I don't want to _define_ gender based on psychology.[ref]Also, on a personal note, can I remark on how _weird_ and _uncomfortable_ it is that defending psychological sex differences has now apparently become my thing? I'm an individualist/egalitarian androgyny fan, not a [complementarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarianism); I [_don't want_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) women and men to have incommensurable souls. But faced with an intellectual climate where brilliant, kind, otherwise-sane people seem to feel morally obligated to _destroy our collective ability to reason about sex using natural language_, I feel morally obligated to not let them get away with it. Not for love of the territory in its current state, but for the love of that property of maps that _reflect_ the territory.[/ref] ([Definitions are overrated](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cFzC996D7Jjds3vS9/arguing-by-definition), anyway.) I do think that biological sex is almost as close as you can get to being a _natural category_[ref]The [chemical elements](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements) would be an example of an even more robustly natural category. Atoms with more protons than nitrogen but fewer than oxygen _do not exist_, and thus there is no analogue in chemistry to the "Well, what about intersex conditions?" [challenge](http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Derailment) to the concept of sex or the "Well, what about [ring species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species)?" challenge to the concept of species.[/ref] in something like the following sense. If we imagine a distribution of artificial intelligences studying life on Earth and humans in particular, but lacking any preconceived concept of _sex_,[ref]It would be more traditional to put aliens rather than AIs in the observer role of this genre of thought experiment, but evolved aliens probably _would_ already know about sex![/ref] different AIs would each invent [different concepts](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XeHYXXTGRuDrhk5XL/unnatural-categories) in order to model the aspects of reality relevant to their own individual values, but most of them would be forced to reinvent the category of _sex_ sooner or later, because sex category membership makes predictions about [_many_ different dimensions of observation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans)—although some with much larger [or smaller](https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-606581.pdf) effect sizes than others—at least _some_ of which are likely to be relevant to the interests of any particular AI that's paying any attention to animal life at _all_.
-[I use the "bimodal multivariate distribution" frame a lot—it's even in the URL—but it's actually worse: sex-specific adaptations—functional adaptations and not just shifted distributions—are a thing https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/the-cluster-structure-of-genderspace/]
-
-[if you have to do definitions, you go by physiology, because that's the part that's truly almost-completely-binary]
-
That categories are clusters in a _high-dimensional_ space is relevant because of a statistical phenomenon perhaps most famously elucidated in [A. W. F. Edwards's critique of Richard Lewontin's critique of the concept of _race_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genetic_Diversity:_Lewontin's_Fallacy): groups that overlap along any _one_ particular measurement might be much more clearly distinguishable when you look at the conjunction of many different measurements.
[TODO: the standard diagram]
+[I use the "bimodal multivariate distribution" frame a lot—it's even in the URL—but it's actually worse: sex-specific adaptations—functional adaptations and not just shifted distributions—are a thing https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/the-cluster-structure-of-genderspace/]
+
+only two types of gametes
+
+[if you have to do definitions, you go by physiology, because that's the part that's truly almost-completely-binary]
+
When discussing whether a proposed recreational basketball association[ref]I'm somewhat reluctant to choose a sports example, because sporting is such a comparatively small and unimportant part of life—at least from the perspective of non-athletes—but it's a good place to start pedagogically, because merely physical sex differences are easy to measure and relatively uncontroversial, and it's important to avoid the distraction of unnecessarily contentious issues in the presentation of a topic that's already so prone to [motivated misunderstandings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man).[/ref] should be sex-segregated or not, one fact that might come up during the discussion is that the sex difference in human height has a magnitude of Cohen's _d_≈1.7, which is relevant because it means that insofar as selecting for good basketball players implies some degree of selection for tall people, it also implies some degree of selection for men, which would detract from the goal of creating an atmosphere where people are socially rewarded for excelling at the [high challenge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/29vqqmGNxNRGzffEj/high-challenge) of their chosen sport rather than for the (preëxisting, uninteresting, mostly immutable[ref]Given current technology.[/ref]) brute fact of their sex.
So is the discussant who brings up height thereby claiming that _tall women aren't actually women_?
[TODO: footnote calculation of how many women and men this would exclude]
-But that was just my _guess_ at how to apply reductionism to describe the atmosphere of women-only spaces using lower-level criteria. A woman who benefits from women-only spaces and knows more about psychology than me might say something different, and we should listen to _her_, not me. The "more than −1σ in both of these two dimensions" threshold was completely arbitrary; maybe she would prefer some other function. Maybe she [doesn't like the Big Five model](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Five_personality_traits&oldid=868909816#Critique). Maybe (in fact, almost certainly) multiple such women wouldn't _agree_ on the exact criteria.
+[TODO: address that "non-exclusively-androphilic" does exclude lesbians]
+
+But that was just my _guess_ at how to apply reductionism to describe the atmosphere of women-only spaces using lower-level criteria—and it was probably a _bad_ guess. (For one thing, [TODO: lesbians]) A woman who benefits from women-only spaces and knows more about psychology than me might say something different, and we should listen to _her_, not me. The "more than −1σ in both of these two dimensions" threshold was completely arbitrary; maybe she would prefer some other function. Maybe she [doesn't like the Big Five model](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Five_personality_traits&oldid=868909816#Critique). Maybe (in fact, almost certainly) multiple such women wouldn't _agree_ on the exact criteria.
But even if such a committee of female psychologists _could_ agree on such criteria, I think most people would say that reorganizing the group as the "not-exclusively-androphilic people in our-favorite-hobby whose results on this-and-such personality battery match the following 1 KiB description ..." does not seem very appealing.
It would seem that in a world where psychological traits can't be cheaply, precisely, and verifiably measured, discrimination on the basis of [easily-observable traits that happen correlate with harder-to-measure traits that we actually care about](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/) turns out to be a practical bright-line Schelling point for people to coordinate around.
-_Not_ an infinitely-thin, infinitely-bright line,[ref]As it is said, correctly: what about masculine women and feminine men (whose share of the population depends on where you set your sex-atypicality thresholds)? What about trans people (0.3%–[TODO] of the population, depending on how you define your categories and whose statistics you trust)? What about people with [5α-Reductase deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency) or any of a dozen other specific intersex conditions?[/ref] but a line thin _enough_ and bright _enough_ that the forces of social evolution have coughed up some institutions and other cultural practices that take the line into account for _functional_ reasons.
+_Not_ an infinitely-thin, infinitely-bright line,[ref]As it is said: what about masculine women and feminine men (whose share of the population depends on where you set your sex-atypicality thresholds)? What about trans people (0.3%–[TODO] of the population, depending on how you define your categories and whose statistics you trust)? What about people with [5α-Reductase deficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_deficiency) or any of a dozen other specific intersex conditions?[/ref] but a line thin _enough_ and bright _enough_ that the forces of social evolution have coughed up some institutions and other cultural practices that take the line into account for _functional_ reasons.
+
+My goal in writing about this is certainly not to argue for _more sexism_—I'm looking forward to the postgender lesbian transhumanist future of Total Morphological Freedom as much as anyone else. (I already have my new name and outfits picked out!) If we can invent _new_ institutions and practices that serve more people more effectively, we should _do it_. But because I am a rationalist, because I cannot _unsee_ the cold, oppressive logic of [Chesterson's fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence), I have to speak when my friends resort to using facile, sophmoric word games [TODO: soften!] to obfuscate the _function_ of the existing fences.
+
+In response to the argument that women's restrooms function as safe havens away from scary men [TODO: verify paraphrase], Ozy writes:
+
+> I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is "people who look like the vast majority of street harassers" versus "people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers." The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man’s psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men's room.
+
+It has to do with _probabilistic perceptions_ of psychology.
-My goal in writing about this is certainly not to argue for _more sexism_—I'm looking forward to the postgender lesbian transhumanist future of Total Morphological Freedom as much as anyone else. (I already have my new name and outfits picked out!) If we can invent _new_ institutions and practices that serve more people more effectively, we should _do it_. But because I am a rationalist and a student of psychology and social science, because I cannot _unsee_ the cold, oppressive logic of [Chesterson's fence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence), I have to speak when my friends resort to using facile, sophmoric word games [TODO: soften!] to obfuscate the _function_ of the existing fence.
-In response to the argument that women's restrooms function as safe havens away from scary men, Ozy writes:
-> I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is "people who look like the vast majority of street harassers" versus "people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers." The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man’s psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men’s room.
if it sounds like I'm advocating stereotypes which are morally bad, well, I agree with Ozy that the solution is more categories]
+
make sure to engage with "more categories"
KcKinnon / Karen White / train station attack
+
+http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/
+
+[TODO: link to Culturally Bound Gender on "Percentages, Prevalence, and ..."]
+
+"The reason characteristics common to men and women, like height or hormone levels, are distributed bimodally and not normally is the impact of the sex binary on them.": https://twitter.com/radicalhag/status/1065860508232880128 (actually clarifies my thinking)
> Given that females prefer to live with female relatives if they are going to live in groups at all, and given that the size and dispersion of these groups is determined by the interaction of food availability and predation risk, how should males map themselves onto the female distribution?
>
> Robin I. M. Dunbar, Primate Social Systems, Ch. 7, "Evolution of Grouping Patterns"
+
+> "LMAO", says a member of the Community Team. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing. "I just heard the funniest joke in the world!" "Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge. "I can't–I just gave someone a code of conduct violation for it!"
+>
+> —old Soviet joke (paraphrased)
+
+> Don't think.
+> If you think, then don't speak.
+> If you think and speak, then don't write.
+> If you think, speak, and write, then don't sign.
+> If you think, speak, write, and sign, then don't be surprised.
+>
+> —Soviet proverb
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff