check in

diff --git a/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md b/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md
index 4ef4a8b..636b16f 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md
+++ b/content/drafts/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention.md
@@ -8,15 +8,21 @@ Status: draft
 >
 > —[Greg Cochran](https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/12/12/internal-contradictions/)
 
-We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want everyone to be judged 
+We socially-liberal individualist/feminist people—I _hope_ I'm still allowed to use the first person here, although the reader will ultimately judge that for herself—have this beautiful moral ideal, where we want all human beings to be free to maximize their potential, unencumbered by oppressive cultural traditions specifying roles and destinies in advance. We want everyone to be judged on her or his _own_ merits rather than treated as a representative of their race or sex.
 
-... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.
+And _because_ we care about the beautiful moral ideal, we tend to assume that psychological group differences don't exist or are superficial or are socially-constructed, 
 
+invidious distinction
 
-There's this an empricial structure to the world that _doesn't go away_ 
+(... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
 
 
-Psychological sex differences are 
+
+And this is _so crazy_ on _multiple levels_.
+
+
+analogy to spelling
+
 
 http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/
 
@@ -28,7 +34,7 @@ out of the three women present—
 
 (or four if you believe in gender identities, because on that worldview, I'm obviously a trans woman in denial)
 
-—they're _all_ trans, and _none_ of them come _close_ to passing.
+—they're _all_ trans, and _none_ of them come _close_ to passing. 
 
 
 

diff --git a/content/drafts/whats-my-motivation.md b/content/drafts/whats-my-motivation.md
index 995d2de..c279f59 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/whats-my-motivation.md
+++ b/content/drafts/whats-my-motivation.md
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial co
 
 But you only live once. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_—the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units—being around 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
 
-But this—_obsession_ with sex differences has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?
+But this—_obsession_ with sex differences and genderbending has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting, of what it's _like_ to have a female-typical hormone balance?
 
 I think—though introspection is difficult—that there's another motive, too, one which I would be remiss to omit, despite my suspicion that some readers (insufficiently appalled by the rest of the blog) may find apalling. Something about legitimacy. If I'm going to have the termerity to blog about trans issues—