Otherkin

[Psyche]

i cannot parse the metaphysics in a way that makes the idea sensical. it's a lot easier to do that wrt trans people since it just requires distinguishing between gender and sex. sexual orientation is even easier. but what is the sense in which otherkin identities map to reality? if we can get the idea down to a network of propositions maybe we can figure out the most respectable form of the idea and then work from there

[Psyche]

so do you have a dysphoria that goes beyond gender or some profound affinity or

[Psyche]

if you don't wanna talk this that's ok i will do my own research and imagine others have also at least looked into the phenomenon

[Psyche]

why do you still get to be here

[Psyche]

i think i figured something out to make all this make sense based on some psychology/metaphysics i've seen on the notion of the self but i guess i don't know how to put it into reasonable words yet

[Psyche]

I think there's a specific sense in which grip is that webcomic character, and that the sense is probably ontologically the same as a lot of the socially defined categories each us identify with. But there are a lot of senses where she isn't, too. And it's probably likely that if we interrogated her conceptualization of the sense in which she is the character, she'd probably offer a sense that doesn't pass muster.

[Psyche]

There seems to be two useful points of comparison with otherkins. On the one hand, we can compare otherkin identities with transgender identities and consider whether they have similar ontological bases. People are already doing that. But we can also consider someone like Rachel Dolezel, someone who identifies as transracial and asserts a racial identity for herself that differs from her birth race.

What gives transgender identities a meaningful basis but not transracial ones? Seems it comes down to the social constructs under consideration.

If we trust wikipedia, gender is a recent conceptual invention. Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. For example, in a bibliography of 12,000 references on marriage and family from 1900–1964, the term gender does not even emerge once. Only by the 1970s did feminist scholars adopt the term gender as way of distinguishing "socially constructed" aspects of male–female differences (gender) from "biologically determined" aspects (sex). Seems "gender" started being used in place of "sex" due to 1) lay misunderstanding of feminist scholarship and 2) desire to use the more "academic" term or avoid connotating copulation. Nevertheless, from the beginning, gender was something defined

entirely on the basis of social expression and relation

- as referring to "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman." (That's how John Money put it, at least.) Because of the kind of thing gender that

is

, identification with a given gender is all but the same as being that gender. So much debate over the legitimacy of transgender identities is played out in semantics, between a definition of gender that equates it with sex, and one more congruent with John Money's definition. Trans people generally

know

that they aren't of the sex that most people with their genders have, and so do transphobes. Neither party seems to disagree about reality beyond what certain words mean and of course the more fundamental normative issue: whether transgender identities should be socially sanctioned or not.

We reject transracialism because race doesn't have that property; gender's ontological basis might be self-disclosure/social expression, but race's isn't. At one point/context it referred to speakers of a common language, and at another to national affiliations, at another roughly to a shared phenotype, and another in terms of ancestry regardless of phenotype. It's a far more fuzzy and ambiguously defined concept than gender, and yet has been impervious to attempts by people like Dolezal to blur them further. The reason why seems to be that even with all its fuzziness, some things about how we conceptualize race aren't fuzzy at all. What race depends on is ambiguous, but it's decidedly doesn't depend at all on self-disclosure like gender does. All the definitions that have been given to "race" aren't put in individual's hands the way gender is. Instead, race is mapped to physical/historical realities that while fuzzy aren't matters of personal choice or action. Dolezal can't link her transracial identity to physical/historical realities relevant to society's fuzzy conceptualization of race, so her self-identification is overwhelmingly rejected. She's not deluded per se when it comes to her identity - she doesn't genuinely think she has African ancestry; interviews suggest she just has a private conceptualization of race that doesn't match societies. She understands race as a matter of self-expression the way we understand gender as a matter of self-expression, and so in her own private language, identifying and presenting as another race is sufficient to be that other race. (Don't get me wrong; it was super immoral for her to lie/knowingly give other people the misconception that she is black in the broadly-understood sense and use that misconception for her own personal gain, though.)

Whether you take otherkin identities as having a meaningful basis similarly depends on the realities you understand the identity as mapping to. People who identify as wolves obviously don't have a karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behavior or ecological niche like the animals we know as wolves. And if their identification as wolves is based on a belief that they

do

have these similarities, then we can rightly reject it as delusional and not based in reality. Similarly, if their identification is based on a belief in some paranormal or spiritual reality - maybe they think they're possessed by or have been reincarnated from a wolf - then we can at least be super dubious since the evidence that these kinds of things actually exist is super light. But it wouldn't really be as alarming and signifying of delusion as if they believed they had wolf genes. Most living human beings have dubious spiritual beliefs, after all, to the extent that having dubious spiritual beliefs is part of what it means to be a normal person! And then there's the even more anodyne sense where their identification as wolves just equates to a choice/affinity for express themselves to themselves and/or others as a wolf, in wolf-like ways. Maybe that's weird and could be pathological depending on how far they take it, but it doesn't come with

any

wrong or dubious beliefs about what's going on in the world at all.

I'm curious about how Grip conceptualizes her identification as the webcomic character, but based on what I've read so far, it seems clear that everyone ITT already has roughly the same idea of what Grip's relationship with the character is! That means to me that the rest of the arguing and insults ITT are just about semantics and values.

[Psyche]

damn it flum we can't have two posters without avatars that's just asking for trouble i'm legit starting to mistake your posts for mine

[Psyche]

Gender dysphoria is rooted in science and I believe the science is settled that you can be born with a brain from a different gender.

so uh what if i told you that this sentence isn't actually true and in fact might be too nonsensical to even be false

[Psyche]

ok there's a sense in which flum's sentence is not nonsensical and is just false i found it. here's some info:

1) The idea that it's settled science that "there are man brains and woman brains" is false. It's not even cutting-edge science. In fact, the last serious talk I heard on the issue reviewed a lot of evidence suggesting that most brains have some parts that are similar to the median male brain and some parts that are similar to the median female brain. If you trained a fancy machine learning classifier on images of brains labeled by gender or even on time courses of brain activity, it would have trouble always classifying the gender of even cisgender brains, and probably do worse than chance at classifying transgender brains. We're

all

a mix of male-like and female-like stuff, at least when it comes to the structural and functional differences you can can see with an MRI.

2) Even if we focus on behavior or clinical patterns, lots of people who haven't experienced dysphoria in the academic sense of the word are transgender. We don't define people's gender on the basis of dysphoria anyway. I really don't think that's how the concept works.

3) What makes someone a man or a woman is how they express themselves to themselves and others. That's because gender and relevant labels are defined solely on the basis of self-expression. Gender is literally just the way we disclose our status as a man or woman. What makes someone a man or a woman isn't science, or having a man or woman brain. It's the disclosure. (Which, again, one could do internally, just to oneself, if they wanted to).

[Psyche]

, it seems clear that everyone ITT already has roughly the same idea of what Grip's relationship with the character is!

I'm not at all sure this is true.

well i guess it's less interesting to me than that I JUST SOLVED THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRANSRACIALISM, TRANS-SPECIESISM, AND TRANSGENDERISM AND MIGHT BE FREED FROM THE URGE TO THINK HARD ABOUT ALL THIS EVER AGAIN

goodbye thread i love you

[Psyche]

ok i will modulate my sureness to around 80% of its previous level

[Psyche]

I just reread Psyche's post, I have a few issues, rel8ing to sex in the stuff a8out gender expression (sex is a social construct), as well as these appeals to reality as if they have any actual 8earing upon someone's life and experience. I want to say real quick, that I don't exist for you to examine and turn away if you think I am derranged, I exist to express myself and live the way I want to. My reality trumps yours if you seek to take this away from me, and I would hurt you if you tried to get me to stop over fear of derangement. No8ody knows what's 8est for me, 8ut me.

I will make a more pointed argument in a 8it, I want to cuddle with my gf, and may8e chill with some WoW. I am going to clear my thoughts out in a text document, 8ecause there is a lot to say

I never suggest that sex is not a social construct nor that you exist for me to examine and turn away if I think you're deranged. I guess I'm sorry that I made the post difficult to parse.

[Psyche]

Aura isn't really going about this in a constructive way but she also isn't wrong. It's pretty inconceivable to me that this never has a material harmful effect on her. Acting like it wont or that she really is a webcomic character isn't helping her, its hurting her in the long run to avoid conflict. I'm sure all of us engage in harmful behaviour. I drink too much soda, lots of the forum drink too much alcohol, some smoke. We all use mafiascum. But we all recognize those behaviours as negative, and don't have people encouraging us to continue doing it.

wow the most reasonable take in the thread

anyway, ego

who is encouraging grip to identify as a webcomic character

[Psyche]

we know

[Psyche]

I think that's bullshit. People have gone

out of their way

to single out and often demean Grip for her thing and Grip has only reacted to that. Most people ITT have had every option to just let Grip be Grip and not focus a lot of posts on the way she expresses herself, and decided against it. That's not her fault.

[Psyche]

We're reacting appropriately. Grip's posting gimmick is annoying and her identity makes no sense. I won't validate this.

Also sex is not a social construct lol

you are so in over your head

[Psyche]

If anyone's in over their head its you. Gtfo with your pseudointellectual bullshittery

i just don't get why you always weigh in on stuff without doing any thinking or reading and expect that to work out for you

[Psyche]

so many posts itt and they're all lazy oneliners doing the

barest

minimum possible to explain why you think it's cool to go out of your way to be shitty to this other person

[Psyche]

hello i had an exam did i miss anything substantive

[Psyche]

awhile ago there was a user here who believed they were god (accountant)
there was a long thread of people trying to break them out of that delusion

was that an okay thing for us to do? where's the line?

i mean that was obviously a massive waste of time in retrospect

[Psyche]

I think there's a fundamental point that you keep missing: this isn't harmful and even if it is you have no idea about how much it is or even if it is in the first place.

i personally think that enabling people to keep up grand delusions not based in reality can be extremely damaging to someone's mental health in the long run, and there are studies that can verify that! maybe not specifically about otherkin, but it is not a controversial statement to say that enabling this kind of shit is bad

the trouble is that there's not really much evidence in grip's posts that she has any actual delusion. she's just stretching the meaning of concepts like "being" super thin. maybe there are some vague spiritualistic commitments baked into it (typical of human beings), but in general her commitments seem semantic rather than about what's literally going on in the world. her otherkin identity is configured like a lot of people belief in God: it's not falsifiable. because of this, it wouldn't qualify as a delusion under any serious scrutiny. it's more like a religion.

[Psyche]

Good point. Cult members are often happy, but I'd be very concerned if one of my friends or family joined one even if they're happy.

If you're talking about all sects of Christianity in general, the comparison only works if they started identifying as Jesus. Religious Christians usually try to model their life off how Jesus lived, but don't think they're Jesus themselves.

there are vaguely parallel beliefs in christianity anyway. the biggest example might be all of the theology surrounding the holy spirit and divine inspiration.

The action of the Holy Spirit is seen as an essential part of the bringing of the person to the Christian faith. The new believer is "born again of the Spirit".[67] The Holy Spirit enables Christian life by dwelling in the individual believers and enables them to live a righteous and faithful life.

In one church I visited for years as a kid, it was even believed that in the moment when you're saved and born again of the spirit, you will start speaking in tongues. There's actually an interesting body of science around the phenomenon but that's a different thing.

[Psyche]

(i wanna underscore again though that gender is a whole different thing because it's defined entirely in terks of self-disclosure and expression)

[Psyche]

But in day to day living they don't require you address their believed spirit inside them and play along with it.

suree

[Psyche]

didnt say it was healthy, just maybe not deluded