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Layers Spectra and Gender Identity

Recently a friend sent over a video of Ben Shapiro debating in a meeting lead by Dr. Drew Pinsky, over whether or not Caitlyn Jenner was deserving of an award received for her battle with her gender identity and with public expectation.

I'm not going to spend time recapping the video that can be watched here:

Ben Shapiro followed up with this video providing additional conversation around what happened. He provides some rationale for his perspective, in the safety of an individually developed video, as the others are free to do themselves, if they have the time, interest or energy.

After watching this video, I realized that people are chronically confused about the concepts, subconcepts, their meanings, and what precisely we're supposed to say to be sure we are true to the facts and sensitive to the people involved. 

In this case, I think Ben Shapiro is doing more harm than good in his treatment to the topic.

I also think we are insufficiently meticulous and subtle in our shared understanding, even if we follow the lead of those in the LGBTQ movement.

The easiest way to explain is to simply dive into my perspective in the topic. 

A key part of my perspective is a willingness to adapt to whatever science reveals to us in all its complexity. So if a reader finds that my opinion is insufficiently sophisticated, I will own that and strive to reach the level of sophistication in communication matching reality.

Not everyone is willing to do the same.

It is clear that language, as we received it, is ill adapted to discuss this topic in all its nuances. And in that case, we hae to be willing to go beyond the concepts we have and speak with detailed descriptions.

Some are shocked by the number of letters in the acronym LGBTQ (and the current full acronym is much longer than this). I don't think any acronym really would be long enough to capture all that is possible in variations that don't seem to match th norm. Part of the reason for the acronym is to convey the great diversity that exists, in contrast to the overly simplistic views presented by those who force everyone into "male" and "female."

Let me talk about myself in some detail at this point, and see to what degree you think my appraisal of myself would match your own.

My mind is my primary sexual organ. Before any consideration of my body, I first have to acknowledge my attention and perception. No one can pay attention to everything in their environments. We learn this in psychology. We are quite adept, however, at picking out things of interest. Of particular interest to us, is anything we happen to find attractive. Speaking for myself, women, who are attractive to me, pop out as if they are the only objects in the environment very frequently. It's as though males and women who are not attractive to me hardly exist, when in the presence of an attractive female. This is not unusual to us. We experience this every day as we make quick eye contact with others who are casually passing through our field of view. There is quite a lot to look at however, we seem to pay attention specifically to what "catches our attention".

What catches *your* attention?

You know what catches my attention? Exclusively women. Well, nearly so. Men who are admiration worthy catch my attention as well. And very occasionally, there is a man that has an effect that is disturbing. Not enough to provoke sexual attraction, but some sort of "crossover attention." I witness others having that experience when i'm in their presence. It happens to men I would not consider homosexual.

The most important determining feature of ours exual experience is our perception. The second most important is our behavior.

I have already mentioned that perceptually I pay the most attention to women. Nearly 100% of the time I will divert my attention to attractive females even in the presence of attractive males. Either way, i'm ignoring all other stimulus the moment I detect an attractive female in the vicinity.

This is really important because this describes your actual consciousness. If you are heterosexual, like myself, your consciouness includes a sort of pre-occupation with the opposite sex, almost to the complext exclusion of the same sex. Notice there is no value judgment in this. There is a spectrum. I happen to know that I pay very little attention to men. I do pay *some* attention. I recognize male beauty. It is not compelling at all in the same way that female beauty is. Furthermore, it doesn't motivate the same sort of object centric actition that female beauty does. Female beauty is a driver towards sexual activity with females.

Perception comes first in this analysis, because perception describes what is on our minds. This relates to our behavior in obvious ways.

Behavior is what we usually take to be the determining factor, although perception is more important? Why? Our perception can be dominated by attraction in one particular direction, yet we can cancel this out and act in ways that don't completely line uup with our perceptions. For one thing, we could have perceptions that are illegal or unacceptable to our social group. Maybe we like women or men outside our age group, or those who are not considered ideal. We like women or men who are overweight, or who are not otherwise in key groups that fit some materialism or status related criteria that we or our society have.

Behaviorally, still there are more layers.

First there is what you think about and do in private, or in a semi-private environment. Secondly there is what you do when you are with some partner. Is the partner a male or a female typically? Is the partner always a male or always a female? Certainly there is more to that question as well since we already identified that that is overly simplistic.

But let me get back to myself. Let's tackle the question of pornography. I obtained my first computer at maybe 14 years old. Needless to say, it was a very short jump to become exposed to, and seek out, sexual imagery and videos. Even prior to that I had exposure to print pornography, probably heightening the interest and even the relief at finally having freely available materials to find on the internet, on a whim. From the very earliest, everything seemed to exist. So for any preference there was already some outlet, seeminly.

My preference, from then until now, was heterosexual. I can say with complete honesty, that I have almost entirely dodged homosexual pornography. On occasion, something will pop-up that's male-male, but never female-female. Female-female is always in the context of a male in some way, and never entirely lesbian.

I believe pornographic activity is the primary way to judge a person's sexuality and sexual preference. Although not necessarily gender. Even though I'm not sure I really think that distinction is as valuable as people think it is. Not because I think only "sexuality" exists, but because a complete model of human sexuality and idenitty would inlude *more* than just the dimensions of gender and sexuality.

Not willing to tackle that issue at present, I focus our attention to the flow of sexual inforamtion through our system.

Frist is the perceptual. That is key. If we are never attentive to the same sex, it is hardly likely that we are homosexual. Secondly, there is behavior. We are highly likely to act upon our impulses in the direction of our perceptions, so long as they are socially acceptible, legal and so on. There is no room to discuss the topic fully here, but I fully expect that the perceptual attraction to exceed the moral and legal boundaries. This is, for one reason, why there are such boundaries, and why we perceive them. Thus, we constrain ourselves, to behave sexually only with a subset of what is possible based on our perceptual gravitations. When we are unable to do so, we are divided into the criminal/immoral and the moral. This means that the moral, far from being perfect perceptually, are those who are able to control their impulses. For even the criminals are similar to the non-criminals, with respect to attraction. We do not deny this. All we recognize, is that the non-criminals do not act on it. I do add here, that is criminal in one generation and culture is not criminal in the next. So we have to admit there is no clarity on what is one or the other, and instead, we agree that it is merely decided upon in the law from one place to the next (like age of consent law), and content ourselves that different rules in different places are different for good reason.

Thus far, I have described that I am:

1. Perceptually heterosexual
2. Behaviorally heterosexual

I need to add, that I am visibly:

3. Heterosexual

And *probably* chromosomally and genetically:

4. Male

This can get very complex at this point, but I don't think we need to go too far to understand my (limited) perspective.

The key determinants of gender are in the brain. The key determinants of sexuality are in the brain and in the body.

At this point, all traditionalists regarding sexuality should feel conflicted. My description makes it plain that there is no reason to look at a persons bodily organs to determine sexuality or gender! Also there is no reason to look at your own body to determine if you are heterosexual or not. All you have to look at is your perceptual and attentional experience, and how you behave in practice. You could literally never proceed to the point of copulation or sexual gratification to understand what your preferences are both for sex and also for behavioral emulation outside of the sexual domain (if there is such a thing).

Then, we move to the topic of actual genetalia and visual biological aspects of sexuality. Of course, when we attempt to determin what a person's sex is, we look at their body. Why do we do that? It most often connects to their behavior and their perception. It is highly predictive. But what I would suggest, is that instead of doing this, trying to make an inference of one from the other, we should merely take the bodily aspect, and the mental aspects, as data points to try to fully understand individuals. So if we are a doctor, and we are examinging somone, like myself, who has a penis, we should not conclude, that that person has sex with woman or has a conscious experience like our own. We should assume, that instead, there are many layers ot sexuality and gender that comprise a person, and that we only understand this, after we have come to be able to describe a person in detail with paragraphs and many words, and not categories like "male" and "female", and that this is in keeping with being meticulous and careful about trying to understand people in their full complexity. We can't just think that everyone fits into the two concepts of "male" and "female" in all respects, and a first stab at this  realization is to make a distinction between gender and sex, but to go beyond this, to the truth, we have to see that there are many layers (although finitely many, so we can come close to the truth), and that with a description we get much closer to the truth. If we want to go beyond descriptions we can then admit that there are different translations of the same characterizations that represent the same phenomoena, that can then be described in any language, and with such detail, we are coming very close to the truth, sine then, we have different languages with different assciation and connotations/denotations in mappings that match our own in representation and tendency towards inferential truth, and with that, we can be very certain we are trending towards truth. But simply calling people "male or female" along the dimensions of "male" and "female" is woefully inadequate. We need to come to this realizatino so that we can understand that people are complex and are better understood with pictures and long narratives instead of words that map to our assumptions and expectations.
