Has there been a lot of research or speculation about if transgenderism shares the same roots as normal gendered behavior?
Consider your typical cisgender man. He’s going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about being emasculated, and if you force him to be really girlish, like wear a dress and put ribbons in his hair or something, he’s going to freak out.
Now consider your typical transgender man. He’s also going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about transphobia or something, and if you force him to be really girlish - again, he’s going to freak out.
Most people I hear talk about this act like these are two totally different things, where the first guy has sexist fragile toxic masculinity, and the second guy has some sort of deep commitment to having their identity respected. But the other possibility is just that the brain has some set point about how your gender must be perceived, and tries really hard to maintain that set point, and transgender people just have a set point not matching their birth gender - and so a much harder time maintaining the set point than everyone else.
Plausibly some people might have really extreme set points. Like if the normal range is from 100% masculine to 100% feminine, some (cis) men might be fixed at 200% masculine, and get really upset if anyone perceives them as less than maximally super manly. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of things like muscle dysmorphia, an anorexia-like condition where very muscular men constantly freak out that their muscles are too small, and keep weightlifting until they’re freakishly huge.
Is this a standard way of thinking about these things, or does someone have a consideration for why it might not be true?
I was thinking the other day about how I experience something that feels a lot like what trans people talk about when they talk about social dysphoria.
(obviously the big difference here is that my gender is respected way more than trans people’s, so this is not unpleasant for me and in fact barely rises to the level of consciously noticing it)
It mostly comes up when I’m in groups of all or mostly men, and I feel like I’m being treated the same as everyone else, and I feel this need to like, remind people of my gender? I might respond by wearing dresses and makeup, or baking cookies for everyone, or talking about what guys I think are hot, or suggesting we all compare digit ratios.
It’s quite responsive to what seems like too-simple solutions, like how half the time I mention something that’s a statistical correlate of my gender around @profhedonium he responds with “well, you’re a woman. so.”