Gender dysphoria
Sex and Gender
When I was a young man the "sexual revolution" was going strong. The basic idea was that sex was good and healthy and in itself wasn't a moral issue.
I still have that view but I can see how various mutations of that meme turned into pretty pernicious stuff.
Playboy magazine was one manifestation. It tried to be liberal. Had lots of interesting ideas. Evem had a 'philosophy" and was full of pictures of nude women and lots of cartoons about sex.
I can remember hearing one night my Mom saying to my Dad "Those women are deformed!"
It was many years before I understood what she meant. They looked pretty good to me.
Later I came to understand the idea of superstimullation.
If the sight of a breast stimulates me then the sight of a bigger breast stimulates me more.
So Playboy was using superstimulation to get rich and push a liberal way of thinking.
A lot of people were aghast. We weren't very far from the Victoria era when tables had skirts to cover their legs.
Sex is a pretty primal drive. Social institutions like churches and states have learned that controlling people's sexuality gives a handle that enables all sorts ot other controls.
I've seen that people who submit to a restrictive sexual morality have a lot of resentment towards those who don't.
So even people who were just sexually free and open were viewed with hostility by a lot of people.
I watched homosexuality emerge from the shadows. Once it was illegal. Now gay couples can marry. I think it was the Kinsey studies of sexuality in the 1960s showed (among many other things) that about 10% of people were naturally homosexual. It wasn't a lifestyle choice.
I can relate to that. I'm heterosexual male and that was not a choice. There is no way that I could have tried homosexual sex even as an experiment.
Now I understand that there can be a disconnect between my anatomy and my sexual preferences. I understand that my sexual preferences have to do with the neuronal structure of various modules in the brain.
For conservatives the worst was yet to come.
I first heard of transgender in the 1970s (IIRC). A boy in Manitoba changed gender from male to female. I was like what!!!?
He was diagnosed with a syndrome called gender dysphoria. It's defined in the psychiatric manual DSM-5
(start quote)
"The DSM-5 estimates that about 0.005% to 0.014% of people assigned male at birth (that is, roughly one in 10,000) and 0.002% to 0.003% of people assigned female at birth (that is, two or three in every 100,000) are diagnosable with gender dysphoria.
The American Psychiatric Association permits a diagnosis of gender dysphoria in adolescents or adults if two or more of the following criteria are experienced for at least six months' duration:[25]
A strong desire to be of a gender other than one's assigned gender
A strong desire to be treated as a gender other than one's assigned gender
A significant incongruence between one's experienced or expressed gender and one's sexual characteristics
A strong desire for the sexual characteristics of a gender other than one's assigned gender
A strong desire to be rid of one's sexual characteristics due to incongruence with one's experienced or expressed gender
A strong conviction that one has the typical reactions and feelings of a gender other than one's assigned gender
In addition, the condition must be associated with clinically significant distress or impairment.[25]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria
(end quote)
The old system that depends on the old straight idea of male and female created an infrastructure that is not suited to accommodating transgender people.
We have male and female toilets and male and female athletes - supposedly based on immutable sexual characteristics.
Now we need bathrooms that are not gendered.
And I can see the problem in sports when trans women want to play.
Once people thought they knew what was normal for humans. Man and woman married and having kids. But we've learned how pernicious and inhumane that perspective can be.
What do you think
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.