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. Most significantly: 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!
-Though it may be a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_, that small cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. 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 dryers in the front seat of their cars doesn't look like an appealing solution.
+Though it might be only a small cost to be socially required to say _woman_ and _she_ to refer to someone whom one would otherwise be inclined to call a _man_—and to let them in to any corresponding sex-segregated spaces, _&c._—that cost needs to be aggregated across everyone subject to it, like so many dust specks in their eyes. 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 dryers 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 identities 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 target gender would appeal to the ways in which this is really is a natural categorization.
-The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](TODO: linky) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming 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, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not particularly focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
+The pre-verbal, subconscious, [System 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dual_process_theory&oldid=820860981#Systems) process by which we notice someone's features (breasts, facial hair, voice, facial structure, gendered clothing or grooming 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, _&c._), mentally categorize them as a _woman_ or a _man_, and use that category to guide our interactions with them, isn't subject to conscious control—but, for most purposes in day-to-day public life, it's also not _directly_ focused on genitalia or chromosomes.
-A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people are _modeling_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, albeit not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
+A natal female who _presents_ to the world as a man, and whom other people _model_ as a man on a System 1 level with no apparent incongruities, might very sensibly be said to _literally_ be a man (in the sense of social gender, not in the sense of "biologically male adult human"), because that's the mental category that people are actually using. Essentially, this is the argument that offers a photograph of a passing trans person, and says, "C'mon, do you _really_ want to call [this person](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Angel#/media/File:Buck_Angel_Headshot.jpg) a woman? Really?"
-Well, no. But notice that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
+Well, no. But the point is that this is an _empirical_ argument for why successfully-socially-transitioned trans people fit into _existing_ concepts of gender, _not_ a redefinition of top-20 nouns by fiat in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings. It works _because_ and _to the extent that_ transitioning actually works. To the extent that this fails to be true of self-identified trans people or some subset thereof—for example, insofar as physical transition _isn't_ always effective, or insofar as because people _do_ have legitimate use-cases for biological-sex classifications that aren't "fooled" by hormones and surgery—then the conclusion is correspondingly weakened.
-----
"Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885 retained a male pattern re criminality
_Slate Star Codex_ 2017 survey: 6939 (87.2%) cis men, 733 (9.2%) cis women, trans women 114 (1.4%): 13.4% trans!!!!
+
+(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.)
+
+-------
+
+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."
+
+ * *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 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.
+
+
+two-type taxonomy
+
+people are good at noticing patterns: if there's a statistical association in the world
+
+obvious | easy-to-observe | harder-to-observe
+features | features | features
+-----------------+---------------------+--------------------
+blue, egg-shaped | furry, flexible | glows, contains vanadium
+red, cube-shaped | smooth, hard | unglowing, contains palladium
+
+Alexander praises Eliezer Yudkowsky's ["How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside"](http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_inside/), which builds off [previous](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nm/disguised_queries/) [posts](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/) discussing a parable about factory workers faced with the task of sorting objects which very strongly tend to _either_ be blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, luminescent, and vanadium-cored (categorized by the workers as "bleggs"), _or_ red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, non-luminescent, and palladium-cored (categorized by the workers as "rubes").
+
+Suppose you're a worker in this factory, and occasionally, an object comes down the conveyor belt that's blue, _roughly_ egg-shaped, and furry, but also hard (unlike the typical blegg, which is slightly flexible to the touch). If such objects are extremely rare, you might not notice them at all—you'd quickly categorize each one as a _blegg_ and toss it in the blegg bin without a second thought. But as these unusual hard bleggs start to become more common, you get curious and take the time to examine one.
+
+You make a startling discovery—the object was originally a smooth, hard red cube, of which someone had sanded off the corners to approximate an egg shape, and ironed on a layer of _faux_ blue fur.
+
+"Wow," you say, "someone sure has gone to a lot of trouble to make these rubes look like bleggs!"
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