(i would argue all shifts in gender/attraction are dissociative processes, but normies are not ready to hear or understand that)
I want to hear all about this :)
so in this, you've given a couple examples of mutability:
gender fluidity and bi/pan cycles
sexuality shifts during transition
it seems like mutability or not are lenses we can choose to apply or not but I'm not seeing what leads you to prefer one.
the point is that probably no, it is not mutable, rather some people have more complex / complementary / contradictory attributes that vary in the extent of their momentary activation / expression / repression / dissociation.
like this is a solid hidden variable theory but the other explanation is that sexuality just changed.
that said, I also prefer to consider these things immutable but I know others prefer mutability as an explanation. what leads you to be certain that you're correct? personally, the immutable view is convenient in a number of ways so I've been slightly discounting it because of that internal bias. or said another way, my personal experience agrees with you but I'm hesitant to universalize.
like this is a solid hidden variable theory but the other explanation is that sexuality just changed.
The point is that it is not a hidden variable theory.
In plurality/dissociative identities one can use positive/negative triggers or other methods to switch between alter states, and thus reliably switch between sexual orientations and gender identities too.
So that attraction can be bound to something totally unrelated like a certain favorite song or specific memory; the orientation as such persists and can be observed at almost any time.
It only becomes a hidden variable when these effects are too subtle, covert, and thus difficult to control.
Many with undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder do not recognize or control much of their own switching either.
sexuality shifts during transition
Just shifting from predominantly testosterone/visual to estrogen/progesterone/context based libido is complicated enough in how that interacts with orientation.
And there is often a reduction in derealization/depersonalization, often with worsening dysphoria too.
Many repress their sexual orientation either before or after transition; but statistically most trans people are double-gay despite their best efforts.
In my own case sexual orientation has not fundamentally changed at all.
gender fluidity and bi/pan cycles
I have a hammer and see a nail. lol
Last I checked did not find any neuroscience studies comparing fixed gender identity, gender fluidity, and gender in dissociative disorders.
I guess there is stigma around dissociation as if that were some abnormal psychology thing; even though it is ubiquitous.
There are neuroscience studies of gender identity and of dissociative disorders.
And there is plenty comparing those within ordinary psychiatry, but that cannot peer into those hidden variables as it were.
also prefer to consider these things immutable but I know others prefer mutability as an explanation. what leads you to be certain that you’re correct?
It would be difficult to summarize that...
Guevadoces are an interesting example: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981
And I guess somebody with more patience could read through this one:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616
That example of pederasty in ancient Greece is just... /r/SapphoAndHerFriend
There are probably also things to be said about fetishization and how that interacts with sexual orientation.
Although disentangling that, I have no idea, that is another huge can of worms...
so my point is that all of these things are equally well explained by the notion that sexuality/gender identity are mutable and do change. there's no reason that mutability can't be constrained to just two or a few options (and so swapping alters would still land one with the same sexuality each time). the core question is why should I prefer your explanation to this one? they seem equally justifiable to me and that it would be extraordinarily difficult to truly prove in one direction or the other, in some objective fashion.
It only becomes a hidden variable when these effects are too subtle, covert, and thus difficult to control.
yeah, that's what I was pointing out.
Just shifting from predominantly testosterone/visual to estrogen/progesterone/context based libido is complicated enough in how that interacts with orientation.
And there is often a reduction in derealization/depersonalization, often with worsening dysphoria too.
Many repress their sexual orientation either before or after transition; but statistically most trans people are double-gay despite their best efforts.
yeah, this is essentially my experience. but I'm able to understand it one of two ways. first, that the hormones and my own desire to be as much of a woman as possible + a healthy dose of internalized queer phobia have led me to reconstruct my identity in such a way that I stayed straight through my transition. or that undoing repression and dealing with dysphoria have allowed me to surface my actual, androphilic sexual orientation. I lean towards the latter because it helps explain more things and is a bit kinder to myself, but I leave room open for the former to be true (or that they're both true to varying degrees). I'm reading you as saying that I the latter explanation is more likely to be correct as the former probably isn't possible and I'd love a solid justification of that so I can put this to bed for myself :).
I do have a suspicion though that gender identity and sexuality are parts of our identities that we construct as much as any other part of our identities. that's a fairly hot take, though, and I haven't worked through even my own objections to that yet, and it runs extremely counter to orthodoxy on these issues.
