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Comment by didibus | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of the suggestions in the article: support racial justice, have better support systems for men, denounce and resist the tough masculinity expectations, etc.

I also can't help myself but point out that it is very bad to extrapolate from a sample of outliers.

There might be some lessons to learn from the experience of a few transgender men, but I'm not sure they speak towards the experience of cis gendered men or women, they most likely speak more towards the experience of transgender men.

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> I also can't help myself but point out that it is very bad to extrapolate from a sample of outliers.

Try framing it like this: foreign correspondents. They are from your culture and are able to describe the nub of what its like to be in country x and watch them do something foreign to you.

because they have experienced both things first hand they are able to describe vividly and concisely the differences and attempt to find a cause.

It feels as though men are awarded so little respect and credibility on the subject of gender issues that the only way the enlightened reader could palatably sympathize with a man is through the lens of the transgendered. It's not as if men haven't been saying these same things for years.

It's more that it's the closest thing we have to an A/B test on the matter.

This is exactly why I expanded on the original article! I have been advocating for all the same interventions, but to hear it from those who have experienced both worlds is a great affirmation of my one-sided experience.

While the idea sounds reasonable, it seems a bit tone deaf. Feminism and racial justice is all about listening to minorities and not silencing their voices. But when it comes to men, we rely on the experience of a very specific group of people. With all the respect I have for these men, I don't think their experience should be considered representative of the experience of cis men in general. Just like cis men wouldn't be representative of the experience of non-cis men. Or men representative of the experience of women.

At least now I understand a bit more the frustration that people feel when they're not represented properly or not taken seriously. That's a nice side effect, and maybe was the whole point of the article. But it still leaves a bad taste.

I don't see it as relying on them, but instead adding an additional extremely compelling of evidence that backs up the core hypothesis. Nearly all complex issues have to be attacked and backed up from many different directions.

I wrote this article because the experience of these transgender men add to my own personal experiences, sometimes affirming my experiences, sometimes providing a new perspective. I have written other articles before from my own perspective.

>But when it comes to men, we rely on the experience of a very specific group of people.

I understand how one might come to this conclusion but it doesn't appear to be correct. In fact, the vast majority of medical and psychological studies has been conducted on (cis) men. Libraries are filled with the thoughts, stories and reflections of men. If anything, it seems the male experience and physiology has been the default template and has and still does claim the most space.

Therefore, I don't think this post can be considered a common or the only accepted example of how to understand the male experience. To me it was one of a very small number of similar pieces I've encountered online actually. I do think this article can actually be considered interesting due to its novelty but I really don't see how it is presented as _the only_ lense through which we should view male experiences and I don't see how that would be factually correct either.

> I also can't help myself but point out that it is very bad to extrapolate from a sample of outliers.

I don't think that's exactly what's happening here.

As an analogy, look at twin studies: they're undeniably based on "a sample of outliers" in a sense, yet they're also key tools in many sciences because the outlier-ness of the participants isn't [directly related to] what's being measured. Rather, it's an external factor that allows the experimenter to control for other factors that might otherwise be difficult or impossible to account for.

The accounts mentioned in this article are far from an objective result. Yet, who better to understand the differences between how men and women are treated in society than somebody who's existed as both? Assuming they "passed" before and after their transitions (a fair assumption IMO), they offer a unique and highly relevant perspective.

With all the modern political strife around these issues, which includes a lot of misinformation and misrepresentation, I think it's easy to draw certain lines between "trans" and "cis" people that may not have much basis in reality. I'm not trans, but it's my understanding that for many trans people "trans" isn't an identity in principle or practice. Rather, they are—for all useful intents and purposes—representative "members" of the genders they identify with.

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