balance, gait, ROM, center of gravity, those are all in play. Growing breasts is a game-changer. Not just the weight, but the forward flexion, the self-conscious "curling inward" so many girls do because of all the factors you mentioned -- if that persists, it can chronically stress the mid-back, C-spine, TMJs, provoke migraines and autonomic dysregulation and all sorts of unpleasantness. It's basically a postural "startle response" that becomes a lived-in body position, and, well . . . it's sadly self-explanatory, isn't it?

I've seen some really sketchy (non-SRS) surgical outcomes and postsurgical chronic pain conditions -- probably in the hundreds by now. Including women with purely cosmetic breast implants. I'm shocked at how casually reassignment procedures are treated by transtrenders. I had major invasive surgery myself, and though it went brilliantly, it took years to regain my ROM and re-adjust to the postsurgical new-normal. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I've seen much, much worse.

No worries for the straying. I could endlessly nerd out about A&P and neurology!

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (7 children)

That is very, very interesting. I wonder if bringing something so unconscious to conscious awareness would then have impact on developing anything that might resemble sexual inversion, or even just gender dysphoria. That seems like it would almost be an overanalyzation of the body and self.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (6 children)

Totally not my area of expertise, but I think it could potentially be tied in with overanalyzation, in synchrony with other factors. Trauma, certainly -- that casts a long shadow. But I often wonder about other conditions and experiences, tho, like early-onset OCD, synesthesia, scrupulousness, high perceptual sensitivity, high empathy, precociousness, highly active imagination, hypnagogia -- how could all of these interact with the places where sensation and cognition meet, along with real-life experiences, during our key developmental stages?

This is a gross oversimplification (and in no way meant to be insulting), but -- as a ferinstance -- we know that some children have a more heightened sense of empathy than others, and those traits do track into adulthood. What would happen if a highly empathetic child began imagining (idly or actively) very early on what it was like to be the other sex, and was also an early-enough abstract thinker to notice some existential or physical discomfort with "being in a body," and through individual preference was drawn to modes of gendered expression and adornment sanctioned by the child's culture . . . even absent some trauma of rejection or abuse or homophobia, and with not-all-that-uncommon genetic "brain processing stuff" going on -- could we see the possibility of that child developing a transgender identification as a multifactorial adaptation to their uniquely inner and constraining outer circumstances? With adverse experiences, could that identification later develop into something that resembles GD?

In other words, I think it's far more complicated than we currently understand. As they say in the journals -- "more research needed."

[–]MarkTwainiac 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

If clinicians working with children diagnosed as having "gender dysphoria" (or in previous eras "gender identity disorder") had observed that an excess of empathy, or empathy at all, was a common factor in these children & might be involved in the etiology of their GD, then they've certainly kept it very quiet. Using the search terms "empathy in children with gender dysphoria" on Google Scholar & PubMed doesn't yield much. Virtually all the papers are about the need to show empathy for children with GD, not empathy within such children.

A couple of different researchers have tried to show that adult males with GD have higher empathy than other males, and/or their level of empathy matches the level often found in females (or assumed to be true of females), but AFAIK this hypothesis has not held up.

As for boys with GID, this is all I could find, which does not support the theory that an excess of empathy is at the root of their issues: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10578-007-0072-7

If anything, in children & adults diagnosed with GD, there seems to be much more of a tendency in the other direction - towards excessive self-involvement, self-preoccupation, vanity & attention-seeking as evinced in the need for external "validation" - as we discussed in our exchange about the meaning of the term "narcissist" on a different thread.

Also, my understanding of empathy is that key to it is the ability to listen to other people describe their experience - whether in words or in cries or whimpers - and to relate this to an emotional state one has experienced or is capable of experiencing. It's about emotionally connecting & relating, not (solely or largely) about imagining or abstract thinking.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

That does surprise me, the GD and NC boys registering about the same -- I would have guessed they'd register higher. So in GD-related "I feel like ___" assertions, this isn't showing up as a porous boundary kind of thing ("I can't tell the difference between where I end and x begins")? I'd like to know more about what is meant by feel and felt wrt gender identity and gender expression. From close interaction with an adult AGP (no GD, but definitely PD stuff going on) I can absolutely see the self-involvement in action; it's very clear, the patterns are very obvious. But what's happening with GD and assertions of "felt" identity?

