[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.]
+[TODO: mention the rhetorical problem where I bring up psychology in discussions, because I can predict that if I said "You're not a woman because of your penis", ppl will say, "Oh, that's not what we meant"]
+
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.
[TODO: the standard diagram]
"Okay," she says. "So, what should we call the group now?"
-You think for a few moments. "What about 'not-exclusively-androphilic 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'?"
+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'?"
I can think of a few criticisms of this proposal.
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.
-I, the author of this blog post, went with "not-exclusively-androphilic" 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].
+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].
[TODO: footnote calculation of how many women and men this would exclude]
[TODO: address that "non-exclusively-androphilic" does exclude lesbians]
+[interruptions study]
+
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.
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.
[TODO: transition sentence (no pun intended)]
+[TODO (somewhere): self-identity is itself a Schelling point]
+
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).
[TODO: explicitly acknowledge that I'm not trying to shift goalposts; locker rooms are different from bathrooms, everyone deserves to pee]
It's possible that I'm underestimating what feats of social-engineering are possible. We could imagine
[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"]
+
+[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/ !!]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff