1 Title: I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
4 Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
7 > With the Hopes that our World is built on
8 > They were utterly out of touch,
9 > They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
10 > They denied she identified as Dutch;
11 > They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
12 > They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
13 > So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
14 > Who promised these beautiful things.
16 > —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
18 This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
20 Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
24 After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion—
26 > Saotome-Westlake argues for the existence of a third definition, based on psychology. He argues that (some) trans people are psychologically different from cisgender members of their identified genders [...] Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.
30 > So by Saotome-Westlake's argument, any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all.
32 > By extension, lesbians are not women.
34 I would like to note that my post does anticipate the "by that argument, lesbians aren't women" _ad absurdum_ objection. [I wrote](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-different-types-of-women-objection):
36 > To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women?
38 > What makes this difficult is that—_conditional_ on the two-types hypothesis and specifically gender dysphoria in non-exclusively-androphilic biological males being mostly not an intersex condition—most trans women aren't just not part of the female cluster in configuration space; they're specifically part of _male_ cluster along most dimensions, which people _already_ have a concept for. [...] [T]he concepts of _women_-as-defined-by-biological-sex, _women_-as-defined-by-self-identity, and _women_-as-defined-by-passing are picking out different (though of course mostly overlapping) regions of the configuration space, which has inescapable logical [consequences](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx/categorizing_has_consequences/) on the kinds of inferences that can be made using each concept.
40 If that wasn't sufficiently clear, perhaps I have _failed as a writer_, and I can only beg that Ozy and our joint readership permit me the chance to try again.
42 I don't want to _define_ gender based on psychology. ([Definitions are overrated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition), anyway.)[ref]Also, on a personal note, can I remark on how _weird_ and _uncomfortable_ it is that defending psychological sex differences has now apparently become my thing? I'm an individualist/egalitarian androgyny fan, not a [complementarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism); I [_don't want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) women and men to have incommensurable souls. But faced with an intellectual climate where brilliant, kind, otherwise-sane people seem to feel morally obligated to _destroy our collective ability to reason about sex using natural language_, I feel morally obligated to not let them get away with it. Not for love of the territory in its current state, but for the love of that property of maps that _reflect_ the territory.[/ref] I do think that biological sex is almost as close as you can get to being a _natural category_[ref]The [chemical elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements) would be an example of an even more robustly natural category. Atoms with more protons than nitrogen but fewer than oxygen _do not exist_, and thus there is no analogue in chemistry to the "Well, what about intersex conditions?" [challenge](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Derailment) to the concept of sex or the "Well, what about [ring species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)?" challenge to the concept of species.[/ref] in something like the following sense. If we imagine a distribution of artificial intelligences studying life on Earth and humans in particular, but lacking any preconceived concept of _sex_,[ref]It would be more traditional to put aliens rather than AIs in the observer role of this genre of thought experiment, but evolved aliens probably _would_ already know about sex![/ref] different AIs would each invent [different concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XeHYXXTGRuDrhk5XL/unnatural-categories) in order to model the aspects of reality relevant to their own individual values, but most of them would be forced to reinvent the category of _sex_ sooner or later, because sex category membership [makes predictions about _many_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans) different [dimensions of observation](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/the-cluster-structure-of-genderspace/)—although some with much larger [or smaller](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-606581.pdf) effect sizes than others—at least _some_ of which are likely to be relevant to the interests of any particular AI that's paying any attention to animal life at _all_.
44 [TODO: rephrase along the lines of, there might be situation where you might be quantitatively less surprised to see trans women behave in a way that is more common in males, than to see the same behavior in cis women, even if behavior never defines anyone's sex, because sex categories are attributed based on genetalia, secondary sex characteristics, &c.]
46 That categories are clusters in a _high-dimensional_ space is relevant because of a statistical phenomenon perhaps most famously elucidated in [A. W. F. Edwards's critique of Richard Lewontin's critique of the concept of _race_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy): groups that overlap along any _one_ particular measurement might be much more clearly distinguishable when you look at the conjunction of many different measurements.
48 [TODO: the standard diagram]
50 [I use the "bimodal multivariate distribution" frame a lot—it's even in the URL—but it's actually worse: sex-specific adaptations—functional adaptations and not just shifted distributions—are a thing ]
52 only two types of gametes
54 [if you have to do definitions, you go by physiology, because that's the part that's truly almost-completely-binary]
56 When discussing whether a proposed recreational basketball association[ref]I'm somewhat reluctant to choose a sports example, because sporting is such a comparatively small and unimportant part of life—at least from the perspective of non-athletes—but it's a good place to start pedagogically, because merely physical sex differences are easy to measure and relatively uncontroversial, and it's important to avoid the distraction of unnecessarily contentious issues in the presentation of a topic that's already so prone to [motivated misunderstandings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).[/ref] should be sex-segregated or not, one fact that might come up during the discussion is that the sex difference in human height has a magnitude of Cohen's _d_≈1.7, which is relevant because it means that insofar as selecting for good basketball players implies some degree of selection for tall people, it also implies some degree of selection for men, which would detract from the goal of creating an atmosphere where people are socially rewarded for excelling at the [high challenge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge) of their chosen sport rather than for the (preëxisting, uninteresting, mostly immutable[ref]Given current technology.[/ref]) brute fact of their sex.
58 [TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world where you do care about sports]
60 So is the discussant who brings up height thereby claiming that _tall women aren't actually women_?
62 Well, no. That would be stupid. Tall women might be more male-typical than female-typical _in the one particular aspect of their height_—and to some extent correlated variables like "weight"—but they are going to be more female-typical than male-typical in the _conjunction_ of all the _other_ measurements that are predicted from or used to assign sex categorizations—some of which measurements might _also_ be relevant to basketball.
64 Of course, just because we plausibly want to separate our basketball league into divisions in the service of creating atmospheres of fair competition, sportsmanship, high challenge, _&c._, doesn't mean we have to do it by _sex_. If height were the only relevant major criterion,[ref]Which probably isn't going to be the case for basketball: consider that the sex difference in muscle mass is _d_≈2.6.[/ref] we would want height classes, just as boxers have [weight classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weight_class_(boxing)).[ref]Although it's worth noting that boxing weight classes are divisions _within_ an already otherwise single-sex competition.[/ref]
66 Similar considerations apply to other social groups or events where some people think sex might be a relevant criterion of inclusion or exclusion. Ozy enumerates some ways in which they and our mutual friend, the author of the (again, highly recommended!) blog [_The Unit of Caring_](https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/), would be a poor fit for declared women-only social events. Ozy writes:
68 > The actual category they should be using is not "cis women." The actual category they should be using is "people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for."
70 _In all philosophical strictness_, I think I agree. (And I wouldn't want to attend a men-only event.)[ref]But mostly for ideological and gender-dysphoria-related reasons, rather than because I _obviously wouldn't belong_. I've historically been inclined to cultivate a _self-image_ of being "not like the other guys", but self-images [aren't necessarily veridical](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). If my self-perceived unmasculinity isn't reflected in other people's assessments of my unaffected personality and social behavior, it would be somewhat unreflective of me to protest, "But _I'm_ not gender-conforming—I have a _ponytail!_"[/ref] Outside of a few _relatively_ narrow domains of life (medicine, intercourse, family planning), I find it hard to think of good reasons to care about sex _per se_, as opposed to characteristics which might correlate with sex at some nonzero but certainly-not-so-huge-as-to-be-effectively-binary effect size. Ozy and me and Scott Alexander are all in agreement that categories are in the map, not the territory. There aren't ontologically-fundamental <span style="font-family: monospace;"><sex value="F"/></span> XML tags attached to people's souls—and moreover, we wouldn't have any reason to care if there _were_.
72 The problem is that people don't always _have_ the detailed individual information that they would need to act in all philosophical strictness, at least not in an explicit, communicable form. If you're having a private get-together with some your friends who you know very well, you can pick and choose who to invite based on your individual knowledge of each individual, and you don't need to communicate (much less justify) your decision criteria to anyone else. If you don't like Brian, you can just not-invite-Brian, even if you're bad at introspection and don't even _know for yourself_ why you don't like Brian.
74 In contrast, imagine telling the organizer of your local Women-in-Your-Favorite-Hobby meetup group, "The actual category you should be using is not _women_ in our-favorite-hobby. The actual category you should be using is, 'people who would contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for.'"
76 "Okay," she says. "So, what should we call the group now?"
78 You think for a few moments. "What about 'non-exclusively-gynephilic people in our-favorite-hobby who are not less than one standard deviation below the population mean in the Agreeableness and Neuroticism factors of the Big Five personality model'?"
80 I can think of a few criticisms of this proposal.
82 First of all, there's a lot of room for disagreement over the operationalization of "people who would contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for" in terms of some function of individual psychological traits that would exclude some women and include some men.
84 I, the author of this blog post, went with "not-exclusively-gynephilic" because I'm imagining that part of the appeal of women-only spaces is not having to deal with people who might want to hit on you, but that excluding bisexual women would go too far; and I went with "more than −1σ in Agreeableness and Neuroticism" because the Big Five seems to be the most popular personality model in the study of psychology, and Agreeableness and Neuroticism are the dimensions of that model with the largest sex differences, at _d_≈0.5 and _d_≈0.4, respectively[ref][Weisberg _et al_](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/)[/ref].
86 [TODO: footnote calculation of how many women and men this would exclude]
88 [TODO: address that "non-exclusively-androphilic" does exclude lesbians]
92 But that was just my _guess_ at how to apply reductionism to describe the atmosphere of women-only spaces using lower-level criteria—and it was probably a _bad_ guess. (For one thing, [TODO: lesbians]) A woman who benefits from women-only spaces and knows more about psychology than me might say something different, and we should listen to _her_, not me. The "more than −1σ in both of these two dimensions" threshold was completely arbitrary; maybe she would prefer some other function. Maybe she [doesn't like the Big Five model](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Five_personality_traits&oldid=868909816#Critique). Maybe (in fact, almost certainly) multiple such women wouldn't _agree_ on the exact criteria.
94 But even if such a committee of female psychologists _could_ agree on such criteria, I think most people would say that reorganizing the group as the "not-exclusively-androphilic people in our-favorite-hobby whose results on this-and-such personality battery match the following 1 KiB description ..." is not a particularly very appealing proposal.
96 It would seem that in a world where psychological traits can't be cheaply, precisely, and verifiably measured, discrimination on the basis of [easily-observable traits that happen correlate with harder-to-measure traits that we actually care about](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) turns out to be a practical bright-line Schelling point for people to coordinate around.
98 _Not_ an infinitely-thin, infinitely-bright line,[ref]As it is said: what about masculine women and feminine men (whose share of the population depends on where you set your sex-atypicality thresholds)? What about trans people (0.3%–[TODO] of the population, depending on how you define your categories and whose statistics you trust)? What about people with [5α-Reductase deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency) or any of a dozen other specific intersex conditions?[/ref] but a line thin _enough_ and bright _enough_ that the forces of social evolution have coughed up some institutions and other cultural practices that take the line into account for _functional_ reasons.
100 My goal in writing about this is certainly not to argue for more sexism—I'm looking forward to the postgender lesbian transhumanist future of Total Morphological Freedom as much as anyone else. (I already have my new name and outfits picked out!) If we can invent _new_ institutions and practices that serve more people more effectively, we should _do it_. But because I am a rationalist, because I cannot _unsee_ the cold, cisheteronormative logic of [Chesterson's fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence), I have to speak out when people are using clever word games to obfuscate the function of the existing fences.
