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 the first of three objections 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 as her first objection 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.
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 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_.
+
+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." (!)
+
+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.
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anisogamy) [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.
And 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 my map is not the territory: it doesn't mean some future sufficiently-advanced neuroscience won't be able to say what the difference means about female and male minds, and some sufficiently advanced evolutionary psychology, under what selection pressures it evolved.
-_Speaking_ future advances in knowledge, the author continues to her second objection—
+_Speaking_ of future advances in knowledge, the author continues to her second objection—
> 2) Someday people are just going to be able to generate the exact physical body they want to inhabit. At that point, "biological" anything isn't going to apply.
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 [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 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—
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
> 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 [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 everyone is a woman or no one is.
+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 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 hesistate 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 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 hesistate 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".
_If_ psychological sex differences aren't real, then there aren't any: _ex hypothesi_, the physiological differences between females and males are the only thing for the word _woman_ to attach to, and _ex hypothesi_, we know how to fix those.
-Alternatively, _if_ psychological sex differences _are_ a thing, _and_ transness is a brain intersex condition such that pre-transition trans women are _already_ psychologically female, then again, there aren't any, _ex hypothesi_ _&c._
+Alternatively, _if_ psychological sex differences _are_ a thing, _and_ transness is a brain intersex condition such that pre-transition trans women are _already_ psychologically female, then again, there aren't any: _ex hypothesi_ _&c._
+
+However, _if_ we should be so unlucky to live in a world in which psychological sex differences _are_ a thing _and_ most trans women are motivated to transition by [some _other_ reason](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) than already having female minds, then we face some subtleties: if our thought-experimental perfect transition tech doesn't edit minds, then we end up with a bunch of female-bodied people with a distribution of psychologies that isn't just not-identical to that of natal females, but is actually coming out of the _male_ distribution. Should such people be called women? Honestly, I lean towards _Yes_, but I can at least _see the argument_ of someone who prefered not to use the word that way.
+
+Wrapping up—
+
+> 3) What does this definition of 'woman' get you?
+
+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 get pregnant sometimes, but cis men and trans women never do.
-_However_, if we should be so unlucky to live in a world where psychological sex differences _are_ a thing _and_ most trans women are motivated to transition by some _other_ reason than already having female minds, then we have some nontrivial difficulties.
+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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff