memoir: Michael's gender reversal

diff --git a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
index f19bdf1..75903cc 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
+++ b/content/drafts/if-clarity-seems-like-death-to-them.md
@@ -641,9 +641,21 @@ Or, I pointed out, (c) I had ceded the territory of the interior of my own mind
 
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+In January 2020, Michael told me that he had changed his mind about gender and the philosophy of language. We talked about it on the phone. He said that the philosophy articulated in ["A Human's Guide to Words"](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) was inadequate for politicized environments where our choice of ontology is constrained. If we didn't know how to coin a new third gender, or teach everyone the language of "clusters in high-dimensional configuration space", our actual choices for how to think about trans women were basically three: creepy men (the TERF narrative), crazy men (the medical model), or a protected class of actual woman.[^reasons-not-to-carve]
+
+[^reasons-not-to-carve]: I had already identified three classes of reasons not to carve reality at the joints: [coordination (wanting everyone to use the same definitions)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), wireheading (making the map look good, at the expense of it failing to reflect the territory), and war (sabotaging someone else's map to make them do what you want). This would fall under coordination.
+
+According to Michael, while "Trans women are real women" was a lie (in the sense that he agreed that me and Jessica and Ziz were not part of the natural cluster of biological females), it was _also_ the case that "Trans women are not real woman" was a lie (in the sense that the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories were wrong). "Trans women are women" could be true in the sense that truth is about processes that create true maps, such that we can choose the concepts that allow discourse and information-flow. If the "creepy men" and "crazy men" stories are a cause of silencing, then—under present conditions—we had to chose the "protected class" story in order for people like Ziz to not be silenced.
+
+My response (more vehemently when thinking on it a few hours later) was that this was a _garbage bullshit_ appeal to consequences. If I wasn't going to let Ray Arnold get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people feel Safe", I shouldn't let Michael get away with "we are better at seeking truth when people aren't Oppressed". Maybe the wider world was ontology-constrained to those three choices, but I was aspiring to higher nuance in my writing, and it seemed to be working pretty well.
+
+"Thanks for being principled," he replied. (He had a few more sentences about the process _vs._ conclusion point being important to his revised-for-politics philosophy of language, but we didn't finish the debate.)
+
+------
+
 On 10 February 2020, Scott Alexander published ["Autogenderphilia Is Common and Not Especially Related to Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), an analysis of the results of the autogynephilia/autoandrophilia questions on the recent _Slate Star Codex_ survey.
 
-I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Mar/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation.
+I appreciated the gesture of getting real data, but I was deeply unimpressed with Alexander's analysis for reasons that I found difficult to write up in a timely manner. Three years later, I eventually got around to [polishing my draft and throwing it up as a standalone post](/2023/Nov/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia/), rather than cluttering the present narrative with my explanation.
 
 Briefly, based on eyballing the survey data, Alexander proposes "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" as a "very boring" theory, but on my worldview, a hypothesis that puts "gay people (cis and trans)" in the antecedent is _not_ boring and actually takes on a big complexity penalty: I just don't think the group of gay men _and_ lesbians _and_ straight males with female gender identities _and_ straight females with male gender identities have much in common with each other, except sociologically (being "queer"), and by being human.
 

diff --git a/notes/memoir-sections.md b/notes/memoir-sections.md
index 8f7e783..63df513 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/memoir-sections.md
+++ b/notes/memoir-sections.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ slotted TODO blocks—
 ✓ Michael Vassar and the Theory of Optimal Gossip
 ✓ complicity and friendship
 ✓ plan to reach out to "Ethan"
-_ Michael on creepy men/crazy men
+✓ Michael on creepy men/crazy men
 _ State of Steven
 _ reaction to Ziz
 _ repair pt. 5 dath ilan transition
@@ -89,6 +89,7 @@ things to discuss with Michael/Ben/Jessica—
 _ Anna on Paul Graham
 _ compression of Yudkowsky thinking reasoning wasn't useful
 _ Michael's SLAPP against REACH
+_ Michael on creepy and crazy men
 
 
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