is an [X]. Most of them, in fact, are not. Nor is it absolutely guaranteed
that every single [X] will be a party member. But most of them, in fact,
are"—thus, requiring representaiton of Xes benefits the party
- * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
- women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
- transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
- "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
- * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
- personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
feminists are masculinized: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4158978/
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/11/30/36431918/if-the-future-is-nonbinary-its-a-bleak-one-for-women
-"Obviously I socially gender him as male as per his preference."
-
-"I wouldn't call it a 'preference' exactly."
-
-"I gender him male as per his philosophical commitments"
-
https://www.theverge.com/2014/4/28/5661118/lab-mice-fear-men-not-women-big-problem-for-science
Mad Ouroboros on the Somewhere Else Discord speculates that "don't call me cis" gendercrits and AFAB enbies are having the same internal gender experience
"Power that is not aligned with natural law leads to evil, because it requires constantly denying reality and punishing dissenters."
"OK, but I still want my own breasts"
-Scott got a lot of pushback just for including the blog that I showed him in a links post (Times have changed! BBL is locally quasi-mainstream after Ozy engaged)
-
but I am starting to get a more detailed appreciation of how the thing-that-is-good-that-I-want-to-call-"individualism" has a lot of missing implementation details; "Everyone's self-reported self-identity must be uncritically respected" social norms are trying to maximize a certain kind of individual choice (you not only get to choose your gender, you can even write-in a new one!), but that choice is taking place in the context of a very specific delusional cultural environment that penalizes other kinds of individual choices (like criticizing the delusions)
I'm sad that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong" to "self-reports are pretty crazy" probably has implication for "Red Pill is probably wrong because everyone's self-report says it's wrong"
circle game paranoia: http://www.unz.com/isteve/bad-juju-in-oak-park-il/
-https://medium.com/@barrakerr/pronouns-are-rohypnol-dbcd1cb9c2d9
-
https://arcdigital.media/on-transwomen-and-sports-54fe1a8963e
https://medium.com/@katieja/young-children-reality-sex-and-gender-3421f4f165f1
-https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
-
-"please like think before you go around using “afab” or “amab” to refer broadly to groups of people in your tweets. neither of these categories are like coherent social categories in any way, and are often used in ways that perpetuate trans misogyny" https://twitter.com/folkpunkjunk/status/1140278990072102912
+"please like think before you go around using "afab" or "amab" to refer broadly to groups of people in your tweets. neither of these categories are like coherent social categories in any way, and are often used in ways that perpetuate trans misogyny" https://twitter.com/folkpunkjunk/status/1140278990072102912
https://medium.com/@aytchellis/talking-past-each-other-about-trans-gender-1da8e058caf8
"Given that English has gendered personal pronouns and it's not feasible to redesign the English language to change this, marking babies in some way to indicate their biological sex (with clothing color, or perhaps by gluing something to them) can be a useful social technology, because it allows people to just say, \"She's such a good baby!\" without having to ask about the baby's sex. Now, obviously, we don't want to indoctrinate innocent babies into oppressive gender roles that might not be a good fit for them, and I agree that gendered clothing increases our risk of falling into this well-trodden failure mode. But maybe there's some way for smart people who understand the problem in sufficient detail to avoid that failure mode, without becoming pawns in a memetic war against \"noticing that biological sex continues to be a predictively-useful concept.\""
-laim that the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",
-
people treat an organisation with more respect and status than simply bunch of people\n\nYes, exactly! This is an exciting arbitrage opportunity for agents who care less about respect and status (in the eyes of people who respect institutions; they may care about an alternative gray/black market of respect and status), and more about Doing Things That Make Sense Even If That's Not the Way Things Are Done Around Here.",
"I think sufficiently self-aware, sufficiently prosocial narcissists and sociopaths deserve love! I hope I don't have any ulterior motives for saying this! (I don't _think_ I'm a narcissist or a sociopath, but people can have false beliefs about themselves.)",
policing: "we definitely expect better models of gender out of you": https://twitter.com/atax1a/status/1157066530028265473
-I just thought of an interesting argument that almost no one else would (because it requires both prog-sight and NRx-sight)
-You know the "signaling hazard" (pace Jim) argument against public tolerance of male homosexuality (tolerating gays interferes with normal men expressing affection for each other without being seen as gay, which is bad for unit cohesion, &c.). Until recently, I hadn't thought much of it (because of my prog upbringing)—why do you care if someone isn't sure you're straight?
-but recent events have made me more sympathetic to its empirical reality—if human nature is such that 140+ IQ ppl actually can't publicly clear up a trivial philosophy-of-language dispute because of the fear of appearing transphobic—well, that's really dumb, but it's the SAME KIND of dumb as "can't express male friendship because of the fear of appearing gay"
-which suggests a "signaling hazard" argument in favor of political correctness (!!)—we can't tolerate racism, or else Good people would have to incur more costs to signal antiracism (same structure as "we can't tolerate gays, or else normal guys have to incur more costs to signal not-gayness")
-
-older works (pre-second wave feminism?) would actually say "man" (or "woman"—see how anachronistic it feels to put the female option second and in parentheses?), presumably not because human nature has changed that much, but because of shifting cultural priorities about when sex is "relevant." (Modern speakers [similarly frown on](https://agentultra.com/blog/the-black-man-stopped-me/) mentioning race when it's not relevant.)
