When discussing my transgender feelings with my family, I am most often confronted with questions which rest entirely upon fallacious teleological assumptions -- that is, assumptions which involve there being a greater purpose to everything. Now, given recent forum controversy, I would like to differentiate this teleological form of thinking, which involves metaphysical "purpose", from searches for causation (like those which characterize the inquiries of, say, Reine -- but are still mistaken as being teleological, unfortunately). No, this form of thinking begins with an assumption as to the fundamentals of human action, not recognizing them to be the product of a foundation which simply exists independently of any metaphysical purpose, but instead forcing a metaphysical purpose. If we were to get into analytic philosophy, we could recount the ire of numerous thinkers toward such assumptions, as they correctly claimed that they were dangerous and unverifiable, but I digress.
To get to the point, I will provide an example -- we start with the ultimate human "purpose" of being "valued". We assume that the telos for the existence of humankind is to seek value, and that is all. Having assumed this telos on nothing but intuition, we begin to build explanations for all of human action. "He/she plays tennis, so he/she obviously finds meaning in tennis", "He/she likes to swallow swords, so he/she must find meaning in swallowing swords"
This is fine, if we correctly identify it as a cause and verify it scientifically, but not if we assume it as some cosmic rule.
Anyway, I find that my feelings are often misunderstood when pegged to simple-minded "cosmic rules". A family member might think that I desire womanhood because I have insecurities as a male, and that I'm attempting to escape them through unconventional means, for example, instead of recognizing that the need to present as a woman, the need to BE a woman, is the result of a purposeless state of affairs, much like even the existence of insecurity itself. . .
I don't know, I feel I've been a bit unclear, as a full explanation would require A LOT of writing, but have any of you encountered similar lines of thinking?