* something about the horror of a world without ambition or the life of the mind (or specifically, the philosopher–scientist's mind, rather than the activist's)? Binnie (who will always have more readers than me) writes characters don't have any concept of _doing_ anything except drugs and complaining about Society's transphobia.
* Abigail Shrier's _Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters_
* _Damage_ is sensationalist right-wing journalism, rather than the kind of careful, nuanced scholarship of the kind you would expect to be reviewed by such a refined blog as _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_—but damned if the situation on the ground doesn't call more sensationalist right-wing journalism
+ * Shon Faye's _The Transgender Issue_
* Multi-Book Review: Various Sex-Ed Books for Children
* comparing and contrasting mainstream (for now) selections ([_What's the Big Secret? Talk about Sex with Girls and Boys_](https://www.amazon.com/Whats-Big-Secret-Talking-about/dp/0316101834), [_Amazing You! Getting Smart About Your Private Parts_](https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-You-Getting-Smart-Private/dp/0142410586), and [_It's Not the Stork! A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends_](https://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-Stork-Families-Friends/dp/0763633313)), to a genderist alternative ([_Who Are You? The Kid's Guide to Gender Identity_](https://www.amazon.com/Who-Are-You-Gender-Identity/dp/1785927280)) and a Christian alternative ([the _God's Design for Sex_ series](https://www.amazon.com/Full-Set-Design-Revised-Paperback/dp/B00O5DIVTU))
* The ideological books are what you would expect and impossible to parody, but I would be [more comfortable reading the Christian book](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) to a child, because at least it explains the facts ("I have a penis. That makes me a boy like Daddy") in the course of attributing everything to God, whereas _Who Are You?_ is trying to set up [a world where facts aren't a thing](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) ("Babies can't talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies").
* the Christians also believe in beauty and have much more competent illustrations
- * You can also see a propaganda gradient in the mainstream books over time. _What's the Big Secret?_ (1997) acknowledges sex stereotypes as having a grain of truth, but is firm about them not being normative or definitive ("Girls and boys do play in different ways. Sometimes, but not always"), whereas _It's Not the Stork_ (2006) bizarrely tries to rebut psychological-sex-difference claims without even acknowledging what they claims are ("Girls catch fish and worms and bugs!" "So do boys!") and has more racially diverse illustrations.
+ * You can also see a propaganda gradient in the mainstream books over time. _What's the Big Secret?_ (1997) acknowledges sex stereotypes as having a grain of truth, but is firm about them not being normative or definitive ("Girls and boys do play in different ways. Sometimes, but not always"), whereas _It's Not the Stork_ (2006) bizarrely tries to rebut psychological-sex-difference claims without even acknowledging what the claims are ("Girls catch fish and worms and bugs!" "So do boys!") and has more racially diverse illustrations.
New list of more ideas I want to finish—
* 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 condiiton (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).
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