Interestingly, a extension of this line of reasoning suggests an apparently novel argument in _favor_ of the self-identity criterion—and which might go part of the way towards _explaining_ many people's favorable attitudes towards the self-identity criterion, even if they've never formulated the argument explicitly. Let me explain.
-(And please don't tell me you're surprised that I'm [inventing novel arguments for the position I've spent the last twenty months of my life obsessively arguing against!](https://archive.is/jPmyd) Policy debates [should not appear one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided): it is _by means of_ searching for and weighing all relevant arguments, that one _computes_ the optimal policy, and [even generally terrible positions will have _some_ arguments supporting them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally). What did you take me for, some kind of _partisan hack?!_)
+(And please don't tell me you're surprised that I'm [inventing novel arguments for the position I've spent the last twenty months of my life obsessively arguing against](https://archive.is/jPmyd)! Policy debates [should not appear one-sided](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided): it is _by means of_ searching for and weighing all relevant arguments, that one _computes_ the optimal policy, and [even generally terrible positions will have _some_ arguments supporting them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally). What did you take me for, some kind of _partisan hack?!_)
As, um, [my favorite author on _Less Wrong_ explains](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests), another desideratum for _intersubjectively_ useful categories is being easy for different people to [_coordinate_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_game) on: in order to work together and _think_ together, we don't just want to choose predictively-useful category boundaries, we also want to make the _same_ choices.
When people need to coordinate on making the _same_ arbitrary-on-the-merits choice, they tend to converge on an option that is (for whatever reason) unusually _salient_. This is the concept of a "Schelling point", after famed economist Thomas Schelling, who posed the question of where strangers should attempt to meet in New York, if they couldn't communicate to pick a rendezvous point in advance. The plurality answer turns out to be "noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station", not because of any properties that make Grand Central Station an objectively superior meeting place that you would pick even if you _could_ communicate in advance, but just because its centrality makes it the focus of reasonable mutual expectations about what you and your partner are likely to do. Similarly, noon is salient as the midpoint of the day. There's no particular reason to meet at noon rather than 9 _a.m._ or 11 _a.m._ or 3 _p.m._, _except_ that choosing 9 or 11 or 3 would seem to demand a particular reason that you expect your counterpart to derive independently.
-Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered,
+We usually expect the question of what sex (or "gender") a person is to have a _canonical answer_ that everyone agrees on: it would be pretty confusing for bystanders if I thought Pat was a woman and said "Pat ... she" and you thought Pat was a man and said "Pat ... he."
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes
+For transgender people who consistently [_pass_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(gender)), this (_ex hypothesi_) isn't a problem. Unfortunately, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, not all aspiring trans people pass consistently: the _same person_ might be perceived as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) or their desired gender, depending on which observer you ask, how long the person has been on hormone replacement therapy, whether the observer knew the them before transition, the current lighting, or any number of other factors.
-[distinguish between "identity" as the Schelling _dimension_ (age rather than maturity), and also the slippery slope on rights (if pronoun, why not bathroom; if bathroom, by not sports?)]
+If, despite this, [social reality](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) continues to require the question to have a definite canonical answer, the natural Schelling point is, "Just _ask_ the person what gender they are, and that's what they are." _Even if_ we [_don't_ assume that people know themselves better than anyone else](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), people are still the focal point for reasonable mutual expectations about knowledge about themselves: if I claim to know Pat's gender better than she knows herself, and you claim to know Pat's gender better than _he_ knows _himself_, then there's no obvious way to break the symmetry except to defer the question to Pat.
+
+(Notably, this is also the procedure you would use for non-trans people who just happen to be really-really androgynous: you're going to believe their answer to "Are you a woman or a man?" because if you could tell, then you wouldn't have asked.)
+
+Schelling points are "sticky." If the set of possible choices is ordered, and it's possible to "move" from a currently-selected choice towards a "nearby" one, then the selected option may [slide down a "slippery slope" until stopping at a Schelling point](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes). Imagine the armies of two countries fighting over contested territory containing a river. The river is a Schelling point for the border between the two countries—unless one of the armies has a military advantage to push the battle line forward to the _next_ Schelling point, we expect peace-treaty negotiations to settle on the river as the border. There's no particular reason that the border couldn't be drawn 2 kilometers north of the river, _except_ that that would invite the question of, "Why 2 kilometers? Why not 1, or 3?"
+
+The coordination problem of _who_ has the authority to decide what "gender" a person is, can be seen of a particular case of the problem of how to decide what gender a person is _in a particular context_. The notion of the same person's "gender" being differnt in different contexts may seem strange, but again, in the absence of magical perfect sex-change technology, we _kind of_ need it: as far as the practice of medicine is concerned, there's no getting around the fact that pregnant trans men are female. (Even if the doctors _address_ the patient as "Mr.", "he", _&c._ they still need to draw on their knowledge of the _female_ reproductive system to practice their craft, and they might need _language_ that reflects what they're actually thinking.)
+
+[...]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff