So far, I probably haven't actually said anything that Alexander didn't already say in the original post. ("A category 'fish' containing herring, dragonflies, and asteroids is going to be stupid [...] it fails to fulfill any conceivable goals of the person designing it.") But it seems worth restating and emphasizing that categories derive their usefulness from the way in which they efficiently represent regularities in the real world, because on the topic of exactly how to apply these philosophical insights to transgender identity claims, Alexander strangely—uncharacteristically—doesn't seem to find it necessary to make any arguments about representing the real world, preferring instead to focus on the mere fact that some people strongly prefer [self-identity](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities)-based gender categories:
-> If I'm willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy—and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me—then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it'll save someone's life. There's no rule of rationality saying that I shouldn't, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that I should.
+(Even if you're [not a fan of gender roles](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) and wish that people were less eager to distinguish humans by sex when it's not absolutely necessary, to the extent that not everyone shares this value or wants to apply it in _all_ areas of life, it matters how the categories are defined.)
-This is true in a tautological sense: if you deliberately gerrymander your category boundaries in order to get the answer you want, you can get the answer you want, which is great for people who want that answer, and people who don't want to hurt their feelings [(and who don't mind letting themselves get emotionally blackmailed)](/2017/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
+Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story were obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair driers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
+
+It's important to stress that this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their desired gender might look like this:
+
+ * *Claim*: Trans people are born with a brain-restricted intersex condition such that their psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex: the proverbial "woman trapped in a man's body" (respectively "man ... woman's") trope is basically accurate.
+ * *Claim*: The medical interventions undergone during transition—hormone replacement surgery, sex reassignment surgery, _&c._—are effective at inducing the phenotype of the other physiological sex: physically, transitioning _works_.
+ * *Claim*: Gender is mostly attributed on the basis of apparent secondary sex characteristics: in most situations, most people don't care about predicting the configuration of someone's genitalia at birth or whether they have a Y chromosome.
+ * *Conclusion*: Trans people can legitimately be said to belong to their stated gender, using the _same_ criteria people usually use to decide such things.
+
+Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. To the extent that any of the claims _fail_ to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—to the extent that physical transition _isn't_ effective, to the extent that people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
+
+Is this too absolutist?—effectively equating "trans" with "passing", and even then marked as an [atypical case](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nk/typicality_and_asymmetrical_similarity/)? Would it really be so costly to grant an occasional isolated unprincipled exception to our usual category boundaries, for kindness's sake?
+
+Perhaps not—if we could trust that the exception to our normal ways of thinking and speaking would _stay_ isolated. But the goals of the modern transgender movement seem to be somewhat broader in scope. Consider this display at at recent conference of the American Philosophical Association—
+
+
+
+(photograph by [Lucia A. Schwarz](https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608))
+
+But this isn't how _anyone_ actually thinks about gender! Human brains are good at _noticing patterns_, even if we usually can't articulate exactly how or why. The process by which we notice someone's features (voice, facial structure, whether they have breasts, gendered clothing cues, any number of [subtle differences in motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/) that your perceptual system can pick up on without you being consciously aware of them), categorize them as a _woman_ or _man_, and use that category (and everything else we can infer about the person, using more-detailed, finer-grained categories) to guide our interactions with them, isn't something subject to conscious control.
+
+That is: if you need a sticker to get people to gender you correctly, your transition has _failed_. In a free Society, everyone should have the right to express themselves, to modify their body and social presentation however they see fit. But having your best to present your true self, you can't—not even _shouldn't_, but _can't_—exert detailed control how other people percieve you.
+
+All you can do is force them to lie.
+
+I'm not "against" trans people. I'm glad [I was able to experiment with hormones](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/) on the basis of informed consent, rather than being gatekept.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"Who are you going to believe, my sticker, or your lying eyes? There's no rule of rationality saying that you shouldn't believe the sticker, and there are plenty of rules of human decency saying that you should."
+
+
+To paraphrase the ["Twelve Virtues"](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/),
+
+> Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, "I'm a woman," and you look at the Great Teacher and see a man. If you think: "It may look like the Great Teacher is a man, but an alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false," you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
+
+> Do not ask whether the rules of rationality or human decency say to do this or that. If you speak overmuch of the Way you will not attain it.
-But it's not very interesting to people like rationalists—although apparently not all people who _self-identify_ as rationalists—who want to use concepts to _describe reality_.
------
-Alexander gives an account of a woman whose ability to function at work was being disrupted by obsessive-compulsive fears of leaving her hair dryer on at home, whose problems were solved by the simple expediency of taking the hair dryer with her when leaving the house. Given that it _worked_ to resolve the woman's distress, we shouldn't care that this isn't how the problems that are categorized as _obsessive-compulsive disorder_ are "supposed" to be treated, and Alexander argues that the same should go for accepting transgender identity claims: if it _works_ for resolving people's gender dysphoria, why not?
-The problem is that there are _significant disanalogies_ between leaving a hair dryer in the front seat of one's car, and agreeing that gender should be defined on the basis of self-identity. The former has no appreciable effects on anyone but the person themselves; the latter affects _everyone who wants to use language to categorize humans by sex_. The words _man_ and _woman_ [are top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns)! People need those nouns to describe their experiences!
-(Even if you're [not a fan of gender roles](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) and wish that people were less eager to distinguish humans by sex when it's not absolutely necessary—to the extent that not everyone shares this value or wants to apply it in _all_ areas of life, it matters how the categories are defined.)
-Imagine if the patient in the hair dryer story was obsessed with the fear not just that _she_ might accidentally leave her hair dryer plugged in unattended, but that that _someone_ might do so, and that it would burn down the whole city. In this slightly modified scenario, insisting that everyone in the city put their hair driers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
------
-It's important to stress that all of this should _not_ be taken to mean that transgender identity claims should necessarily be rejected! (Bad arguments can be made for true propositions just as easily as false ones.) As Alexander briefly alludes to late in the post ("I could relate this [...] to the various heavily researched apparent biological correlates of transgender"), a _non_-question-begging argument for accepting trans people as their desired gender might look like this:
- * *Claim*: Trans people are born with a brain-restricted intersex condition such that their psychology is much more typical of the other physiological sex: the proverbial "woman trapped in a man's body" (respectively "man ... woman's") trope is basically accurate.
- * *Claim*: The medical interventions undergone during transition—hormone replacement surgery, sex reassignment surgery, _&c._—are effective at inducing the phenotype of the other physiological sex: physically, transitioning _works_.
- * *Claim*: Gender is mostly attributed on the basis of apparent secondary sex characteristics: in most situations, most people don't care about predicting the configuration of someone's genitalia at birth or whether they have a Y chromosome.
- * *Conclusion*: Trans people can legitimately be said to belong to their stated gender, using the _same_ criteria people usually use to decide such things.
-Notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, not a redefinition of words by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. To the extent that any of the claims _fail_ to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—to the extent that physical transition _isn't_ effective, to the extent that people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff
