> The actual category they should be using is not "cis women." The actual category they should be using is "people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for."
-_In all philosophical strictness_, I agree. (And I wouldn't want to attend a men-only event.)[ref]But mostly for ideological and gender-dysphoria-related reasons, rather than because I _obviously wouldn't belong_. It has sometimes been for me to have a _self-image_ of being "not like the other guys", but self-images [aren't necessarily veridical](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/); if my self-perceived unmasculinity isn't reflected in other people's assessments of my unaffected personality and social behavior, it would be somewhat unreflective of me to protest, "But _I'm_ not gender-conforming—I have a _ponytail_!"[/ref] Outside of a few _relatively_ narrow domains of life (medicine, intercourse, family planning), I find it hard to think of good reasons to care about sex _per se_, as opposed to characteristics which might correlate with sex at some nonzero but certainly-not-so-huge-as-to-be-effectively-binary effect size. Ozy and me and Scott Alexander are all in agreement that categories are in the map, not the territory. There aren't ontologically-fundamental <code><sex value="F"/></code> XML tags attached to people's souls—and moreover, we wouldn't have any reason to care if there _were_.
+_In all philosophical strictness_, I agree. (And I wouldn't want to attend a men-only event.)[ref]But mostly for ideological and gender-dysphoria-related reasons, rather than because I _obviously wouldn't belong_. I've historically been inclined to cultivate a _self-image_ of being "not like the other guys", but self-images [aren't necessarily veridical](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). If my self-perceived unmasculinity isn't reflected in other people's assessments of my unaffected personality and social behavior, it would be somewhat unreflective of me to protest, "But _I'm_ not gender-conforming—I have a _ponytail_!"[/ref] Outside of a few _relatively_ narrow domains of life (medicine, intercourse, family planning), I find it hard to think of good reasons to care about sex _per se_, as opposed to characteristics which might correlate with sex at some nonzero but certainly-not-so-huge-as-to-be-effectively-binary effect size. Ozy and me and Scott Alexander are all in agreement that categories are in the map, not the territory. There aren't ontologically-fundamental <span style="font-family: monospace;"><sex value="F"/></span> XML tags attached to people's souls—and moreover, we wouldn't have any reason to care if there _were_.
The problem is that people don't always _have_ the detailed individual information that they would need to act in all philosophical strictness, at least not in an explicit, communicable form. If you're having a private get-together with some your friends who you know very well, you can pick and choose who to invite based on your individual knowledge of each individual, and you don't need to communicate (much less justify) your decision criteria to anyone else. If you don't like Brian, you can just not-invite-Brian, even if you're bad at introspection and don't even _know for yourself_ why you don't like Brian.
_Not_ an infinitely-thin, infinitely-bright line,[ref]As it is said: what about masculine women and feminine men (whose share of the population depends on where you set your sex-atypicality thresholds)? What about trans people (0.3%–[TODO] of the population, depending on how you define your categories and whose statistics you trust)? What about people with [5α-Reductase deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency) or any of a dozen other specific intersex conditions?[/ref] but a line thin _enough_ and bright _enough_ that the forces of social evolution have coughed up some institutions and other cultural practices that take the line into account for _functional_ reasons.
-My goal in writing about this is certainly not to argue for _more sexism_—I'm looking forward to the postgender lesbian transhumanist future of Total Morphological Freedom as much as anyone else. (I already have my new name and outfits picked out!) If we can invent _new_ institutions and practices that serve more people more effectively, we should _do it_. But because I am a rationalist, because I cannot _unsee_ the cold, cisheteronormative logic of [Chesterson's fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence), I have to speak when my friends resort to using facile, sophmoric word games [TODO: soften!] to obfuscate the _function_ of the existing fences.
+My goal in writing about this is certainly not to argue _for more sexism_—I'm looking forward to the postgender lesbian transhumanist future of Total Morphological Freedom as much as anyone else. (I already have my new name and outfits picked out!) If we can invent _new_ institutions and practices that serve more people more effectively, we should _do it_. But because I am a rationalist, because I cannot _unsee_ the cold, cisheteronormative logic of [Chesterson's fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence), I have to speak out when people are using clever word games to obfuscate the function of the existing fences. It's not that it's impossible to do better; it's that doing better _isn't trivial_.
-In response to the argument that women's restrooms function as safe havens where women can retreat and exclude scary or threatening men [TODO: verify paraphrase], Ozy writes:
+In response to the argument that women's restrooms function as safe havens that women can retreat to and exclude scary or threatening men from, Ozy writes:
> I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is "people who look like the vast majority of street harassers" versus "people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers." The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man's psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men's room.
-It has to do with _probabilistic predictions about_ psychology in a world where [male violence against females is _older than humanity itself_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sexual_coercion&oldid=866576906). Certainly _most_ men are nice, civilized people who you can
+It has to do with _probabilistic predictions about_ psychology in a world where [male violence against females is _older than humanity itself_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sexual_coercion&oldid=866576906). We can imagine an alternate universe designed by a loving God, where the people have the same physical forms as the women and men of our own world, but where rape and sexual harrassment and voyeurism are unknown, and in _that_ world, people with female bodies would have no particular reason to be wary of people with male bodies.[ref]Well, except for that _d_≈2.6 difference in muscle mass should a disputre escalate to physical fighting.[/ref]
+Certainly _most_ men are nice, civilized people who don't harrass women—and occasional Hemsworthlike, lumberjack-bearded androphilic trans men with a feminine personalities, present even _less_ of a threat. But when designing the social norms for a safe space for the modal cis woman, false positives (including someone who shouldn't be included) are probably going to be worse than false negatives (excluding someone who shouldn't be). If "Does this person look male?" is _easier to directly assess_ than "Does this person-of-whatever-sex look like a potential threat to my safety and comfort?"—and possibly more importantly, is easier for third parties to _agree on_ when third parties are called in to enforce the rules—then the rule ends up being "no males."
+Which is _not_ necessarily a great rule!
[***]
-[...]
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-[III. Ozy argues that "look like street harrassers" is the relevant criterion; I think this is overestimating the extent to which bad male behavior is an artifact of ideology
-"has nothing to do with psychology anyway"—it has to do with _perceptions_ of psychology; bystanders can't _know_ that feminine-androphilic trans man is one of them; you could imagine an alternative world in which human physiology looked the same but there was no history of male violence, but that's not our world
-I agree that everyone deserves a place to pee; let's talk about changing rooms
-]
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+[agree that everyone deserves a place to pee]
Finally, Ozy makes an analogy between social gender and money. What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
[what about consent of the modelers in addition to consent of the modeled?]
+"That's not what I meant by the word 'woman' in this context, _and you fucking know it!_"
+
+This reply is perhaps quite rude, and not at all in accordance with the precepts of Slate Star charitable discourse norms. But—conditional on the hypothesis that her interlocutor does, in fact, fucking know it—then it _is_ in accordance with the principles of _rationality_.
+
+And _that's_ the point.
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+
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Unordered scraps—
if it sounds like I'm advocating stereotypes which are morally bad, well, I agree with Ozy that the solution is more categories]
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make sure to engage with "more categories"
KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff