Tags: discourse, transhumanism, bullet-biting
Status: draft
-> _There's a land that I see
-> Where the children are free
-> And I say it ain't far
-> To this land from where we are_
->
-> —"Free To Be ... You and Me"
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> If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to _make it so_, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ.
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> —[Greg Cochran](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/)
Secondly, not only does the nature _vs._ nurture dichotomy fail to hold up to basic scrutiny (the question has been compared to asking whether the area of a rectangle is caused more by its length or its width), it also isn't even adequate to the inferential work we tend to expect of it: [not everything biological is immuatable, and not everything social is easy to change.](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/) (Consider the case of [spelling reform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform): no one would suggest that the myriad quirks of English orthography are _genetically_ determined, and yet the entirely social difficulties of getting everyone to coordinate on more logical spellings seem insurmountable.)
-Because of these epistemological errors, adherents of the beautiful moral ideal
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-that may put us at a competitive disadvantage to our ideological enemies
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-I _want_ to believe that sex differences in personality and interests are small-to-nonexistent. I _want_ to believe that trans women are women.
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-out of the three women present—
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-(or four if you believe in gender identities, because on that worldview, I'm obviously a trans woman in denial)
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-—they're _all_ trans. (And none of them pass.)
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-[...]
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-Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision).
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-_I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is—
+Maybe [Good Is Dumb](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb) doesn't _have_ to be [Truth in Television](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TruthInTelevision). _I want to make the stupid dream real._ But to _get_ to the good world—whatever you think that is—
... you're going to have to bootstrap from _today's_, unremediated, genderspace. Which requires _understanding_ it first.
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-OUTLINE OF POINTS TO HIT—
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- * ✓ beautiful moral idea of equality
- * ✓ —makes people believe that group differences are superficial/fake/social
- * make sure to explicitly explain _why_ this is appealing
- * ✓ but this is crazy because:
- * ✓ is does not imply ought
- * people feel the need to accept the naturalistic fallacy _inference_,
- but deny the antecedent and perform _modus tollens_—I think it's more
- tenable to reject the conditional
- * ✓ social vs. biological isn't even the axis you care about
- * but, we also assume things are biological/fixed when that's convenient for
- "minority" things we want to protect (sexual orientation, gender identity)
- * requiring crazy beliefs in order to be a good person is a drain, a drag, and
- a tax on sanity
- * _be specific_ about what's gerrymandered and wrong about "sex diffs
- real/gender identity not"