-And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals were phylogenetically related.
+And so, Alexander explains, the ancient Hebrews weren't _wrong_ to classify whales as a type of _dag_ (typically translated as _fish_), even though modern biologists classify whales as mammals and not fish, because the ancient Hebrews were more interested in distinguishing which animals live in the water rather than which animals are phylogenetically related. Similarly, borders between countries are agreed upon for a variety of pragmatic reasons, and can be quite convoluted—while there may often be some "obvious" geographic or cultural Schelling points anchoring these decisions, there's not going to be any instrinsic, eternal fact of the matter as to where one country starts and another begins.
+
+All of this is entirely correct—and thus, an excellent [motte](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/) for the less honest half of _Slate Star Codex_ readers to appeal to when they want to disrupt and obfuscate discussions about empirical reality by insisting on [...]
+
+
+
+Alexander goes on to attempt to use the categories-are-relative insight to rebut skeptics of transgenderedness: referring to trans people as their desired gender is a category boundary
+
+Agreed so far—
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+We can at least discuss _in detail_
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+You can call a tail a leg, but you can't stop people from _noticing_ that of a dog's five legs, one of them is different from the others, so different that people habitually distinguish between the walking-legs and the wagging-leg.