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I hear that they have been telling people that school bathrooms now have litter boxes for the kids that identify as cats, something that is completely absurd, and yet for some reason people believe that
I mean I've met someone who actually identified as a fox... I'm like 95% sure they were just doing a bit, but they were pretty adamant and actually never let on that they were joking, and there was a lot of detail to it... so I actually don't know
But I mean that has nothing to do with being trans but instead the furry subculture, so irrelevant anyway here
Actually they may have been a Therianthrope or an Otherkin, but this kind of person wouldn't use a god damn litterbox and the claim there is usually spiritual and not neurological as it is with gender dysphoria.
@HawlSera @Azzu Gender dysphoria is a neurological thing in the same sense that *everything* is a neurological thing. Afaik, they haven't found anything reproducable in the neurological department beyond “the brain lights up in pain when pain is experienced!”, so I find it weird to say that one's neurological and the other isn't.
In a utopian anarchist sci-fi setting, would they be treated much differently? Or would it just be “oh, you want your body to be different? Marcy's down the hall”?
The neural circuitry must exist for people to think like this, so naturally every human behavior is neurological.
But what they were referring to is that gender dysphoria is likely (some evidence has been produced) a condition with an innate genetic cause. Some chemistry related to hormones being different makes it very "easy"/logical that a born man may feel like a woman (and vice versa), the genetic code is almost completely identical. However it's much harder, if not impossible, to make the link to feeling like a completely different species, thus it is more akin to religion, "just" a culture-based belief system.
All conditions have an innate genetic cause: ever seen a diabetic rock?
I get what you're saying, but this isn't one of those things where allele X causes phenotype Y. At best, there's genetic predisposition.
Mammal brains are quite generic. Perhaps the body map is hardcoded, but not even the visual system is hardcoded, and humans with >5 fingers or tails rarely have problems using them, so that would surprise me. If it develops from body feedback, a “disruption” to that could cause all sorts.
I'm not sure what you're talking about/what point you're trying to make. I understand that all our behavior is genetic in some way, since that's what we're built based on. However there is still a qualitative difference between an innate condition that is not majorly affected by the individual environment/circumstances (gender dysphoria), and a condition that only manifests through a specific environment/circumstances (identifying as a fox). One you can do something about, the other not really.
That dichotomy is non-exhaustive. What about innate conditions that are majorly, but not entirely, affected by circumstance? What about conditions that present identically, but are "really" multiple different things, each with distinct causes?
When we don't know, I don't think it's useful to try to talk about things as though we do.
You don't know enough to classify those things the way you've classified them – or if you do, please share the research because I'm interested in this topic!
We always work with incomplete information. We know nothing for certain. It seems to me like you're essentially arguing to just throw our hands up in uncertainty and say "we can't know so nothing we can do".
But even with incomplete, weak, non-95%-statistically-significant data we can make better decisions than without any data. If there is a 51% chance for the one thing being right instead of 49% chance for the other thing, it makes rational sense to act 51% like the one thing is true and 49% like the other thing is true, so in other words, lean towards the 51% thing. On average, you're going to make better decisions this way. You should look into Bayesian epistemology if you want to know more.
I obviously don't know the exact percentages for the things I claimed. But there is decent evidence for gender dysphoria not being entirely environmentally (still acting on our genes of course) caused, but relatively independent of the environment.
One, of course, is the mass of reports of transsexuals that they've "always in some way felt like this". While not being scientific data, as a rational person you should not ignore this evidence. Of course you don't weigh it as heavily as a peer-reviewed scientific study with proper methods, but it should still have some weight.
Then there are a few studies that have found differences in genes responsible for sex hormones, specifically androgen which seems to reduce its effectiveness in binding testosterone. I've heard of other such studies on sex hormones.
There are also twin studies done. They have found that identical twins have a much higher likelihood to both be trans than dizygotic (non-identical, i.e. different genes) twins, further pointing towards significant innate genetic predisposition towards gender dysphoria.
Of course, the topic of identifying as a fox has not been studied this deeply. However, based on all I know on human behavior, it is extremely likely that this condition has nothing really to do with foxes or fox-based genes somehow causing this behavior. From the way I talked to the person that identified as a fox, if I were to take it seriously, I would say that they have a deep feeling of not belonging anywhere and having found companionship with other people of similar interests. But I would be pretty sure that this interest could have been something else, filling the same need for companionship, without much friction, thus my claim that it is solely culturally/environmentally-based.
These studies show that the measured effects are statistically significant; that doesn't mean it's universal, only that it's prevalent enough in the population to be detectable. It doesn't mean that this is *the* reason: only that it's part of the puzzle.
Loads of trans people have “always in some way felt like this” – and loads of trans people haven't particularly noticed anything for decades. Academic explanations are very much incomplete: many don't even know what they need to be explaining.