Title: Crossing the Line
-Date: 2020-12-26 05:00
+Date: 2020-12-17 14:00
Category: commentary
Tags: categorization, convention, social construction, review (paper), Julia Serano
-Status: draft
> _There are lines I've always felt I had to toe
> Some were blurry, some unseen
Regular readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ know where I'm going with this! Why do we care about the further question of what "gender" someone is, if we already have fine-grained perceptions of how the person looks and behaves? Because our brains [use category-membership as an input into predictions when our perceptions are uncertain](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#everyday-base-rates).
-If categories influence judgement on tasks as simple as _remembering colors_, then on theoretical grounds, I would expect the effect of gender on perception of people to be _much_ worse (that is, larger), because people are much more complicated than colors. With colors, what you see is _basically_ what there is: if your memories or perception of 500-nanometer wavelength light get rounded off slightly bluewards or greenwards depending on how many color words are in your native language, that's kind of bad compared to what a well-designed AI with access to the pure, unmediated colorspace could perceive, but at least that bias is only acting on the _one_ dimension of color. In contrast, your observations of a particular person are going to be much sparser than everything your brain might want to predict about that person, so your priors about what humans are like are going to have to do a greater share of the work—work that relies on the ways ([some blurry](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16173891/), [some unseen](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)) that female humans are different from male humans.
+If categories influence judgement on tasks as simple as _remembering colors_, then on theoretical grounds, I would expect the effect of gender on perception of people to be _much_ worse (that is, larger), because people are much more complicated than colors. With colors, what you see is _basically_ what there is: if your memories or perception of 500-nanometer wavelength light get rounded off slightly bluewards or greenwards depending on how many color words are in your native language, that's bad compared to what a well-designed AI with access to the pure, unmediated colorspace could perceive, but at least that bias is only acting on the _one_ dimension of color. In contrast, your observations of a particular person are going to be much sparser than everything your brain might want to predict about that person. Under those circumstances, the dominant algorithm might end up [eating bias in order to reduce variance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff) by having your priors about what humans are like do a greater share of the work—work that relies on the ways ([some blurry](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16173891/), [some unseen](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)) that female humans are different from male humans.
Transgender people are in a uniquely epistemically privileged position to observe this process, as the change from not-passing to passing is simultaneously a _small_ one as far as the person themselves is concerned, and a _large_ one as far as how the person is percieved by others. In a couple paragraphs that make me feel sad and jealous (I can't say _dysphoric_ because I don't know what that word means), Julia Serano explains what it's like to cross that line (in Ch. 8, "Dismantling Cissexual Privilege", of _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_):
> [W]hen I eventually did transition, I chose not to put on a performance—I simply acted, dressed, and spoke the way I always had, the way that felt most comfortable to me. After being on female hormones for a few months, I found that people began to consistently gender me as female despite the fact that I was "doing" my gender the same way I always had. What I found most striking was how other people interpreted my same actions and mannerisms differently based on whether they perceived me as female or male. For example, when ordering drinks at bars, I found that if I looked around the room while waiting for my drink (as I always unconsciously had prior to transitioning), men started hitting on me because they assumed I was signaling my availability (when I was male, the same action was likely to be interpreted simply as me scoping out the room). And in supermarket checkout lines, when the child in the cart ahead of me started smiling and talking to me, I found that I could interact with them without their mother becoming suspicious or fearful (which is what often happened in similar situations where I was perceived as male).
-> During the first year of my transition, I experienced hundreds of little moments like that, where other people interpreted my words and actions differently based solely on the changed in my perceived sex. And it was not merely my behaviors that were interpreted differently, it was my body as well: the way people approached me, spoke to me, the assumptions they made about me, the lack of deference and respect I often received, the way others often sexualized my body. All of these changes occured without my having to say or do a thing.
+> During the first year of my transition, I experienced hundreds of little moments like that, where other people interpreted my words and actions differently based solely on the change in my perceived sex. And it was not merely my behaviors that were interpreted differently, it was my body as well: the way people approached me, spoke to me, the assumptions they made about me, the lack of deference and respect I often received, the way others often sexualized my body. All of these changes occured without my having to say or do a thing.
-Serano goes on to suggest that social gender exists, not in the way individuals perform gender, but in how others perceive it, and that therefore efforts to create a less oppressive world must involve dismantling cissexist and heteronormative assumptions: "if we truly want to bring an end to all gender-based oppression, then we must begin by taking responsibility for our own perceptions and presumptions[; t]he most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies."
+Serano goes on to suggest that social gender exists, not in the way individuals perform gender, but in how others perceive it, and that therefore efforts to create a less oppressive world must involve dismantling cisnormative assumptions: "if we truly want to bring an end to all gender-based oppression, then we must begin by taking responsibility for our own perceptions and presumptions[; t]he most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies."
-I can see how one might derive that lesson from the described experiences of transitioning, but I think it's ultimately a flawed generalization from a _necessarily_ unrepresentative experience. The ways people treated Serano differently after she transitioned despite Serano being the same person the whole time, are not _arbitrary_: that happened _because_ the fact that Serano looked like a woman, prompted people to use mental models trained against the distribution of women. (There might be [_reasons_ going back hundreds of millions of years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_in_primates) for primate mothers to become suspicious or fearful of males near their children.)
+I can see how one might derive that lesson from the described experiences of transitioning, but I think it's ultimately a flawed generalization from a _necessarily_ unrepresentative experience. The ways people treated Serano differently after she transitioned despite Serano being the same person the whole time, are not _arbitrary_: that happened _because_ the fact that Serano looked like a woman, prompted people to use mental models trained against the distribution of [adult human females](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/). (There might be [_reasons_ going back hundreds of millions of years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide_in_primates) for primate mothers to become suspicious or fearful of males near their children.)
-In the same chapter of _Whipping Girl_, Serano mentions that in her days of identifying as a male crossdresser, she found it easier to pass in suburban areas rather than cities, "where people were presumably more aware of the existence of gender-variant people."
+In the same chapter of _Whipping Girl_, Serano mentions that in her days of identifying as a male crossdresser, she found it easier to pass in suburban areas rather than cities, "where people were presumably more aware of the existence of gender-variant people." This also makes tragic Bayesian sense: transitioning to organically be perceived as the other sex is easier to pull off when it's unexpected, because the lower the prior, the less of a [likelihood ratio you need](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/) in order to reach a given posterior probability.
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-The change in other agents' behaviors elicited by [sending the signals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) of a different type is so dramatic specifically [_because_ it's a rare, off-equilibrium play](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist).
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-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace
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-If there were much more probability-mass just on either side of a line people are using to make predictions and decisions, then _the line wouldn't be there_.
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-[TODO research—
-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias%E2%80%93variance_tradeoff
-> Gerd Gigerenzer and co-workers [...] that the human brain resolves the dilemma in the case of the typically sparse, poorly-characterised training-sets provided by experience by adopting high-bias/low variance heuristic
-]
+The change in other agents' behaviors elicited by crossing the line into [sending the signals](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) of a different type is so dramatic specifically [_because_ it's a rare, off-equilibrium play](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist). Lines between categories are placed in the no man's land between [regions of unusually high probability-density in configuration space](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace). If there were much more probability-mass just on either side of a line people are using to make predictions and decisions, then _the line wouldn't be there_.
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