This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](TODO: linky) 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/).
-> 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: if you graph, say, how likely cisgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, and how likely transgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, these charts will not look very much like each other at all. Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.
+After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy
-[gut take, not sure where/how it belongs in the post: I have misgivings about this, because I'm not a _fan_ of psychological sexual dimorphism and it feels weird to be painted as a defender of it. But, but—if the difference is still going to _be there_ no matter how I feel about it, then that's _worth noticing_]
+> 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.
+>
+> [...]
+>
+> 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.
+>
+> By extension, lesbians are not women.
-> Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.
-A side note, but—this doesn't actually seem hard to explain. If the ought-to-be-five means MtFs, well, you _can't_ transition MtF and _stay_ in the NFL—HRT is going to kill your performance. Even if you think the effect size of hormones is overhyped, this is a _very_ competitive area, you can't say, "Oh, it only affected performance like ten percent, that's nothing—ten percent is _huge_." This doesn't rule out Jenner-class eggs in the NFL.
-And if it means FtMs, well, people get into football as teenagers: there are going to be structural reasons making that difficult even if gynephilic FtMs _are_ the sort of people who would like to play (difficulty of transitioning _that_ early _and_ being stealthy about it, and difficulty of being accepted as one of the guys if you're not stealthy—let alone NFL/NCAA policy about steroid use, if the matter has even come up, which is probably hasn't)
-> 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.
->
-> By extension, lesbians are not women.
+So, [definitions are overrated](https://www.readthesequences.com/Arguing-By-Definition). It's not that
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+[gut take, not sure where/how it belongs in the post: I have misgivings about this, because I'm not a _fan_ of psychological sexual dimorphism and it feels weird to be painted as a defender of it. But, but—if the difference is still going to _be there_ no matter how I feel about it, then that's _worth noticing_]
+
-I do want to note that my post does (briefly) anticipate the "by that argument, lesbians aren't women" _ad absurdum_ objection. (See the few paragraphs [starting with](TODO: hash-fragment linky), "To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women".)
+
+I do want to note that my post does (briefly) anticipate the "by that argument, lesbians aren't women" _ad absurdum_ objection. (See the few paragraphs [starting with](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/#anchor-different-types-of-women-objection), "To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women [...]".)
[...]
-> 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.
+> 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! link the research on multivariate differences and how it might actually be d=2.7]
[The money argument is a good place to start—I agree that money and gender are both "social constructs" in a relevant and sane sense—but there are constraints as to what social constructs are _stable_: cigarettes emerge as prison currency because they _function_ as a store of value. There's a big space of possible currencies, but some of them will be "interpreted as damage and routed around". 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."]
[Address the "our social genders should be fully consensual"—what about consent of the modelers in addition to consent of the modeled?]
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+https://www.wheresgeorge.com/
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+Rachel McKinnon documents say she's a woman https://archive.is/PWmOP https://twitter.com/rachelvmckinnon/status/1053633641161678848
+Rachel McKinnon on her opponents making gender-identity https://archive.is/mmhwU
+
+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
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+
+we can expect sex to be fully consensual, because there's a fallback position of no sex if one party doesn't consent:
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+
+-----
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+I. Ozy says that my argument implies that lesbians aren't women
+ Reply: I didn't want to _define_ gender on psychology; rather, sexual dimorphism is actually real and psychology is _one_ of the implicated dimensions
+
+II. Ozy says that "people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for."
+ Reply: bright lines and specifiability: you can get "people who contribute to the atmosphere" by picking a guest list of people you know,
+ Side note: the effect size here is greater than d=1
+
+if it sounds like I'm advocating stereotypes, well, I agree with Ozy that the solution is more categories
+
+III. Ozy argues that "look like street harrassers" is the relevant criterion; I think this is overestimating the extent to which bad male behavior is an artifact of ideology
+"has nothing to do with psychology anyway"—it has to do with _perceptions_ of psychology; bystanders can't _know_ that feminine-androphilic trans man is one of them; you could imagine an alternative world in which human physiology looked the same but there was no history of male violence, but that's not our world
+I agree that everyone deserves a place to pee; let's talk about changing rooms
+
+IV. Money analogy. I really like this analogy! I agree that money is a social convention, but what would it mean for money to be fully consensual?
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+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 someone advocating for a _different_ money regime isn't making an epistemic _mistake_. [TODO RESEARCH: include historical example of debate over changing money standards in U.S.; "Cross of Gold" speech]
+
+I _really like_ this example! An important thing to notice here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from arrowheads among American Indians [TODO RESEARCH: is that actually true?!] to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank) [...]
+
+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:
+
+> 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.
+
+Similarly, 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 ...
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