check in

The history of the categories-notes file is probably going to be hideous, with
all this copy-pasting back and forth as I rework the material—but we trust that
the historians are prepared to live with this; our primary concern in these
dying weeks of my sabbatical is cutting through to a final draft to serve as an
introduction to The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought for Slate Star
Codex readers.

diff --git a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
index d89f8f9..1c4a08c 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
+++ b/content/drafts/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md
@@ -108,7 +108,7 @@ What I can say is that _whatever_ the right thing to do is, we stand a better ch
 
 -----
 
-Alexander ends his post by citing, as a charming example of the power of kindness, the case of Joshua Norton, a man who proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, whose claims to power were widely humored by local citizens.
+Alexander ends his post by citing, as a charming example of the power of kindness the case of [Joshua Norton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton), a man who proclaimed himself Emperor Norton I of the United States and Protector of Mexico, whose claims to power were widely humored by local citizens.
 
 Norton's story is certainly _entertaining to read about_ a hundred and forty years after the fact. But before endorsing it as a model of humane behavior, I think it's worth dwelling on what it would be like to live through, not just read about as a historical curiosity.
 
@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ What if one of your friends had a psychotic break and decided that they were Emp
 
 What if it were _you_?
 
-It was me, once. I had a couple [psychotic](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [episodes](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) last year, including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought that I had been appointed Gender Czar of this equivalence class of instances of Earth across the multiverse, that I was objectively one of the seven most important people in the world with a key role to play in the [intelligence explosion](TODO: linky), 
+It was me, once. I had a couple [psychotic](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [episodes](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) last year, including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought that I had been appointed Gender Czar of this equivalence class of instances of Earth across the multiverse, that I was objectively one of the seven most important people in the world with a key role to play in the [intelligence explosion](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Intelligence_explosion).
 
 [...]
 
@@ -134,7 +134,7 @@ He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry. He emits long, shuddering sobs
 
 You wait many minutes for him to calm down.
 
-"It's not wrong, is it?" he eventually says. "To _want_ to rule, to _want_ to be Emperor?"
+"It's not wrong, is it?" he eventually says. "To want to rule, to _want_ to be Emperor?"
 
 "No," you say, "it's not wrong to want it."
 

diff --git a/notes/categories-notes.md b/notes/categories-notes.md
index 8dc38ba..8de3fe2 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/categories-notes.md
+++ b/notes/categories-notes.md
@@ -1,3 +1,88 @@
+REMAINING SEGMENTS TO FILL—
+
+* explain taxonomy
+* the trouble with stickers
+* Norton story gaps
+
+
+OUTLINE OF TAIL END—
+
+ * dysphoria could me more than one thing
+ * in fact, it is more than one thing, per BBL
+    * and you can believe this even if you think the AGP story is wrong, I'm
+      depending on the weaker claim that the non-exclusively-androphilic
+      cluster is not an intersex condition: they start out male-typical
+    * passing is _hard_
+    * incl. my quip about "men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to
+      become _that_"
+    * explicitly address the "Puerto Rican women don't have exactly the same
+      distribution as women as a whole, but they're still women" argument
+      (distribution of MtTs isn't just different from women as a whole, it's
+      actually part of the _male_ cluster, which people already have a concept
+      for)
+     * link "Blegg Mode" somewhere
+
+ * "Portland"-like places have lots of trans women, and this has consequences for actual women—
+   * secret clothing swaps
+   * bathrooms
+   * sports, prisons, medicine
+   * weird social taboos, stickers
+   * no matter what policy decision you ultimately decide on, you need to be
+     honest about the trade-offs, rather than appealing to the idiot sophistry
+     of "Trans women are women, by definition"
+   * notice that re race, we _do_ say "don't care about costs to bigots"
+ * Emperor Norton 
+
+
+If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, _your transition has failed_.
+
+In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having done your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
+
+All you can do is force them to lie.
+
+This is not rationality. This is not even kindness. 
+
+"Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should."
+
+--
+
+As a transhumanist as and as an individualist, I want to protect people's freedom to modify their body and social presentation, which _implies_ the right to transition. For the same reasons, I want to protect freedom of association, which _implies_ the right to have sex-segregated spaces that are actually segregated by biological sex if there exists demand that kind of space.
+
+People should get what they want. We should have social norms that help people get what they want. I don't _know_ what the optimal social norms around transitioning are. 
+
+
+ * link Ozy on "We don't have a gender gap, we have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap"
+ * call out the mendacity of "assigned at birth" language
+ * more justified segregation examples: sports (link "Questions Such As ..."), prison
+ * section about how this a question of what social norms we want to negotiate
+
+------
+
+[...]
+
+the _idiot sophistry_ of "Women are people who identify as women, _by definition_, and definitions can't be wrong, except if you use another definition, you're hurting people!—look, even Scott Alexander says so!"
+
+-----
+
+[cut for flow from an earlier draft, partially salvagable?—]
+
+Is this too absolutist?—effectively equating "trans" with "passing", and even then marked as an [atypical case](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/)? Would it really be so costly to grant an occasional isolated unprincipled exception to our usual category boundaries, for kindness's sake?
+
+Perhaps not—if we could trust that the exception to our normal ways of thinking and speaking would _stay_ isolated. But the goals of the modern transgender movement seem to be somewhat broader in scope. Consider this display at at recent conference of the American Philosophical Association—
+
+![APA pronoun stickers]({filename}/images/apa_pronoun_stickers.jpg)
+
+(photograph by [Lucia A. Schwarz](https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608))
+
+But this isn't how _anyone_ actually thinks about gender! Human brains are good at _noticing patterns_, even if we usually can't articulate exactly how or why. The process by which we notice someone's features (voice, facial structure, whether they have breasts, gendered clothing cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them), categorize them as a _woman_ or _man_, and use that category (and everything else we can infer about the person, using more-detailed, finer-grained categories) to guide our interactions with them, isn't something subject to conscious control.
+
+That is: If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has _failed_. In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
+
+All you can do is force them to lie.
+
+----
+
+
 People should get what they want. We should have social norms that help people get what they want. 
 
 Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important that we 

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 952fb55..aad63d4 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -312,6 +312,8 @@ https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/7iqcaf/told_my_wife_i_want_to_transition/
 
 https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/5axie2/nsfw_im_mtf_i_feel_like_my_body_is_aroused_and/
 
+https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/7vdw5u/arousal_is_really_messing_with_my_head/
+
 Lindsay Shepherd/James Damore shipfic
 
 Brazillian woman moves to Sweeden and cherished egalitarian culture: https://medium.com/@sayhellotovanessa/the-oddities-of-being-an-invisible-woman-8570394caa0d