-That is: if you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has _failed_. In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
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-All you can do is force them to lie.
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-I'm not "against" trans people. I'm glad [I was able to experiment with hormones](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/) on the basis of informed consent, rather than being gatekept.
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-"Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should."
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-To paraphrase the ["Twelve Virtues"](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/),
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-> Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, "I'm a woman," and you look at the Great Teacher and see a man. If you think: "It may look like the Great Teacher is a man, but an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false," you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
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-> Do not ask whether the rules of rationality or human decency say to do this or that. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.
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------------------
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-**DRAFT IS ABOVE THE LINE; BELOW ARE NOTES/SCRAPS/OUTLINING**
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-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.)
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-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.
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-(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/).)
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-[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]
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-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.
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-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.
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-A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of the Berkeley, California rationalist community reports on recent changes in local social norms—
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-> 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.
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-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
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-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.
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-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._"
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-[Alexander cites Emperor Norton as a charming example of the power of kindness, but as fun as the story is to read about on Wikipedia, that kind of "benevolent" gaslighting is not something you would do to someone you actually _respected_; I'm glad my friends didn't lie to me when I was having delusions of grandeur]
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-[imagine you're Emperor Norton's best friend and he expresses doubt as to whether he's being hugboxed]
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-[...]
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-"What if—what if I'm not actually the Emperor?"
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-"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say.
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-[...]