Gödel is Sure Bach, and Trans People Are Sure Their Gender
Reflections on the Pulitzer-winning ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ (1979)
Today I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, which is a math book, and since everything is trans, let me tell you something trans.
The idea here is that formal systems encounter truths they can’t prove. In mathematics, anyway. Hofstadter is explaining Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. The true statement — the one you’re having difficulty proving— remains true in the actual world, but you’d need to go find a different system if you needed to prove it, because this system won’t prove this statement.
I’m not sure how much of this applies outside of mathematics. But here’s how I make it applicable to something I care about.
Trans Men are Men. Trans Women are Women.
Some thoughts about this statement, in light of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Metaknowledge
How do you know what you know? When someone asks “How many…?”, and you know you can get the answer, either you’ve memorized an answer like “five million” (“declarative” stored knowledge) or you must count (“a procedural method of finding the answer”). How do you know how you…
