+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+<div class="dialogue">
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Have you seen <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885">Dhejne <em>et al.</em>'s long-term followup study of transsexuals in Sweeden</a>? In Tables S1 and S2, the authors report that trans women commited violent crimes at far higher rates than cis women, with an adjusted-for-immigrant-and-psychiatric-status hazard ratio of 18.1—but only slightly lower rates than cis men, against whom the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.8.</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Yes, how terrible that we still live in such a transphobic Society that those poor marginalized trans women are disproportionately driven to violent crime!</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: That's one theory. Can you think of any <em>other</em> possible interpretations of the data?</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: No.</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Like, what do you make of the observation that the trans women's violent crime rate was not just higher than cis women's, but also strikingly close to that of cis <em>men</em>? Can you think of any reason—any reason at all—why that <em>might not be a coincidence</em>?</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: No, that has to be a coincidence. What could trans women and cis men possibly have in common?</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: ...</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+(Another dialogue about reproduction belongs in this collection, but was deemed too obvious and has been cut for space.)
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+The point being illustrated here is that if it's socially unacceptable for people who want to talk about sex to say "That's not what I meant by _woman_ in this context _and you know it_", then people who would prefer not to acknowledge sex will always get the last word—not because they have superior arguments, but because the terms of discourse have been [systematically engineered to conflate dissent with unkindness](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+
+To this it might be objected that trans activists are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably [David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hystorectomy) if that's what you _really mean_. I think this is underestimating the usefulness of having simple, [_short_](https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) descriptions for the categories that do the most predictive work on typical cases.
+
+Kind or not, morally justified or not, voluntary or not, sexual dimorphism is _actually a real thing_. Studying the pages of _Gray's Anatomy_—[or _Wikipedia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology) if you're on a budget—you can absorb all sorts of detailed, _specific_ knowledge of the differences between female and male humans, from the obvious (sex organs, vocal pitch, height, muscle mass, body hair) to the less-obvious-but-well-known (chromosomes, hormones, pelvis shape) to the comparatively obscure (blood pressure! lymphocyte concentrations! gray-matter-to-white-matter ratios in the brain!). Nor is this surprising from a theoretical standpoint, where we have theories explaining [mechanisms by which](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection) sexual dimorphism can evolve and [what kinds of differences](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parental_investment&oldid=832276512#Trivers'_parental_investment_theory) it produces in different species.
+
+If—like me—you're the kind of person who is not necessarily _happy_ about sexual dimorphism, you can always deliberately define your categories in order to minimize it: if there's a large sex difference in some observable measurement, just say you _don't care_ about predicting that particular measurement.
+
+But people who have _other_ concerns than minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular _sense_ of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing. Being limited to just saying "people with uteruses" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just construction turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the other dimensions along which women statistically have things in common. Including things that are hard to articulate or measure. Including things that may not even be currently _known_. _I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_ psychologically, but that's a fact
+
+
+
+
+The author goes on to her second objection—
+
+> 2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn’t going to apply.
+
+I definitely agree that biological anything isn't going to apply in the glorious posthuman future of unimaginable power and freedom when people can reshape their body and mind at will.
+
+[(If we survive.)](https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)
+
+But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious pre-posthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent acheivements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
+
+But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend [Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions).
+
+[TODO: I used to be more optimistic]