- Joined
- Nov 16, 2021
This is glib, but it touches on something I've been thinking of a lot, which is the phenomology of disease and diagnosis. An old friend of mine from uni has recently been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and watching her entire personality turn into advocacy for it on social media has been.... interesting. She is quite clearly recontextualizing her own experience of her life with this diagnosis in mind, so that being a chronic weed smoker is now evidence of her suffering. It made me dig into the condition more, though I think most here would be aware that fibromyalgia is controversial, because despite the pain experiences by sufferers, there's no apparent abnormalities in the tissues of the pain points, often the joints. It's very much a diagnosis in the gaps, with symptoms and a lack of other explanations being the essential criteria.
I found this book from 2005 that was a researcher interviewing women who suffered from fibromyalgia, and it was where this concept of the phenomology of disease piqued my interest. The observation the researcher made was that the diagnosis provided an abstract framework for many of these women to interpret their own experiences, one that fixated on pain. Potentially normal aches, the general plagues are being alive, became experienced differently due to the diagnosis provided, it reframed and shaped the experience of the diagnosed. Whatever the cause, or causes, of people experiencing the pain that leads them to seek help, the fibromyalgia diagnosis creates its own modification and alteration of the person's experience and can make their subjective experience and outcomes worse.
You know how Blanchard noted that most HSTS troons in his study came from more conservative families and cultures? See, I think this meshes with what I wrote above, and speaks to the phenomology of identities in general. In particular with transness, I think a big issue is that, whatever one of the varied sources troons get their initial discomfort from, the "cracking egg" process is essentially infecting them with a set of memes that fixated them on their suffering and recontextualizes their own experiences as tormenting and requiring extreme actions like suicide. It's likely many of the men trooning out now would still display some other psychological or behavior anomalies if they weren't exposed to it. Maybe there are some that truly do need to transition to live a functional life. But there is no way to know that right now, what percentage that might be, because the conceptual model we are providing people to understand their own experiences is driving them to extreme behavior.
I actually feel like this about even sexual orientation as well. I feel as though the framing of gayness is essentially prescriptivist now. Instead of just not passing any particular judgment or assigning any category to kids until they reach puberty and start experiencing sexual attraction themselves, adults are searching for reasons to label them one way or another and providing them with very specific cultural frameworks to understand themselves. You are a gay, let me pay you last gaga songs because that's part of "gay culture". Effectively, gayness becomes analogous to the specific gay subculture in the United States, specifically the New York and LA one that everything else pulls out of (or Atlanta for the black gays). That's why I don't think that the current system is good, even if I think that previous ways that "Western" society conceived of sex and sexuality were also bad. The fact that previous models had negative or destructive effects for many doesn't mean that the current model is superior or more based in reality.
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This make me want to scream for reasons I can't quite articulate. Feminists have long fought against the pressure for women to "earn" their womanhood through stuff like cosmetic surgery and calory restricting only for men in dress to define those things as the very fabric of womanhood. Transwomen often point out that cis women have body dysmorphia as if it's an own and not a proof of the immense pressure that society put on women's bodies. And then they have the gall to call terfs misogynistic for not validating a cis girl's anorexia or something.
Feel free to rate me mati and autistic, I earned it.
Humans (men and women) having insecurity with their body image is not analogous with passing. Feeling ugly and unattractive because you don't match up to idealized standards is a very common experience and does not involve the fear or desire to be seen as a different class of being than you are. Short dudes and flat-chested chicks are not worried they will be seen as women or men, respectively. That extra context is what makes one a standard human experience and the other obsessive lunacy
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