From 6420791b3209d72ddd62b023555b47b666707a11 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2018 21:43:48 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] "Categories Were Made": anchor site for "different kinds of women" objection --- .../the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/content/2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md b/content/2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md index 4ebbc34..88f4337 100644 --- a/content/2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md +++ b/content/2018/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions.md @@ -85,7 +85,7 @@ To avoid the main ideas of this post getting mired in _unnecessary_ controversy, I _am_, however, supposing that the late-onset type or types is either not an intersex condition, or at _most_, a very mild one: we could perhaps imagine a gender identity "switch" in the brain that can get flipped around (explaining the eventual need to transition) without much affecting other sexually-dimorphic parts of the brain (explaining how transition could be delayed so long, and come as such a surprise to others). This hypothesis is weaker than the autogynephilia theory, but still has implications for the ways in which transgender identity claims might or might not be validated by natural, prediction-motivated categorization schemes. If most trans women's traits are noticeably _not drawn from from the female distribution_, that's a factor making it less practical to insist that others categorize them as women. -To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women? +To this it might be objected that there are many different types of women. Clusters can internally have many subclusters: Pureto Rican women (or married women, or young women, or lesbians, _&c_.) don't have the _same_ distribution of traits as women as a whole, and yet are still women. Why should "trans" be different from any other adjective one might use to specify a subcategory of women? What makes this difficult is that—_conditional_ on the two-types hypothesis and specifically gender dysphoria in non-exclusively-androphilic biological males being mostly not an intersex condition—most trans women aren't just not part of the female cluster in configuration space; they're specifically part of _male_ cluster along most dimensions, which people _already_ have a concept for. This doesn't mean that we can't get away with classifying them as women—there's nothing _stopping_ us from drawing the category boundary however we want. But it [isn't an arbitrary choice](/2018/Feb/blegg-mode/)—the concepts of _women_-as-defined-by-biological-sex, _women_-as-defined-by-self-identity, and _women_-as-defined-by-passing are picking out different (though of course mostly overlapping) regions of the configuration space, which has inescapable logical [consequences](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nx/categorizing_has_consequences/) on the kinds of inferences that can be made using each concept. -- 2.17.1