Last I checked did not find any neuroscience studies comparing fixed gender identity, gender fluidity, and gender in dissociative disorders.
I guess there is stigma around dissociation as if that were some abnormal psychology thing; even though it is ubiquitous.
ahh, I was hoping you had something on how disassociation affects gender identity and sexuality and can cause them to fluctuate as I thought that's what you were saying. maybe I was reading you wrong though.
hoping you had something on how disassociation affects gender identity and sexuality and can cause them to fluctuate
The thing neuroscience might be able to show is MRI or fMRI differences between these things.
It could at least falsify my claim that these fluctuations / cycles / switches are of the same type.
There is plenty written in psychiatry about this stuff, but the problem is that can get very speculative, and deals mostly with outward expression and behavior, and so cannot differentiate structure and activation patterns.
Salman Akthar's work in Broken Structures on personality disorders for example is interesting, but much interpretation is required.
On trauma and dissociation as spectrum there is Bessel van der Kolk, is mostly useful in cPTSD. Also relevant is ACEs.
Onno van der Hart is famous with The Haunted Self, but his work is shit, and he is shit, and has been blacklisted from practicing psychiatry.
And I assumed you already know this page: https://genderanalysis.net/depersonalization
As for plural/dissociative identity and genders, it comes up in online plural and DID discussion groups all the time.
In fact, whereas the default is misdiagnosis with N comorbidities, there is probably a strong diagnostic bias towards DID if there are multiple gender identities, because that is one switch that can be hard to miss or explain away.
I’m reading you as saying that I the latter explanation is more likely to be correct
Look, I cannot answer to the truth of the matter, and I cannot summarize my theoretical framework here, but:
Loss of attraction is likely dissociation, that if you had attraction both ways, then something could have been deactivated temporarily. However, in transwomen there is often a separate confusion of wanting to be with and wanting to be like, such that something of a lesbian obsession can be all about removing objects of dysphoria altogether.
And in that regard, cis-male-homosexuality could be doubly dysphoria inducing.
I doubt in your case that internalized queerphobia could be sufficient to suppress translesbian type attraction; for repression to function it has to be quite severe.
There is far too many people having gone to gay conversion camps, how did repression fail for them? I think only something like internalized religion (eternal damnation) or dysphoria (self-annihilation) or trauma seems sufficient to me.
Although I am here conceptualizing suppression as more an active process of denial, cognitive dissonance, and ego-defense; while dissociation is more about inactive structure in terms mostly of salience.
Attractions are much more like structures or memories, since to have selective attraction to a certain gender requires highly complex circuitry, this is not something that simply goes away.
To put it differently, network structures that are dormant simply are stored like memory, while network structures that are active accrue and evolve.
In so far as transition from one to another state is continuous rather than abrupt, involving often conscious reevaluation, it is more likely that structure has been modified rather than merely dissociated.
I do have a suspicion though that gender identity and sexuality are parts of our identities that we construct as much as any other part of our identities.
In terms of plurality/dissociative identities that is also an extremely politically loaded question.
In syscourse, if plurality requires early childhood trauma, and is caused by failure of an integrative process in development, it puts alter formation before/during the larger synaptic pruning stages which could explain more aspects remaining afterwards.
Oh... and here I am assuming something like "infantile sexuality" from psychoanalysis is true; basically that at some stage of the development of sexuality is there is no defined object of attraction, except maybe nipples if you want to be hardcore Freudian.
But the view that early trauma is required is highly controversial, and exclusionary; which is just another way of saying there are too many anomalies in such a theory.
And there is no such requirement even in the DSM or ICD, and some prominent psychiatrists are unequivocal; i.e. trauma is not the only force that sculpts the brain.
So I tend to think of things like gender or orientation not as an attributes or object in the brain; but as structures or even proportions within active networks.
Such that an overall brain might be somewhat more masculine or maybe androgynous (that much could be gender identity at birth), but that how this translates into gender depends also on activation within that network.
And that in most people, these larger scale activation patterns can be almost as steady state as the structure itself.
It is not uncommon in plurality for there to be a strong overall trend of gender and orientation, that a majority of alters could tend to be similar (maybe follow the structure) while a few are not (more skewed activation as it were).
I cannot overstate though the extent to which gender and orientation tends to be fixed within alters; even if switches occur quickly, or they have been dormant for years, or they have been around for years.
That said in plurality the dividing line between parts-of-self and other-selves can get very blurry and blended.
And one level is confusing, but on another level that is exactly what to expect from interlaced neural networks, especially if those are bound up into (or might even exist as parallel) global neuronal workplaces.
Another thing is like, when you construct identity, the pieces of it that you internalize are largely determined by what is already there.
In that sense identity accrues more of itself than it really adds things unfiltered from the environment.
Even in broadening horizons as it were what exists in the intersection can become increasingly apparent.
...so who knows if any of this was helpful. Akthar book is worth looking up if only for the poems.
...also I should spend less time typing and more time reading; good things happen when I have done that before...
To put a cap on this, I'll just say that old habits die hard.
I want to hear all about this :)
so in this, you've given a couple examples of mutability:
it seems like mutability or not are lenses we can choose to apply or not but I'm not seeing what leads you to prefer one.
like this is a solid hidden variable theory but the other explanation is that sexuality just changed.
that said, I also prefer to consider these things immutable but I know others prefer mutability as an explanation. what leads you to be certain that you're correct? personally, the immutable view is convenient in a number of ways so I've been slightly discounting it because of that internal bias. or said another way, my personal experience agrees with you but I'm hesitant to universalize.
The point is that it is not a hidden variable theory.
In plurality/dissociative identities one can use positive/negative triggers or other methods to switch between alter states, and thus reliably switch between sexual orientations and gender identities too.
So that attraction can be bound to something totally unrelated like a certain favorite song or specific memory; the orientation as such persists and can be observed at almost any time.
It only becomes a hidden variable when these effects are too subtle, covert, and thus difficult to control.
Many with undiagnosed dissociative identity disorder do not recognize or control much of their own switching either.
Just shifting from predominantly testosterone/visual to estrogen/progesterone/context based libido is complicated enough in how that interacts with orientation.
And there is often a reduction in derealization/depersonalization, often with worsening dysphoria too.
Many repress their sexual orientation either before or after transition; but statistically most trans people are double-gay despite their best efforts.
In my own case sexual orientation has not fundamentally changed at all.
I have a hammer and see a nail. lol
Last I checked did not find any neuroscience studies comparing fixed gender identity, gender fluidity, and gender in dissociative disorders.
I guess there is stigma around dissociation as if that were some abnormal psychology thing; even though it is ubiquitous.
There are neuroscience studies of gender identity and of dissociative disorders.
And there is plenty comparing those within ordinary psychiatry, but that cannot peer into those hidden variables as it were.
It would be difficult to summarize that...
Guevadoces are an interesting example: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34290981
And I guess somebody with more patience could read through this one:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616
That example of pederasty in ancient Greece is just... /r/SapphoAndHerFriend
There are probably also things to be said about fetishization and how that interacts with sexual orientation.
Although disentangling that, I have no idea, that is another huge can of worms...
so my point is that all of these things are equally well explained by the notion that sexuality/gender identity are mutable and do change. there's no reason that mutability can't be constrained to just two or a few options (and so swapping alters would still land one with the same sexuality each time). the core question is why should I prefer your explanation to this one? they seem equally justifiable to me and that it would be extraordinarily difficult to truly prove in one direction or the other, in some objective fashion.
yeah, that's what I was pointing out.
yeah, this is essentially my experience. but I'm able to understand it one of two ways. first, that the hormones and my own desire to be as much of a woman as possible + a healthy dose of internalized queer phobia have led me to reconstruct my identity in such a way that I stayed straight through my transition. or that undoing repression and dealing with dysphoria have allowed me to surface my actual, androphilic sexual orientation. I lean towards the latter because it helps explain more things and is a bit kinder to myself, but I leave room open for the former to be true (or that they're both true to varying degrees). I'm reading you as saying that I the latter explanation is more likely to be correct as the former probably isn't possible and I'd love a solid justification of that so I can put this to bed for myself :).
I do have a suspicion though that gender identity and sexuality are parts of our identities that we construct as much as any other part of our identities. that's a fairly hot take, though, and I haven't worked through even my own objections to that yet, and it runs extremely counter to orthodoxy on these issues.
ahh, I was hoping you had something on how disassociation affects gender identity and sexuality and can cause them to fluctuate as I thought that's what you were saying. maybe I was reading you wrong though.
The thing neuroscience might be able to show is MRI or fMRI differences between these things.
It could at least falsify my claim that these fluctuations / cycles / switches are of the same type.
There is plenty written in psychiatry about this stuff, but the problem is that can get very speculative, and deals mostly with outward expression and behavior, and so cannot differentiate structure and activation patterns.
Salman Akthar's work in Broken Structures on personality disorders for example is interesting, but much interpretation is required.
On trauma and dissociation as spectrum there is Bessel van der Kolk, is mostly useful in cPTSD. Also relevant is ACEs.
Onno van der Hart is famous with The Haunted Self, but his work is shit, and he is shit, and has been blacklisted from practicing psychiatry.
On dissociation underlying various other diagnostic categories Colin Ross:
lecture from 2016 (CW: quite harrowing, covers topics related to 'hysteria')
There are many others saying similar things, but there is just far too much material on these topics.
And I assumed you already know this page: https://genderanalysis.net/depersonalization
As for plural/dissociative identity and genders, it comes up in online plural and DID discussion groups all the time.
In fact, whereas the default is misdiagnosis with N comorbidities, there is probably a strong diagnostic bias towards DID if there are multiple gender identities, because that is one switch that can be hard to miss or explain away.
Look, I cannot answer to the truth of the matter, and I cannot summarize my theoretical framework here, but:
Loss of attraction is likely dissociation, that if you had attraction both ways, then something could have been deactivated temporarily.
However, in transwomen there is often a separate confusion of wanting to be with and wanting to be like, such that something of a lesbian obsession can be all about removing objects of dysphoria altogether.
And in that regard, cis-male-homosexuality could be doubly dysphoria inducing.
I doubt in your case that internalized queerphobia could be sufficient to suppress translesbian type attraction; for repression to function it has to be quite severe.
There is far too many people having gone to gay conversion camps, how did repression fail for them? I think only something like internalized religion (eternal damnation) or dysphoria (self-annihilation) or trauma seems sufficient to me.
Although I am here conceptualizing suppression as more an active process of denial, cognitive dissonance, and ego-defense; while dissociation is more about inactive structure in terms mostly of salience.
Attractions are much more like structures or memories, since to have selective attraction to a certain gender requires highly complex circuitry, this is not something that simply goes away.
To put it differently, network structures that are dormant simply are stored like memory, while network structures that are active accrue and evolve.
In so far as transition from one to another state is continuous rather than abrupt, involving often conscious reevaluation, it is more likely that structure has been modified rather than merely dissociated.
In terms of plurality/dissociative identities that is also an extremely politically loaded question.
In syscourse, if plurality requires early childhood trauma, and is caused by failure of an integrative process in development, it puts alter formation before/during the larger synaptic pruning stages which could explain more aspects remaining afterwards.
Oh... and here I am assuming something like "infantile sexuality" from psychoanalysis is true; basically that at some stage of the development of sexuality is there is no defined object of attraction, except maybe nipples if you want to be hardcore Freudian.
But the view that early trauma is required is highly controversial, and exclusionary; which is just another way of saying there are too many anomalies in such a theory.
And there is no such requirement even in the DSM or ICD, and some prominent psychiatrists are unequivocal; i.e. trauma is not the only force that sculpts the brain.
So I tend to think of things like gender or orientation not as an attributes or object in the brain; but as structures or even proportions within active networks.
Such that an overall brain might be somewhat more masculine or maybe androgynous (that much could be gender identity at birth), but that how this translates into gender depends also on activation within that network.
And that in most people, these larger scale activation patterns can be almost as steady state as the structure itself.
It is not uncommon in plurality for there to be a strong overall trend of gender and orientation, that a majority of alters could tend to be similar (maybe follow the structure) while a few are not (more skewed activation as it were).
I cannot overstate though the extent to which gender and orientation tends to be fixed within alters; even if switches occur quickly, or they have been dormant for years, or they have been around for years.
That said in plurality the dividing line between parts-of-self and other-selves can get very blurry and blended.
And one level is confusing, but on another level that is exactly what to expect from interlaced neural networks, especially if those are bound up into (or might even exist as parallel) global neuronal workplaces.
Another thing is like, when you construct identity, the pieces of it that you internalize are largely determined by what is already there.
In that sense identity accrues more of itself than it really adds things unfiltered from the environment.
Even in broadening horizons as it were what exists in the intersection can become increasingly apparent.
...so who knows if any of this was helpful. Akthar book is worth looking up if only for the poems.
...also I should spend less time typing and more time reading; good things happen when I have done that before...
To put a cap on this, I'll just say that old habits die hard.