+REMAINING SEGMENTS TO FILL—
+
+* explain taxonomy
+* the trouble with stickers
+* Norton story gaps
+
+
+OUTLINE OF TAIL END—
+
+ * dysphoria could me more than one thing
+ * in fact, it is more than one thing, per BBL
+ * and you can believe this even if you think the AGP story is wrong, I'm
+ depending on the weaker claim that the non-exclusively-androphilic
+ cluster is not an intersex condition: they start out male-typical
+ * passing is _hard_
+ * incl. my quip about "men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to
+ become _that_"
+ * 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
+
+ * "Portland"-like places have lots of trans women, and this has consequences for actual women—
+ * secret clothing swaps
+ * bathrooms
+ * sports, prisons, medicine
+ * 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"
+ * notice that re race, we _do_ say "don't care about costs to bigots"
+ * Emperor Norton
+
+
+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
+
+
+I don't _know_ what the optimal set of social norms around transitioning should be.
+
+the _idiot sophistry_ of, "Women are people who identify as women _by definition_ and definitions can't be wrong; look, Scott Alexander said so."
+
+We're _smarter_ than this.
+
+-----
+
+[Emperor Norton]
+
+
+and no one is allowed to talk about the social problems because we're not supposed to use the phrase "actual women" to avoid hurting anyone's feelings ... this is CRAZY! I don't know what the right solution is! But the status quo is CRAZY. We're smarter than this!
+
+This is a question about what sort of social norms we want to establish, and different choices of social norms have different costs and benefits! In a world where trans isn't a thing, the standard is, "Pass as a natal woman, or be regarded as a man pretending to be a woman." This isn't good for autogynephilic transsexuals! Later, the standard became, "If if looks like you're sincerely trying to pass as a natal woman, we'll model you that way, even if you don't quite pass." This is a better deal for autogynephilic transsexuals!
+
+
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/).)
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/when-i-was-raped-it-was-female-only-spaces-helped-me-recover
caveats to the "male pattern of criminality" study: https://medium.com/@notCursedE/do-trans-women-retain-male-pattern-violence-df67954373fd
+
+/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/
+
+-----
+
+Another (cis) female friend of the blog writes:
+
+> I think of women's restrooms as safe havens. If a suspicious looking man is following me on the street, or I am concerned about someone male being a danger to me because they are loud and shouty and sexist or catcalling, I will sometimes make a beeline for the nearest women's restroom because I know that is a safe haven. Other people might not intervene if someone is just suspiciously following me, but there is a strong taboo against men in women's restrooms and I feel confident that the men will either not follow me in there due to that taboo or other women will intervene if they do. It's also got useful plausible deniability; I, and potential bystanders, may not be willing to say "you are a possible instigator of violence and we feel unsafe" because that's rude, but we can say "you're not allowed in here, this is a woman's bathroom" because coming into the wrong bathroom is ruder. If that safe haven did not exist because there was no taboo against people who look male in female restrooms, I would be extremely distressed about the non-possibility of retreating somewhere safe, and be much less comfortable entering clubs or pubs or other public party/drink-themed spaces. It would likely cause me to not go to some of them.
+
+----
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff