Tags: epistemology, Ozy, sex differences
Status: draft
-This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) 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/).
+> With the Hopes that our World is built on
+> They were utterly out of touch,
+> They denied that the Moon could be defined to be Stilton;
+> They denied she identified as Dutch;
+> They denied that Wishes should be categorized as Horses;
+> They denied that a Pig could be stipulated to have Wings;
+> So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
+> Who promised these beautiful things.
+>
+> —Rudyard Kipling, ["The Gods of the Copybook Headings"](http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm) (paraphrased)
+
+This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/18/man-should-allocate-some-more-categories/) 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/). The reply ends up covering a lot of worldview-ground, so ideas in this post may be expanded upon in future posts.
+
+Before anything else, I'd like to thank Ozy for their thoughtful reply. Substantive, longform engagement between contrasting viewpoints is a rare and beautiful thing that deserves to be socially rewarded so that we get more of it, thereby collectively becoming more likely to get things right [systematically rather than by coincidence](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/24/guided-by-the-beauty-of-our-weapons/)!
+
+-----
After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy argues that my appeal to the relevance of pyschological sex differences commits me to an absurd conclusion—
I don't want to _define_ gender based on psychology. ([Definitions are overrated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition), anyway.)[ref]Also, on a personal note, can I remark on how _weird_ and _uncomfortable_ it is that defending psychological sex differences has now apparently become my thing? I'm an individualist/egalitarian androgyny fan, not a [complementarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism); I [_don't want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) women and men to have incommensurable souls. But faced with an intellectual climate where brilliant, kind, otherwise-sane people seem to feel morally obligated to _destroy our collective ability to reason about sex using natural language_, I feel morally obligated to not let them get away with it. Not for love of the territory in its current state, but for the love of that property of maps that _reflect_ the territory.[/ref] I do think that biological sex is almost as close as you can get to being a _natural category_[ref]The [chemical elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements) would be an example of an even more robustly natural category. Atoms with more protons than nitrogen but fewer than oxygen _do not exist_, and thus there is no analogue in chemistry to the "Well, what about intersex conditions?" [challenge](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Derailment) to the concept of sex or the "Well, what about [ring species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)?" challenge to the concept of species.[/ref] in something like the following sense. If we imagine a distribution of artificial intelligences studying life on Earth and humans in particular, but lacking any preconceived concept of _sex_,[ref]It would be more traditional to put aliens rather than AIs in the observer role of this genre of thought experiment, but evolved aliens probably _would_ already know about sex![/ref] different AIs would each invent [different concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XeHYXXTGRuDrhk5XL/unnatural-categories) in order to model the aspects of reality relevant to their own individual values, but most of them would be forced to reinvent the category of _sex_ sooner or later, because sex category membership [makes predictions about _many_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans) different [dimensions of observation](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/the-cluster-structure-of-genderspace/)—although some with much larger [or smaller](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-606581.pdf) effect sizes than others—at least _some_ of which are likely to be relevant to the interests of any particular AI that's paying any attention to animal life at _all_.
+[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.]
+
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]
When discussing whether a proposed recreational basketball association[ref]I'm somewhat reluctant to choose a sports example, because sporting is such a comparatively small and unimportant part of life—at least from the perspective of non-athletes—but it's a good place to start pedagogically, because merely physical sex differences are easy to measure and relatively uncontroversial, and it's important to avoid the distraction of unnecessarily contentious issues in the presentation of a topic that's already so prone to [motivated misunderstandings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).[/ref] should be sex-segregated or not, one fact that might come up during the discussion is that the sex difference in human height has a magnitude of Cohen's _d_≈1.7, which is relevant because it means that insofar as selecting for good basketball players implies some degree of selection for tall people, it also implies some degree of selection for men, which would detract from the goal of creating an atmosphere where people are socially rewarded for excelling at the [high challenge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge) of their chosen sport rather than for the (preëxisting, uninteresting, mostly immutable[ref]Given current technology.[/ref]) brute fact of their sex.
+[TODO: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/neQ7eXuaXpiYw7SBy/the-least-convenient-possible-world where you do care about sports]
+
So is the discussant who brings up height thereby claiming that _tall women aren't actually women_?
Well, no. That would be stupid. Tall women might be more male-typical than female-typical _in the one particular aspect of their height_—and to some extent correlated variables like "weight"—but they are going to be more female-typical than male-typical in the _conjunction_ of all the _other_ measurements that are predicted from or used to assign sex categorizations—some of which measurements might _also_ be relevant to basketball.