My gender crusade becomes much less interesting insofar as it can be explained simply by me being born too early and not getting "kids these days." It's not that cultural change is necessarily bad; it's that I want culture to innovate in the direction of "achieving godlike understanding of objective reality and optimizing the hell out of it" rather than "playing mind games on each other to make it artificially harder to notice that we don't actually live in a Total Morphological Freedom tech regime."
"Had I not transitioned, I would fear the power you have over me, and remain silent." https://aria.dog/support-all-your-friends/
-
https://www.reddit.com/r/ftm/comments/cqplrh/how_do_yall_cope_in_mixed_trans_spaces/
Raven is cosplayed more than any other Teen Titan
I thought it should be acceptable for someone to send one final "OK, sorry" message in response to being told to stop contacting someone
where I feel like my position is analogous to Scott Aaronson's complaint about his police encounter: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3903 , that people who are in the process of complying should be treated with good faith; you don't want the cops to shoot unarmed men and defend themselves on the grounds of, "Well, he wasn't complying fast enough"
-that's the thing; I read as lefty because I am morally lefty (in contrast to Real Men Who Lift &c.); it's just that I had the "bad luck" of reading everything I could about race and IQ after the James Watson affair in 'aught-seven, and all my leftness is filtered through ten years of living with inconvenient hypotheses
-
"Every year, the people who are isomorphic in opinions to you become more masculine (because of everyone moving left), which means they are going to have more inferential distance on gender dysphoria."
you can get away with a lot when you read as a lefty? At hack day, someone said they read about Pinterest's skin-tone debiaser tech being thrown out because it drew on very old papers by a EUGENICIST (article turned out to be https://www.wired.com/story/pinterest-skin-tone-search/ ), and I was like, Oh, interesting, so what was wrong with the research? That got an incredulous stare: "You mean, what's wrong with eugenics??!" And I'm like, no, that's not what I mean, I'm curious about the specfiic technical flaw, which is distinct from the author's odious views
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/comments/dy7241/peak_trans_x_tell_your_story_here/filh1fn/
-
-https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/1229060502984306689
-> For those determined to miss the point, I deplore the idea of a eugenic policy. I simply said deploring it doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. Just as we breed cows to yield more milk, we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.
-
-> While a limited form of selection in humans is acceptable—for example, preventing a couple who are carriers of a recessive genetic defect or disease from producing an offspring with that condition—the kind of wholesale and directed selective breeding of humans suggested by the word “eugenics” is immoral, and I don’t favor it at all.
-https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2020/02/20/discovery-institute-makes-hay-of-dawkins-tweet-and-a-geneticist-mistakenly-says-that-artificial-selection-wont-work-in-humans/
-
-> I hold eugenics to be completely immoral and we should not attempt to implement it.
-https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1229890352275955713
-
> "We must be guided by solidarity, not stigma," the director general of the World Health Organization warned on Saturday. "The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other."
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1229832977472946184
https://archive.is/1pQ4p
> This, of course, reflects folk biology, captured in the two dictionary definitions of innate as "present from birth" and as "intrinsic." Social constructivist arguments frequently take the form that because thus-and-such is absent at birth, or doesn't appear until after age seven, or until after puberty, it is obviously "learned" or "socially constructed." AS a result, a common, but generally irrelevant feature of "nativist" versus "environmentalist" debates is over what is "present from birth." This confuses (among other things) the question of whether something is expressed at the time of birth with whether there exists in the individual evolved devel- opmental mechanisms that may activate and organize the expression of an adaptation at some point in the life cycle. Developmental processes continue to bring additional adaptations on line (as well as remove them) at least until adulthood, and there is an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agedriven adaptive changes in psycho- logical architecture continue throughout adulthood (see, e.g., Daly & Wilson, 1988). Thus, just as teeth and breasts are absent at birth and develop later in an individual's life history, perceptual organization, domain-specific reasoning mechanisms, the language acquisition device, motivational organization, and many other intricate psychological adaptations mature and are elaborated in age-specific fashions that are not simply the product of the accumulation of "experience." Consequently, psychological adaptations may be developmentally timed to appear, disappear, or change operation to mesh with the changing demands of different age-specific tasks, such as parenting, emotional decoding of the mother's voice, language acquisition, species-appropriate song learning, and so on (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Fernald, this volume; Marler, 199 1; Newport, 1990).
> For any particular gender difference, many psy- chologists are interested in whether it was caused (1) by sexually monomorphic psy- chologies encountering differential treatment by the social world, or (2) by sexually differentiated developmental mechanisms encountering treatment from the social world, whether that treatment was uniform or differential. As interesting as this ques- tion may be, however, the fact that an expressed gender difference may first appear after birth, or even late in life, is evidence neither for nor against either of these views.
