Title: Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2019-10-06 20:35
Category: commentary
-Tags: game theory, sociology
-Status: draft
+Tags: categorization, game theory, sociology
Previously on _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ (["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), we've considered at length the ways in which the self-identity criterion for gender (_e.g._, "Women are people who identify as women") fails to satisfy some of the basic desiderata for useful categories: the _cognitive function_ of categories is to group similar things together so that our brains can make similar predictions about them under conditions of uncertainty. In order to _make the case_ that it's useful to think and speak such that "identifying as" a gender is the same thing as _being_ of that gender, one would need to show that those who identify as a gender form a natural [cluster in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace)—and [not just a uselessly low-dimensional subspace thereof](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries). ("Identifies as a woman" clusters with "prefers she/her pronouns", but if there's nothing _else_ you can say about such people, then it's not clear why we care.)
The author gives the age of majority as an example. Presumably the right to vote should be based on _relevant_ features of a person (in a word, "maturity"), not how many times the Earth has gone around the sun since they were born. But it wouldn't be practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to assess "maturity", whereas it _is_ practical for everyone to come to consensus on how to subtract dates, so our _shared_ socially-constructed category of "legal adulthood" ends up being defined in terms of a semi-arbitrary age cut-off, at the cost of mature 16-year-olds and immature 20-year-olds losing out on or gaining privileges that they should or shouldn't have (respectively).
-When people need to coordinate on making the _same_ arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually _salient_. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you _could_ communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 _a.m._ or 11 _a.m._ or 3 _p.m._, _except_ that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to derive independently.
+When people need to coordinate on making the _same_ arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually _salient_. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you _could_ communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 _a.m._ or 11 _a.m._ or 3 _p.m._, _except_ that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to be able to derive independently.
We usually expect the question of what sex (or "gender") a person is to have a _canonical answer_ that everyone agrees on: it would be pretty confusing for bystanders if I thought Pat was a woman and said "Pat ... she" and you thought Pat was a man and said "Pat ... he."
-For transgender people who consistently [_pass_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(gender)), this (_ex hypothesi_) isn't a problem. Unfortunately, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, not all aspiring trans people pass consistently: the _same person_ might be perceived as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) or their desired gender, depending on which observer you ask, how long the person has been on hormone replacement therapy, whether the observer knew the them before transition, the current lighting, or any number of other factors.
+For transgender people who consistently [_pass_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(gender)), this (_ex hypothesi_) isn't a problem. Unfortunately, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, not all aspiring trans people pass consistently: the _same person_ might be perceived as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) or their desired gender, depending on which observer you ask, how long the person has been on hormone replacement therapy, whether the observer knew the person before transition, the current lighting, or any number of other factors.
-If, despite this, [social reality](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) continues to require the question to have a definite canonical answer, the natural Schelling point is, "Just _ask_ the person what gender they are, and that's what they are." _Even if_ we [_don't_ assume that people know themselves better than anyone else](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), people are still the focal point for reasonable mutual expectations about knowledge about themselves: if I claim to know Pat's gender better than she knows herself, and you claim to know Pat's gender better than _he_ knows _himself_, then there's no obvious way to break the symmetry except to defer the question to Pat.
+If, despite this, [social reality](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) continues to require the question to have a definite canonical answer, and we can't appeal to "passing" because that's too subjective and blurry, the natural Schelling point is, "Just _ask_ the person what gender they are, and that's what they are." Even if we [_don't_ assume that people know themselves better than anyone else](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), people are still the focal point for reasonable mutual expectations about knowledge about themselves: if I claim to know Pat's gender better than she knows herself, and you claim to know Pat's gender better than _he_ knows _himself_, then there's no more obvious way to break the symmetry except to defer the question to Pat.
(Notably, this is also the procedure you would use for non-trans people who just happen to be really-really androgynous: you're going to believe their answer to "Are you a woman or a man?" because if you could tell, then you wouldn't have asked.)
-Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered, and it's possible to "move" from a currently-selected choice towards a "nearby" one, then the selected option may [slide down a "slippery slope" until stopping at a Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes). Imagine the armies of two countries fighting over contested territory containing a river. The river is a Schelling point for the border between the two countries—unless one of the armies has a military advantage to push the battle line forward to the _next_ Schelling point, we expect peace-treaty negotiations to settle on the river as the border. There's no particular reason that the border couldn't be drawn 2 kilometers north of the river, _except_ that that would invite the question of, "Why 2 kilometers? Why not 1, or 3?"
+Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered, and it's possible to "move" from a currently-selected choice towards a "nearby" one, then the selected option may [slide down a "slippery slope" until stopping at a Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes). Imagine the armies of two countries fighting over contested territory containing a river. The river is a Schelling point for the border between the two countries: unless one of the armies has a military advantage to push the battle line forward to the _next_ Schelling point, we expect peace-treaty negotiations to settle on the river as the border. There's no particular reason that the border couldn't be drawn 2 kilometers north of the river, _except_ that that would invite the question of, "Why 2 kilometers? Why not 1, or 3?"
-The coordination problem of _who_ has the authority to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen of a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is _in a particular context_. The notion of the same person's "gender" being different in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we _kind of_ need it: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, for example, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors _address_ the patient as "Mr.", "he", _&c._ they still need to draw on their mental models of the human _female_ body to practice their craft, and in the course of that practice, they might need _language_ that reflects what they're actually thinking.)
+The coordination problem of how to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen as a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is _in a particular context_. The notion of the same person's "gender" being different in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we _might_ need it for some purposes: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, for example, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors _address_ the patient as "Mr.", "he", _&c._, they still need to draw on their mental models of the human _female_ body to practice their craft, which presupposes a _referent_ for the concept of "human female body.")
-[...]
+But here we have a slippery slope on what domains within Society should use developmental-sex categories or self-identity categories.
+
+At one extreme, a "Sex is immutable and determined by the presence of a Y chromosome, no exceptions" regime is a stable Schelling point: if you have a lab that can do karyotypes, there would be no ambiguity on how to classify anyone _with respect to_ the stated category system. (It would be cruel to trans people and people with [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome), but it would be a Schelling point.)
+
+At the other extreme, "Self-reported self-identity only, no exceptions" is a stable Schelling point: _given_ the self-identity criterion of "Just ask the person what gender they are", there's no ambiguity about how to classify anyone. (This requires us to affirm the existence of ["female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes"](https://archive.is/Fpaw3), but it's a Schelling point.)
+
+In contrast, any of a number of "compromise" systems, while potentially performing better on edge cases, suffer from ambiguity and are on that account less game-theoretically stable. It's a lot harder for Society to establish a specific convention of the form "Okay, you can have your pronouns, but you can't use your target-gender {bathroom, locker room, sports league, hospital ward, _&c._} unless you {pass really well, get bottom surgery, have a gender recognition certificate, _&c._}", not only because different factions will disagree on where to draw the line for each particular gendered privilege, but also because any line not drawn on a sufficiently sticky Schelling point will face constant attempts to push it up or down the slippery slope.
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