-Let's consider some of what is known about trans women. (For the remainder of this post, I'm going to focus on trans women, for reasons of personal interest. The task of analyzing the situation of trans men is left to the interested reader.)
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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/).)
[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]
-In less tolerant places and decades, where transsexuals were very rare and had to try very hard to pass as women out of dire necessity, their impact on the social order and how people think about gender was minimal—there were just too few trans people to make much of a difference.
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Nowadays, in progressive enclaves of Western countries, this is no longer true, and in communities that form around [non-sex-balanced interests](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/), the numbers can be quite dramatic. For example, on the 2018 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, 9.4% responded _F (cisgender)_ to the gender question, compared to 1.4% responding _F (transgender m -> f)_. So, if trans women are women, _13.4%_ (!!) of female _Slate Star Codex_ readers are trans.
A (cis) female friend of the blog, a member of the Berkeley, California rationalist community reports on recent changes in local social norms—
Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings.
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two-type taxonomy
people are good at noticing patterns: if there's a statistical association in the world
blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible | glows, contains vanadium
red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard | unglowing, contains palladium
-Alexander praises Eliezer Yudkowsky's ["How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/), which builds off [previous](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [posts](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) discussing a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to _either_ be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").
+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—
+
+At least, not yet. The current situation in (progressive enclaves of) Western countries, where the need to respect everyone's self-identified gender identity is held sacrosanct, doesn't seem sustainable to me. With decreased gatekeeping and increased acceptance, you don't only get more AGPs transitioning who wouldn't have in the previous cultural regime; we should also expect transitioners on the margin to be less "suitable" (passable) with respect to traditional gatekeeper standards. That's how you end up with scenarios like that recounted by Prof. Bailey's correspondent in the "bad trans behavior" thread: if there are only a very few AGP trans women who are (out of necessity) trying very hard to pass, the impact on the social order is minimal. But as you start to have a nontrivial population of natal males attempting to live as women who are simultaneously identifiable (usually or often not passing as natal females) and noticeably not drawn from the same distribution of psychological traits as natal females, and you inject too many of them into social spaces and roles that developed around the psychology of natal females, that's going to change the dynamics of those spaces in ways that the incumbent women might not be happy with.
-Suppose you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, _roughly_ egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a _blegg_ and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you get curious and take the time to examine one.
+"Development and Validation of the Transgender Inclusive Behavior Scale" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28406387
-You make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded off the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of _faux_ blue fur.
+https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/when-i-was-raped-it-was-female-only-spaces-helped-me-recover
-"Wow," you say, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
+caveats to the "male pattern of criminality" study: https://medium.com/@notCursedE/do-trans-women-retain-male-pattern-violence-df67954373fd
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff