on a Facebook thread about female-dominated gym classes, a female acquaintance writes, "My class focuses on weightlifting and it's still all women (including one trans, oddly enough)." (You wouldn't say "oddly enough" if you actually believed that trans women are women!)
This is so great (super-AGP 13th century Jewish narrative)
+https://web.archive.org/web/20160420122918/http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
http://www.on1foot.org/text/even-bochan-kalonymus-ben-kalonymus
http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf
"Transgender Women in the Female Category of Sport: Perspectives on Testosterone Suppression and Performance Advantage"
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
+"How does hormone transition in transgender women"
+https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2021/02/28/bjsports-2020-103106
https://impossiblehq.com/well-see/
I've frequently argued against the social practice of people being expected to declare (in their social media profile, or on badges at conferences) what third-person pronouns others should use to refer to oneself. The end goal of transitioning—one would think—is to be organically perceived as the sex other than one's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/).
What pronoun other people _naturally_ use to refer to you when they're _not_ trying to be polite, but just trying to _talk about the world they see_ in the language that comes naturally to them, is a test of whether your transition is actually _succeeding_ at the goal of changing your (perceived) sex.
+
+https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/statement-on-new-york-times-article#comment-1263382
+> like a screed complaining about Jewish bankers, being read by someone whose only opinion of bankers is that they provide a safe place for him to store his money
+
+https://avoiceformen.com/featured/my-son-doesnt-want-to-be-a-man/
+
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695466/
+
+https://jezebel.com/these-girls-just-wanted-to-run-the-right-wanted-a-war-1846280528
+
+https://unspeakablelgbtq.weebly.com/the-stories
+
+"Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer-Reviewed and Gray Literature"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436370/
+
+------
+
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
+
+[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
+
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
+
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
+
+Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
+
+-----
+
+Amy Harmon quoting Half Sigma and Jason Malloy back in the day?! Times have changed https://archive.is/6cXMD
+
+Univariate fallacy again https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html
+
+https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/america-has-a-boy-crisis/
+
+-----
+
+The problem isn't that I particularly care about citing some particular Canadian clinical psychologist; the problem is that I aspire to work in a paradigm that's _solely_ about minimizing the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions (even when it hurts, perhaps _especially_ when it hurts), which puts me in conflict with a culture that prioritizes other things, like "politeness" or "not triggering horrible dysphoria" or "not giving rhetorical ammunition to our hate-filled ideological enemies who want me and my friends to not-exist". Removing citations to the Canadian clinical psychologist wouldn't actually solve the real conflict.
+
+I mean that the joint trait distribution of males-on-exogenous-estrogen-who-have-either-been-castrated-or-are-on-spironolactone is not only not the same as the joint trait distribution of untreated natal females, it's _also_ going to be a better fit to the joint trait distribution of untreated natal males along the many dimensions that aren't sufficiently affected by exogenous hormone replacement therapy, and that this is sufficiently robust that it's useful to be able to express concisely with a short phrase such as "biological sex exists", even in cases where I don't have the expertise or data to prove it, and this is important because most of life depends on tacit knowledge embedded in linguistic and cultural priors, rather than provable expertise and data.
+
+There's this cultural pattern that only went mainstream about five years ago where smart progressive people want to apply _strict scrutiny_ to any attempt to refer to or reason about sex. The culture almost never requires you to flat-out _lie_ about anything; there's just this coordinated juggernaut of gerrymandered concepts and unparsimonious implied causal theories and isolated demands for rigor that I think are _in practice_ making everyone crazy, even if you can never catch anyone in an easily verifiable lie.
+
+Ordinary people can _in fact_ recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy (hair covered, males clean-shaven) even though we don't have introspective access to _how_ our brains are accomplishing this high-dimensional image-classification task: <http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf>, and this is actually important for understanding what's actually going on in the heads of TERFs who cry, "That's a man! I _have eyes_ and I can _see_ that's a man! How dumb do you think we are?! Fraud!! Gaslighting!!1!"
+
+If the normative high-status response in your culture is to say, "How do you know? What do you mean by _man_? I think this is just dumb gatekeeping, and you're a horrible person who deserves contempt", then I think your culture ends up very confused about human behavior, because minimizing the length of the message needed to desribe your observations (<https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length>) would require concepts to which the culture has assigned long codeword lengths ("assigned at birth"). But I can't prove it.
+
+(I borrowed the "dumb gatekeeping" and "horrible people who deserve contempt" language from Brodski's blog post <https://deathisbadblog.com/the-real-transphobes-are-the-ones-we-made-along-the-way/>)
+
+I'm _not happy_ about the fact that this belief puts me in conflict with everyone in Berkeley and _especially_ the people who are _exactly like me_ except born five years later but I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to do?
+
+------
+
+Everest brain regression
+https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763421000804
+
+https://www.city-journal.org/the-miseducation-of-americas-elites
+
+---
+
+Scott Alexander—
+> It's hard to explain to people that yes, "we" have several billion dollars, but they still need to donate themselves.
+https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/m0vob7/why_hasnt_effective_altruism_grown_since_2015/gqhvuop/?context=3
+
+Maybe that's a sign that they shouldn't? Don't we want people to be making decisions on the basis of explanations?
+
+----
+
+Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say?
+https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/644563577202704384/your-experiences-are-not-universal-theory-of
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff