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 terms of discourse have been [systematically engineered 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 "uterus-havers" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hystorectomy) if that's what you _really mean_. I think 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.
+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 hystorectomy) if that's what you _really mean_. I think 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.
Kind or not, morally justified or not, voluntary or not, sexual dimorphism is _actually a real thing_. Studying the pages of _Gray's Anatomy_—[or _Wikipedia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology) if you're on a budget—you can absorb all sorts of detailed, _specific_ knowledge of the differences between female and male humans, from the obvious (sex organs, vocal pitch, height, muscle mass, body hair) to the less-obvious-but-well-known (chromosomes, hormones, pelvis shape) to the comparatively obscure (blood pressure! lymphocyte concentrations! gray-matter-to-white-matter ratios in the brain!). Nor is this surprising from a theoretical standpoint, where we have theories explaining [mechanisms by which](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection) sexual dimorphism can evolve and [what kinds of differences](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parental_investment&oldid=832276512#Trivers'_parental_investment_theory) it produces in different species.
-If—like me—you're the kind of person who is not necessarily _happy_ about sexual dimorphism, you can always deliberately define your categories in order to minimize it: if there's a large sex difference in some observable measurement, just say you _don't care_ about predicting that particular measurement. But people who have _other_ concerns than "minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism" (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular _sense_ of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing. Being limited to just saying "uterus-havers" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just constructions turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the other aspects in which women statistically have things in common, including things that are hard to articulate or measure, and things that may not even be currently _known_. (_I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_, but the map is not the territory: my _ignorance_
+If—like me—you're the kind of person who is not necessarily _happy_ about sexual dimorphism, you can always deliberately define your categories in order to minimize it: if there's a large sex difference in some observable measurement, just say you _don't care_ about predicting that particular measurement.
+
+But people who have _other_ concerns than minimizing Blue Tribe people's quasi-religious discomfort with sexual dimorphism (it's my former quasi-religion, too, so I'm allowed to make fun of us) might want a common word—or even just a particular _sense_ of a common word—to describe the world they see, in which sex is a real thing worth noticing. Being limited to just saying "people with uteruses" when the topic of conversation happens to be childbearing (or whatever the approved socially-just construction turns out to be) is not a suitable replacement (per Alicorn's maxim) when the speaker wants to refer to all the other dimensions along which women statistically have things in common. Including things that are hard to articulate or measure. Including things that may not even be currently _known_. _I_ certainly don't know what differences in gray-to-white brain matter ratios _mean_ psychologically, but that's a fact
> If your definition of a 'woman' is one where trans people will be their preferred gender once the tech catches up, then I think you should probably reflect on what actually changes about anyone's lived experience on that magic day when our cyborgs hit your threshold. And if it isn't, then you're stuck asserting that if a woman is cell-for-cell identical to me then she still might not be a 'biological woman'. That's a sign that this isn't actually about biology.
-I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorities 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).)
+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).)
-While the Sorities paradox is certainly an instructive philosophical exercise, 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 the argument isn't _really_ about the amount of sand in a location.
+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 the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you bought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesistate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
+http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/04/04/adult-neurogenesis-a-pointed-review/
-replacement scan of "There's a word for it" notebook pages
+put (partial?) post slug back in footnotes (needed to disambiguate on multi-post pages)
bigger click-target pagination links
restrict "fiction" to "longform" (not dialogues) (I made the opposite call at some point, and I think I want to reverse it)
What's going on with caching behavior??
Atom vs. RSS proper??
maybe switch back to absolute links?? (copy-paste broke all self-links when Bailey copy-paste shared to SEXNET; but it looks like many browsers/applications silently correct that)
line at bottom of image links??
-individual post history links http://jessicastringham.net/2016/12/12/github.html
+individual post history links http://jessicastringham.net/2016/12/12/github.html (only when there's post-publication history)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff