And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world: in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
-But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
+But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
Even if many usages of words like _woman_ can and should be interpreted in a trans-inclusive sense, it's important that it also be possible to sometimes use the words in a trans-exclusive sense in those cases where the distributions of trans people and cis people of a given "gender" differ significantly for the variables of interest. The point is not to be mean to trans women (who are a huge fraction of my and _The Unit of Caring_ author's friends); the point is that it should be socially acceptable to _describe reality using words_.
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 blessed 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—
+I don't doubt that the inhabitants of some future world of Total Morphological Freedom won't use the same concepts to describe their blessed 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://web.archive.org/web/20200210091741/https://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://web.archive.org/web/20200617220922/https://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>
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff