* a post about how sex concepts represent _both_ categorical differences _and_ the conjunction of statistical differences of various effect sizes, such that if you try to unpin the word from the categorical differences, you end up (as per the usual gender-critical complaint) defining gender in terms of stereotypes because there's nothing _left_ for the word to attach to (working title: "Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes")
* a post about how gender identity ideology is actually _not_ very compatible with the traditional liberal impulse to make gender less of a big deal, because there's a huge difference between omitting category information that's not relevant, _vs._ letting people choose their category-membership (working title: "Elision _vs_. Choice")
* a steelperson of the "assigned at birth" terminology (working title: "'Assigned at Birth' Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)")
- * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) where AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
+ * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) whether AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
* a post about the motivation for positing peseudobisexuality or meta-attraction as part of the two-type taxonomy of MtF: it may _sound_ like a suspicious _ad hoc_ patch to save the theory from falsification by bi trans women, but it's actually needed to explain the commonality of (a) AGP males expressing attraction to men _only while in "girl mode" themselves_, and (b) self-reports of sexual orientation changing post-transition in trans women who weren't androphilic _before_
* (a) is suspicious is because "bi + AGP, independently" doesn't explain why the interest would be dependent on one's _own_ presentation; (b) is suspicious is because everything else we know about sexual orientation in males (but [not females](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf)) makes it look awfully _stable_. (Conversion therapy doesn't work; criminally convicted pedophiles still show genital response to child stimuli despite the huge incentives to conceal/repress it; [correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) makes it look like a [prenatal organizational effect, rather than an activational effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis) that would respond to HRT as an adult.)
* Maybe these two bullet points suffice and I don't need to pad it out into a whole post?
* a critique of the implicit [presentism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)) in Holden Karnofsky's [_Cold Takes_](https://www.cold-takes.com/) blog
- * For a blog that [aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old](https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/), there's just something very _off_ about proclaiming with a straight face that ["one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current era, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is [about sixty years old](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism).
+ * For a blog that [aspires to see the world as if you were a billion years old](https://www.cold-takes.com/olden-the-imaginary-billion-year-old-version-of-me/), there's just something very _off_ about proclaiming with a straight face that ["one of our goals as a society should be to fight things—from sexism to disease—that have afflicted us for most of our history"](https://www.cold-takes.com/hunter-gatherer-gender-relations-seem-bad/). Not that I'm pro-sexism—I grew up in the current year, too—but I think a little bit of self-awareness is in order about how our ancestors had a word for "disease" in their own language and knew why it was bad, whereas our concept of "sexism" is [about sixty years old](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sexism).
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff