Creative Thinking and Gender Identity

I think that neuroscientists know about different hardware components of the brain (but not necessarily how they function). I think neuroscientists are capable of scanning/imaging someone’s brain over some period of time and noticing that the structure of the brain changed. I don’t think I gave them much more credit than that in my essay.

Would you mind pointing out some of the parts that you disagree with? Also would it be fair to say that you already agreed with most/all of these ideas before having read my essay?

One of my goals for this essay would be to share it with someone who isn’t very familiar with this topic to help them understand my beliefs. I realize I should have included more detail on the goal and target audience of the essay in my original submission.

I appreciate your feedback.

I have recently been thinking about my own personal preferences regarding gender identity and wanted to write this essay to help organize my thoughts. I wanted to share it here to get feedback on my ideas. I assume there are errors in my essay and posting here would be a good way to hopefully have those errors pointed out and corrected.

The target audience for the essay would be someone who isn’t familiar with the topics discussed (creative thinking, mental illness and gender identity). So far I’ve only shared it with one person (one of my close friends who is a medical doctor).

I also wanted to get feedback on my approach. For example, I left out some important topics like how human brains are computers and “jumps to universality”. I purposefully left these out because I thought they would distract too much from my goals for this essay (which I should have included in the original post).

At a high level my goals would be to:

  1. Familiarize the reader with the idea that humans can think creatively.
  2. Explain that our creative thinking can be used to learn “bad” or “harmful” ideas.
  3. Help the reader realize there is a distinction between physical illnesses and “bad” ideas.
  4. Explain that being “transgender” is not an illness or disorder. It’s a preference or an idea.

I’m worried that by leaving out potentially important topics I would be encouraging the reader to build their “knowledge skyscraper” with major errors in their ideas.

At the same time I wanted the essay to be accessible enough that someone could read it and understand my point without having to go learn other ideas about computation and universality.

I’m not sure how to evaluate if I’m using a valid “skyscraper design” or if I’m doing a disservice to the reader by obfuscating some of the complexity.

I’m also questioning the relevancy of the part about “neuroplasticity” and how it relates to my goals for the essay. I included it as kind of an “olive branch” to my friend to show there is some “neuroscience” which (at least partially) agrees with what I’m trying to explain.

Thanks for your feedback Alan, I appreciate you taking the time to read my essay.

“Overreach is about considering and managing your rate of making errors compared with your rate of correcting errors. If your error rate exceeds your error correction rate, then you’re doing stuff that’s too hard for you.”

Do you think that my essay contains errors? Would you mind pointing out the sections that contain errors?

I agree that leaving out important or relevant information could be considered an error. In one of my replies above I outlined my goals for this essay. With those goals in mind do you still think that I’m leaving out relevant information?

I agree that’s a very good point. However, since I’m not a qualified psychiatrist wouldn’t it be better to avoid talking about why we diagnose people with mental illnesses? The reasons could change depending on which specific psychiatrist you speak with, which country or time period you live in, etc.

Again, wouldn’t this depend on which country you live in and how healthcare works in your country? It’s very interesting but I’m not sure that talking about it would help me accomplish the goals I set out for this essay. It might be that the goals I set out for this essay are bad and I should reevaluate them. I would appreciate any feedback you could share on the goals for my essay that I outlined above.

I would guess you’re talking about controversies like trans athletes in sports or giving hormones to children who identify as trans? I agree those topics are important but I’m not sure how they would strengthen the arguments I presented in my essay. Also I don’t plan to compete in professional sports or to take hormones so I didn’t feel the need to organize my thoughts on those issues at this point.

Appreciate your feedback =)

It’s worth noting that both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Psychological Association (APA) no longer consider simply being transgender to be a mental disorder or mental illness.

Gender Dysphoria is still listed as a mental disorder in the DSM-V. But if that were removed, it would be harder to get insurance coverage for things like hormone therapy, gender surgeries, psychotherapy, etc for transgender issues. If there were no mental disorders associated with being transgender, then it would no longer be considered a medical issue, so health insurance companies would no longer need to cover it. (It would be similar to plastic surgery.)

How did you pick this topic over others?

This contradicts CF’s rejection of evaluating arguments by degree of goodness.

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A quote from the original post:

A quote from your reply to me:

A quote from your post about trans stuff:

The first quote sez you don’t want to talk about motives. In the second quote, written earlier, you’re already talking about motives: social and ethical values. You’re also talking about stigmatizing conduct rather than excusing it. This is a problem with your discussion.

Political and economic institutions that are pretty similar between different Western countries - such as compulsory education, involuntary psychiatric treatment and price controls and regulations on medical treatments imposed by government - change what people say and think about gender identity. There is a lot of group think and hostility in discussions of this issue partly because people can use the power of the state to force other people to go along with their preferences on this issue. I am sceptical that you are immune from this problem if you haven’t thought about it.

I think you gave them much more credit than that.

For example,

This implies that neuroscientists know something about the relationship between “bad ideas or harmful ways of thinking” and physical configurations of neurons in the brain.


I don’t want to do this, because it takes time and because the other places I disagree with are not as significant or not as clear-cut.

Yes. I think I would be a bad model for your target audience.

Why did you stop replying @S_Emiya ?

I picked this topic because I was struggling to understand my own gender identity. And I found it difficult to talk about with other people because I assumed they would think there was something wrong with me, or wrong with my brain. I didn’t want them to think that I was “disordered”.

It was also a confusing topic for me to work through because I thought I was “supposed” to want to take hormones, or get surgery, or dislike my current body. And I never felt a strong desire to do any of those things. So I thought that my preferences for being called a “woman’s” name or wearing “women’s” clothes were invalid (I used quotations because I don’t think names or clothes are inherently linked to sex or gender, saying dresses are women’s clothes is subjective). It helped a lot when I thought in terms of preferences and ideas, rather than hormones or biology. It made me feel that my preferences were valid, and that I wasn’t mentally disordered.

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That’s a fair point. When I said I didn’t want to discuss motives I meant the motive the psychiatrist has for diagnosing someone with a disorder. I don’t know what their motive is because I’m not a psychiatrist.

I don’t need to know the specific motive the psychiatrist has for diagnosing the disorder in this example. Whatever their motive, labeling someone as “disordered” is stigmatizing because it implies there is something wrong with them or their brain. And that judgement is based on subjective social and ethical values. There are no objective tests to diagnose someone with a “disorder”.

I don’t think this is necessarily bad if it’s based on objective criteria and good explanations. For example, my preference is that the state use force to mandate that people who need glasses wear them when they drive.

I don’t think we should have a class of citizens (psychiatrists) who have been granted special power over others by the state. Psychiatry isn’t based on objective criteria or good explanations. It shouldn’t be used to force other people to act against their own, non-violent ideas.

I think that ideas are stored in your brain. Learning a new idea would require your brain to store that information in some way, meaning that the previous configuration of your brain’s neurons would change to store this additional information.

I didn’t get this idea from neuroscience:

Elliot Temple

you can arrange your neurons in a bad configuration by forming bad ideas. you can make unwise life decisions, believe a bunch of crap from a cult, and it physically affects the arrangement of your neurons.

Because I didn’t think my contributions were especially worthwhile or that anyone really cared about them. I recently read this post:

I realized that learning in the background without contributing isn’t helpful to Elliot. And since I care about him and want him to keep making content I am going to try to engage more.

That makes sense except why did you use the Unbounded category?

Because I wanted criticism of my ideas, people to point out flaws, etc. Isn’t that the purpose of the unbounded category?

Hi, speaking as a moderator, you need to edit your post to blockquote the quote and be more careful with quotes going forward.

You’ve posted my writing as if it’s your writing (there’s no markup indicating otherwise, it’s just body text within your post). You should also put the source before the quote (just like e.g. earlier in your post you have “lmf:” before, not after, the text lmf wrote. it makes more sense to introduce quotes beforehand so people know what they’re reading while reading it, instead of after).

For how to quote, type “>”, use the quote button, or see the quoting section at Forum Features Guide

Quoting issues are one of the few things that are actively policed at this forum (and I don’t like having to waste time on them, but inaccurate or misleading quotes are worse). Please use the post preview feature since it should be pretty easy to see visually that it didn’t come out right.

Isn’t this the default behaviour when I highlight some text and select the “Quote” option? I can see in the post preview that the quote I selected is showing as “Elliot: just like e.g. earlier…”

Highlight the text you want to quote by clicking and dragging with the mouse, and then click on the Quote button.

Source: Forum Features Guide

Following that process results in the “lmf:” before, not after, the text lmf wrote.

Sorry, I thought that the way I quoted it and provided the source would make it clear it was not my writing. I will be more careful in the future.

You’ve now edited the text within the quote to be inaccurate – it does not match the text on the source webpage.

You’re maybe confused by misreading and mixing up before and after? Sources should go before quotes (and outside of the blockquote), not after nor inside. Any text in a blockquote should be exactly literally correct, character for character – it must be the actual quote as the other person wrote it (with exceptions for standard quoting techniques like square brackets and ellipses).

EDIT: Sources that appear within a blockquote are OK when they are done by Discourse software like this:

The raw text for that should look something like:

[quote=“Elliot, post:26, topic:522”]

Note that the source there is actually an attribute of the quote tag, not within the blockquote.

Yes, I got confused reading the below sentence:

In this context I thought you meant the “source” was lmf. And that I should put the source (like lmf, or Elliot Temple) after the text. So I modified my previous quote (from the mental illness discussion) to put your name after the text that you wrote.

It should be fixed now. Thanks for your feedback.

Stuff like this is pretty typical in my experience. It’s an example of why I think people should study and practice grammar trees. I think that would help people. I’ve been making educational stuff about it because I think it’s an important problem for most people to work on.

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