[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.
It has to do with _probabilistic predictions about_ psychology in a world where [male violence against females is _older than humanity itself_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sexual_coercion&oldid=866576906), and with [defensible Schelling points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes).
-Certainly _most_ men are nice, civilized people who don't harrass women—and occasional Hemsworthlike, lumberjack-bearded androphilic trans men with a feminine personalities, present even _less_ of a threat. But when designing the social norms for a safe space for the modal cis woman, false positives (including someone who shouldn't be included) are probably going to be worse than false negatives (excluding someone who shouldn't be). If "Does this person look male?" is _easier to assess_ than "Does this person-of-whatever-sex look like a potential threat to my safety, comfort, and privacy?"—and possibly more importantly, is easier for third parties to _agree on_ when third parties are called in to enforce the rules—then the rule ends up being "no men" (or more precisely, "no male-looking people", with corresponding consequences for trans men and non-passing trans women).
+Certainly _most_ men are nice, civilized people who don't harrass women—and occasional Hemsworthlike, lumberjack-bearded androphilic trans men with a feminine personalities, present even less of a threat. But when designing the social norms for a safe space for the modal cis woman, false positives (including someone who shouldn't be included) are probably going to be worse than false negatives (excluding someone who shouldn't be). If "Does this person look male?" is _easier to assess_ than "Does this person-of-whatever-sex look like a potential threat to my safety, comfort, and privacy?"—and possibly more importantly, is easier for third parties to _agree on_ when third parties are called in to enforce the rules—then the rule ends up being "no men" (or more precisely, "no male-looking people", with corresponding consequences for trans men and non-passing trans women), because "no suspicious-looking people" is nearly impossible to enforce in a non-arbitrary way.
Depending on your values, this may not be the best rule! This is (despite everything) not a politics blog. I should hope to help clearly identify the trade-offs inherent in the objective reality of a situation, rather than champion one trade or the other; it's not for me to decide what kind of spaces people should demand, or what false-positive and false-negative rates they should accept.
Ozy continues—
-> Even today, and much more so in the past, men's bathrooms are not equipped with changing tables for babies. When in such a poorly-designed bathroom, some fathers will go into the women's bathroom and use the changing table there. [...] Harassers do not carry around babies in order to have plausible deniability in the event that the woman they are harassing enters a woman’s bathroom at the same time the baby happens to poop.
->
> Similarly, early-transition trans women can be placed into the former category. In our culture, it is generally very stigmatized for men to wear dresses, skirts, makeup, and other signifiers of womanhood. In particular, catcallers and sexist harassers essentially never do: if you're a catcaller or a sexist harasser, it is probably because you are invested in a particular style of masculinity that is completely incompatible with wearing a skirt. Therefore, allowing all dress-wearing people to use the women's bathroom has minimal risk of allowing catcallers in. In the event that men wearing dresses and makeup is completely destigmatized to the point that even sexist assholes do so, I am happy to reexamine this statement.
-Although I lack relevant lived experience, I suspect this is _wildly_ overestimating the ideological component of women's discomfort around men. I agree that certain very overt kinds of harrassment (the kind that involves yelling slurs and obcenities) can be attributed to sexist subcultures of _machismo_ and toxic masculinity.
-
-Unfortunately, I fear the [threat model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model) is a little bit subtler and more expansive than that.
+Although I lack relevant lived experience, I suspect this is _wildly_ overestimating the _ideological_ component of women's discomfort around men. I agree that certain very overt kinds of harrassment (the kind that involves yelling slurs or obcenities) can be attributed to sexist subcultures of _machismo_ and toxic masculinity. Unfortunately, I fear the [threat model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threat_model) is a little bit subtler and more expansive than that.
-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."
+[TODO: expand on the expanded threat model, marginalism]
-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.
+Maybe you want to bite that bullet. But you should at least _acknowledge_ the existence of the bullet, once someone points it out. And if you want to call yourself a rationalist, maybe try to proactively look for the bullet
-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.
+-----
-[...]
+I think there's a more general lesson underlying these kinds of discussions. If you want to get through life without _verbally_ acknowledging the concept of biological sex, then you _can_ get away with it.
-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?"
+If the object of discussion is a large, undeniable, binary sex difference, you can always say, "Oh, that's a mere policy question that can be handled on the basis of more specific details of that particular use-case." So, for example, we can agree with people with prostates should get prostate cancer screenings as they get older, without necessarily reifying that category of people as 'men' or 'males'.
