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> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
-At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the September 2019 date of this one.)[/ref] 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_.
+At the end of [their reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to [the immortal Scott Alexander on gender categorization](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias makes an analogy between social gender and money.[ref]As teased at the beginning of [the bulleted list in my post-Christmas cry of pain last year](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#post-ideas-list), I _also_ have responses to the other arguments Ozy makes earlier in ["Man Should Allocate Some More Categories"](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/). The fact that the present post focuses specifically on replying to the gender/money analogy shall not be construed to mean that I'm conceding any other points—just that I'm a [ludicrously, _miserably_ unproductive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/). (Compare the June 2018 date of Ozy's post to the October 2019 (!) date of this one.)[/ref] 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_.
I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off, [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
-Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately modeled as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would _mean_ to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.
+Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately thought of as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would _mean_ to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.
Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression.[/ref] [ref][Friend of the blog](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/837846616937750528) Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
I happily agree that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it _feasible_. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being _immediately_ destroyed by normal people who _have eyes_ and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking mind games the way that readers of this blog do?
-That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question _actually has a literal answer_, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. _Somehow_, societies have evolved from a condition in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present condition where everyone and her dog accepts paper money as money without a thought—where the "somehow" probably involves the use of state violence to enforce banking regulations.
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+That's not a rhetorical question. In the case of fiat currency, the question _actually has a literal answer_, although I personally am not well-versed enough in economic history to tell it. _Somehow_, societies have evolved from a condition in which the idea of paper currency would have provoked a "How dumb do you think I am?" reaction, to the present condition where everyone _and her dog_ accepts paper money as money without a thought—where the "somehow" _probably_ involves the use of state violence to enforce banking regulations.
+Ozy concludes—
> Since it is not, properly speaking, a definition, the decision of who should be socially gendered male or female, and how many social genders we should have is not an epistemic decision. This decision can and should be made on purely utilitarian grounds.
-[TODO: it's possible that I'm underestimating the social-engineering feats that might be possible—it's kind of surprising that fiat money equilibria aren't also destroyed by a "How dumb do you think we are?" faction—but fiat money equilibria evolved over a long time for complicated reasons; you need more of an actual argument than "maybe things would be better"]
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-what kind of monster could possibly be against _utility_?!
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-the girl in the [G.I.R.L.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL)
+In some sense, this is kind of unobjectionable—what kind of monster could possibly be against _utility_?!—but it's an _incredibly vague_ sense. The decision of what kind of money we should have should be made on purely utilitarian grounds, but the set of possible solutions to that problem, and how well each solution performs with respect to the global utilitarian calculus, is _very tightly constrained_ by many _facts_ of economics and sociology.[ref]For example, fiat money lets central banks exert greater control over the money supply, but can suffer disastrous [hyperinflation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation) under the wrong conditions.[/ref]
+So too with gender. "Utilitarian grounds" does _not_ mean, "I and some other people have an [unconstrained utopian vision](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=A_Conflict_of_Visions&oldid=915640693#The_unconstrained_vision), and we'll be _very_ dysphoric if you don't implement it, so the global utilitarian calculus says you should obey us." To be sure, your dysphoria is _a_ cost under the global utilitarian calculus—but it's just one of _many_ possible costs and benefits in a complex system. If someone _actually_ wants to do a careful economically and sociologically-informed analysis of how a "fully consensual gender" regime could actually be implemented in real life,[ref]Although speaking of "real life", I happily concede that the social-engineering problem of fully consensual gender is _much_ easier in online communities, where pesky expensive-to-change secondary sex characteristics are hidden behind the fog of net. In other words, [on the internet, nobody knows](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog) you're a [G.I.R.L.](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GIRL).[/ref] and what impact it would have in terms of QALYs, that would be really interesting to read!
-The question remains: how dumb do you think we are?
+Until then, the question remains: how dumb do you think we are?!
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