_(Attention conservation notice: perhaps not that much new content relative to length if you've already read ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/).)_
-The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog [_The Unit of Caring_](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com) [responds to](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word _woman_ as "adult human biological female":
+The author of the (highly recommended!) Tumblr blog [_The Unit of Caring_ responds to](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/171986501376/your-post-on-definition-of-gender-and-woman-and) an anonymous correspondent's observation that trans-exclusionary radical feminists tend to define the word _woman_ as "adult human biological female":
> Oh, yeah, sorry, I've heard that one too though I've yet to find anyone willing to justify it. If you can find anyone explaining why this is a good definition, or even explaining what good properties it has, I'd appreciate it because I did sincerely put in the effort and—uncharitably, it’s as if there’s just 'matches historical use' and 'doesn’t involve any people I consider icky being in my category'.
I would say that a notable good property of the "adult human female" definition is _non-circularity_: we can articulate membership tests that do a pretty good job of narrowing down which entities _do_ and _do not_ belong to the category we're trying to talk about, _without_ appealing to the category itself. Does the person have a vagina, ovaries, breasts, and two X chromosomes? That's a woman. Has the person given birth? _Definitely_ a woman. Does the person have a penis? Definitely _not_ a woman. This at least gives us a starting point from which we can begin to use this _woman_ concept to make sense of the world, even if it's not immediately clear whether and how we should apply it to various comparatively rare edge-cases. (What about female-to-male transsexuals, a.k.a. trans men? What about people with [complete androgen insensitivity syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome)? _&c._)
-In contrast, a strict gender-identity-based definition doesn't have this useful non-circularity property. If all I know about _women_ is that women are defined as people who identify as women, I can't _use_ that definition to figure out which people are women and what probabilistic predictions I should make about them. This point may be more apparent if you substitute some completely foreign concept for _women_. If someone told you that zorplebobben are people who identify as zorplebobben, you would probably have questions about what that means! _Why_ do they identify as zorplebobben? _Given_ that someone is a zorplebobben, what _else_ should I infer about them? The self-identity criterion doesn't help: without a base case, the infinite recursion of (people who identify as (people who identify as (people who identify as ...))) never terminates.
+In contrast, a strict gender-identity-based definition doesn't have this useful non-circularity property. If all I know about _women_ is that women are defined as people who identify as women, I can't _use_ that definition to figure out which people are women. This point may be more apparent if you substitute some completely foreign concept for _women_. If someone told you that zorplebobben are people who identify as zorplebobben, you would probably have questions about what that means! _Why_ do they identify as zorplebobben? _Given_ that someone is a zorplebobben, what _else_ should I infer about them? The self-identity criterion doesn't help: without a base case, the infinite recursion of (people who identify as (people who identify as (people who identify as ...))) never terminates.
Of course, people who believe in the primacy of gender identity aren't _trying_ to engage in circular reasoning. If they _are_ making a philosophical mistake, there has to be some explanation of what makes the mistake appealing enough for so many people to make it.
But this is a mere broadening of the "adult human female" definition that tacks on extra complexity (partially for humanitarian reasons and partially to better predict social phenomena that most people care more about modeling well than biological minutiæ). The core idea is still intact and centered, such that even if we end up using the disjunctive, trans-inclusive sense a lot of the time, the narrower, trans-exclusive sense is still pretty salient, rather than being a perplexingly unmotivated notion with no good properties.
-One might counterargue that this is unjustifiably assuming "biologically female" as a primitive. The author seems to endorse a critique along these lines as her first objection to the "adult human female" criterion of womanhood—
+One might counterargue that this is unjustifiably assuming "biologically female" as a primitive. The author seems to endorse a critique along these lines the first of three objections to the "adult human female" criterion of womanhood—
> 1) The way we draw categories in biology is a social decision we make for social and cultural reasons, it isn’t a feature of the biology itself. A different sort of society might categorize infertile humans as a separate gender, for example, and that'd be as justified by the biology as our system. Or have 'prepubescent' be a gender, or 'having living offspring' be a gender—there are a million things that these categories could just as reasonably, from the biology, have been drawn around.
It is of course true that different cultures will place different emphases and interpretations on various ways in which people can differ: being prepubescent or being a parent might have special significance in some cultures that outsiders could never understand. But to say that prepubescents might as well be a "gender"—well, at this point I must confess that I'm really not sure what this "gender" thing is that the author is trying to talk about.
-And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world—in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
+And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world: in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
-The point being illustrated here is that if it's socially unacceptable for people who want to talk about sex to say "That's not what I meant by _woman_ in this context _and you know it_", then people who would prefer not to acknowledge sex will always get the last word—not because they have superior arguments, but because the very terms of discourse have been [systematically gamed to conflate dissent with unkindness](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+The point being illustrated here is that if it's socially unacceptable for people who want to talk about sex to say "That's not what I meant by _woman_ in this context _and you know it_", then people who would prefer not to acknowledge sex will always get the last word, not because they have superior arguments, but because the very terms of discourse have been [systematically gamed to conflate dissent with unkindness](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-To this it might be objected that trans activists are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably [David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hysterectomy) if that's what you _really mean_.