-[***]
+And if the object of discussion is a small, statistical sex difference, you can always point out (correctly! importantly!), "Some cis people of that gender are like that, too!"
-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 people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
-
-I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways (my bull might be younger or fitter than yours) can't function as a unit of account.
+Does the fact that it's possible to scrupulously rephrase any individual sentence to elide sex imply that the corresponding mental _representation_ of the concept of 'sex' is of little practical use? I don't think so, and I've tried, within the limits of my time and my writing ability, to explain why. But if some readers still aren't convinced—well, maybe I can live with that.
-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.
+"Winning" arguments is uninteresting, _especially_ arguments about definitions. Everyone knows that the same word can be used in many ways depending on context. What _matters_ is learning about reality, and finding concepts and representations that make reality _less_ confusing rather than _more_ confusing. If, after thousands of words of argument, someone _still_ thinks a concept that I find useful should not be used because I can't provide explicit necessary-and-sufficient conditions to classify a series of ever-more obscure and contrived edge cases and "gotcha"s—or because [it hurts someone's feelings](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/)—then I guess my response is to shrug and say, "Okay, whatever, I'll continue modeling reality using my concepts, and I wish you good luck trying to do the same with yours."
-Following the money analogy, 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 ... and it's not easy to imagine how it _could_ be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a blank piece of paper and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 check' category now"?
+[TODO: transition sentence about how the map is part of the territory]
-Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Perhaps we should imagine someone taking Canadian $5 bills, crossing out "Canada", drawing a beard on Wilfrid Laurier, and saying "I'd like [this](/images/american_5_dollar_note.png) to be considered an American $5 bill." (Exchange rate at time of writing: 1 Canadian dollar = 0.76 U.S. dollars.) Suppose a social norm catches on within a certain subset of Society that it's _unforgivably rude_ to question someone who says they're giving you American money, but that
+-----
-[ [interpreted as damage and routed around](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore) ]
-
-[***]
-
-Ozy probably didn't intend for the analogy to be pushed quite this far, but there's a serious point here. Every freedom-to implies the lack of a freedom-from somewhere else, and _vice versa_: as the cliché goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. "Fully consensual gender" _sounds_ like a good idea when you phrase it like that: what kind of monster could possibly be against consent, or for non-consent?
-
-But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
-
-[***]
-
-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
+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 people advocating for a _different_ money regime (like [late-19th century American bimetalists](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bimetallism&oldid=864176071#Political_debate) or contemporary cryptocurrency advocates) aren't making an epistemic _mistake_.
-if the butchest women in the city show up, that would be bad for the atmosphere in a way similar
+I _really like_ this analogy! An important thing to note here is that while the form of money can vary widely across sociocultural contexts (from [shell beads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum), to silver coins, to fiat paper currency, to database entries in a bank), not just any form will suffice to serve the functions of money: perishable goods like cheese can't function as a long-term store of value; non-fungible items that vary in quality in hard-to-measure ways can't function as a unit of account.[ref]_E.g._, my goat might be healthier than your goat in a way that neither of us nor any of the other local goat-herders know how to quantify.[/ref]
-anecodote about the gay guy who showed up at EBNoM
+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:
-> 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.
+> 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.
-[I _wish_ it were _d_=1! [linky](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3251566/)]
+Following the money analogy, 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 ... and it's not easy to imagine how it _could_ be applied (a prerequisite to figuring out if perhaps it would improve things if it were). Could I buy a car by offering the dealer a banana and saying, "I would like this to be put in the '$20,000 bill' category now"? What would happen to the economy if everyone did that?
-[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?]
+Maybe the hypothetical doesn't have to be that extreme. Perhaps we should imagine someone taking Canadian $5 bills, crossing out "Canada", drawing a beard on Wilfrid Laurier, and saying "I'd like [this](/images/american_5_dollar_note.png) to be considered an American $5 bill." (Exchange rate at time of writing: 1 Canadian dollar = 0.76 U.S. dollars.) Then imagine that a social norm catches on within a certain subset of Society that it's _incredibly rude_ to question someone who says they're giving you American money, but that this standard hasn't spread to the U.S. government and financial system.
-[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.]
+Economists have a name for this kind of situation. [Gresham's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law): bad money drives out good. In contexts where custom requires that defaced Canadian dollars be regarded as equivalent to U.S. dollars, maybe everyone will smile and pretend not to notice the difference.
