tie off "Point Man"

A friend of the blog points out that "gender" is a recent (and
dubious) innovation, so the Genesis riff gets cut.

I probably don't need to explain the pronouns discussion; it's not
central.

I'd schedule it to auto-publish on a future morning now, but I
actually want to use this to test the Pelican pingback plugin, and I
want to do that manually so I can attend if the plugin doesn't work as
expected. (Don't want to publish now because I just pushed the
Decision Child linkpost.)

diff --git a/content/drafts/point-man.md b/content/drafts/point-man.md
index da0ef46..ff71007 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/point-man.md
+++ b/content/drafts/point-man.md
@@ -20,9 +20,7 @@ What was it like to be the _deer_? To be _used_ like that, as a prop in someone
 
 ----
 
-[TODO: add back just enough of the pronoun discussion to contextualize the quote]
-
-During a recent discussion of pronoun conventions, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
+During a recent discussion of gender and pronoun conventions, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
 
 > I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
 
@@ -38,9 +36,7 @@ And the less intuitive it is, the better it works _as_ a loyalty test: referring
 
 I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, of course; just the design signature of [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).
 
-In the beginning, [Azathoth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLRogvJLPPg6Mrvg4/an-alien-god) created female and male, and the physical fact was called "sex", and the social recognition and implications thereof was called "gender"—the first day.
-
-As a very rare biological anomaly, there have always been an extreme right tail of very masculine lesbians who fit into Society better as men and very feminine gay men who fit into Society better as women, and twentieth-century doctors developed medical interventions to aid them in this transformation. This worked pretty well.
+Here's my theory. As a very rare biological anomaly, there have always been an extreme right tail of very masculine lesbians who fit into Society better as men and very feminine gay men who fit into Society better as women, and twentieth-century doctors developed medical interventions to aid them in this transformation. This worked pretty well.
 
 Separately, there are, and [perhaps](http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf) [always](/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/) have been, perverted men who wished they were women—autogynephiles—and the extreme right tail of them also sought out interventions from the twentieth-century doctors. Tragically, this [didn't usually work as well](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/a-passing-privilege/), but it was rare enough for autogynephiles to actually attempt it (as opposed to privately fantasizing or playing dress-up) that it didn't have much impact on the social order.
 
@@ -54,6 +50,6 @@ Again, no individual mastermind is required for [the collective outcome to play
 
 As a transhumanist, I believe that fantasies deserve to be fulfilled—but _actually_ fulfilled, fulfilled _for real_, not humored by everyone forcing everyone else to pretend in order to maintain the equilibrium in some idiot political game.
 
-I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [_isn't helping those people_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/). Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt it's helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they're selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
+I'm glad that sex reassignment exists for those who need it, or just _want_ it. (I would want it if the technology were better.) But this new culture in which any attempt to talk about sex in the common language gets adversarially reinterpreted as a claim about this mysterious "gender" thing that has no particular truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, [isn't helping transsexuals](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2019/04/08/oppressive-rituals-of-ceremoniously-announcing-one-gender-pronouns/) who have successfully transitioned and moved on with their lives. Relative to more honest alternatives that could be invented or rediscovered, I very much doubt this culture is helping those who enthusiastically advocate for and participate in it—if they only _knew_ in detail what they're selling and being sold. Selfishly, I resent the forced updates to my native language, which I still need to make sense of the world I see.
 
 And, and—that poor deer!