+To this it might be objected that trans activists and allies are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably [David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hysterectomy) if that's what you _really mean_.
-Alternatively, we could imagine people agreeing that word _woman_ refers to social roles and gender identity and must always be used in a trans-inclusive sense, while reserving _female_ for when people want to talk about biological sex. However, I get the sense that this is not a compromise most contemporary trans activists would find acceptable: witness, for example, Zinnia Jones [proclaiming that](https://genderanalysis.net/2017/10/medical-professionals-increasingly-agree-trans-women-are-female-trans-men-are-male/) "[t]rans women are female—with female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes." (!)
+Alternatively, we could imagine people agreeing that word _woman_ refers solely to social roles and personal identity and must always be used in a trans-inclusive sense, while reserving _female_ for when people want to talk about biological sex. However, I get the sense that this is not a compromise most contemporary trans activists would find acceptable: witness, for example, [Zinnia Jones proclaiming that](https://genderanalysis.net/2017/10/medical-professionals-increasingly-agree-trans-women-are-female-trans-men-are-male/) "[t]rans women are female—with female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes." (!)
Ultimately, I think all this is underestimating the usefulness of having simple, [_short_](https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) descriptions for the categories that do the most predictive work on typical cases.
These days, dwelling on the general case feels awfully pedantic. I think what changed is that as I read more and gained some personal experience with real-world technology development (albeit in mere software), I began to appreciate technology as the sum of many contingent developments with particular implementation details that someone had to spend thousands of engineer–years pinning down, rather than as an unspecified generic force of everything getting better over time. _In principle_, everything not directly prohibited by the laws of physics is probably possible, which basically amounts to any miracle you can imagine. In practice, we get a very few, very _specific_ miracles that depend on vast institutions and supply chains and knowledge that can be lost as well as gained.
-I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their happy lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which [we can't write correct software](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even exist](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/) and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
+I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their blessed lives that we need to navigate our comparatively impoverished existence in which [we can't write correct software](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), [aren't sure what basic biological mechanisms even _exist_](http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/), and [don't remember how to go the moon](https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2015/12/11/how-we-lost-the-ability-to-travel-to-the-moon/) or [build a subway for less than a billion dollars a mile](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/). But while we work towards a better future (_n.b._, _work towards_, not _wait for_; waiting doesn't help), we have to go on living in a world where [our means don't match our ambitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard), and—as we typically recognize with respect to _other_ standard transhumanist goals—the difference can't be made up by means of clever redefinitions of words—
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorites paradox](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/), the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from [the principle of mathematical induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) that no number _n_ ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a ["heap of zero grains"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox).) Analogously, if a sufficiently small change in MtF transition outcome can't change whether someone is a woman, then we are seemingly forced to accept that either everyone is a woman or no one is.
-While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that conceding that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesitate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
+While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than to concede that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesitate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
> If that's the side of this question you come down on, then I encourage you to ask yourself why that trans women still doesn't count. I expect that whatever your answer, that's the real definition you’re using, not "biological".
It gets us a concept to refer to the set of adult human females. (Even if, again, we often also use the word _woman_ in a broader trans-inclusive sense; it's not uncommon for words to have both narrower and broader definitions which can be distinguished from context.)
-If the concept of _women_ in the narrow, trans-exclusionary sense is to be forbidden from polite Society, then people trying to make sense of the experiences will be forced to reinvent it, probably by means of obfuscatory neologisms ("assigned female at birth") coupled with the indefatigable [wordless anticipation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) that it's _somehow not a coincidence_ that cis women and trans men and a.f.a.b. nonbinary people get pregnant sometimes, but cis men and trans women and a.m.a.b. nonbinary people never do.
+If the concept of _women_ in the narrow, trans-exclusionary sense is to be forbidden from polite Society, then people trying to make sense of their experiences will be forced to reinvent it, probably by means of obfuscatory neologisms ("assigned female at birth") coupled with the quietly indefatigable [wordless anticipation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) that it's _somehow not a coincidence_ that cis women and trans men and a.f.a.b. nonbinary people get pregnant sometimes, but cis men and trans women and a.m.a.b. nonbinary people never do.
-I _want_ to live in that glorious future of Total Morphological Freedom. But _nature to be commanded must be obeyed_: to _get_ godlike mastery over our physical forms, to _break free_ of the prison of today's unremediated genderspace, is going to require a detailed understanding of exactly how things work _today_, as such knowledge is the only thing that can inform the design of a superior solution. And the fact that _the smartest people I know_ tend to direct more of their effort towards redefining top-20 nouns than on biotechnology research, does not exactly inspire hope.
+I _want_ to live in that glorious future of Total Morphological Freedom. But _nature to be commanded must be obeyed_. To _get_ godlike mastery over our physical forms, to _break free_ of the prison of today's unremediated genderspace, is going to require a detailed understanding of exactly how things work _today_, as it is only from such knowledge that pallative interventions can be designed. And, bluntly, the fact that _the smartest people I know_ tend to direct more of their effort towards redefining top-20 nouns than on biotechnology research, does not exactly inspire confidence or hope.
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