All in the mind

Ok so the solution to my problem a few hours ago is excerpts.

It shall be so.

tigger_the_wing:

The hospital had a section for people who suffered severe traumatic brain injury. These people were particularly interesting. As their brains healed and grew new connections, and they learned to do literally everything all over again they became totally different people. They had no memories of their previous lives; those stories and photos which their families and friends showed them might as well have happened to someone else. I’ve had parents crying in my taxi because the son or daughter they thought would die a few years earlier…had returned to them a complete stranger.

Mike Haubrich:

Being transgender is not an experience, it is an explanation for what some people experience. It’s a diagnosis, but it’s not based on anything more than a simple idea that can’t be formulated into a testable hypothesis.

I do not deny their experiences, but what I doubt and am skeptical of is their diagnosis, or their explanation for why they have those experiences.

Sastra:

I’ve often wondered why the extreme intensity of the anguish felt by those who are convinced their mental-sex doesn’t fit their body is routinely assumed to support that assumption. A high level of obsessive rumination and fractured sense of self is generally associated with psychological pathologies, not with birth defects.

An intense, agonizing, inescapable feeling of an unfilled need for something you rationally reject doesn’t give me a lot of confidence on the self-diagnosis. That supporters don’t seem to notice this doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that they’re analyzing it properly, either.

iknklast:

I have done a lot of literature search on these things, partially because students are always coming up with things I need to address as a science teacher. Some of it sounds astonishing to me, that you know there are demons because you woke to one sitting on your chest. Even after I learned about sleep paralysis, it seemed odd that would lead to such an experience.

Then one morning I couldn’t move when I woke up. I had sleep paralysis. I felt fortunate that I knew about it before I experienced it; that allowed me to interpret my experience accurately. I’m sure I would never have jumped to the conclusion that a demon was sitting on me, but I might have thought I had some serious condition. We filter such experiences through our expectations.

The Original 'Nightmare' Was a Demon That Sat on Your Chest and Suffocated  You - Atlas Obscura

Nullius in verba:

It’s vaguely reminiscent of the cosmological argument. Assuming the argument is entirely valid and sound, it still doesn’t establish the existence of any particular deity. Likewise, assuming the absolute sincerity and torture of cross-sex belief doesn’t establish its veridicality. When I’ve pointed this out before, believers have responded that I’m missing the point, immediately pivoting from “therefore it’s true and TWAW” to “therefore we ought to believe that TWAW”. That is, our moral convictions should logically precede and determine our beliefs about the world.

Your Name’s not Bruce?

“Gender affirming” “care” is competing with watchful waiting for the minds and bodies of children. Practitioners promoting the “trans” pathway have something to push, whether it’s pharmaceuticals, surgeries, or both. Patients have an excellent chance of becoming lifelong customers, as they are ushered along their “gender journey,” a never-ending chase for a fantasy goal that’s always, and ever will be, out of reach. As I’ve said before, “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” In contrast, those going the talk therapy route have little to sell but puberty. The end goal is independence and acceptance, however uneasy, of how things really are.

Bjarte Foshaug:

I keep returning to the the old “what if I see blue the way you see red” problem. If there is no way to describe “ways xyz”, if there is no way to specify what I mean when I claim to feel like a “woman” (apart from “I think or feel like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like the kind of person who thinks or feels like etc… etc.. ad Infinitum“), I can’t possibly know that anyone else who claims to feel like a “woman” is talking about the same thing. If Chase Strangio is a “man” then I’m not. If Chase Strangio claims to be what I am, it’s fucking disingenuous to go on talking as if this were all about trans people’s right to be “who they are”.

Don’t eat a jar of hot sauce just before bedtime.

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