outline sketch for "Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion"

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+Title: Gender Identity as Cognitive Illusion: Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes
+Date: 2021-06-01 05:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: categorization, epistemology
+Status: draft
+
+Outline—
+
+ * our brains are good at using the same word to represent absolute differences and low-effect-size stereotypes; it kind of has to be this way, but can result in puzzles and paradoxes if you don't know what's going on
+ * the paradoxes go away when you stop down and just think about the high-dimensional probability distribution
+
+### One example: why lesbians are women (do ... do I even need to explain this?)
+
+ * when you point out masculine behavior of AGP TW as evidence for them being male, people will say, "Ah, but lesbians are masculine, too; are you saying that lesbians aren't women???"
+ * reply: we want the word "women" to refer to the actually-biological-female cluster, which is discretely identifiable, but overlaps with the male cluster if you look at a chosen subspace of individual psychology variables
+ * maybe in some contexts you might want to talk about "masculine people" that includes prototypical men and butch lesbians
+ * sketch out a toy model with numbers 
+
+How I put it in the comments—
+
+http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Mar/point-man/#isso-171
+
+> our brains are good at using a single concept to simultaneously represent discrete differences (genitals, chromosomes) and mere statistical differences (of various effect sizes) that have a lot of overlap—basically, stereotypes.
+
+> (Such that if you only know someone's sex and nothing else about them, your expectations are going to come out of a probability distribution centered on stereotypes, but this doesn't doom us to an oppressive caste system as long as you can update on individuating information: outliers of various degrees along various dimensions merely require a slightly longer message to describe rather than getting shot.)
+
+> People who are sympathetic to people who wish they could change sex imagine that they can safely delete the discrete differences from the concept-definition—but if you do that, then, as you describe, there's nothing left for the concept to attach to, except the things we know how to change (people with currently estrogen-dominant hormone systems?), and stereotypes. But people can't say out loud that they're trying to re-anchor the concepts onto smaller-effect-size stereotypes, because they haven't forgotten that the previous iteration of the ideology held sexism is bad. So we end up with a huge amount of doublethink and dissembling,