--- /dev/null
+Title: "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs and Benefits of Nonbinary Gender as a Social Technology
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: epistemology, nonbinary, social technology
+Status: draft
+
+> [TODO: how does the line go?] _and I'm waiting
+> To finally talk to a girl a little cooler than me
+> Her name is Nona; she's a rocker with a nose ring
+> She's AFAB enby but I'm not quite sure what that means_
+>
+> —["Girl All the Bad Guys Want"](https://genius.com/Bowling-for-soup-girl-all-the-bad-guys-want-lyrics) by Bowling for Soup (paraphrased)
+
This post is a reply to [friend of the blog](/tag/ozy/) Ozymandias's [reply](TODO: linky) to [my reply](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) to Scott Alexander's ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
+After summarizing the discussion so far, Ozy
+
> Saotome-Westlake argues for the existence of a third definition, based on psychology. He argues that (some) trans people are psychologically different from cisgender members of their identified genders: if you graph, say, how likely cisgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, and how likely transgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, these charts will not look very much like each other at all. Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.
[gut take, not sure where/how it belongs in the post: I have misgivings about this, because I'm not a _fan_ of psychological sexual dimorphism and it feels weird to be painted as a defender of it. But, but—if the difference is still going to _be there_ no matter how I feel about it, then that's _worth noticing_]
-> Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.
-
-A side note, but—this doesn't actually seem hard to explain. If the ought-to-be-five means MtFs, well, you _can't_ transition MtF and _stay_ in the NFL—HRT is going to kill your performance. Even if you think the effect size of hormones is overhyped, this is a _very_ competitive area, you can't say, "Oh, it only affected performance like ten percent, that's nothing—ten percent is _huge_." This doesn't rule out Jenner-class eggs in the NFL.
-
-And if it means FtMs, well, people get into football as teenagers: there are going to be structural reasons making that difficult even if gynephilic FtMs _are_ the sort of people who would like to play (difficulty of transitioning _that_ early _and_ being stealthy about it, and difficulty of being accepted as one of the guys if you're not stealthy—let alone NFL/NCAA policy about steroid use, if the matter has even come up, which is probably hasn't)
> So by Saotome-Westlake’s argument, any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all.
>
[...]
-> If the Cohen’s d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as “large”), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem.
+> If the Cohen's d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as "large"), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem.
[I _wish_ it were _d_=1! link the research on multivariate differences and how it might actually be d=2.7]
"I think that if you crossdress, or if you kink on trans stuff, or you show _any signs_ of egghood, you _need_ to marry someone who is okay with you eventually transitioning. Not because you definitely will transition! But because it is _likely enough_ that you need to _plan_ for it."
"I probably don't actually _disagree_. Keeping promises is very important—
-But in the spirit of [Policy Debates Should No Appear One-Sided](TODO: linky), I would like to register a note of sadness that we're are effectively thereby saying 'eggs don't deserve love.'"
+But in the spirit of [Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided](TODO: linky), I would like to register a note of sadness that we're are effectively thereby saying 'eggs don't deserve love.'"
"Eggs can have love, they just add a constraint."
>
> —"Cocoon" by Greg Egan
-> She's AFAB enby but I'm not quite sure what that means
->
-> —["Girl All the Bad Guys Want"](https://genius.com/Bowling-for-soup-girl-all-the-bad-guys-want-lyrics) by Bowling for Soup (paraphrased)
-
> What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.
>
> —Susan Sontag
> Gender portrayal seems to vary based on target audience. In genres and channels targeting boys, girls are more likely to be depicted as smarter, less emotional, and more technically savvy (Baker & Raney, 2007; Gerding and & Signorielli, 2014; Thompson & Zerbinos, 1995). Conversely, genres and channels targeting girl viewers depict boys as more emotional and affectionate than do boy-oriented media (Aubrey & Harrison, 2004; Hentges & Case, 2013).
The authors go on to state that "[i]n sum, children's media reinforce gender role binaries and suggest that our culture values strictly delineated gender roles." But left unexplained is why a culture that values strictly delineated gender roles would optimize for portraying girls with masculine-coded virtues in boys' media and boys with feminine-coded virtues in girls' media. (An alternative theory that does predict this particular datum is that media producers are incentivized to cater to children's egocentric fantasies of the other sex's psychology being more like their own ...)
+
+
+-----
+
+Extracted from reply to Ozy on categories—
+
+> Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.
+
+A side note, but—this doesn't actually seem hard to explain. If the ought-to-be-five means MtFs, well, you _can't_ transition MtF and _stay_ in the NFL—HRT is going to kill your performance. Even if you think the effect size of hormones is overhyped, this is a _very_ competitive area, you can't say, "Oh, it only affected performance like ten percent, that's nothing—ten percent is _huge_." This doesn't rule out Jenner-class eggs in the NFL.
+
+And if it means FtMs, well, people get into football as teenagers: there are going to be structural reasons making that difficult even if gynephilic FtMs _are_ the sort of people who would like to play (difficulty of transitioning _that_ early _and_ being stealthy about it, and difficulty of being accepted as one of the guys if you're not stealthy—let alone NFL/NCAA policy about steroid use, if the matter has even come up, which is probably hasn't)
-Scattered Personal Reflections
-I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
-The View From Nowhere
-"But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": on the Costs and Benefits of Nonbinary Genders as a Social Technology
+_ Scattered Personal Reflections
+_ The View From Nowhere
+_ I Mean, Yes, I Agree That Man Should Allocate Some More Categories, But
+_ "But I'm Not Quite Sure What That Means": Costs and Benefits of Nonbinary Genders as a Social Technology
+
+minor—
+_ ask S. if I can repost her information-theoretic account of passing??
+✓ Christina Hoff Sommers
+✓ eggs don't deserve love
Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb; Or, Charity, Objectivity, and ...
Demibuoy
Q Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
_ Stereotypes, Models, and Cognition: Beyond Maximum-Entropy Psychology
-
Imperfect Trait Measurements Regress to the Mean
Q The Gender Czar's Compromise
Friendship Practices of ...
Product Review: FaceApp
Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
Q Book Review: Nevada
-ask S. if I can repost her information-theoretic account of passing??
Product Review: Oculus Go
All You Had to Say https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/8xa97t/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_09_2018/e228vyj/
-✓ Christina Hoff Sommers
-✓ eggs don't deserve love
IDEAS STOCKPILE—
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff