Of course, people who believe in the primacy of gender identity aren't _trying_ to engage in circular reasoning. If they _are_ making a philosophical mistake, there has to be some explanation of what makes the mistake appealing enough for so many people to make it.
-But it's not hard to guess: there are, empirically, a small-but-not-vanishingly-small minority of people with a penis, XY chromosomes, facial hair, _&c._ who _wish_ that they had a vagina, XX chromosomes, breasts, _&c._, and in a enlightened techological civilization, it seems humane to accomodate this desire as much as feasible, by giving people access to hormones and surgeries that approximate the phenotype of the other sex, respecting their chosen pronouns, _&c._ Thus we can legitimately end up with a _non_-circular trans-inclusive sense of the word _women_: "adult human females, and also adult human males who have undergone interventions to resemble adult human females sufficiently closely so that they can be taken as such socially."
+But it's not hard to guess: there are, empirically, a small-but-not-vanishingly-small minority of people with a penis, XY chromosomes, facial hair, _&c._ who _wish_ that they had a vagina, XX chromosomes, breasts, _&c._, and in a enlightened technological civilization, it seems humane to accommodate this desire as much as feasible, by giving people access to hormones and surgeries that approximate the phenotype of the other sex, respecting their chosen pronouns, _&c._ Thus we can legitimately end up with a _non_-circular trans-inclusive sense of the word _women_: "adult human females, and also adult human males who have undergone interventions to resemble adult human females sufficiently closely so that they can be taken as such socially."
But this is a mere broadening of the "adult human female" definition that tacks on extra complexity (partially for humanitarian reasons and partially to better predict social phenomena that most people care more about modeling well than biological minutiæ). The core idea is still intact and centered, such that even if we end up using the disjunctive, trans-inclusive sense a lot of the time, the narrower, trans-exclusive sense is still pretty salient, rather than being a perplexingly unmotivated notion with no good properties.
I've addressed this class of argument at length (about 7500 words) in a previous post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), but to summarize _briefly_, while I _agree_ that categories can be defined in many ways to suit different cultural priorities, it's also the case that not all possible categories are equally useful, because the cognitive function of categories is to group similar things together so that we can make similar predictions about them, and not every possible grouping of entities yields a "tight" distribution of predictions that can be usefully abstracted over.
-A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the othrodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is instrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodills—even if, _in all philosophical strictness_, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?
+A free-thinking biologist certainly _could_ choose to reject the orthodoxy of grouping living things by ancestry and reproductive isolation and instead choose to study living things that are yellow, but their treatises would probably be difficult to follow, because "living things that are yellow" is intrinsically a much less cohesive subject matter than, say, "birds": experience with black crows is probably going to be _more_ useful when studying yellow canaries than experience with yellow daffodils—even if, _in all philosophical strictness_, there are a million things that these categories could have been drawn around, and who can say but that some hypothetical other culture might have chosen color rather than ancestry as the true determinant of "species"?
It is of course true that different cultures will place different emphases and interpretations on various ways in which people can differ: being prepubescent or being a parent might have special significance in some cultures that outsiders could never understand. But to say that prepubescents might as well be a "gender"—well, at this point I must confess that I'm really not sure what this "gender" thing is that the author is trying to talk about.
-And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Mirriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world—in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
+And I guess that's the problem. People who assume a TERFy definition of _woman_—like, say, the authors of the Merriam–Webster dictionary [("noun, **1.a.**, an adult female person")](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/woman)—generally aren't trying to invalidate anyone's "gender"; they're trying to talk about _biological sex_ using simple, universally-understood words. Biological sex is obviously not the only category in the world—in a lot of situations, you might care more about whether someone has living children—or for that matter, whether an organism is yellow—than what sex it is.
But when people _do_ want to talk about sex—when they want to carve reality along that _particular_ joint, without denying that there are [superexponentially](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/82eMd5KLiJ5Z6rTrr/superexponential-conceptspace-and-simple-words) many others in the vastness of configuration space—there's something _profoundly frustrating_ about [Blue Tribe](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) culture's axiomatic insistence that certain inferences _must not_ be made, that certain conceptual distinctions must not be _expressible_, except perhaps cloaked behind polysyllabic obfuscations like "assigned sex at birth" (as if the doctors made a _mistake_!).
<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
<div class="dialogue">
-<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Have you seen <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885">Dhejne <em>et al.</em>'s long-term followup study of transsexuals in Sweeden</a>? In Tables S1 and S2, the authors report that trans women commited violent crimes at far higher rates than cis women, with an adjusted-for-immigrant-and-psychiatric-status hazard ratio of 18.1—but only slightly lower rates than cis men, against whom the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.8.</p>
+<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Alice</span>: Have you seen <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885">Dhejne <em>et al.</em>'s long-term followup study of transsexuals in Sweden</a>? In Tables S1 and S2, the authors report that trans women committed violent crimes at far higher rates than cis women, with an adjusted-for-immigrant-and-psychiatric-status hazard ratio of 18.1—but only slightly lower rates than cis men, against whom the adjusted hazard ratio was 0.8.</p>
<p><span class="dialogue-character-label">Bob</span>: Yes, how terrible that we still live in such a transphobic Society that those poor marginalized trans women are disproportionately driven to violent crime!</p>
The point being illustrated here is that if it's socially unacceptable for people who want to talk about sex to say "That's not what I meant by _woman_ in this context _and you know it_", then people who would prefer not to acknowledge sex will always get the last word—not because they have superior arguments, but because the very terms of discourse have been [systematically gamed to conflate dissent with unkindness](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-To this it might be objected that trans activists are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably [David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hystorectomy) if that's what you _really mean_.
+To this it might be objected that trans activists are merely advocating for greater precision, rather than trying to make it socially unacceptable to think about biological sex: after all, you can just say "cis women" (which excludes trans women, trans men, and natal-female nonbinary people) or "assigned female at birth" (which excludes trans women, but includes trans men and natal-female nonbinary people and presumably [David Reimer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)) or "people with uteruses" (which excludes trans women and natal females who have had a hysterectomy) if that's what you _really mean_.
Alternatively, we could imagine people agreeing that word _woman_ refers to social roles and gender identity and must always be used in a trans-inclusive sense, while reserving _female_ for when people want to talk about biological sex. However, I get the sense that this is not a compromise most contemporary trans activists would find acceptable: witness, for example, Zinnia Jones [proclaiming that](https://genderanalysis.net/2017/10/medical-professionals-increasingly-agree-trans-women-are-female-trans-men-are-male/) "[t]rans women are female—with female penises, female prostates, female sperm, and female XY chromosomes." (!)
[(If we survive.)](https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html)
-But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious preposthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent acheivements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
+But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious preposthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent achievements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend reading [Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take.
I would rather say that's a sign that we're facing an instance of the [Sorites paradox](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/), the ancient challenge to applying discrete categories to a continuous world. If one grain of sand doesn't make a heap (the argument goes), and the addition of one more grain of sand can't change whether something is a heap, then we can conclude from [the principle of mathematical induction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction) that no number _n_ ∈ ℕ of grains make a heap. (Or, alternatively, that the absence of any sand constitutes a ["heap of zero grains"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nso8WXdjHLLHkJKhr/the-conscious-sorites-paradox).) Analogously, if a sufficiently small change in MtF transition outcome can't change whether someone is a woman, then we are seemingly forced to accept that either everyone is a woman or no one is.
-While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that conceding that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesistate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
+While the Sorites paradox is certainly an instructive exercise in the philosophy of language, its practical impact seems limited: most people find it more palatable to conclude that that the heap-ness is a somewhat fuzzy concept, rather than that conceding that the argument isn't actually about the amount of sand in a location. And if you brought a single grain of sand when someone asked you for a heap, they probably wouldn't hesitate to say, "That's not what I meant by _heap_ in this context _and you know it_."
> If that's the side of this question you come down on, then I encourage you to ask yourself why that trans women still doesn't count. I expect that whatever your answer, that's the real definition you’re using, not "biological".
Alternatively, _if_ psychological sex differences _are_ a thing, _and_ transness is a brain intersex condition such that pre-transition trans women are _already_ psychologically female, then again, there aren't any: _ex hypothesi_ _&c._
-However, _if_ we should be so unlucky to live in a world in which psychological sex differences _are_ a thing _and_ most trans women are motivated to transition by [some _other_ reason](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) than already having female minds, then we face some subtleties: if our thought-experimental perfect transition tech doesn't edit minds, then we end up with a bunch of female-bodied people with a distribution of psychologies that isn't just not-identical to that of natal females, but is actually coming out of the _male_ distribution. Should such people be called women? Honestly, I lean towards _Yes_, but I can at least _see the argument_ of someone who prefered not to use the word that way.
+However, _if_ we should be so unlucky to live in a world in which psychological sex differences _are_ a thing _and_ most trans women are motivated to transition by [some _other_ reason](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) than already having female minds, then we face some subtleties: if our thought-experimental perfect transition tech doesn't edit minds, then we end up with a bunch of female-bodied people with a distribution of psychologies that isn't just not-identical to that of natal females, but is actually coming out of the _male_ distribution. Should such people be called women? Honestly, I lean towards _Yes_, but I can at least _see the argument_ of someone who preferred not to use the word that way.
Wrapping up—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff