[quote DadJoke]@9toenails
First the analogy with guardian angels is just silly. Guardian angels are not well established objects of research and scientific consensus.
A better analogy is sexuality. You can observe behaviour and assume sexuality, or, the most common way of finding out - you just ask.
Before that nomenclature existed, gay people were treated as abnormal and suffering from a mental condition. Straight people were just "normal," and many of them objected to the nomenclature because it assumed that homosexuality was not pathological.
I think we all accept that when a person with gender dysphoria says that there is a mismatch between their body and their sense of being a man or woman, that that internal sense is something real, not like a "guardian angel". So, gender dysphoria brings that sense to the foreground, because of the conflict between their gender identity and their sexed characteristics just as issues with proprioception do.
So, we probably agree that in the case of gender dysphoria there is something real going on, and we label that inner sense as "gender identity." You just disagree that people without gender dysphoria have that inner sense.
How do I detect gender identity? The same way you "detect" sexaulity. You just ask.
Are you a woman?
If you answer the question "yes," a researcher would mark you as having a gender identity of being a woman, definitionally. It makes no difference what you attribute that to, or whether you "feel" like a woman, any more than you have self-knowledge of your proprioception. There is no inner conflict between your gender identity and your body.
My statement about gender identity being detectable was not facetious. If I could invite a device and point it at someone and it returned their gender identity (which they confirmed verbally), would you accept that gender identity was real?
If it makes any difference to you, gender identity, like sexuality, has a hereditable component, and cultural factors are negligible.
www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2018-polderman.pdf[/quote]
Hello again DadJoke . Thanks for the thoughtful response and well done for sticking with it.
It is getting far too long. Matters ramify. This is why I tried to simplify to a particular single challenge. Oh well.
DadJoke First the analogy with guardian angels is just silly. Guardian angels are not well established objects of research and scientific consensus.
This just seems wholly question-begging, DadJoke. Do you see why? The question at issue is whether gender identity is a scientific notion. Your remark here just assumes it is. But you know I say it is not; so how does your assertion here move the discussion on?
– For any logic/philosophy neophytes reading: to beg the question is to assume the conclusion of what you are trying to argue for as part of the argument. [ DadJoke I assume you understand this, but please ask me for more explanation if you need it.]
[Btw we do have some evidence, if not of the existence of angels, at least of belief therein: 77% of Americans think angels are real, see Angels. People are strange. ( ‘Nowt so queer as folk,’ perhaps more appropriate just here?) It is difficult to assess the popularity of belief in gender identity for comparison, partly I hazard because the latter notion is less definite in sense (to put it mildly) than the former. But I suspect the proportion of true believers, as it were, is anyway rather less, even in the land of the free gullible. No matter. (This is just an irrelevant aside, btw.)]
DadJoke A better analogy is sexuality. You can observe behaviour and assume sexuality, or, the most common way of finding out - you just ask.
This is interesting, not least in light of how many people have questioned the addition of T to LGB. Is T relevantly similar to LGB? DadJoke thinks so. Let us have a look.
Let us take it, first, that I have a particular relation to how I feel. I just know how I feel, you might say. So if I sincerely say I feel so-and-so, it will be true that I feel so-and-so. (Wrinkles here about making sense, perhaps Freud , and so on … let us ignore such wrinkles for now.)
Now sexuality is about sexual attraction. And if I feel that I am attracted to someone, it follows that I am attracted to them. To feel attracted is to be attracted.
There are other states like this. If I feel that I am hungry, or afraid, it follows that I am hungry or afraid. Why? Simply because to feel hungry is to be hungry; to feel afraid is to be afraid.
OK, now self-descriptions of such states as these are indefeasible; we might say they are self-validating , in the sense that, if I sincerely say I feel that I am hungry, for instance, it must be true that I am hungry. And likewise, since self-descriptions of sexual attraction self-validate in this way (because to feel attracted is to be attracted), if I sincerely say I am gay, for instance, it must be true that I am gay.
Thus a sincere self-description of sexuality is indeed determinative of sexuality, as you say, DadJoke : just ask.
But of course not all self-descriptions are self-validating in this way. To feel that one is Elvis is not to be Elvis. To feel that one is the coolest dude in the joint is not to be the coolest dude etc. So we need another way of determining whether someone who (even sincerely) claims to be Elvis is, in fact, Elvis, other than just asking. (He may be just a guy who works down the chip-shop and not Elvis at all.)
