A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the othrodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is instrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodills—even if, in all philosophical strictness, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?
+[TODO: Similarly, I'm not sure how you talk about biology or history without sex; "matches historical usage" isn't just a matter of maintaining every arbitrary convention of the past—it's hard to see how things could have been too much otherwise]
+
It is of course true that different cultures will place different emphases and interpretations on various ways in which people can differ: being prepubescent or a parent might have special significance in some cultures that outsiders could never understand. But to say that prepubescents might as well be a "gender"—well, at this point I must confess that I'm really not sure what this "gender" thing is the author is trying to talk about.
And I guess that's the problem. People who favor the "adult human female" definition of _women_ 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 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_.
+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 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_.
Consider these fictional (but distressingly realistic) dialogues—
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-**Alice**: I'm sad that the sex ratio of my local decision-theory and compiler-development unified meetup group is so horribly lopsided, because this observation is in tension with my [beautiful moral ideal](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) of neither sex having a monopoly on any kind of virtue! If there's anything my native subcultures are doing to needlessly antagonize women, then that's _wrong_ and I want to _fix it_!
+**Alice**: I'm sad that the sex ratio of my local decision-theory and compiler-development unified meetup group is so horribly lopsided, because this observation is in tension with my [beautiful and sacred moral ideal](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) of neither sex having a monopoly on any kind of virtue! If there's anything my native subcultures are doing to needlessly antagonize women, then that's _wrong_ and I want to _fix it_!
**Bob**: What are you talking about? There were lots of women at that meetup.
**Alice**: Have you seen [Dhejne _et al._'s long-term followup study of transsexuals in Sweeden](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885)? In Tables S1 and S2, the authors report that trans women commited violent crimes at far higher rates than cis women, with an adjusted-for-immigrant-and-psychiatric-status hazard ratio of 18.1—but only slightly lower rates than cis men, against whom the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.8.
-**Bob**: Yes, how terrible that we still live in such a transphobic society that those poor marginalized trans women are disproportionately driven to violent crime!
+**Bob**: Yes, how terrible that we still live in such a transphobic Society that those poor marginalized trans women are disproportionately driven to violent crime!
**Alice**: That's one theory. Can you think of any _other_ possible interpretations of the data?
(Another dialogue about reproduction belongs in this collection, but is too obvious and has been cut for space.)
-----
+
+[TODO: addres why just saying "cis women" or "AFAB" isn't sufficient]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff