The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

i agree with some of foucault’s historical criticisms of the institution of “mental illness”, and many of the ideas of thomas szasz (both of whom i assume you agree with) my problem with self-asserted identity doesn’t actually intersect those ideas

I don't consider transsexualism or even gender to be an identity or a reasonable component of identity and think that's a bewildering confusion.

I haven't read either of those authors honestly.

some of their ideas (maybe only their goodish ones?) have leaked out into the zeitgeist

All ideas worth anything tend to come in and out of fashion perennially even without any exposure to them. But really, let's say you have two legs. Then you say "I identify as a two-legged person". What have you done here? Have you even made a statement that engages with fact?

It seems to me that the statement doesn't engage with fact, because identification doesn't make any truth claims. But then what is identification? Is it some sort of phenomenological striving, like Sartre thought? That's the only analysis I've encountered that even broaches it

But what's the point of striving to become what you already are? The only way transsexualism makes sense is if you assume that self-identification is generated by some underlying fact which is sufficient to cause the identification but insufficient to provide satisfaction for it.

That is, a transsexual is not a man or a woman but carries some fragment of neurological manhood or womanhood that causes them to want to ground a reflexive identity (I identity as a woman because women identify as women and I am one) in something else, like secondary sex traits