102 In response to the argument that women's restrooms function as safe havens that women can retreat to and exclude scary or threatening men from, Ozy writes:
104 > I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is "people who look like the vast majority of street harassers" versus "people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers." The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man's psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men's room.
106 It has to do with _probabilistic predictions about_ psychology in a world where [male violence against females is _older than humanity itself_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sexual_coercion&oldid=866576906), and with [defensible Schelling points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes).
108 Certainly _most_ men are nice, civilized people who don't harrass women—and occasional Hemsworthlike, lumberjack-bearded androphilic trans men with a feminine personalities, present even less of a threat. But when designing the social norms for a safe space for the modal cis woman, false positives (including someone who shouldn't be included) are probably going to be worse than false negatives (excluding someone who shouldn't be). If "Does this person look male?" is _easier to assess_ than "Does this person-of-whatever-sex look like a potential threat to my safety, comfort, and privacy?"—and possibly more importantly, is easier for third parties to _agree on_ when third parties are called in to enforce the rules—then the rule ends up being "no men" (or more precisely, "no male-looking people", with corresponding consequences for trans men and non-passing trans women), because "no suspicious-looking people" is nearly impossible to enforce in a non-arbitrary way.
110 Depending on your values, this may not be the best rule! This is (despite everything) not a politics blog. I should hope to help clearly identify the trade-offs inherent in the objective reality of a situation, rather than champion one trade or the other; it's not for me to decide what kind of spaces people should demand, or what false-positive and false-negative rates they should accept.
112 [TODO: transition sentence (no pun intended)]
114 When the _Times_ of London filed some freedom-of-information act requests, they found that [almost 90% of harrassment/assault/voyeurism incidents in changing rooms took place in the minority of unisex facilities](https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger-8lwbp8kgk).
116 [TODO: explicitly acknowledge that I'm not trying to shift goalposts; locker rooms are different from bathrooms, everyone deserves to pee]
120 > Similarly, early-transition trans women can be placed into the former category. In our culture, it is generally very stigmatized for men to wear dresses, skirts, makeup, and other signifiers of womanhood. In particular, catcallers and sexist harassers essentially never do: if you're a catcaller or a sexist harasser, it is probably because you are invested in a particular style of masculinity that is completely incompatible with wearing a skirt. Therefore, allowing all dress-wearing people to use the women's bathroom has minimal risk of allowing catcallers in. In the event that men wearing dresses and makeup is completely destigmatized to the point that even sexist assholes do so, I am happy to reexamine this statement.
122 Although I lack relevant lived experience, I suspect this is _wildly_ overestimating the _ideological_ component of women's discomfort around men. I agree that certain very overt kinds of harrassment (the kind that involves yelling slurs or obcenities) can be attributed to sexist subcultures of _machismo_ and toxic masculinity. Unfortunately, I fear the [threat model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model) is a little bit subtler and more expansive than that.
124 [TODO: expand on the expanded threat model, marginalism]
126 Maybe you want to bite that bullet. But you should at least _acknowledge_ the existence of the bullet, once someone points it out. And if you want to call yourself a rationalist, maybe try to proactively look for the bullet
130 I think there's a more general lesson underlying these kinds of discussions. If you want to get through life without _verbally_ acknowledging the concept of biological sex, then you _can_ get away with it.
132 If the object of discussion is a large, undeniable, binary sex difference, you can always say, "Oh, that's a mere policy question that can be handled on the basis of more specific details of that particular use-case." So, for example, we can agree with people with prostates should get prostate cancer screenings as they get older, without necessarily reifying that category of people as 'men' or 'males'.
134 And if the object of discussion is a small, statistical sex difference, you can always point out (correctly! importantly!), "Some cis people of that gender are like that, too!"
136 Does the fact that it's possible to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex imply that the corresponding mental _representation_ of the concept of 'sex' is of little practical use? I don't think so, and I've tried, within the limits of my time and my writing ability, to explain why. But if some readers still aren't convinced—well, maybe I can live with that.
