Good Idea I'll cross post there.

EDIT: Looks like I have to wait a day since I don't use reddit.

I've never put any thought into it.

I actually typed out a long personal post for this topic, but then thought it might be both a bit too heavy and revealing for this forum, as well as feeling more than a little self-indulgent.

i'll just confine myself to saying, that my own sense of self, and especially of being male is so screwed up anyway, it's hard to say how much of that is related to blindness.

I will note that in England any blind person automatically falls into the "homo blindus weerdus" species, and therefore any sense of "social identity", as you put it first has to overcome the fact that most people don't perceive you as a human being anyway, so how you look or don't look in a mirror is pretty secondary to that anyhow.

Also, to answer the second part of the first post, regarding masculinity and femininity.
The good thing about brain's mental map is, that our senses are not the only way to update it.
Some kind of sense is required in order to get input data, but once we have them, we can make abstractions based on them.
And then feed those abstractions to our mental map.

Thus it doesn't really matter, whether one sees that he / she is male or female. He or she reads about it, hears about it, can even sense it by touch and has also the internal mechanisms driving toward one of the directions.
His brain will do the rest, what can't be seen will be supported with other senses and abstraction.

I have never seen a neural network for example, but based on its description, mathematical formulas, results of computations, I have a quite good imagination of what it is, all of that just through one sense, sound.
Its abstraction created my mind model, or better said its class for neural network, and is able to work with it.

So, as I said in my previous post, mind map is not truly about sight. The only problem is, that light carries a really lot of informations. Very accurate informations.
Most of the informations we get is from sight, about 60 or 70%, if I remember correctly. Thus being out of this rich information source is quite a problem, but not a problem of creating mental maps, but a problem of acquiring informations.
We must somehow get them through the rest 30% of our input. And that is the whole art of being blind. Or the whole hell of being blind, you can choose.

Best regards

Rastislav

For me I actually looked at myself in a mirror because I lost might sight when I was 3. I remember thinking I had a big nose. Other than that though just the sound of my voice and other stuff like that I suppose.

One good example for importance of informations for building a mental map happened to me just about a month ago.
It was morning, I just woke up in my bed and assumed, that a new day is starting. When I found... an arm. Someone's arm, lying in my bed.
That was the first surprise, an alien arm in a bed for one person is not something you'd see very often.
I assumed that someone is crouching near my bed, with his / her arm lying on it. The position would quite match that state, so i have stopped moving and started listening. But noone was there, I didn't catch any sounds typical for human presence, like breathing, moving, etc.
Another wtf, what is an arm without an owner doing in my bed? That's even weirder than someone being around.
Because arms don't produce sound, and tasting or smelling it wouldn't give me any useful informations, I have used my touch, right hand, to track the arm's owner.
After a while, I found, that the arm is connected to my body!
What the f-**k?! Although I didn'ŧ want to believe it at first, it was really my arm. But I didn't sense anything in it, infact, I have realized that I am one-handed at that point.
When I lifted it with my right hand, it was really like lifting a hand of someone else, absolutely no response.
Because reclamation probably wouldn't help me much, I tried to repair it myself. After some massaging, it slowly started taking sense back and after few minutes, I was able to use my left arm, like nothing had happened.
This thing is a quite common problem, sometimes called a numb arm or dead arm. It's caused by compression of nerves controlling the arm, if you sleep on it.
And it's especially interesting encountering it as blind, there is really no reason to consider that arm to be yours until you find the connection.
It nicely highlights the importance of the information flow to understanding things around us.

Also, it is a good example of ability of our brains to analyse a probability of every information and making judges on them.
This wasn't the first time when I encountered the numb arm, it happens from time to time, as I musn't sleep on my back due to health reasons. And its always surprising, because these informations are one of the first processed after waking up.
However, besides numb arm, I have also encountered numb... le'ts call it genitals.
This can occur as well, for the same reason as numb arm. However, I didn't get it in bed, but probably in a bad sitting position during a day.
And while it was definitely weird, totally no response after touching, I was not surprised in means of who do they belong to. They were there just few minutes ago, it must be them.
They're probably just being updated or something.

Note here, how does the availability of reliable informations change the view. Human brain is a truly amazing machine.

Best regards

Rastislav

For me, sound is my main way of identifying with the world, other sences as  well, but I rely on sound the most.

My opinion is that the sighted people rely so much on visual information that they must have an immage of themselves in their mind in order to have identity. This fact isn't entirely necessary, in fact, as a blind person I have no immage of myself and I don't need one. It's hard to need something that your mind doesn't know it really exists or not. For born blind people immage is just an abstract thing, just as is ecolocation for most of the sighted. Surely I can make my own guesses about what sight is but I'm sure they are so inaccurate that it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. The problem is that senses don't need words to describe because they are innate to us and everyone perceives them. You can't describe a banana to someone who haven't tasted it, the same applies to sight.
Regarding identity, I believe the most important sense in this matter is proprioception. This sense tells you where your arm is, where your legs are and in which way they are moving without looking or touching them. It allows you to feel all your body-parts and to be sure that they are yours.
In the end, I don't need to identify with any immage, it's enough that I exist, that's sufficient proof for me.

