[***] Categorization isn't like this. [maybe make this angrier—talk about a rape victim being force to describe her accuser as male. You might say, "well, if she wanted to describe her accuser as an elephant, that would be factually incorrect", but there's a reason she doesn't do that by bringing up rapists, I might be accused of trying to play Ethnic Tension against trans women, but] [AGPs as a _third gender_, or unfeminine women (who these days are increasingly coming out as AFAB enby) as a _third gender_ is way more tenable than "AGPs are women."] [http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7524] [what about consent of the modelers in addition to consent of the modeled?] "That's not what I meant by the word 'woman' in this context, _and you fucking know it!_" This reply is perhaps quite rude, and not at all in accordance with the precepts of Slate Star charitable discourse norms. But—conditional on the hypothesis that her interlocutor does, in fact, fucking know it—then it _is_ in accordance with the principles of _rationality_. And _that's_ the point. ---------- Unordered scraps— /papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf if the butchest women in the city show up, that would be bad for the atmosphere in a way similar anecodote about the gay guy who showed up at EBNoM > If the Cohen's d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as "large"), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem. [I _wish_ it were _d_=1! [linky](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3251566/)] [Talk about the value of bright lines as resistance to rules-lawyering? And like—agreeing that people are complex and should be treated as individuals rather than rounded off to a category, but biological sex is still allowed to be an _input_ to your modeling function?] [I'm trying to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) the commonsense notion of sex shared by [normal people who haven't been poisoned by ideology](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Mar/smart/), who somehow manage to simultaneously believe that psychological sex differences are socially relevant and that butch lesbians are women.] if it sounds like I'm advocating stereotypes which are morally bad, well, I agree with Ozy that the solution is more categories] make sure to engage with "more categories" KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ [TODO: link to Culturally Bound Gender on "Percentages, Prevalence, and ..."] "The reason characteristics common to men and women, like height or hormone levels, are distributed bimodally and not normally is the impact of the sex binary on them.": https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1065860508232880128 (actually clarifies my thinking) https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/percentages-prevalence-and-why-some-women-are-freaked-out-by-this-whole-locker-room-thing/ Sunday _Times_ found that "Almost 90% of reported sexual assaults, harassment and voyeurism in swimming pool and sports-centre changing rooms happen in unisex facilities, which make up less than half the total." https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger-8lwbp8kgk (Paywalled—can I get library access to the full article?) https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bullshit&oldid=868771273#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle We could imagine an alternate universe designed by a loving God, where the people have the same physical forms as the women and men of our own world, but where rape and sexual harrassment and voyeurism are unknown, and in _that_ world, people with female bodies would have no particular reason to be wary of people with male bodies.[ref]Well, except for that _d_≈2.6 difference in muscle mass should a dispute escalate to physical fighting.[/ref] But in the Darwinian horrorscape of our world, well ... I say, "I'm not sure what 'it's okay to not persue any medical transition options while still not identifying with your asab' is supposed to mean if it doesn't cash out to 'it's okay to enforce social norms preventing other people from admitting out loud that they have correctly noticed your biological sex'": K. replies that it's not clear that "You can change your name" is mostly about enforcing the social norm that other people can't notice your old name https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2018/11/28/sex-revenge-and-the-social-fabric Lewontin's fallacy and brain sex differences: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/14/E1966 Bootstrapping: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/nonbinary-gender/ Imagine a woman telling a man, "This is a space where women are likely to be indisposed and uncomfortable with the presence of a man such as yourself; accordingly, I must ask you to leave." Suppose the man replies, "Oh, you-all don't need to worry, it's not like I'm not some kind of _sexist asshole_", and refuses to budge. Somehow, I don't think this is likely to make the woman then say, "Oh, okay then—come on in!" It's worth considering why. [...] Suppose the man replies, "What do you mean, a man such as myself? I'm a woman, just like you! Surely you don't mean to imply that trans women aren't women?" Oh, maybe the NFL thing actually is relevant insofar as it's being offered in support of "transgender people are also not particularly similar to their assigned genders at birth" > A natural cluster, a group of things highly similar to each other, may have no set of necessary and sufficient properties—no set of characteristics that all group members have, and no non-members have. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace [TODO: do something with an explicit Bayes net, maybe closer to the begining] [TODO: you can change your name, but names are pretty close to being arbitrary tags] [TODO: emphasize multilevel models] But even if it's _possible_ to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex, it's less clear how to avoid reïnventing the corresponding mental _representation_. It's not a _coincidence_ that people with prostates _also_ have penises, _and_ a lot more facial and body hair than people who don't, _and_ [so on and so forth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans). [TODO: more examples] Human brains trying to make sense of the world are probably going to do _something like_ reifying the not-a-coincidence into a "concept", allocating a word for the concept (probably a [short word](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes)), and going on to usefully use the concept and the word to make useful probabilistic inferences in everyday life. If you're the sort of intellectual who likes playing clever definition games, you can go back and forth indefinitely proposing ever-more-obscure edge cases and "gotcha"s. [TODO: kicker paragraph] Say something about female primates defending their kin against male aggression, about males competing to control access to females a male friend of the blog went through a period of dissassociating from his sexuality "As no woman has ever referred to herself as ‘a person with a cervix’, there’s a real danger that misguided deference to trans activists will mean some women end up missing out on medical check-ups specific to their sex.": https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/12/26/the-year-of-trans-tyranny/#.XCNeJ5uEWR8.twitter