How To Find Some Kernell Of Truth (Empricism, Logic, Etc)

[Guest Lily B]

I have always had intense and complicated emotions when thinking about my own gender. It makes me kinda miserable so I want to know what to do about it.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about this and one of the most ideas is, of course, what it means to be "female" or "male" and where I fall on that spectrum.

It's important to me that what I think to be true is objectively true.

This is what I've figure out so far:

As an aside, let's first demonstrate that emotions do not give us an accurate reflection of reality. By contradiction:

Let's assume that emotions give accurate information about reality. Evidently there exist people who feel that tennis is fun, there also exist people who feel that tennis is not fun. But that would imply that tennis is fun and that tennis is not fun. By contradiction the original assumption must be false.

With that in mind, suppose you are questioning your gender.

Obviously the first thing to do is to find an objective definition of male, female, etc.

We can establish that the defining characteristic is not physical. Observe that being the victim of some accident or illness, which destroys the body parts that are commonly considered to be the defining physical characteristics of gender, would not change your gender. e.g. breast cancer, amputation, etc.

Second, let's consider the proposition that the defining differences between male and female are psychological. The field of psychology is empirical, therefore any conclusions about gender had to have been arrived at by determining that if a subject is "male" they are likely to have some characteristics, and if they are "female" they are likely to have some other characteristics. This presupposes the definition of male and female so it cannot be the key to an objective definition without being circular. Additional it is statistical, so it tells you nothing about an individual subject, i.e. you.

That leaves the possibility that the objective distinction between genders is something which can only be arrived at by pure deduction.

But that is something which is impossible unless someone figures out a way to disprove solipsism, since solipsism(by the fact that only one conscious entity is known to exist) makes the idea of gender meaningless.

As far as I can tell this discredits all ideas which could be presented to you.

The problem is that this leaves you in a position where you have to make a decision(since your options are act or don't act) and where there is no good way to decide.

Also there is quite a lot at risk here so maybe making a baseless decision is not a good idea.

You could argue for acting based on your own ideas of gender. But if you inspect your psyche and find that, to you, x is a female characteristic you will immediately know that this has no basis in reality and you will only be able to accept it by willful ignorance. I'm not arguing against willful ignorance but I would like to avoid it.

=/ So you see it's hopeless.

Am I missing some key idea? or did I make a mistake somewhere?

How do other people and the psychiatric community circumvent this?

Part 2 (yes, there's a part 2)

How is it best to act knowing that this is the case?

They key problem is that (if you consider the aside at the beginning) predicting your own emotions is impossible. The only way you could do this would be to have a knowledge of biology and physics way beyond current science, if that. There really is no way to reliably know how you will feel about something that happens 10 minutes from now, much less in 20-30 years. Just consider that any piece of radiation within a lightyear of here could collide with and change your brain chemistry or be interpreted as sensory data within the next year, or you could encounter an otherwise mundane object which reminds you of something else and causes you to respond emotionally. There is no way you could compute something like that. Even with the computational power the amount of chaotic systems which could affect you makes prediction impossible(if you're not into that, chaos is the reason that short term weather predictions are so limited in accuracy, and will probably always be).

So I'm really quite lost. I'm not sure what to do with this information or how I'm supposed to appease or alleviate these feelings. halp!

Ps.

Sorry if anything I said is offensive, or makes you feel a strong negative emotion you would not like to feel. That is not my intent and I tried to avoid doing such a thing, but obviously I am human and mess up from time to time.

[Guest Sharah]

Lily,

Very interesting exercise in logic. I think the flaw in your thinking is in a basic assumption that is not true, that being that gender identity is a logical process. I think gender identity is wrapped up in a very complex combination of biology and pyschology and I know that psychology often doesn't lend itself to logical analysis. Once feelings get involved logic goes out the window as anything but a mechanism to deny the reality of the feelings or to define that the feelings are not in congruence with reality but that argument does not change the fact that the feelings are real feelings.

[Guest ChloëC]

um, I'm concerned about your original example regarding tennis.

Tennis is tennis. neither fun nor not fun. Now a rational searching entity enters and decides for itself about tennis. It doesn't change the fact of tennis, there is only an emotion in the entity. How is this emotion determined? What does it mean? Can it be judged by any other entity?

See, that's a real problem. What I (as an entity) find 'fun' should have absolutely no impact on the 'what' itself or on others who have determined an emotion for themselves. If my decision on how I feel impacts others, that's their problem to determine how to deal with it, not mine (unless, I make it mine).

To consider whether emotions give 'accurate' or 'inaccurate' information is basically a fallatious stance, because to do so would mean to allow others to judge another's own accuracy, based on their level of accuracy. I don't believe that can be done. It is, of course, but it's wrong.

Secondly, the next part I tend to disagree with. We have an outward appearing gender and a self understood inward feeling of gender. Changing the outward should have little to do with the inward, unless we feel that the changes are significant enough to affect the ability to perform the outward appearance. If we are male-male for example, to lose the outward characteristics could have a dramatic impact on our gender view of ourselves, most likely negative, as in 'I'm no longer a 'man' That's a gender changing outward effect that has a strong psychological effect. Yet, if male-female it may be looked as a blessing and a chance to move forward from a psychological viewpoint.

To me, they are highly intertwined. Which is why gender dysphoria is quite real, when something is not aligned with something else.

Just some thoughts

Hugs

Chloë

[Guest Lily B]

Sarah,

You bring up an interesting point. I'm actually not quite sure what to say yet except that I agree that the emotions themselves are real.

It definitely does change things in an important way. Thanks a bunch.

Chloë,

I think we agree about the tennis thing. I was trying to demonstrate that claiming that "tennis is fun because I feel that it is" is nonsense. I agree that "I enjoy tennis" can be true and makes sense, but like you said someone liking tennis has no impact on tennis itself.

But considering whether emotions give accurate information is not fallacious, because I didn't assume that the measure of accuracy were other peoples emotions. It doesn't matter what the measure of accuracy is, the only important bit is the fact that the people in the argument disagree. because that shows that at least one of them must be wrong. It could be that all emotional data is nonsense, but I don't think I could prove or disprove that.

As to the second thing you mentioned, It sounds like you're saying that sometimes your physical gender affects your understood inward feeling of gender and sometimes it doesn't. That's what I was trying to address with the tennis thing. The tennis argument shows that what you feel you inward gender is may or may not agree with what your inward gender actually is.

But now I'm actually not so sure that there is inward gender beyond what you feel your gender is. I definitely don't have any reason to think so at the moment.

It's still an interesting idea that your physical gender can, in some cases, affect the inward gender. I definitely would like to test this.

I really like what you're saying, and not just because you agree with me =p

[Carolyn Marie]

Wow, we've got a real philosophical debate going on here. I'm impressed with everyone's arguments as well as your ability to explain your

points of view lucidly. Lily, I'm going to guess that you were either a philosophy major or have read extensively in that area.

I don't profess to be any kind of expert on this subject, but in my view, the objective facts about gender include that the presence or

absence of X & Y chromosomes lead to certain physical manifestations of gender, but they can be present in unusual combinations which

can confuse outward gender markers, and make gender "selection" by doctors and parents a completely arbitrary exercise.

But that is only half of what makes one a particular gender. There are those psychological factors that can and do tell us we

are a gender that doesn't conform to our outward appearance, or cause us to not feel we are members of either gender, or of both.

So for me, it comes down to how we feel internally, which seems to trump whatever our phenotypes show to the outside world.

Carolyn Marie

[Guest Lily B]

Carolyn,

Thank=] I'll take what you said as a compliment. I'm actually a mathematics major, but I have read a little bit into philosophy.

I think I agree that it comes down to how you feel, that definitely does seem to be what the reasoning shows.