@daigonite, a book you might find interesting is Simon Hayhoe's book philosophy and exclusion, blindness touch and the arts in England 2015 (and I don't say that just because he was the external examiner for my phd).

It's surprisingly readable for a book on ethics, and is about the history of education for blind people in England and america, and how  the various theories of how blind people acquire knowledge have changed over time, since Hayhoe's point is that any theory of disability comes itself from existing concepts of disability, EG about the representative quality of various senses, for example, how  modern beliefs about blindness are founded on traditions such as that of Leonado de vinci, who actually argued that blind people were less close to god than sighted people because in christian worship it was the image of god that was venorated, and the "light of god" which blind people were denied, theories which lead directly to the idea that blind people could not directly assimilate knowledge even accept through rote learning and repetitive activity, somethig which is scarily close to some of the attitudes of the special school I attended myself.

You are correct on the difference between direct top down perception which most sighted people use, and indirect bottom up perception in terms of processing speed.
However, bare in mind indirect perception does tend to increase the more you use it. This is why I suspect most sighted people buy into the myth that blind people have superior other senses, simply because blind people pay attention to more things.

For example, i once astounded a couple of friends by being able to find the right exit from a crowded train station by smell, they couldn't see the sign, but I happened to know where the starbux is. I have also noticed that sighted people do not pay much attention to spacial or tactile information, heck I've watched films with people and when I comment on the soundtrack people have told me they literally didn't' hear it.

I also remember when i was at one vocal studies class where people were complaining of an inability to learn songs, my first advice was "don't hold the words", since I notice myself, on the rare occasions I have had actually written words to read in front of me, I don't rely on my memory, whereas if I simply learn the words myself before singing, I always can be confident of remembering them, even if I'm singing in German or Italian.

it's actually a rather amusing experience on the rare occasions I've been allowed into a production, where at the beginning whilst I'm still learning words, I always feel a little inadequate since I probably haven't learned the hole thing until the second time through, then suddenly there will be that wonderful moment where the conductor yells at everyone:
"scores down! sing without words"

And suddenly everyone else is having far more trouble than I am .

I'm afraid gender identity for me is a pretty confusing business, since sexual abuse is also involved (sexual abuse perpetrated by girls).

if you want my take on this send me a pm, but it's probably too heavy a subject to go into publicly on this forum.

@MDW:  interestingly enough, I am precisely the opposite way around. I carry a cane, or use my guide dog simply as a mobility aide to make my personal life easier. I absolutely refuse to wear any of the hyper reflective clothing which is almost a blindness uniform over here, and if I'm in an environment where I can get on without a mobility aide, I won't use one, indeed I remember someone once asked me if I took my cane  when performing on stage and I denied them vehemently.

On the other hand, if I'm in most public environments where I need a mobility aide, I actually feel better having one with me, since I am far more worried about falling into a step or walking into something, and having my cane or my dog just helps with that, especially I might say my guide dog.

So yeah, thinking about this subject in the context of the mirror test was kinda mindblowing, personally.
There was a time when I could see well enough to know that mirrors exist, but what I saw in mirrors was not especially clear or useful, so I generally ignored them unless I was bored and climbed onto the bathroom counter to get close enough to make out details.
For the level of vision I had, what I needed to get that kind of detail was a video with just the right lighting and zoom. Photos of people were never good enough.
So I went about rather unreflectively, until one day when I was searching through a bunch of VHS cassettes for Fox Kids recordings, and put in a home video instead. Normally I'd just immediately take it back out, but that seemed kinda rude, so I let it play for a while.
Turned out to be my second birthday. I remembered certain bits, not so much others, and there were spots where my memory and the video disagreed (ex, at one point I remember my hair in my eyes, and I'd mentally edited the color to match what it had become later).
If there is any moment that can be considered identity-critical, it's after watching that, comparing my memory to the video, then getting that perfect shot with the perfect zoom and lighting that it's way better than any mirror, and having the differences forced to my attention.

