Quote from: TheWalkingSadness on November 15, 2016, 08:23:28 AMI mean I've read some stuff on the internet and they make sense, I mean I'm still a man, no matter what I do. I'm just lying to myself. my chromosomes and everything are the same... I don't see why gender should even matter to anyone, I mean i can do what I want despite my gender why should it even matter to me?
Identity is rooted in your interiority, in your subjectivity. To think it's based on external "objective" factors is a mistake. This might be why you're so keen on scientific methods -- because it's a way to avoid dealing with your interiority, of putting that into a box and locked away.
Well, interiority can't be locked up, and any dysphoria you have about your embodiment and social role will inevitably come out. Our emotions precede conscious thought (Antonio Damasio,
The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt, 1999) and furthermore, our entire process of determining what is "good" or "bad" is actually rooted in our specific embodiment; these values come from feelings, not reason.
You have no choice in your feelings.
Furthermore, what you "are" is kind of a myth -- yes, there are many different criteria by which you may be categorized, even by yourself, but categories themselves are not bound by set logic, which is certainly unfortunate for certain philosophers (George Lakoff,
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987). Categories do not exist ontologically; they are simply ways for the human brain to parse out the data of the world around us.
So maybe,
if this is true of your interiority, you're still a woman, no matter what you do. And any attempt to avoid that fundamental truth is simply lying to yourself.
Quoteinstead of wasting money on hrt and wasting my time, I could work on...
Attending to the truth of yourself is not a waste of time. Because you are inherently valuable. Which is the very same reason we "do science" -- to create better experiences for people, because people are inherently valuable.
Why do people take caffeine? To make themselves feel like they have more energy than they actually do. It's not lying, it's self-modification. The same with taking pain-killers -- they don't treat the underlying cause, but they do make the experience so much better. But HRT is much more powerful than that -- not only can it change your psychology (in my experience it primarily opened me up to my feelings) but it produces physiological changes in your body as well. And those changes are no lie.
Here's how you ascertain the truth about yourself: How do you feel about having a male body, and being perceived by everyone around you as male? Compare that to how you feel about having a female body, and being perceived by everyone around you as female. If one makes you feel dysphoric (a combination of sad, mad, scared, and/or disgust) and the other makes feel good or at least relieved, there's your answer.
Making yourself happy
is making the world a better place. And like you say, you can still do all the other things in the world that you want... but wouldn't it be
better if you were doing those things as your true self?
