+It's important to stress that all of this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their desired gender might look like this:
+
+ * *Claim*: Trans people are born with a brain-restricted intersex condition such that their psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex: the proverbial "woman trapped in a man's body" (respectively "man ... woman's") trope is basically accurate.
+ * *Claim*: The medical interventions undergone during transition—hormone replacement surgery, sex reassignment surgery, _&c._—are effective at inducing the phenotype of the other physiological sex: physically, transitioning _works_.
+ * *Claim*: Gender is mostly attributed on the basis of apparent secondary sex characteristics: in most situations, most people don't care about predicting the configuration of someone's genitalia at birth or whether they have a Y chromosome.
+ * *Conclusion*: Trans people can legitimately be said to belong to their stated gender, using the _same_ criteria people usually use to decide such things.
+
+Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. To the extent that any of the claims _fail_ to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—to the extent that physical transition _isn't_ effective, to the extent that people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
+
+-----------------
+
+**DRAFT IS ABOVE THE LINE; BELOW ARE NOTES/SCRAPS/OUTLINING**
+
+Let's consider some of what is known about trans women. (For the remainder of this post, I'm going to focus on trans women, for reasons of personal interest. The task of analyzing the situation of trans men is left to the interested reader.)
+
+While a minority of trans women in Western countries fit the "classical transsexual" profile of being attracted to men, displaying lifelong female-typical social behavior and interests, and transitioning early. But the majority don't fit this pattern.
+
+(To interested readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Anne Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf) For a more exhaustive treatment, see Lawrence's book [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).)
+
+[caveats: take care to note that it's possible to believe in a weaker form of it: maybe you agree to the bimodality in the data, but don't think it's two discrete etiological types; or, maybe you [agree that there are two etiologies, but](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) don't buy that AGP is the cause]
+
+In less tolerant places and decades, where transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference.
+
+Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, this is no longer true, and in communities that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, 9.4% responded _F (cisgender)_ to the gender question, compared to 1.4% responding _F (transgender m -> f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of female _Slate Star Codex_ readers are trans.
+
+A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of the Berkeley, California rationalist community reports on recent changes in local social norms—
+
+> There have been "all women" things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it's hard, because it's weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that's happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things "for friends," with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can't include women who aren't _already_ in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.
+
+This is a _terrible_ outcome with respect to _everyone's_ values. One couldn't even say, "The cost to bigoted cis women of not being able to have trans-exclusionary spaces is more than outweighed by trans women's identities being respected," b
+
+Depending on your values, of course, you might be in favor of making it socially unacceptable to have sex-segregated spaces that are actually segregated by biological sex. The methods of rationality themselves have nothing to say on the matter.
+
+To only say, "What's the problem? Trans women are women, by definition, and definitions can't be wrong" is to invite the reply, "That's not what I meant _and you fucking know it._"