Re: gender, idk. "Cis by default" comes built in with a lack of content. I generally found social pressure toward gendering things unpleasant? I never liked Hotwheels? I'd comment on fighting games and action cartoons, but then I realized that my grandmother was a huge Wrestling fan, I played fighting games with my sister / aunt / cousins, and when I got into online communities, it was via fanfiction with a community that was pretty diverse (when I wasn't driving everyone away by turning up the "lol im so random" and arrogance up to 111). Really, mostly my feelings on gender are that stereotypes have always felt like bullcrap, and it's always been nice when someone misgenders me unintentionally, or when someone gave me a female-coded gift by mistake, etc. And I've generally hated when websites force you to pick a gender, because gah it's the internet it doesn't matter let me be myself and ignore the damned box!
Having said all that, intentional misgendering was always frustrating because of the fact that it was teasing. It could have been about anything (someone deliberately acting like my hair was a different color, or that I was wearing a different shirt, or pick a detail), and I'd still have been loudly annoyed by it in the 1990s. (When I was very small, people liked exaggeratedly feminizing my name, which is hilarious in hindsight because my name is already unisex).
Does blindness have anything to do with any of that? I have no idea. My dad went with a more 1980s muscleman aesthetic combined with a heavy dose of Bruce Lee, which made it frustrating to know end when I'd want a toy based on a child character and he'd complain about how overpriced and unimpressive it was compared to the more 80s masculin characters. And there was this one time, when he would tell me bedtime stories, and the protagonists had lost their powers but were transforming into Street Fighter characters out of sheer will and imagination, and I suggested one character become Dhalsim, and he had the other become Guile, and it was really obvious which character was supposed to be having the most trouble with the mindstate from his performance. (Then the action sequence happened, and he remembered the tactical advantages of being able to teleport and set things on fire, but that's neither here nor there).
If my vision played into this at all, I suppose it'd have to do with ... idk, how well I could appreciate the details? The character portraits in Street Fighter 2 were kinda weird, and going only by those, Blanca, Guile and Vega (Ja: Balrog) were the portraits I actually liked, because of their lack of reliance on complex shapes or details, and instead having huge swaths of distinct color. Dhalsim I could recognize as soon as the fight began because of his reach, and the effects of his projectile were very clear. Big muscles or prominant curves just meant more blurry lines distracting from the colors and big shapes I could actually appreciate? Like, I generally don't imagine the characters in my writing / games as having well-defined muscles or curves, other than like two examples for each (and one of those is modeled after an action figure, and the others only grew them as I contemplated art styles and actors, and the other is just so big that his overall shape makes bulging biceps redundant). Most of the time, it never occurs to me that characters have these features until I get my hands on an action figure.
(Funny little Power Rangers tangent: when MMPR was new, I naturally wanted the complete team in toy form. Finding the 10 inch versions of the male rangers was trivial. By the time Christmas came around, someone had found a yellow one, too. But We scoured every Wal-mart, K-mart, KB Toys, and Toys R Us within a 50mi radius, and the only pink ranger that could be found was an oversized plushy. We finally found one (with kicking action) at a Toys R Us on the day that "The  mutiny" aired, and it was indeed the exact same shape as the others but with a different helmet, and this is exactly what I expected. Then, a year later, the Movie came out, along with those McDonalds toys, and the Pink and Yellow rangers had boobs, and I was very confused and blamed it on the movie exaggerating. It would be like 10 years or more before I'd discover that the yellow ranger had actually been gender-swapped in MMPR compared to Zyuuranger. Even though my stepmother commented that she looked like a boy when I got one of the first figures, and one of the movie trailers went out of its way to get a frontal shot of the yellow ranger to let everyone know they'd noticed. So far as I was concerned, the only way to tell boys and girls apart was hair length, and given that I had long hair as a toddler and my sister's was short, even that was unreliable.)

I guess I sorta feel like my vision plays into my general tendency to imagine / prefer androgyny, but it also results in my prefering simple character designs and outfits and not caring about facial descriptions beyond hair and eye color. And it is worth noting that there are plenty of people with comparable visual experience, and I rather doubt they've taken these things the same way. So while it's easy to tie these things to vision, I expect there's way more going on that's less obvious.

Very interesting topic, so in no particular order, let me show some thoughts:
-The mirror thing is about self conciousness, not about social identity. In any case, the same concept works for hearing your own voice, touching your own face or whatever. Back to the mirror, I think the point is that you can understand that something external is representing you, as if you listen yourself through headphones while you talk to a microphone, you would know it's your own voice even if you never heard your voice before, just because you are aware of your own actions, then you know exactly what are you saying.
-ABOUT the so called identity, as a male, female, transgender, etc, perhaps my personal opinion is weird because I am blind since I was 4 years old, but I believe it's a useless social aspect. Am I a male? Yes, I am supposed to be one. I definitely prefer girls, but I never wake up in the morning and think: oh, yes! I am a man! I play a lot of diferent roles in my life: I am a son, a friend, a lover, a musizian, a colleague, whatever, but, a man? I see no diferences between me an any other human being in that field, I have more in common with some girls than with some guys.
From my point of view, my male identity has the same meaning as someone who one day decides he is a member of the blond comunity, and starts living his live as blond people is suposed to live.
the identity of anyone is made from many aspects, but, again in my opinion, if you are paying so much atention to your gender, you may have a problem. live your life your way and enjoy, your gender would help you find your favorite clothes in a shop: skirts to the right, pants to the left, for the rest, being a male doesn't mean anything for me.
Please excuse my english, hopefully it makes sense