The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. Most significantly: the former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!
-Though it may be a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_, that small cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
+Though it might be only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identities should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
-The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](TODO: linky) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not particularly focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
+The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
-A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people are _modeling_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, albeit not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
+A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
-Well, no. But notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
+Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff