+<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 very terms of discourse have been [systematically gamed 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) [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.
+
+It might be worth noticing even if you don't believe in psychological sex differences! That's why generations of feminists have fought valiantly for women's rights on the grounds that women are every bit the moral and intellectual equals of men, rather than the grounds that it's not clear whether "women" actually exist as a non-arbitrary category.
+
+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.
+
+And 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 my map is not the territory: it doesn't mean some future sufficiently-advanced neuroscience won't be able to say what the difference means about female and male minds, and some sufficiently advanced evolutionary psychology, under what selection pressures it evolved.
+
+_Speaking_ future advances in knowledge, the author continues 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 preposthuman 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 reading [Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take.
+
+In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.
+
+These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
+
+I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their happy lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which we [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even exist](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/) and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+<div class="dialogue">
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: When I lost my mother, I knew I could not rest until Death itself is defeated!</p>
+
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: But as long as you remember her, your mother lives on in you!</p>