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 3 fun5 insightful - 2 fun6 insightful - 3 fun -  (3 children)

But what's happening with GD and assertions of "felt" identity?

Presumptuousness? And projection and fantasy. My impression is, most of the people who claim to feel like the opposite sex - or not like their own sex - live largely (entirely?) in their own heads, and have not spent much - or any - time having deep, probing convos with other people about how they feel inside, experience their bodies & see the world. The root issue is not just narcissism, it's solipsism.

[–][deleted] 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

That may be. I also suspect over-self-diagnosis (which is not the same as saying "GD" as we know it isn't a real phenomenon).

I've also wondered how often typical neurological weirdness gets conflated with all this. Example: brief episodes of dysphoria, dissociation, and euphoria are pretty common in non-ASD children (confirmed for me by clinicians, I don't have data handy). I've experienced all three as a child, including some frightening non-febrile dissociative states (one instance from a cold swimming pool, another from strobe lights) that I later found out were dysautonomia symptoms very common to a genetic condition I have (iow no big deal, in my case they don't cause seizures and pass and reset on their own). But they're intensely disorienting, and if there's no "adult in the room" to reality-check these kinds of experiences -- do they automatically become aggregated into a larger sense of distress/dysphoria?

[–]MarkTwainiac 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

But you're still operating on the premise that what persons who claim to "feel like" the opposite sex - or no sex - experience in childhood is highly unusual. When I don't think their experiences are that unusual - at all.

It's common for kids to go through all sorts of distressing, disorienting & discombobulating experiences growing up - and many kids experience major traumas. Moreover, kids have amazingly rich fantasy lives. I remember teaching USA kids circa age 9-11 a summer writing course more than 40 years ago, and all the kids in the class were writing about their "memories" of their "OBE"s - out of body experiences, not Order of the British Empire, LOL - coz belief in OBEs was popular amongst kids at the time. (Not coincidentally, methinks, the next decade brought a rash of accusations of satanic ritual abuse & CSA in daycare centers as well as the new phenomenon of recovered memory syndrome amongst mostly young adults.)

Until the era of mass vaccinations came to pass very recently in history, it's been the norm for nearly all children to go through bouts of serious childhood illness involving high fevers, fever dreams & hallucinations whilst awake. I recall several instances of hallucinating like that as a child when sick with measles, chicken pox & other once-common childhood illnesses. And before that, at age 3 I had a vision of the Virgin Mary coming into my bedroom one night, and was sure at age 4 that the spirit of my older brother who had recently died came to get me another night & took me flying high in the heavens so I could see the stars up close & the earth far away down below. My parents didn't shame me when I reported these experiences, but they didn't "affirm" that they'd actually happened, either. And they certainly didn't tell me that my claimed visions meant I was a really special little girl with mystical abilities who was destined to be a saint. Nor did they trot me down to the parish church to tell the priest & bishop so I could get put on the fast track to canonization.

IMO, what's unusual with those who say that since childhood they've always "felt like" the opposite sex (or now increasingly, neither sex) is the way they interpret what they've experienced, not necessarily what they actually experienced in & of itself. And I think a MAIN problem is that there IS or has been an "adult in the room" - or many adults in a number of different rooms - helping them make sense of their experience. Only instead of providing kids, adolescents & young adults with the "reality check" and the tools they need to correctly assess & healthily process & deal with their experiences, these screwed-up, regressively sexist, homophobic adults - be they, parents, gender therapists, "LGBTQ+" "educators," promulgators of QT, charities, political lobby groups, YouTubers, gamers, groomers and so on - have filled these kids' & young people's heads with a lot of harmful nonsense.

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

But you're still operating on the premise that what persons who claim to "feel like" the opposite sex - or no sex - experience in childhood is highly unusual.

Not at all. I'm arguing the opposite, that it isn't uncommon.

What I'm questioning are where assertions of "felt identities" come from, and why.

I do agree that many of those considered "adults in the room" are not remotely qualified to advise children, and now (worse) clinics are in part affirming disparate childhood weirdness (meaning common-but-unusual cognitive and sensory experiences) as indicators of "being trans."

(edited for clarity)