-need to work in—
+REMAINING SEGMENTS TO FILL—
-* my quip about men who love what we _wish_ women were
-* address the "Puerto Rican women don't have exactly the same distribution as women as a whole" argument
-* link "Blegg Mode" somewhere
-* restrooms as safe spaces quote (if I can get permission)
-* link Ozy on "We don't have a sex gap"
-* call out the mendacity of "assigned at birth"
-* link track post
-* this a question of what social norms we want to negotiate
+* explain taxonomy
+* the trouble with stickers
+* Norton story gaps
+
+REMAINING POINTS—
+
+ * (say) Caitlyn Jenner and Janet Mock don't _look_ like the same thing
+ * passing is _hard_
+ * explicitly address the "Puerto Rican women don't have exactly the same
+ distribution as women as a whole, but they're still women" argument
+ (distribution of MtTs isn't just different from women as a whole, it's
+ actually part of the _male_ cluster, which people already have a concept
+ for)
+ * link "Blegg Mode" somewhere
+ * link http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail
+ * link http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/
+ * the mismatch gets _worse_ with less gatekeeping
+ * "gay" trans women are etiologically straight
+ * high dimensional spaces
+
+ * weird social taboos, stickers
+ * no matter what policy decision you ultimately decide on, you need to be
+ honest about the trade-offs, rather than appealing to the idiot sophistry
+ of "Trans women are women, by definition"
+ * address "This never happens"
+
+
+If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, _your transition has failed_.
+
+In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having done your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
+
+All you can do is force them to lie.
+
+This is not rationality. This is not even kindness.
+
+"Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should."
+
+--
+
+As a transhumanist as and as an individualist, I want to protect people's freedom to modify their body and social presentation, which _implies_ the right to transition. For the same reasons, I want to protect freedom of association, which _implies_ the right to have sex-segregated spaces that are actually segregated by biological sex if there exists demand that kind of space.
+
+People should get what they want. We should have social norms that help people get what they want. I don't _know_ what the optimal social norms around transitioning are.
+
+
+ * link Ozy on "We don't have a gender gap, we have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap"
+ * call out the mendacity of "assigned at birth" language
+ * more justified segregation examples: sports (link "Questions Such As ..."), prison
+ * section about how this a question of what social norms we want to negotiate
+
+------
+
+[...]
+
+the _idiot sophistry_ of "Women are people who identify as women, _by definition_, and definitions can't be wrong, except if you use another definition, you're hurting people!—look, even Scott Alexander says so!"
+
+-----
+
+[cut for flow from an earlier draft, partially salvagable?—]
+
+Is this too absolutist?—effectively equating "trans" with "passing", and even then marked as an [atypical case](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/)? Would it really be so costly to grant an occasional isolated unprincipled exception to our usual category boundaries, for kindness's sake?
+
+Perhaps not—if we could trust that the exception to our normal ways of thinking and speaking would _stay_ isolated. But the goals of the modern transgender movement seem to be somewhat broader in scope. Consider this display at at recent conference of the American Philosophical Association—
+
+
+
+(photograph by [Lucia A. Schwarz](https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608))
+
+But this isn't how _anyone_ actually thinks about gender! Human brains are good at _noticing patterns_, even if we usually can't articulate exactly how or why. The process by which we notice someone's features (voice, facial structure, whether they have breasts, gendered clothing 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), categorize them as a _woman_ or _man_, and use that category (and everything else we can infer about the person, using more-detailed, finer-grained categories) to guide our interactions with them, isn't something subject to conscious control.
+
+That is: If you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has _failed_. In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
+
+All you can do is force them to lie.
+
+----
+
+
+People should get what they want. We should have social norms that help people get what they want.
+
+Unfortunately, helping people get the things that they want is a hard problem, because people are complicated and the world is complicated. That's why, when renegotiating social norms to apply to a historically unprecedented situation, it's important that we
As a rationalist, I want to protect people's freedom to describe the world as it
While a minority of trans women in Western countries fit the "classical transsexual" profile of being attracted to men, displaying lifelong female-typical social behavior and interests, and transitioning early. But the majority don't fit this pattern.
-(To interested readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Anne Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf) For a more exhaustive treatment, see Lawrence's book [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).)
+A review of the empirical evidence supporting the two-type taxonomy is regrettably outside the scope of this post. To interested or skeptical readers who only have time to read one paper, I recommend Lawrence's ["Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism: Concepts and Controversies"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lawrence-agp_and_typology.pdf) For a more exhaustive treatment, see Lawrence's book [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf) or follow the links and citations in [Kay Brown's FAQ](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/).
+
[caveats: take care to note that it's possible to believe in a weaker form of it: maybe you agree to the bimodality in the data, but don't think it's two discrete etiological types; or, maybe you [agree that there are two etiologies, but](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/against-blanchardianism/) don't buy that AGP is the cause]
blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible | glows, contains vanadium
red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard | unglowing, contains palladium
-link John Salvatier on "Reality has a surprising amount of detail": http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail
from my SEXNET message—
----
+Jenner transitioned at age 65
+married to women three times, fathered six children
+
+-----
+
+From my Reddit comment just now (the same point I've been aware of for a decade, but don't have in its own post anywhere; the "starting to look more like" phrasing may be new)—
+
+Consider an illustrative diagram in which there is a hard line in the combined height–weight configuration space, but the line isn't describable in terms of height or weight alone. If there were sufficiently many more traits/dimensions, we could imagine "not describable in terms of some small number of variables n" starting to look more like "not explicitly describable by humans."
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff