+You could command them not to—but does that actually _work_? People don't have conscious access to or control of the way their brain takes demographic base rates into account. [Nelson _et al._ 1990](/papers/nelson_et_al-everyday_base_rates_sex_stereotypes_potent_and_resilient.pdf) gave people photographs of women and men and asked them to estimate the photo-subjects' heights. The estimates end up reflecting sex as well as actual-height—which is, again, the correct Bayesian behavior given uncertainty in sex-blind estimates. But furthermore, when the researchers prepared a special height-matched set of photos where for every woman of a given height, there was a man of the same height _and_ told the participants about the height-matching _and_ offered cash rewards for accuracy, more than half of the base-rate adjustment _still_ remained! People don't know how to turn it off!
+
+And if they _could_ turn it off, such that you could order your male soldiers not to treat a woman among them any differently than they would a man, and have the verbal instruction have exactly the desired effect on their brain's subconscious quantitative decisionmaking machinery—who is this even _helping_, exactly?
+
+Keltham expresses doubt whether it's worse for a woman to be conscripted than a man, and when his interlocutor gestures at harms to a woman from living among men (not trusted family members, but men unselected from the general public), Keltham understands that she's talking about the possibility of intercourse, including rape (!), and he immediately generates "cheap truthspells" as a way to mitigate that problem while maintaining sex-integrated military units.
+
+And, sure, I agree that truthspells would help, given the settled assumption that you need to have sex-integrated military units. But—why is that a decideratum? We're told that dath ilan's beliefs about evolutionary psychology [include the idea that](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508?page=14):
+
+> 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.
+
+And just—if you _actually believe that_, it seems like there's this very obvious policy of _not forcing females to fight in close quarters alongside the people with an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_?! (Come to think of it, the "instinctively trying to increase the number and quality of men who'll be interested in her" part seems like it could cause other kinds of problems, too??) Even if you have cheap truthspells, there's this concept of 'securitymindset', where you want to design systems that are robust against unexpected things happening, and the "Just don't conscript women in the first place" policy neatly sidesteps entire classes of potential social pathologies that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the organization you're using to keep your country from getting conquered?! If someone asks whether it's worse for a woman or a man to be put in the situation of having to fight in close quarters alongside the people with _an instinct to sieze and guard female reproductive capacity_, I don't think it should be hard to admit the obvious correct answer that that's worse for a woman?!
+
+I mean, it's not worse _with Probability One_.