-if it sounds like I'm advocating stereotypes which are morally bad, well, I agree with Ozy that the solution is more categories]
+_They will be lying_. In marketplaces governed by "trans American dollars _are_ American dollars" social norms, smart buyers will prefer to buy with defaced Canadian dollars, and smart sellers will try to find plausibly-deniable excuses to not accept them ("That'll be $5." "Here you go! A completely normal, definitely non-suspicious American $5 bill!" "_Ooh_, you know what, actually we _just_ sold out"), because everyone knows that when it comes time to interact with the larger banking system, the two types of dollars won't be regarded as being of equal value. Never doubting the value of other people's currency may be basic human decency, but if so, the market [interprets basic human decency as damage and routes around it](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gilmore).
-make sure to engage with "more categories"
+Similarly, there seem to be increasingly large subsets of Society in which it's _incredibly rude_ to question someone's stated gender. But even if everyone _says_ "Trans women are women" and uses the right pronouns solely on the basis of self-reported self-identity with no questions asked and no one batting an eye, it's not clear that this constitutes successfully entering a "fully consensual gender" regime insofar as people following their own self-interest are likely to systematically make _decisions_ that treat non-well-passing trans women as if they were something more like men, even if no one would dream of being so rude as to _admit out loud_ that that's what they're doing.
-KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack
+And how are you going to stop them? Every freedom-to implies the lack of a freedom-from somewhere else, and _vice versa_: as the cliché goes, your right to swing your fist ends at my nose. "Fully consensual gender" _sounds_ like a good idea when you _phrase_ it like that: what kind of monster could possibly be against consent, or for non-consent?
-http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
+But the word "consent" is usually used in contexts where an overwhelming asymmetry of interests makes us want to resolve conflicts in a particular direction every time: when we say that all sex should be consensual, we mean that a person's right to bodily autonomy _always_ takes precedence over someone else's mere horniness. Even pointing out that this is (technically, like everything else) a trade-off [feels creepy](/papers/tetlock_et_al-psychology_of_the_unthinkable.pdf).
-[TODO: link to Culturally Bound Gender on "Percentages, Prevalence, and ..."]
+Categorization really doesn't seem like this. If there's a conflict between one person's desire to be modeled as belonging to a particular gender and someone else's perception that the person is more accurately modeled as belonging to a different gender, then it's not clear what it would _mean_ to resolve the conflict in the direction of "consent of the modeled" other than mind control, or at least compelled speech.
-"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)
+Ozy gives a list of predictions you can make about someone on the basis of social gender, as distinct from sex, apparently meant to demonstrate the usefulness of the former concept. But a lot of the individual list items seem either superficial ("Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup"—surely we don't want to go for "gender as clothing", do we??), or tied to other people's _perceptions_ of sex.[ref]The harrassment and expected-sacrifices example in particular are what radical feminists would call sex-based oppression![/ref] [ref]Friend of the blog Ray Blanchard [recently proposed on Twitter](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/status/1054743819206434816) that the term "subjective sex" might be more useful than "gender".[/ref]
+Take the "How many messages they get on a dating site" item. The _reason_ men send lots of messages to women on dating sites is because they want to date people with vaginas and female secondary sex characteristics, and maybe father children with them, _&c._. [TODO: footnote about how this is predicted by evopsych]
+If one were to say to such a man, "Ah, I see you're sending lots of messages to women, by which I mean people who self-identify as women, in accordance with the utilitarian-desirable social policy of fully-consensual gender. Therefore, you should also send messages to these non-op trans women who aren't on HRT," I think he would reply "How _dumb_ do you think I am?" This isn't necessarily trans-exclusionary—a lot of those same men would be happy to date trans women who were _on HRT_ and thereby came to more closely rememble actual women. But that just gets us back to passing (like I was trying to say thousands of words ago), not fully consensual gender.
-https://culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/percentages-prevalence-and-why-some-women-are-freaked-out-by-this-whole-locker-room-thing/
+I happily concede that fully consensual gender is a _coherent_ position. That doesn't make it feasible. _How_ are you going to maintain that social equilibrium without it being immediately destroyed by normal people who have eyes and don't care about clever philosophical definition-hacking games the way that readers of this blog do?
-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?)
+It's possible that I'm underestimating what feats of social-engineering are possible. We could imagine
-https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bullshit&oldid=868771273#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle
+[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"]
-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 ...
+[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/12/radical-feminist-warned-refer-transgender-defendant-assault/ !!]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff