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
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff