R
revert_jen
Guest
This time, I’m going to put my thread-relevant comments at the top of my post, instead of at the end where nobody will notice them because I write too much. 
I am concerned that once a child has caused people to go to great trouble to deal with what turned out to be a temporary desire, the child will feel somewhat pressured (internally, I mean) to go on with it. After you’ve made your parents get you new clothes, and made your schoolmates call you by a different name and pronoun, and made the school allow you the use of a separate bathroom, it would be difficult to go back and say, “Sorry, I changed my mind again.” (I remember a guy in junior high tried to get people to stop using a nickname he’d had in elementary school, and it took almost two years for people to stop using it. And that was just a nickname!) Also, the whole gender thing makes them special and different, something that a lot of children (and adults) find gratifying. The longer you waited to let people know it was temporary, the more habit would make you comfortable in your “new gender.” I have no doubts that if it went on until puberty, you would be unlikely ever to return to your true gender identity, because people are really surprisingly adaptable, most of the time. So I guess what I’m saying is that allowing young children to go through the whole gender transition for what might frequently be a temporary condition may be causing them lifelong trouble. They will never be able to have children naturally if they continue in the transitioned gender and eventually get surgery. They will always have some sort of gender issues.
Also, on a personal level, I feel I have a right not to have people with male genitals in the ladies’ room. If I’m going to adjust my clothing or whatever, I think it is fair to insist that I’m only doing it in front of people who have the same basic equipment I have.
How do you get experience knowing about the true level of maturity of an anonymous community?
There’s really two parts to this. First, if people are anonymous, how do you know what they are like IRL? The nature of the anonymonity of the internet forum is such that you can’t know what the vast majority of the posters are like IRL. So how can anyone possibly know from experience that someone’s posting is more representative of their true maturity than their day-to-day interactions, since in the vast majority of cases, you can’t match up the two situations for the same person and compare them?
The second part has to do with the nature of personality. I have to strongly disagree that any aspect of a person’s personality is more genuinely expressed by removing an inherent set of (name removed by moderator)uts into that personality. It’s like saying that green is really blue, as you can see when you filter all of that false yellow out of it.
People’s responses to the norms of society and their inherent dislike of causing people pain in person are valid parts of their personalities and indicators of their maturity. I would actually argue that anonymous posting is a (greater or lesser) distortion of people’s real personalities, rather than saying that they are their “true” selves only in this artificial method of communication. Seriously, the converse would mean that nobody had been their true selves or experienced real self expression in the entire history of the world until the 1990s. People’s true selves, by and large, cannot exist in a vacuum. The parts that are a response to personal interaction (IRL) and responses to societal norms are integral to a personality.
Personally, I’m not really particularly different in person than on the internet. Sometimes I say stuff that makes sense and/or is helpful, sometimes I’m just long-windedly tedious, sometimes I screw up and say something hurtful, and so forth. I know that for some, their internet and real-life versions of themselves are further apart. But how can the internet presentation of their personality, consisting (as it does) of an incomplete expression of the things that make up their personality, be more accurate than their presentation IRL?
Anyway, I can see how it would be possible to have a theory that anonymous posting displayed “a more pure experience of the level of maturity of a community,” (although as I say above, I disagree on logical grounds with that theory, I can see how it could be reasonably held and argued) but I am really not sure how anyone could have enough experience to say that on experiential grounds.
–Jen
I am concerned that once a child has caused people to go to great trouble to deal with what turned out to be a temporary desire, the child will feel somewhat pressured (internally, I mean) to go on with it. After you’ve made your parents get you new clothes, and made your schoolmates call you by a different name and pronoun, and made the school allow you the use of a separate bathroom, it would be difficult to go back and say, “Sorry, I changed my mind again.” (I remember a guy in junior high tried to get people to stop using a nickname he’d had in elementary school, and it took almost two years for people to stop using it. And that was just a nickname!) Also, the whole gender thing makes them special and different, something that a lot of children (and adults) find gratifying. The longer you waited to let people know it was temporary, the more habit would make you comfortable in your “new gender.” I have no doubts that if it went on until puberty, you would be unlikely ever to return to your true gender identity, because people are really surprisingly adaptable, most of the time. So I guess what I’m saying is that allowing young children to go through the whole gender transition for what might frequently be a temporary condition may be causing them lifelong trouble. They will never be able to have children naturally if they continue in the transitioned gender and eventually get surgery. They will always have some sort of gender issues.
Also, on a personal level, I feel I have a right not to have people with male genitals in the ladies’ room. If I’m going to adjust my clothing or whatever, I think it is fair to insist that I’m only doing it in front of people who have the same basic equipment I have.
Sorry, I wasn’t actually going to jump in on this thread, but I have to ask about this.
How do you get experience knowing about the true level of maturity of an anonymous community?
There’s really two parts to this. First, if people are anonymous, how do you know what they are like IRL? The nature of the anonymonity of the internet forum is such that you can’t know what the vast majority of the posters are like IRL. So how can anyone possibly know from experience that someone’s posting is more representative of their true maturity than their day-to-day interactions, since in the vast majority of cases, you can’t match up the two situations for the same person and compare them?
The second part has to do with the nature of personality. I have to strongly disagree that any aspect of a person’s personality is more genuinely expressed by removing an inherent set of (name removed by moderator)uts into that personality. It’s like saying that green is really blue, as you can see when you filter all of that false yellow out of it.
People’s responses to the norms of society and their inherent dislike of causing people pain in person are valid parts of their personalities and indicators of their maturity. I would actually argue that anonymous posting is a (greater or lesser) distortion of people’s real personalities, rather than saying that they are their “true” selves only in this artificial method of communication. Seriously, the converse would mean that nobody had been their true selves or experienced real self expression in the entire history of the world until the 1990s. People’s true selves, by and large, cannot exist in a vacuum. The parts that are a response to personal interaction (IRL) and responses to societal norms are integral to a personality.
Personally, I’m not really particularly different in person than on the internet. Sometimes I say stuff that makes sense and/or is helpful, sometimes I’m just long-windedly tedious, sometimes I screw up and say something hurtful, and so forth. I know that for some, their internet and real-life versions of themselves are further apart. But how can the internet presentation of their personality, consisting (as it does) of an incomplete expression of the things that make up their personality, be more accurate than their presentation IRL?
Anyway, I can see how it would be possible to have a theory that anonymous posting displayed “a more pure experience of the level of maturity of a community,” (although as I say above, I disagree on logical grounds with that theory, I can see how it could be reasonably held and argued) but I am really not sure how anyone could have enough experience to say that on experiential grounds.
–Jen