In reply to neuromancer:
This is fascinating stuff, and I have an early start tomorrow...
> I think it's pretty obvious what is described by scientific evidence.
That's rather difficult when talking about someone else's subjective experience don't you think? There are no objective and knowable facts about a person's identity, until we have a reliable neurological correlate of the experience of 'having an identity'. Until then, all we have is what people report - without this, fMRI evidence etc is meaningless.
> It's flippant, but if I said to you that I had consistent, permanent subjective experience that I was George Clooney, would that make me George Clooney? Quite clearly not.
You're frustratingly mixing in a separate point about individuals. You can't be George Clooney because he is already George Clooney. Identifying as a different category of person is perfectly possible, and as we know.
> Instead, you're making a philosophical point. An interesting one, but it has a simple counterargument. Since they have never been the opposite sex, how can they know what it is to be the opposite sex? They can only, logically or philosophically know that they do not feel like their biological sex should feel like, with "should feel like" being built up of their experiences and surrounding culture.
Interesting point, but it's based on a 'blank slate' assumption: that there is no innate feeling of gender identity. I think this assumption is likely false, as the existence of trans people implies that sometimes, the brain develops in such a way as to give rise to a gender identity mismatched to the physical identity.
> So a trans woman can KNOW that they are a "trans woman", but whether or not that actually IS a woman, or still a man requires objective analysis. Which, so far, has mostly concluded "it's not but don't be mean".
I don't take a view on the semantic point about whether a trans woman *is* a woman or *is* a man. I differ from Jen here. It's just an objective fact that some physically male people have the experience of identifying as a woman, and vice versa. Seems most likely that this all governed by the way the brain is connected up - if we could analyse all the connections, we'd see what the differences were. I suspect the same is true of homosexuality. This doesn't mean it's genetic, just that it has a physical, neural substrate that has developed as the brain developed.
> Actually, brain scans can quite clearly differentiate classic male and female brain characteristics on fmri or by diffusion tensor imaging.
Yes, that sounds as expected. But until we know how the brain generates gender identity, we don't know what the relevant neural differences between trans women and other women are. It would be astonishing to find that a trans woman's brain showed identical characteristics to a woman's brain when the two were housed in different bodies, with different hormones and all the rest. It's setting an inappropriate criterion for scientific evidence to decide what to me is a pretty meaningless semantic point anyway. A trans woman obviously isn't identical to any other woman - she's got a man's body! But if she says "I identify as a woman", then no amount of brain scans is going to change that she identifies as a woman. Whether an outsider applies the label "woman" "trans woman" or "mentally ill man" isn't going to change the fact that this person is psychologically female but physically male.
> Furthermore that's a particularly unhelpful way of looking at mental illness. Have you met someone who is a paranoid schizophrenic?
Depends on the example you choose. If you're talking about schizophrenia, it's useful to categorise that as an illness because of the harm and possible treatment. If you're talking about homosexuality, it's absolutely not useful to categorise it that way. Depression is somewhere in the middle. For some cases, it's best seen as an illness, in my view. In other cases, it is medicalising the fact that someone's life is a mess and they are permanently miserable because of that. Categorising them as 'ill' might be helpful for them. Or it might be just putting them on tablets when they could otherwise be leaving their wife and getting a new job and spending more time with their kids and getting better that way. So no, it's not an unhelpful way of looking at mental illness, it's just factually correct: there is no objective definition.
Post edited at 23:40