User:RD/9k/I think therefore I'm trans (Q50,45)

Main entry

5045. Q5045/Q50,45

      I think therefore I'm trans

      / Transgender people think therefore transgender people are / Trans people think therefore trans people are -> this is the crux of my problem with current theories on gender identity. this Cartesian construction was overturned for crusty old White men within their own groups' philosophers so it seems strange we should be using it for anyone else.
      

      "I think, therefore I am" + gender identity = this.

"Disclosure of meaning"

5045. Q5045/Q50,45 I think therefore I'm trans / Appealing to an authority justifies that authority's legitimacy, therefore people choosing what is right for themselves is better and unless it is harmful it is true (anti-normative queer theory) [1] -> there are so many things wrong with this that my main remark is, "is this... a new set of truth values?" that's almost what it looks like. 'individual self-expression that is not harmful', or something like that. 'authentic self-expression that is not harmful'. I don't know what the opposite or opposites would be.
      my second remark... have you read Chouette? it's not exactly about gender but it is about the idea of what is harmful. the concept of what is harmful doesn't come from individuals having freedom and having freedom in parallel, it comes from collisions between individuals and society in which the collision itself contains all the harm coming down in both directions and it's actually really hard to determine what is harmful or isn't. purely by rooting itself in real anecdotes the book ended up being superbly dialectical.
618. Sexuality is a discursive production (Foucault) / (9k) -> what Chouette is to owl-autism this is to real-world sexualities
618. Q618/Q618 Waiting for a disclosure of meaning gives the one who discloses it power / Appealing to authority for legitimacy always reifies the legitimacy of that authority more than of the ones who appeal (anti-normative queer theory)

Related

618. Transgender inner experiences deserve their own autonomous existence regardless of whether cis people understand that they exist or what the majority thinks / (9k) -> to me this is a different proposition from Q50,45 because it doesn't specify exactly why transgender people are valid independent of the majority and in particular it does not try to pull a Descartes-AynRand-Orwell trick of saying that your inner experience and perceptions validate whatever you do or say.
5042. Q5042/Q50,42 I think, therefore I am / The writer cannot be the writer's hallucination / The writer cannot be a proposition inaccurate to reality -> classic, famous proposition used by Descartes as a basic axiom. one good argument against it is that by Gödel's incompleteness theorem no computer or logic book can reason about the actual computer or things outside the computer and certainly be correct. there's always a causal separation between computer, brain, or logic book and reality itself in the sense that one can say physics "is" the separation between objects.
576. promotes freedom (truth value) / authentic self-expression that is not harmful (truth value) / (9k) -> this would be the truth value that is being promoted here.
575. does not promote freedom (truth value) / unique self-expression that is harmful (truth value) / (9k) -> according to blue and charcoal anarchists this is the truth value of genuine allegiance to either Liberal-republicanism or Communism.
618. Foucauldianism -> this is why I thought of Chouette. it's this interplay between disability or in this case identity and The State, and this assertion that official institutions or officialized chunks of industry are insufficient for supporting disabilities compared with the activity of individuals and Filaments of individuals to organize into new countable cultures that are effectively separate new "countries" or "governments".
     the first second you look at queer theory you go "what a sobering realization" and then the more you think about it for at least a minute the weirder and weirder it gets until you are looking back at it going "what's even going on here?". there's some kind of nationogenesis going on. there's some kind of process going on here where people think they are being ejected from "The State" but they're actually being ejected from countable cultures and forming a new countable culture which must contain rules and norms to protect itself. this is why the Trotskyite conspiracy doesn't prove anarchism, and why it instead supports Trotskyists being a countable culture that intends to create a countably-separate workers' state.
618. He thought, he wasn't (fiction) / She thought, she wasn't; they thought, they weren't (fiction) / Book characters can think thoughts within a narrative, but a fictional character thinking and experiencing things due to interaction with their surrounding environment does not prove they exist in the real world -> this is one of the most obvious arguments against "I think therefore I am", though that isn't to say it's one of the easiest ones to argue.
     one possible rebuttal to this proposition is to say that if you have a book by Lenin it does not prove Lenin existed. and my response to that is: correct. I have actually been experimenting with a historical fiction series that incorporates imaginary Marxist articles as part of its storytelling. so if you were reading that particular book series, then having an article by Lenin would not prove he existed nor said that. (specifically, it would not prove Lenin existed in that form or in that imagined historical period.)
     so, if a lot of Marxism is actually being taught to people from books, how do you know if any of it's true? that sounds like a really difficult question at first, but it does have answers. one of the fastest ways to begin the overall task of getting to those answers is simply to show that books do not have to be non-fictional to be accurate to reality, and that even fiction can be representational art and contain facts. fiction does not educate people through metaphors alone; if fiction can't contain material facts then it cannot serve as anti-racist education, full stop. from there, it's pretty easy to show that even blatantly made-up stories contain material models, and representational art is representational because it contains at least some scraps of Materialism. once you've shown that there is Materialism in made-up stories, it's not difficult to show that there is Materialism in Marxist texts, and then go through the tedious, less-interesting part of showing that the material models in the texts are historically accurate to what happened in a few particular countries. you then have to begin explaining why models that were supposed to describe some particular country were not predictive. often the anticommunist arguments are actually bad-faith arguments, so really, if you get that far you've mostly won, unless somebody brings out an actually good analysis of a Marxist model failing to describe something and you get into the actual bleeding edge of Marxist theory. to show Marxism is materially accurate you never actually have to prove that thoughts or experiences are true by virtue of being thoughts or experiences. you only really have to prove that physical descriptions are logically consistent by the rules and objectives of physics, and the physical interactions Marxists call "material contradictions".
     there is such a big fraction of philosophy that just feels fake-deep and unnecessary once you know about Marxism. all this philosophy that's like, what is existence, what does life mean, do I really exist, and various stuff like that, that's like, literally what does it get you to ask that, where does it get you on the things that are important to anybody except the person writing that. Heidegger's book Being and Time is one of the only exceptions, being this book that starts on the "dumb" questions that shouldn't actually mean anything and then it actually goes somewhere useful by explaining that "being" can never be a thing or "noun" and it can only be a process or "verb". thoroughly defining the concept of discrete physical objects and countability is actually useful, because it provides a clear foundation for describing chemical or quantum interactions in physics, or relativistic interactions across points in spacetime. Heidegger can get through the first few steps of explaining how a GPS unit works, and I think that's pretty neat.

Ideologies or fields

• LGBT / queer theory
• A / anti-normative queer theory
• ES / Foucauldianism

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[9k] I think therefore I'm trans - Q50,45 - next nine thousand ; Trans people think therefore transgender people are ; authentic self-expression that is not harmful