And of course you will see how this goes now. To feel that one is a woman is not to be a woman, although to feel that one is attracted to a woman is , precisely, to be so attracted.
So, DadJoke , your analogy with sexuality fails. We can indeed detect your sexuality by asking and assuming sincerity in your answer. But, as with you being Elvis or being cool, so with gender identity: we need another way of detecting your gender identity apart from just asking. Some self-descriptions are self-delusions.
Do you see, DadJoke ?
Interesting, perhaps, that this has arisen out of a soupçon of analysis of that very privileged access to mental states you were surprised to miss in Alex Byrne’s little piece. Interesting, too, I think, in a wider sense, in that it is grist to the mill of those who suspect that T does not really belong with LGB.
DadJoke My statement about gender identity being detectable was not facetious. If I could invite a device and point it at someone and it returned their gender identity (which they confirmed verbally), would you accept that gender identity was real?
I am wary of talk of things being real : ‘real’ means too many things to too many different people. But if you just mean to ask whether I would accept the existence of gender identity in such a case, yes, of course I would. Why not? (You help yourself to a lot in ‘they confirm verbally’, but you are entitled; your thought experiment, your rules.)
Of course even following such a determination-by-machine, we would still have the task of finding out what this strange thing the machine detects actually is , what people mean by their confirmations, and whether it has any connection with sex etc. But, well, good luck with the invention.
DadJoke If it makes any difference to you, gender identity, like sexuality, has a hereditable component, and cultural factors are negligible.
www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/heritable/2018-polderman.pdf
Thanks for the link. I had a look. Nowhere do the authors, or as far as I can tell, the studies they consider, offer a way of detecting the presence of gender identity, although they do assert its existence and offer, albeit somewhat warily, some suggestions of things they claim correlate with it.
A few (fairly typical) extracts to illustrate:
About half of the studies investigated “masculinity” and “femininity.” … Masculinity and femininity are usually measured with items reflecting sex-specific behaviors, feelings, or even cultural stereotypes as part of personality questionnaires (e.g., “I am often the leader among my friends”, or “I am a kind and gentle person”)
In a large longitudinal study in 7 and 10-year old Dutch twins, two items of the Child Behavior Checklist were summed (i.e., ‘behaves like opposite sex’ and ‘wishes to be of opposite sex’) to measure cross-gender behavior and cross-gender identity (van Beijsterveldt et al. 2006).
It is important to note the limitations of the instruments used to measure gender identity. We must recognize the possibility that they may conflate true gender identity with gender expression.
– Indeed we must.
A gender diagnosticity score is computed … gender diagnosticity is a Bayesian probability that an individual is male or female on the basis of gender-related indicators.
– But we might note that neither the Bayesian priors nor conditions include gender identity.
I do not have time to give a thorough critique. There is lots to say. Too much.
Just one thing, as follows. The notion of gender identity as used by DadJoke and others is essentially causal (hence the claim to scientific status, of course): ‘gender identity causes dysphoria when mismatched [how? hmm ] with sex’ etc. But in none of these studies cited by Polderman et al on behalf of the International Gender Diversity Genomics Consortium (or any others I have seen) does it ever get a specific mention in any causal role. Claims are made for its heritability, but it is only the heritability of ‘behaves like the opposite sex’, ‘sex-specific behaviours’, ‘cultural sterotypes’, ‘I am a kind and gentle person’ and the like that are even claimed to be measured.
Why not measure gender identity itself in a study purporting to be about gender identity? It must be because we have no way of detecting its presence. But, then, this means we have as much reason to believe in its existence, DadJoke , as we do in guardian angels and all the rest.
Or, DadJoke , prove me wrong. Show me where someone claims to have found a way of detecting its existence. We still have no satisfactory answer to the question, How do we detect the presence of gender identity?
[I apologise, DadJoke , for not considering your stuff about ‘inner’ states and so on. Can of worms, ‘inner/outer’. Easy to get confused. If you want to have a bit of a think about it, maybe have a look at Candlish and Wrisley’s Private Language in Stanford Encylopedia: Private Language You might find it interesting. (This is a fairly authoritative source)]