138 "Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."
140 [TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]
144 Finally, Ozy makes an analogy between social gender and money. What constitutes money in a given social context is determined by collective agreement: money is whatever you can reliably expect everyone else to accept as payment. This isn't a circular definition (in the way that "money is whatever we agree is money" would be uninformative to an alien who didn't already have a referent for the word _money_), and people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
146 I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
148 Because of these constraints, I don't think the money/social-gender analogy can do the work Ozy seems to expect of it. They write:
150 > Similarly, "you're a woman if you identify as a woman!" is not a definition of womanhood. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says "I would like to be put in the 'woman' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person's social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.
152 Following the money analogy, we could imagine someone arguing that our money should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says, "I would like this to be put in the 'dollar' category now," you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied ... and it's not easy to imagine how it _could_ be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a banana and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 bill' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that?
154 Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Perhaps we should imagine someone taking Canadian $5 bills, crossing out "Canada", drawing a beard on Wilfrid Laurier, and saying "I'd like [this](/images/american_5_dollar_note.png) to be considered an American $5 bill." (Exchange rate at time of writing: 1 Canadian dollar = 0.76 U.S. dollars.) Then imagine that a social norm catches on within a certain subset of Society that it's _incredibly rude_ to question someone who says they're giving you American money, but that this standard hasn't spread to the U.S. government and financial system.
156 Economists have a name for this kind of situation. [Gresham's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law): bad money drives out good. In contexts where custom requires that defaced Canadian dollars be regarded as equivalent to U.S. dollars, maybe everyone will smile and pretend not to notice the difference.
158 _They will be lying_. In marketplaces governed by "trans American dollars _are_ American dollars" social norms, smart buyers will prefer to buy with defaced Canadian dollars, and smart sellers will try to find plausibly-deniable excuses to not accept them ("That'll be $5." "Here you go! A completely normal, definitely non-suspicious American $5 bill!" "_Ooh_, you know what, actually we _just_ sold out"), because everyone knows that when it comes time to interact with the larger banking system, the two types of dollars won't be regarded as being of equal value. Never doubting the value of other people's currency may be basic human decency, but if so, the market [interprets basic human decency as damage and routes around it](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore).
160 Similarly, there seem to be increasingly large subsets of Society in which it's _incredibly rude_ to question someone's stated gender. But even if everyone _says_ "Trans women are women" and uses the right pronouns solely on the basis of self-reported self-identity with no questions asked and no one batting an eye, it's not clear that this constitutes successfully entering a "fully consensual gender" regime insofar as people following their own self-interest are likely to systematically make _decisions_ that treat non-well-passing trans women as if they were something more like men, even if no one would dream of being so rude as to _admit out loud_ that that's what they're doing.
162 And how are you going to stop them? Every freedom-to implies the lack of a freedom-from somewhere else, and _vice versa_: as the cliché goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. "Fully consensual gender" _sounds_ like a good idea when you _phrase_ it like that: what kind of monster could possibly be against consent, or for non-consent?
164 But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
166 Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately modeled as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would _mean_ to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.
168 Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression![/ref] [ref]Friend of the blog Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
170 Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe father children with them, _&c._. [TODO: footnote about how this is predicted by evopsych]
172 If one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT," I think he would reply "How _dumb_ do you think I am?" This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—a lot of those same men would be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.
174 I happily concede that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it feasible. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being immediately destroyed by normal people who have eyes and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking games the way that readers of this blog do?
176 It's possible that I'm underestimating what feats of social-engineering are possible. We could imagine
178 [TODO: it's possible that I'm underestimating the social-engineering feats that might be possible—it's kind of surprising that fiat money equilibria aren't also destroyed by a "How dumb do you think we are?" faction—but fiat money equilibria evolved over a long time for complicated reasons; you need more of an actual argument than "maybe things would be better"]
180 [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/ !!]
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