Please dunk on this nerd: https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1316160566394851328
Nothing bothers me more than people - always men - who drop "rationally," "logically," etc. It is so tiresome.
I hate that they always conflate logic, which is just truth preserving, with capital-T truths. Like yes, if you can control the definitions of all these words, and pretend the empirical input is on your side, then sure, you can come up with a consistent set of statements that support your beliefs. Congrats.
"I've found something logically consistent, this supersedes all other logic!". It doesn't really have to be said that these people are always without exception incredible narcissists. I wish this shit was taught in schools. Things have to be logical as a fucking minimum standard. Being able to appraise that logic with critical thinking and analysis is the key.
As someone who is extremely rational and unemotional, let me tell you that being like that sucks. It's like living life outside a window. It's not a point of pride, at all.
And these chuds are just classic examples of garbage in, garbage out. Yes, if your premises start skewed, and you're unable to recognize that you even might be biased, you're gonna come to some pretty ironclad (wrong) conclusions.
Another bad sign is that they think they can apply their "logic" to every situation. I absolutely am aware I can't, so I try very hard to not engage with subjects I'm unfamiliar with.
Maybe, hopefully, a link to the study is in the article linked to in the replies, I admit to not having read it yet.
But I remember coming across this study showing that people (and iirc there was a gender disparity that was noted) who self identified as "logical" were actually worse at solving logic problems than those who weren't.
And the hypothesis given was that if someone thinks they're logical, they're not going to challenge their innate biases, they're just going to simply deny they even have them.
Their identity is too invested in being logical that they'll refuse to admit when they're behaving illogically.I've tried searching for the study again, but I keep coming up empty handed.
Which is why there's a big difference between people who strive hard to recognize and correct when they're behaving illogically, and people who simply claim to be logical.
I try hard to be as logical as possible, but that's because I'm inherently an anxious, sometimes paranoid, mess, who can't really rely on quick intuitive thinking for very long until things go haywire, so I often have to step back and try to be as objective as possible.
I bristle when people label me as logical. I'm most certainly not, I just try (and regularly fail) to recognize when I'm acting illogically, then try to fix it.I found this out firsthand, long ago, when interacting with other "logical" people.
And, of course, when I openly admitted my faults, I was dogpiled on, because it wasn't about a dynamic process for them. It was about a fixed identity.
It's not that they are now a woman and no longer gay, they were always a woman and on realising this discovered they were not gay.
Basic Logic 101. There is no way around this.
What????? What is this even supposed to mean??? Like, what point is he trying to make here?
It's just a strawman because he has a middle school comprehension of gender dysphoria and doesn't think people are cool with the concept of not being gay after they transition.
Like the whole point of a person getting gender affirming surgery is that they were born with the wrong parts, so someone in this position likely identifies as a straight version of the opposite sex and not a gay version of their assigned sex well before surgery. But really who cares because just let people do what they want to do with their bodies without trying to debate them.
I mean, yeah, but the specific gotcha here is that he's using "sexuality is immutable" to apply to the label/construct (gay vs straight) rather than the internal experience of a person. it's middle school, and I'm sure his understanding of dysphoria is even worse, but I don't think it's a strawman, just galaxy brain.
I believe Matt here is a religious conservative, maybe evangelical. For those folks, it's actually super-important for their doctrine that being attracted to the same sex is a choice, not something innate to your being. If it's a "choice", then it can be written off as "sin", which is consistent with how the Bible talks about homosexuality. But if it's not a choice, then it really does bring up some uncomfortable questions for evangelicals. If same sex attraction is innate, then that means they were made that way by God. And if that's the case, well, then they have to wrestle with questions of how a good God can orient people a certain way but still consider it "sin".
I think they actually go a step further and say that (not in these terms) people have agency so even if you are attracted to people of the same sex, you are sinning if you choose to engage in those behaviours.
It's also why you shouldn't engage with them and the parameters of their fucking stupid discourse.
even if it was changable and not immutable, why do we have to assume its a decision that then can have sin applied to it?? what a dumb arguement
ah, an argument fashioned after the famous Greek philosopher Play-Doh
Whenever I'm looking for some logic, I always turn to my nearest trad cath fascist moron.
this guy is the biggest idiot ive ever seen. that person would still want male dongers
Straight is the only sexuality with the weird rigidity anyway. It's the only one that gets "tainted" if you play with the taint the wrong way. I remember ContraPoints talking about it. For anyone else, sexuality is a signifier like WTB [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] or WTS [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. It makes it clear what kind of person you are trying to attract. For straighthehehehehe culture, it's a status that must be maintained, a ritual that must be practiced. If not for that, a man could use a bidet and dance to Shakira before baking cookies for your breadwinner gf and be straight.
If you were gay and made an exception for a special woman, it wouldn't be a massive upheaval like the opposite would be.
serious question: why cant sexuality be both immutable for some and mutable(?) for others?
Sexuality is obviously mutuable if you look at the historical evidence of significant changes in sexual orientation depending when and where you were born. You don't need an expert historiographical analysis of Greek city-state sexual practices to pick this up.
Another readily apparent example is children, who do not emerge with a predefined sexuality but develop this over time.
However, saying that sexuality is mutable is very contentious in the West because if you accept that sexuality can change, then the default response to behaviour and desires seen as abnormal is to use coercive and stigmatising methods of criminalisation and 'treatment'. So the rhetorical strategy of the immutability of sexuality was and is a key part of legalising homosexually and ensuring it is broadly accepted here.
I don't see any real harm in believing that sexuality is immutable beyond the discursive knots people tie themselves in trying to 'discover' their 'real sexuality', and what happens when their initial discovery turns out to be not entirely how they feel at the next moment.
Personally, I'm much happier to leave the typologies, medicalisation and inadvertent pathologisation of anything outside the accepted bounds to the medical experts.
that makes sense. The reason why I was curious on why mutability might make more sense is because there very well could be alot of people who at one point were actually straight and became heteroflexible/bi/gay etc later on. usually i hear this written off that they were always some form of LGBT and just repressed it due to pressure. but that feels reductive and while likely very true for some not so much for others. Thanks for your take i like getting new perspectives and i always appreciate effort posts :)
this is a somewhat controversial topic, but I am probably right about it, so:
it often makes more sense to think of gynephilia/androphilia rather than gay/straight or homo/hetro.
(gay/straight are more like social-class distinctions than psychological descriptions)many who are bisexual/pansexual fluctuate, sometimes being attracted to one or the other instead of both at the same time.
gender fluidity has a similarly fluctuating manifestation.there is no change in gender identity or sexual orientation when people discover they are transgender.
(although various aspects of transition can shift attraction somewhat)in any case trying to change gender identity or sexual orientation via hormones or conversion therapies has been often attempted and effectively never works.
plurality/dissociative identity can also be illustrative here, in that individual alters have mostly fixed orientation/gender, although outward expression would appear variable.
(i would argue all shifts in gender/attraction are dissociative processes, but normies are not ready to hear or understand that)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.
those who have been androphilic or gynephilic all their lives tend to remain so, and those that fluctuate tend to persist as such also.obviously all people are mutable if we consider the scalpel or tumor. though suppose that is more like mut-ilate-able, which is perhaps the point.
this is a somewhat controversial topic, but I am probably right about it, so:
This is an amazing sentence, thank you.
thank that write up was fascinating and something Ill think on after work! especially the dissociative stuff which I had never considered! Thanks a ton for the effort post!
(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-34290981And I guess somebody with more patience could read through this one:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616That 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.
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.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.