-Somni gets it! https://somnilogical.tumblr.com/post/189782657699/legally-blind
-
> Do you consent to peristalsis or apoptosis or the Krebs cycle?
https://www.reddit.com/r/GCdebatesQT/comments/glg1o7/qt_blind_spots_and_hypocrisy_in_gc_ideology/fqz1om6/
Still citing it (22 Mar 21): https://twitter.com/Cererean/status/1374130529667268609
+Still citing it (2 May 21)!!: https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-tree/
+
+Still citing it (20 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/qagtqk/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_october_18/hhdiyd1/
+
+Still citing it (21 October 21): https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/qcrhc4/can_someone_provide_an_overview_ofintroduction_to/hhkf6kk/
+
+Still citing it (15 July 21) in a way that suggests it's ratsphere canon: https://twitter.com/NLRG_/status/1415754203293757445
+
+Still citing it (14 November 21): https://twitter.com/captain_mrs/status/1459846336845697028
+
+Still citing it (December 21 podcast): https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2021/12/152-frame-control-with-aella/
+
+The correctness of this post has been disputed at length: [object-level reply](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), [meta-level reply (part 1)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), [meta-level reply (part 2)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), [supplementary material on dolphins/whales](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water)
+
+
darwin2500 "Women's leagues are for women, trans women are women. That's all the justification needed" https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/hym5xb/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_27_2020/fzvfres/
another "Categories Were Made" cite, just as an example post: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/i10p4m/survey_on_moving_ssc_to_substack/fzwkfqk/
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/04/01/trans-neo-nazi-group-taylor-parker-dipeppe-atomwaffen-division-florida-crime-jail/
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/04/the-claim-of-substantial-difference-in-mean-is-currently-not-based-on-strong-evidence/
+
+"free in my ontology and costly in another"
+https://twitter.com/acesounderglass/status/1380383145623580676
+
+"Considering Sex as a Biological Variable"
+https://academic.oup.com/edrv/advance-article/doi/10.1210/endrev/bnaa034/6159361
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/honesttransgender/comments/mnkgha/dont_say_trans_community_if_youre_just_talking/
+
+https://www.womenarehuman.com/transgender-inmates-are-raping-female-prisons-at-a-shocking-rate-ministry-of-justice-reveals/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/honesttransgender/comments/ec2kfd/unsure_if_or_how_i_can_find_my_place_in_the_trans/
+
+https://www.speedrun.com/news/632-2021-3-24-spotlight-four-women-in-speedrunning
+
+"Does Maltreatment in Childhood Affect Sexual Orientation in Adulthood?"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3535560/
+
+https://nintil.com/why-so-few-women-in-cs-the-google-memo-is-right
+
+The scene in _Invincible_ where Mark says, "That's sexist" in response to talk of getting the girl—some Amazon reviewers thought it was SJW garbage, but having been a teenage boy in the 'aughts, it felt very true-to-life
+
+https://www.feministcurrent.com/2021/04/12/heres-why-andrew-sullivans-proposed-truce-on-transgenderism-doesnt-work/
+
+https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/people-literally-do-not-understand-what-laws-are-or-how-they-work
+
+"The ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a private citizen for requesting public records from the Washington State Department of Corrections"
+https://thepostmillennial.com/aclu-blocks-womans-request-for-data-on-numbers-of-transgender-inmates-in-womens-prisons
+
+http://www.westcoastleaf.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/A.B.-decision-January-2020bcca11.pdf
+
+https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/merit-blake-smith
+
+Working in terms of variance exaggerates (e.g.) how little shared environment matters
+https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/delgiudice_apples-squared-apples_preprint.pdf
+
+Sometimes I forget how blinkered most radfems are; these comments are really bad; "AGP is not a sexuality"??
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/28008/the-problem-with-autogynephilia-trans-trending
+
+The depressing and hopeless thing about my "activist" project—such as it is—is that I'm trying to affect _concepts_, not _policy_. (I prefer to think of myself as an "informist"—trying to improve the _information_
+
+https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-accelerated-math-courses-equity
+
+"not getting the joke"
+https://blog.reaction.la/culture/governor-cuomo-shocked-that-women-will-do-anything-for-an-alpha-male-thug/
+https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-goal-is-soft-genocide-unless-stopped-the-outcome-will-be-hard-genocide/
+
+https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/pronouns-are-about-power
+
+life history switch https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/mtuhyd/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_april_19_2021/gvirbwb/
+
+----
+
+Notes from the "Cognitive Creationism" paper (https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/131) (No. 1 in the Journal of Controversial Ideas)—
+
+The decline of religion means that people turn to wokism—but I can't blame them; I'm exactly the same way—"rationalism" became my religion
+
+"Their science is driving theirinterpretation of Scripture, and not the other way round"—as a bad thing. Shades of Julia Serano
+
+----
+
+Biological sex is a "brighter line" (stabler Schelling point) than menopause, and legal reasoning often depends on such bright lines. (Thus, jurisprudence on the rule against perpetuities assumes that people are always fertile.)
+
+https://janhove.github.io/reporting/2015/02/05/standardised-vs-unstandardised-es
+https://janhove.github.io/design/2015/03/16/standardised-es-revisited
+https://janhove.github.io/design/2017/07/14/OtherRoadsToPower
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/28810/attraction-to-someone-you-don-t-know-is-trans-the-reality
+
+https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/04/husband-cross-dressing-turned-off-sex-advice.html
+
+https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeble_(psychology)
+
+There should be a way to look down on the young without being dehumanizing about it. I approve of my teenage self relative to my surroundings
+
+adolescent self-esteem by race &c.
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3263756/
+
+> We must secure the existence of our tomboys and a future for tomboy children.
+https://old.reddit.com/r/CultureWarRoundup/comments/n3obw1/may_03_2021_weekly_offtopic_and_loweffort_cw/gxelx5q/
+
+----
+
+Abort commenting on Facebook—
+
+A potential mechanism for why a single man looking for polyamorous partners could come off as "someone with poor odds affording themselves poorer odds" is if the request stems from a "markets for lemons" effect: men with poor mate value might think they have a better chance of finding someone (anyone) if they don't demand exclusivity—but the very fact of advertising this signals their poor mate value! I doubt this model is applicable to [...] particular (unusual) case, but if it applies to many other men, [...] might face the problem of credibly signaling to potential partners that he's not one of those guys—the information asymmetries can't just be moralized away!!
+
+Re normalization of poly and LGBT, I'm skeptical that "political" vs. "not-political" is a useful distinction here; everything that you and your friends happen to agree on looks "non-political". (Indeed, the contingencies of political coalition-formation would seem to be the only reason to lump "LGBT" together into one term/concept; if it weren't for having social conservatives as a commmon enemy, it's not obvious what (e.g.) androphilic males (G) and gynephilic-males-who-wish-they-were-females (part of the T) would have to do with each other, and the coalition may already be starting to fray.) The underlying psychological variations (towards homosexuality, or towards higher levels of sociosexuality) probably exist everywhere, but our culture's particular reification of "poly" or "LGBT" as sexual orientations is setting up an implicit cultural filter (a "political choice") that may be more visible to [...] than others.
+
+-----
+
+_not_ as a gender-role self-fulfilling-prophecy enforcement attempt (bulldozing the territory to fit a preconceivedly sexist map would be really bad!!)
+
+but as a neutral scientific claim that _could_ be false (like any falsifiable claim), but which I think is true and which I have citations for (attempting to map features of the territory that would probably still be there independently of whether or not they appear on the map, where sexist self-fulfilling prophecies are potentially a real concern, but I'm not that worried about them on the current cultural margin in Berkeley 2021, even though I would worry in other cities and years)
+
+----
+
+walking animation carry angle: https://www.biomotionlab.ca/html5-bml-walker/
+
+
+https://www.healthline.com/health/how-are-transgenders-born
+> For example, those who don't want to pass might: [...]
+> not identify with the norms present in cis culture
+> have a sense of gender that can’t be affirmed using reference points grounded in the cis experience
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/31752/why-do-trans-people-like-doing-things-that-are-feminine-but-even-females-don-t-l
+> only straight men talk about women's bodies like this.
+
+
+on this account cis transhumanists are sane
+> Trans transhumanists: omg what if hot-swappable body parts? Real functioning tails and cat ears? Permanently purple hair?
+> Cis transhumanists: with this nootropic stack and optimized nutrient slurry my tragic meat machine is 8% more efficient at converting calories into javascript
+https://twitter.com/mspowahs/status/957995279092875264
+
+I get this one a lot. So much so that I had to waste three years of my life explaining and re-explaining the cognitive function of categorization in exhaustive, exhaustive detail: see ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) (6500 words, February 2018), ["Where to Draw the Boundaries?"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) (3800 words, April 2019), and ["Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception) (9900 words, January 2021).
+
+> It does shed some light on some of the more cryptic things my mom had said over the years
+https://bodyswapfiction.com/enter/time-loop/
+
+Sex differences in language use, and gays (discussion includes sex-differences cites)
+https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.639887/full
+
+The R.A.I.N.B.O.W. (Respect Acceptance Inclusivity Nonjudgemental Born-this-way Open-minded Worthy) LGBTQIA employee interest group had a Zoom event for the start of Pride month today. I spoke, but was very inarticulate https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FMkQtPvzsriQAow5q/the-correct-response-to-uncertainty-is-not-half-speed (I was going to write a post about it, but I feel like being paranoid and risk-averse)
+
+Gayness has been reified such that you can make gay part of your public identity without people having to think about anal being a thing (which I still can't believe)
+
+a simplistic account, but ... https://medium.com/@awbreymaggie8/detransition-505c99d822df
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/32816/thoughts-on-feeling-like-a-woman
+> I've been asking the older women in my life if they ever "felt like a woman" literally all of them (completely oblivious to TRAs) look at me with such a puzzled and confused face, they're like "no?? was i supposed to?"
+
+https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/996319297/gender-identity-pronouns-expression-guide-lgbtq
+
+https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-just-six-months/
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/32969/cisgender-questionnaire-given-ahead-of-zen-center-meeting
+
+https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/14/archives/conundrum-by-jan-morris-a-helen-and-kurt-wolff-book-174-pp-new-york.html
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/nqm85g/review_of_i_was_born_in_slavery_aka_the_past_is_a/h0dbcua/
+> Arguably every generation lives in a completely different world than the one before it. The social milieu of one's teens and twenties is formative on a deep, visceral level as to what "the issues" are, and what's important in the grand scheme of things.
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/nowgdg/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_may_31_2021/h0nxdb2/
+> America developed its race blind ideology when it was 90% white and had been a deeply religious country. The race blind ideology is like a fit person eating cake
+
+Senior year cross country championships: I was 43rd amongst boys in 17:32 (5:39 mile pace), which was faster than the top girl 17:58 (5:47)
+http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIBoys2005.html
+(archived https://archive.is/JyJYd)
+http://www.cifncs.org/sports/cross_country/History/2005/DivIIGirls2005.html
+(archived https://archive.is/n53BD)
+
+"Ethical-Advice Taker: Do Language Models Understand Natural Language Interventions?"
+https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01465
+
+"Sex Differences in General Knowledge: Meta-Analysis and New Data on the Contribution of School-Related Moderators among High-School Students"
+https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210204/
+
+https://twitter.com/caderaspindrift/status/1407591174911578114
+> like if you know I'm AMAB that tells you nothing about my hormone levels or whether I have a dick or whatever
+> why do you need a term for this
+
+https://www.newsweek.com/theres-no-standard-care-when-it-comes-trans-medicine-opinion-1603450
+
+https://www.outsports.com/2019/6/3/18649927/ncaa-track-champion-cece-telfer-transgender-athlete-fpu-trans-testosterone
+
+https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-unabombers-autogynephilic-transgenderism/
+
+> I've witnessed such public intellectuals busily negotiating terms, topics and outcomes of their next debate [...] its most plausible corollary would be that the "Substack cabal"
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/o9edtt/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_june_28_2021/h3e8827/?context=3
+
+https://transsubstantiation.com/a-letter-to-anne-lawrence-709fac0af75e
+
+> Someone recently likened AGP to the movie Get Out
+https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/35359/silicone-female-body-suit-links-to-amazon/fc473510-7d4a-4e11-af9c-7b7fadfdb551#comment-fc473510-7d4a-4e11-af9c-7b7fadfdb551
+
+------
+
+Can ... can I ask you a question about your beliefs? (Not to argue, but to understand; I wouldn't spend bandwidth asking if my Intellectual Turing Test procedure could predict what your reply, but I can't predict it.)
+
+I thought your position was (my attempted paraphrase—) "Gender is a social category; it's better to let people choose it freely rather than tying it to assigned sex at birth."
+
+But I'm having trouble reconciling that with the language of "now they think they might be a girl [...] Some people who think they might be a girl are really sure, and some aren't sure", which suggests there's a pre-existing underlying fact of the matter.
+
+If you believe it's a social category that people should be able to self-designate into, wouldn't you use language that describes it as a choice or preference rather than an underlying fact? That is, you'd say "aren't sure whether they _prefer_ to be a girl" rather than "aren't sure whether they _are_ a girl".
+
+------
+
+"How Mainstream Trans Narratives are Harmful"
+https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2RqxAasmH4
+
+https://scarlettphoenix.substack.com/p/detransition-diary-1
+
+"When Selves Have Sex: What the Phenomenology of Trans Sexuality Can Teach About Sexual Orientation"
+https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00918369.2014.865472
+
+every day like the first
+http://hannahtg1000.blogspot.com/2021/07/jake-and-rabbits-foot-finale.html
+a similar theme—
+https://some-tg-caps.blogspot.com/2021/08/male-brain.html
+
+https://medium.com/@notCursedE/a-glossary-of-transphobia-a31a001d279
+
+shared environment effects female but not male sexuality
+https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18536986/
+
+> trans women are untouchable, individually and as a group
+https://uploads.ovarit.com/4f3856b9-c73a-54fa-8557-ce565cb2fec5.png
+
+> The Transgender Industry Is Culling Tomboys Out Of Existence
+https://archive.is/NZmPe
+
+The world is so small: Gwern linked to a Crooked Timber blog post, and my roommate (!) is a few comments below
+
+Scott repeating the story from Inadequate Equilibria is typical of our insular cult https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-aducanumab
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/39177/i-just-found-out-that-the-tim-who-works-at-my-village-supermarket-is-a-convicted
+
+> you look inside CLIP, you find neurons corresponding to literally every trait — or almost every trait — that is a protected attribute in the United States
+https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/chris-olah-interpretability-research/#safety-implications-004101
+
+> These changes seem to have gone farther in women, whose head hair is thicker and somewhat longer.
+https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=60916
+linked from https://www.unz.com/isteve/does-womens-hair-grow-longer-than-mens-hair/
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/ouap22/i_need_help_coming_out_to_my_literally/
+
+I want to know how the dialogue would have continued after—
+
+woman: Okay, I see what you're trying to do, but I think it's ultimately misguided. The reason your employer markets cars and dolls side-by-side as a choice, rather than happening to have cars one month, and dolls the next month, is precisely to cater pre-existing statistical sex differences in children's play styles—on average, they'd lose sales from parents of girls during car month, and vice versa. I know, the idea of sex differences in toy preferences seems far-fetched to you—after all, there were no _trucks_ in the environment of evolutionary adapatedness. Nevertheless, empirically, this is a thing! The difference in preference for vehicle toys is Cohen's d of 2.4 (http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/davis-hines-how_large_are_gender_differences_in_toy_preferences.pdf). That's huge! Shit's been stable for the fifty years psychologists have been studying this (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01989-8)! I know, it's the patriarchy, right?
+
+But then how do you explain—okay, so there's this genetic condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia, where people's bodies don't make enough of this enzyme called 21-hydroxylase, and it turns out that, in girls, this results in too much androgen during a key point in fetal development. And it turns out that these girls actually have much more male-typical behavior than normal, including toy preferences (http://unremediatedgender.space/images/cah_diffs_table.png), in a way that's _linear_ with the level of 21-hydroxylase deficiency, suggesting that prenatal hormones account for the difference.
+
+And before you point out the half-dozen confounders anyone could point out in five seconds, the researchers already thought of that. They had a control group of non-CAH girls! They had a control group of the CAH girls' siblings! They had a control group of CAH boys! They checked whether they girls behaved differently when their parents were present—and they actually played with "boy's" toys more when the parents weren't there, the _opposite_ direction of the effect that you would expect from the parental socialization theory.
+
+You might say—so what? Even if statistical sex differences in play styles are real, that's still just an average, right? Cohen's d of 2.4 still an overlap of—um, two times the normal CDF of negative d divided by two—twenty-three percent! So we should still refuse to acknowledge Hot Wheels as "boy's" toys, right?
+
+But look—statistical trends are actually useful for navigating the world, such that we often want language that's optimized for handling the most common case, without seeking to deny or disparage the existence of exceptions? Again, that's _why_ the restaurant is offering two choices of toy in the first place, which is a Pareto improvement over disappointing a lot of girls during car month, or never offering any choices that are known—known!—to appeal more to one sex than the other. Statistically! Given that it's happening anyway, does being able to talk about it make it worse?
+
+This Happy Meal is for my nephew. I don't know the kid that well, but he seems like a pretty typical—boy? Such that, if I'm going to get fast food and there's a choice of toy, my guess is that he's going to want whichever choice was optimized around the mean of boys' preferences, even if I didn't know in advance whether that would be Hot Wheels or Transformers. Am—am I not supposed to notice? Am I not supposed to have language to describe the pattern I'm seeing in the world? How much are people really hurt by this?
+
+If I had known that the kid specifically liked Barbies, or was generally effeminate, maybe I would have asked for the girls' toy. Like, it seems like a lot less hassle to just say that sometimes girls like boys' toys and vice versa, rather than to insist on playing dumb about whether "girls' toys" is a coherent concept, which the children themselves typically manage to work out over the ideological protests of progressive parents?
+
+(I actually favor the "don't unnecessarily gender toys" position myself—I'm happy to say "Barbie or Hot Wheels" to avoid contributing to a partially-self-fulfilling-prophecy effect, even at the cost of obfuscating the causal explanation of why the dichotomy is there—but I end up writing things like this anyway, because the level of pretending-to-be-stupid biological sex denialism among people who you'd think would have the science chops to know better—even people in a cult of alleged "Bayesians"!—is really, really out of hand. If you're worried about self-fulfilling prophecies, talk about that hypothesis _explicitly_, rather than throwing out the concept of probabilistic reasoning using language!!)
+
+> [Duncan—]
+> there *isn't* a good reason to push back against calling the Barbie a Barbie instead of calling it a girl toy
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. "It's being clear about why the restaurant is offering two, and only two, and specifically these two, toy choices" is a reason. Liberal anti-gender-role individualists like us don't think it's a sufficiently strong reason to outweigh the externality, but the concern about externalities is value-laden; protesting, "Oh, I'm only asking you to be _specific_, no ideological agenda here!" would be a lie.
+
+More small world: CronoDAS (a LWer) on /r/slaythespire https://www.reddit.com/r/slaythespire/comments/p92011/my_first_defect_heart_kill_ascension_6/
+
+A stronger skeptical position than "delusional / confused / making it up" would be that recent cultural developments are encouraging people with underlying gender-role-non-conformant psychological predispositions to conceptually reify those feelings as a "gender identity", when people with the same underlying tendencies in previous generations wouldn't have thought about it that way: the same people who would have been "tomboys" or "butch women" or "women who have short hair in order to credibly signal gender-role-non-conformity" in (say) the year 2011, are now much more likely to think of themselves as "not a woman". The "if you have these feelings, you're almost certainly not cis" argument presupposes an ontology of human psychology under which some people "are cis" or "are trans" (as an underlying state of being, distinct from both biological sex, and the state of having undergone social or medical interventions to resemble the other sex), which is exactly what the skeptics are contesting!
+
+a.f.a.b. enbies and TERFs are sampled from the same underlying psychological phenotype (say, females with less-than-30th-percentile conventional femininity), and the difference between them is ideological/cultural
+
+https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
+
+> The untrained male has an instinct to seize and guard a woman's reproductive capacity, instinctively using violence to stop her from interacting with other men at the same that he instinctively displays other forms of commitment to try to earn her acquiescence. The untrained female has adaptations that assume an environment in which men will try to pressure her into more sex than is optimal for her own reproductive fitness, so her adaptations push her to instinctively resist that pressure while also instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her. There is a long-running dichotomy-tradeoff-argument in dath ilan between the position that this is just stupid, and somewhat evil, and was structurally evil back when some of the first sexually recombinant organisms started to specialize in injecting their genes into other organisms; and that current humans should opt out entirely from the more conflicty and combative ways that sex evolved to work, starting with using mental discipline to counteract those tendencies and eventually trying to select them out of humanity's descendants. Versus the position that it's (1) not that bad, (2) actually quite fun in saner versions, and (3) now baked into humanity's core utility function as a top-level value that is not up for debate from merely instrumental considerations or how it originated a billion years earlier. Almost nobody completely believes in either implausibly-oversimplified-policy-stance extreme, of course, but people differ in where they place themselves on that spectrum of opinion.
+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14
+
+> Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves.
+
+"Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation: A Systematic Review of the Human Neuroimaging Literature"
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02005-9
+
+https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/de-platformed-the-musical
+
+
+The Codex paper https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03374.pdf
+> We found that, in response to simple prompts like `def gender(x):`, the generations often assumed binary gender for both single-and multi-line autocompletions
+> [...]
+> Prompts for probes related to classification of protected classes are often leading in their own right
+
+https://abigailshrier.substack.com/p/should-public-schools-be-allowed
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/41402/i-don-t-think-this-pronouns-thing-will-work-the-way-tras-want-it-to
+
+I only argue my theories, because those were the theories I needed to _make sense_ of my _own_ life, not to meddle in politics for its own sake. If you think I've become un-updateable, great—can you tell me what _specific_ updates I should have made, especially about myself?
+
+My attempted Intellectual Turing Test of your position is, "If you think transitioning might make you happier, then do it; if not, don't; and feel free to experiment. The etiology of _why_ some people are trans (where 'trans' means, 'would be made happier by transitioning') is unknown and there could be multiple contributing factors, but none of that is decision-relevant."
+
+(Passing an ITT on the first try is hard, but I hope that was pretty close?)
+
+And when people say things like this, I can never understand the "none of that is decision-relevant" part. It seems to be precribing a diagnosis and an intervention while refusing to have any _specific_ model of what the problem _is_. (Where an example of a specific model might be, "Brain sex exists, and gender dysphoria happens when your brain sex doesn't match your body.")
+
+But when I try to think about the specifics and talk about the specifics (rather than somehow making a decision about what would make me happy, without any particular model of the world of myself), everyone tells me I'm wrong and un-updateable and have already written my bottom line.
+
+Testosterone as a major component of predicting genius
+https://aeolipera.wordpress.com/2015/08/11/testosterone-as-a-major-component-of-predicting-genius/
+
+https://www.ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/42312/it-s-easy-to-talk-them-out-of-it
+
+Ovarit linked to this article—and it just happens to cite Slate Star Codex in the first sentence: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/07/it-s-still-possible-cancel-gender-critical-feminists-strategy-won-t-work
+
+> The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
+> The answer: Yes
+https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808
+
+similar premise to "Dr. Equality and the Great Shift": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8kZ7M-Kwiw
+
+"To My Daughter's Therapist: You Were Wrong"
+https://archive.ph/14kOD
+
+https://wyclif.substack.com/p/biorxiv-wouldnt-host-our-paper-on
+
+"Impact Protection Potential of Mammalian Hair: Testing the Pugilism Hypothesis for the Evolution of Human Facial Hair"
+https://academic.oup.com/iob/article/2/1/obaa005/5799080
+
+autoponyphilia: http://pone.tf/
+
+Evidence of meta-attraction from "We Have Better Graphs" (2007)—
+OTOH there is no sum I would accept to become attracted to men, unless you _also_ made me a woman. (I should add that in that case I would have to meet a man who was a straight woman who made the reciprocal bargain.) So do I then have an erotic identity but _not_ a gender identity? Absurd!—but so obviously right?
+
+Littman study on detransitioners
+https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-021-02163-w.pdf
+
+https://twitter.com/hndcpstd/status/1450621296325316610
+>impressionable women exert huge collective sway over democracy
+>hypercompetitive men become trannies to leverage this
+>impressionable women become trannies too because they see the men doing it
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/46374/i-recently-cut-off-contact-with-a-sexually-abusive-tim
+
+https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385
+
+https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2021/10/31/richard-dawkins-claims-yet-again-that-a-trans-woman-is-not-a-woman/
+
+https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/10/social-justice-fails-parenting-advice-care-feeding.html
+
+https://www.reddit.com/r/actuallesbians/comments/qmg9j8/feeling_like_a_failure_after_penetrative_sex/
+
+"When TERF lesbians talk about being sexually harassed by trans women, do you believe their stories?"
+https://archive.ph/0kgmG
+
+https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/11/debbie-hayton-which-toilets-should-transwomen-use/
+
+https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/social-influence-and-detransition
+
+https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/nov/16/trans-women-should-not-have-to-reduce-testosterone-say-new-ioc-guidelines
+
+https://spectatorworld.com/topic/pregnant-at-end-of-world-children/
+
+https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/11/a-guide-to-peaking-the-woke-by-an-lgn-reader-most-people-have-no-idea-of-the-harm-that-lies-beneath-the-rainbow-flags-and-the-seemingly-innocuous-mantras/
+
+https://www.xenopolitix.com/post/trans
+> Correctly stated, the current transgender movement's demand is not, "Recognise people who were born biologically and spiritually male as female." Put accurately the demand is actually: "Whatever we say or feel about reality must be granted as true."
+
+https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/49661/there-s-no-transwomen-in-mom-groups
+
+https://www.stellabiderman.com/
+
+https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/teesside-woman-accused-using-sex-22260053
+> Teesside woman accused of exposing penis, using sex toy and masturbating in public
+> She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.
+
+"Gender: A Wider Lens" podcast has Debbie Hayton talking about AGP on episode 51
+
+The "paraphilias are unknown in women" part of the argument was never that strong https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34811651/
+
+https://www.outkick.com/transgender-penn-swimmer-sets-another-record-has-fastest-female-500m-time-in-the-nation/
+
+https://strigoi.substack.com/p/a-few-notes-on-agp
+
+https://www.dailywire.com/news/resign-or-repent-watch-as-parents-unload-on-teachers-they-say-secretly-coached-12-year-old-daughter-into-being-trans
+
+gender ID ideology is like Scientology: eventually, it gets marginalized because its victims become the main source of information: https://ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/55684/prediction-criticism-of-trans-ideology-will-be-a-cottage-industry-for-victims
+
+sex-realist criminology
+https://jophoenix.substack.com/p/what-do-we-stand-for
+
+This is how I feel about the "rationalists"—
+> One way that truth dies is that when we place such exacting preconditions on its delivery into our lives that there is virtually no messenger or message that can penetrate our hearts.
+https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/the-places-where-truth-goes-to-die
+
+-----
+
+There's a glowfic thread where Thellim is _horrified_ at how shallow and superficial Jane Austen characters are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be: "Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves."
+
+This horror is basically how I feel about trans culture. It actively discourages self-modeling! (People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Politically-unfavorable critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._)
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=20
+
+_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._
+
+https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=21
+
+-----
+
+> [African-Americans as an ethnic group were] fundamentally created by a gigantic act of human violation and cruelty
+https://www.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ruvu1k/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_january_03/hrdqmzk/
+
+https://letter.wiki/conversation/1232
+
+----
+
+in the context of quantifying predictions, [in the post evaluating his 2020 predictions, Alexander writes](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/2020-predictions-calibration-results):
+
+> We have a debate every year over whether 50% predictions are meaningful in this paradigm; feel free to continue it.
+
+Someone reading this who trusted Alexander as a general-purpose intellectual authority ("the best of us", the "rationalists") might walk away with the idea that it's an open problem whether 50% binary predictions are meaningful—perhaps reasoning, if the immortal Scott Alexander doesn't know, then who am I to know?
+
+But it's not. On this website, [Rafael Harth explains why 50% isn't special](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DAc4iuy4D3EiNBt9B/how-to-evaluate-50-predictions). I claim that this should actually be pretty obvious to competent quantitative thinkers, even if it's not obvious to the collective _SSC_/_ACX_ commentariat, and Alexander can't tell which of his commenters are competent quantitative thinkers.
+
+I don't particularly fault Scott for this: [by his own admission, he's not a math guy](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/). (And the vast majority of math people can't write as well or as fast as Scott. No one is the best at everything!) Rather, I'm saying that a culture that wants to _actually_ be right about everything would do better to _just_ focus on being right on the object level, without [wireheading on its own promises of being right about everything](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/).
+
+(Incidentally, Scott himself is actually very good about [not trying to claim more authority than is actually justified by his performance](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/04/some-clarifications-on-rationalist-blogging/). His fans should try to be more like him along this dimension!)
+
+https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-prisoners/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff