vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Ultimately it sounds like you're doing a marginally more sophisticated version of the style of argument that trans activists seem to love so much: "the existence of a few marginal edge cases in your categorisation system proves that it's COMPLETELY useless, so we might as well just throw our hands up and make both categories elective"
The main difference is that I'm genuinely happy with gametes as the best "lie to children" definition of sex. I don't think it's completely useless, anymore than I think "The Earth is a sphere" or the Bohr model of the atom are completely useless.
You simply asked what flaws I thought existed with these models, and I gave my opinion. Plenty of flawed things are still useful, and worthy of being used.
Also, I hope it was clear - I reject the idea that transwomen are biological women. I was just saying if you're going to be a little unprincipled in category construction, you don't have as much room to prevent someone saying you should be even more unprincipled.
If literally the only predictive difference between members of category A and members of category C is that the former can get pregnant and the latter can't, but they are otherwise identical, it just seems inefficient to create a whole separate category.
There's a ton of differences between Turner syndrome women and the modal woman. People with Turner syndrome have physical differences (low set ears, short stature, lymphodema of the hands and feet), they don't normally undergo puberty, often have issues with spatial visualization and mathematics, and are prone to certain diseases (heart defects, Type II diabetes, hypothyroidism, and conductive hearing loss)
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
While being broadly supportive of the definition of biological sex in Trump's EO, I touched on some of my reservations here.
Basically, it just seems obvious to me that the gamete definition of sex fails to create a two sex system, which seems to be a desideratum for a lot of anti-trans people. There are three natural gamete types in humans: type one produces small, mobile gametes, type two produces large gametes, and type three produces no gametes. Turning this into a two-sex model seems to require injecting a kind of Platonism into things, which is anti-empirical.
That is, the claim seems to be something like, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this person with Turner syndrome who produces no gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
But if we're going to get Platonic with it, why couldn't we also say, "In some ideal sense separate from the raw biological reality of their situation, this transsexual person who produces small gametes, is actually a woman, even though womanhood is defined by producing large gametes, and they do not do this."
Put another way, I don't actually think the concept of a "defective woman" is actually scientific. It involves adding information to a raw, empirical reality in an undisciplined and unjustified way.
As for cluster definitions, I think the biggest objection is that they're "inelegant" and don't actually seem to do the thing we want to do, which is provide an easy membership test we can just apply to any new object in order to determine what category it belongs to. "Naturally produces small gametes" is an easy membership test. "Enough of their traits (chromosomes, anatomy, SRY gene, hormones, etc.) point in the right direction" is barely a test at all, even if 99+% of people are easily classified.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Calling your adoptive child son and calling your wife's mother mom are exactly intuitive, and perfectly fine for everyday use.
I suppose when I said "intuitive", I meant that it wasn't something that virtually every human culture would come up with independently.
I would assume virtually every human culture has the concept of "toy animals" or "animal statues", and that in many languages, you might colloquially refer to it as the animal in question.
Given that there are large civilizations without Western-style adoption, like the Islamic world, I take that to be a demonstration that adoptive children are only "intuitive" insofar as one is raised to consider it so.
By that same token, once transness becomes more than an emerging social role, I think it will be equally "intuitive" to consider trans women honorary women in the relevant contexts for a given social milleu. But it is not "intuitive" in the same way animal statues being the represented animal is "intuitive."
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Culturally speaking, the alternative way of dealing with the problem of defective people is to put them in their own category.
Occidentals don't like to do this for reasons that take whole books to explain, but if you want to have a third social role made of eunuchs and other infertile people, it has ample precedent.
Yeah, when it comes to biological sex, I think a three sex model makes the most sense: male, female, neuter. It just seems like desperate grasping at straws to insist that there are only two sexes, especially when the popular definition seems to be the gamete model (in that it is what Trump's EO uses.)
There are four ways gametes can be present in an individual: small, large, both, and neither. Humans do not naturally produce both gametes, therefore we are left with three categories. Attempts to avoid this conclusion just seem to be socially motivated ways to avoid putting a person in an "othered" category. The category makers would rather someone be a "weird woman" than a third thing that is almost a woman.
Then you could make a natural vs. artificial distinction. Today, we only have artificial neuters, though we have quasi-artificial females (with Turner's syndrome people who are given hormone therapy and possibly IVF with donor eggs still failing to be gametically female, but getting about as close as a human can be to female without being one.) Perhaps some day there will be artificial females and males, but we're not there today.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Well, I'm neither a transmed nor a tucute. My socio-legal sex model doesn't even really care about "gender" or "gender identity", though there are certainly comparisons with "honorary sex" within my model. The difference is relationship and emphasis - "honorary sex" is explicitly a social construct built in relation to biological sex.
People who don't produce any are, in every case, a defective version of one or the other (yes this includes all types of intersex people).
I've actually always felt that this is kind of an odd abstraction from a philosophical stand point, wherever we do it - not just in the trans domain.
If we're talking about the "facts" about a person's biology, then shouldn't we actually talk about the empirical facts?
Like, if we want the central definition of dog to be something like, "Four-legged animal descended from wolves", then it seems a bit odd to me to say that a congenitally three-legged dog is "actually" a defective four-legged animal. It seems to me that it actually is a three legged animal, and while the central definition of dog might have four legs, it is actually fuzzier in the way almost all biological definitions are.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not stupid. I get the idea of human category making involving a central exemplar, and then making accomodations for difference. If I saw a purple horse, I would not lose all sense and go, "What kind of strange creature is this?", but I'd also be prepared to widen my effective definition of horses to include the possibility of non-central horses like a congenitally purple horse, the same way I do for albino or melanistic animals.
It kind of strikes me as a strange sort of epicycle to justify having any definitions at all in the biological space.
Like, by what metric is a person with Turner's syndrome (X0-karyotype) actually a "defective" woman? Sure, she'll have feminine anatomy, but she doesn't naturally undergo puberty and can't produce large gametes. If we're talking about congenital biology, that seems like a natal null to me, and our medical science is currently capable of pushing her body in a more womanly direction. But that was an intervention - it is not natural. How can we say she is a "biological woman", or a "defective biological woman" if we're using the gamete definition of sex? Surely, there would then be some ground to claim that a trans woman is just an extremely defective biological woman by the same token?
If we can admit comparisons and contrasts to the larger class as a non-central example, then it seems to me the limits of inclusion are social willingness and not any "objective" facts about the reference class.
Edit: Typo, flow.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Calling an adoptive child "my son", or my wife's mother "mother-in-law" isn't intuitive either. It is a social convention concerning common ways we stretch and skew language.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
I'm not sure that I've observed this inconsistency.
What are some instances where you think the definitions are strong, and on trans people's sides that they tend to bring up?
In many ways, the core of my adoptive sex model is one that sidesteps definitions all together. Sure, call trans women "men" if you want - that has absolutely no bearing on whether they're an honorary woman, because honorary statuses exist in the social realm not the empirical realm.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
That still means you're in favor of sending men to women's prison because they've had a sentencing-day realization that they're trans (or even a post-sentencing-day one, and transferring them), of letting men pommel women in sports like boxing during the Olympics, or of telling the women complaining about a bloke with a raging erection in their women-only naked spa, that they're the one in the wrong. Correct?
Incorrect.
Adoption laws don't force us to pretend that adoptive parents will likely be possible bone marrow donors, and honorary sex laws have no necessary legal connection to a package of particular treatment norms.
We could have the institution of honorary sex, and decide to still segregate some or all of the spaces you listed. The only one I'm actually inclined to push for is bathroom honorary sex integration, because I think that the requirement most societies will have to show social proof will usually prevent same day declarations by malefactors, and my assessment of risks versus rewards just doesn't agree with the integration pessimists. (Especially because I think a pseudo-trans malefactor who would want to lie could always be smart and say something like, "Hey, I don't want to be here either, but I'm a trans man - a biological woman - and the stupid laws require me to be here. I'll try to be quick and do my business in private without getting in your way" - before assaulting a victim when they let their guard down. I don't think any enforcement mechanism can fix the problem of a motivated invader without getting overly draconian.)
It's an administrative process that cannot be rejected, I don't consider it social proof of any sort. Originally I didn't mean to imply you support this, but you clearly seem to.
I mean, in some places all it takes to get married is to sign a piece of paper with a witness. I would still consider that a form of social proof - even if "throwing a party with all of our friends and family where we state our commitment to one another" is probably a more central example of social proof.
I don't support the punitive aspects of such laws. I'm a big believer in pluralism and free speech culture, and I would rather the government didn't force people to say or do things that go against deeply help beliefs of theirs.
I'm okay with fairly lax laws for letting the government know you want to adopt an honorary sex role though. That's up to every society and subculture to decide for themselves, including the decision to reject it entirely.
EDIT:
And with that you should answer the original scenario. Should I be able to change my race to black, by filing some paperwork?
I think I already said that I accept transracialism up thread, and even think that it is far more common than usually thought (cf. Hispanics becoming "white" in the US.)
I tend to think that more costly social proof is more likely to be widely accepted, but I have nothing against a culture or subculture making the gatekeeping for honorary statuses as low as they collectively decide.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for.
I don't think you can avoid doing a little philosophy when you are talking about rigorous scientific definitions.
I think you and I are in near complete agreement as far as empirically verifiable reality surrounding trans women or biological sex is concerned.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I think that the terminology problem that arises here is the difference between social truths and mind-independent truths about reality.
If I was speaking colloquially, I would allow social truths to be called "objective" in some sense. But I think there is a difference between a sentence like "The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour", and "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium." The first is referring to an intersubjective agreement about a rule in society, and the second is a fact that even Martians could discover about the universe.
In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independeng facts about reality (objective.)
I think these sentences are mind-independent truths:
- Adoptive children are not the biological offspring of their adoptive parents. Augustus is not the son of Caesar.
- Trans women belong to the class of people who produce small, mobile gametes. Trans women are biological men.
But they are completely compatible with the social truths:
- Adoptive children are the children of their adoptive parents. Augustus is the son of Caesar.
- Trans people are honorary members of their identified sex. Trans women are women.
I agree that social truths lend themselves to falsification. If I make a move in chess, it is either legal or it is not. But chess is not a mind-independent part of the universe that a Martian scientist could just discover "out there." It exists as a set of intersubjective agreements between humans, who agree to abide by the rules of chess.
So too, every society decides the rules by which they judge the validity of adoption and honorary sex transition. The Islamic world rejects the concept of "adoption", replacing it with a legal construct of "guardianship" with different implications for inheritance, for example. "Adoption" is not a legal move in the game of Islamic jurisprudence.
Right now, honorary sex transition is in a state of flux - finding acceptance among some in the Western world, and rejection among others. People are playing different games, and may or may not converge on a single game some day.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency.
Could you point me in the direction of these laws? Do they allow you to self-ID without letting anyone know until you're called on it, or do they require you to file paperwork with the government still? Because filing paperwork is still a form of social proof in my book.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Is it, though? Howcome when Trump passes his EO's the response from the mainstream media isn't "Trump Being Obtuse: Fails To Realize Trans Identity Is A Social Role, Not A Medical Claim", but "Trump'S Definition Of 'Male,' 'Female' Criticized By Medical And Legal Experts"?
I'm not responsible for the silly things other people claim, even if they come to conclusions that superficially resemble my own. Before I answer your question, let me touch on my feelings about Trump's EO.
On one level, I'm basically fine with the definitions of biological sex in Trump's EO, and I disagree with the critics that say they're malformed.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
Gametic sex always felt like the best way to define biological sex to me, and I think that the people criticizing the "at conception" part of the definition are a bit wrong-headed. It makes sense that you can belong to a category (the sex that produces large or small gametes) even if you don't yet have the mature ability to do the thing characteristic of that category. A caterpillar is still a juvenile butterfly, even if it doesn't have wings.
I could quibble about the fact that at conception a fertilized egg can become one person, two people (twins) or half of a person (chimeras), and that this can technically lead to weird cases like this fertile chimera woman who was a fusion of two beings who, at conception, arguably belonged to the male sex, and the female sex - unless we count her conception as starting at the point where the chimera was formed, in which case it is not clear to me that we knew what sex she belonged to (based on the EO's definition) until she finally developed. Can a person's sex technically remain in limbo for more than a decade by this definition?
I could also quibble about people I would describe not as "intersex" but "nullsex." If sex is defined by gametes, what about people who don't naturally produce gametes? I always find it a bit odd that people with Turner syndrome (X0-karyotype) are considered "biolgical women." While they have gynomorphic anatomy, they typically do not naturally go through puberty, and do not have functional ovaries. If given hormone therapy, they'll go through a female puberty, and they can get pregnant through IVF with donor eggs, but under a gametic definition of sex they'd surely represent a third sex (a null sex.)
But I'm not inclined to such quibbling here. Law is an example of practical philosophy. Those corner cases will be dealt with by courts interpreting the definitions used. That chimera woman would likely be considered "female" by any competent court. So too, they'd likely class people with Turner syndrome as women, regardless of how the law defines "female."
To actually answer your question. I think the article you're talking about is pulling a bit of a motte and bailey. I read it, and what it claims is technically true. The director of the health institute they interviewed did indeed claim that the cluster definition of sex was a better model, and thought that EO ignored intersex people. The lawyer they interviewed did indeed worry that trans people and intersex people would be hurt by the order. Nowhere did the article actually try to defend "gender" (what I would call "honorary sex"), and there's actually a weird disconnect in the middle of the article. The cluster definition is certainly a defensible alternative definition of sex, but it's not one that seems to easily cohere with the issue of trans people (who would likely still be classed in their biological sex, even with a cluster definition.)
I think they think this is the strongest case they can make in an adversarial environment. Retreat to, "sex is more complex than this, what about intersex people?" and "it will hurt people" - not actually claim anything about the nature of trans people one way or the other.
What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?
Cultural narratives that justify social change will do what they will, I have no control over that. LGB activists really enjoyed bringing up gay penguins and the like, even though it reeks of the naturalistic fallacy to me. But the "born this way" narrative really took off, and it was only natural that trans people would try the same rhetorical move. It's the same thing that happened with the anti-cryptocurrency people who recycled the environmental critique and used it against generative AI, even though the amount of energy being used is a drop in the bucket compared to things like airline travel, existing data centers' energy usage, etc.
I think it must always be weird to live through a decentralized social change. Sets of narratives will compete until one that finally wins the day and convinces people bubbles up to the top. The narrative that wins won't necessarily be "true" - just convincing.
I don't care that my "honorary sex" model isn't the one preferred by trans advocates. I think it is the most true model of the situation, until an artificial superintelligence studies humanity and fully explains every aspect of aberrant human psychology one way or the other.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment, any more than I've endorsed the view that you can just adopt an orphaned child at any given moment. I think in most cases and with most social groups, honorary statuses will require some kind of "social proof" for a group to accept them. In the case of adoption, it might look like filling out a bunch of forms with the government. In the case of trans people, it might look like paying $50 at your DMV to get your sex indicators changed on your driver's license.
The "social proof" doesn't have to involve the government, though that is usually the "easiest" path since it means that the people with the ability to enforce contracts through their monopoly on force recognize your claim as legitimate. However, if a national disaster created a 10 year state of anarchy, I think people in a community that already believed in the basic legitimacy of child adoption could have informal adoption with enough social proof that most of the people in a community recognized the validity of the claim.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Sure, that kind of thing happens all the time. Light brown-skinned Hispanic people are increasingly identifying as just "white" in the United States and their voting behavior is becoming more correlated with assimilated white Americans, for example. There's a long history of things like blanqueamiento in the Latin American world.
I think there are a few basic levels of intersubjective truth claims:
- Tier 1: Things some group of people (perhaps as small as a single family, or a friend group) believe.
- Tier 2: Things a slightly larger group like a tribe or subculture believe.
- Tier 3: Things larger groups like a nation or civilization believe.
- Tier 4: Things that transcend tribe or nation in some way.
Trans people might arguably be at the level of Tier 2 - if one is willing to talk about "progressives" as a tribe. So far as I know, transracial people in the Rachel Dolezal style are still at Tier 1. These tiers aren't about making a thing "more true" - since I think social "truths" like "dollars have value", "The United States exists", or "So-and-so is the true king" are all operating more at the level of fiction. If you want to be nitpicky, I think they could all be called false in a strict sense, in the same way that saying something like, "Harry Potter is a wizard" is false - there is no such person as Harry Potter, and no such thing as wizards. But everyone who knows how to speak and use words also knows that "Harry Potter is a wizard" is a more felicitous sentence than "Harry Potter is a fire-breathing dragon."
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth.
I think this is a category error. It would be a bit like saying, "Scientifically speaking, an in-law is not your relative." Like, sure, I have no biological relationship to my mother-in-law, but we have a societal convention that marriage creates kin relationships, to not just my wife, but her whole family.
Similarly, it would be obtuse to say something like, "Scientifically speaking, 'adopted children' do not exist." Again, we normally consider the parent-child relationship to be biological, but adopted children and adoptive parents are granted an honorary parent-child relationship as a societal convention.
I think transness is best explained as an honorary social status. It has a family resemblance to institutions like the sworn virgins of Albania, or Queen Hatshepsut's honorary maleness. It's just an emerging social role within some Anglo-European societies, where a person of one sex declares that they would like to live as the other sex, usually adopting as much of the appearance of the opposite sex as possible and requesting treatment appropriate to that adopted sex role. It's not "scientific" to say, "transwomen are women", but neither is saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son." But we shouldn't expect all "true" statements to be true in a scientific way, rather than in an intersubjective cultural way.
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
Many people find this to be their main sticking point with the pronoun stuff. Not only is somebody lying, they want everyone else to lie too.
I don't think this is truly people's objection, whatever else they may say.
I think there are a ton of cases where a fuzzy boundary, usually corresponding to some biological reality, gets bridged with an honorary status. Whether it is adoption of children creating honorary blood relations, or conversion to ethnoreligions like the ex-Muslim Vaishnavite convert Haridasa Thakur or the Biblical Ruth's adoption of Jewish customs and ways.
I think the "adoption" model (which I've sometimes called the "socio-legal sex" model) of trans people is the closest to being an accurate statement of the reality of trans people, and it has the advantage of not requiring any dubious metaphysics. A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child. Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality - they are intersubjective facts about human social relationships and (potentially) associated legal structures
There is no lie in saying, "Augustus was Julius Ceasar's son" any more than there is a lie in saying "The United States has 50 states" or any number of other intersubjective human-created "truths." Of course, with these kinds of truths, there will always be room for rivalrous claims. If I say, "There is no King of England", then depending on what I mean by that, I could be saying a perfectly "true" fact. (For example, if I was an anarchist, and didn't regard any monarchical claim as valid.)
vorpa-glavo
4d ago
contrapoints
I wouldn't really consider Contrapoints to be within the rationalist sphere. She's just an ex-academic socialist who became a Youtuber, and who accidentally became a part of the "Breadtube" coalition of progressive content creators. Correct me if I'm wrong though - Google didn't turn up much connection between Contrapoints and the rationalist diaspora.
Point of order. LessWrong was banning people for "mis-gendering" and "dead-naming" as far back as 2012.
To be fair, I think this is consistent with the rationalist flirtation with transhumanism. If you believe people should have the right to experiment with their bodies and subject themselves to far more radical technological transformations, then someone coming to you saying, "I was born male, but I want to use science and technology to make my body as similar to a natal female's as possible, and then I want to be treated like a woman as far as possible", then you're more likely to just shrug and say, "Sure, why not?"
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.
Funny, my reading was just that she was a troll, especially because her bio has "[...] you can call me a troll until your throat hurts." My money would be on "cis male troll" before it would be on "good faith trans woman", but only because a username like "just a woman" feels like something neither a cis nor trans woman would make, and certainly not in this space.
vorpa-glavo
6d ago
No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.
The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)
vorpa-glavo
7d ago
If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
The thing you're missing is that Congress kept delegating rule-making authority to "independent agencies" under the executive, while also creating rules the executive branch had to follow while exercising the delegated authority. The fear from those who are concerned by this move is that Trump will keep the delegated rule-making authority, while ignoring the rules for exercising that delegated authority.
In theory, if Congress wanted to, they could seize power back with unvetoable majorities in the House and Senate, and remove both the delegated authority and the rules for exercising it. But with the split between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans, and Democrats, that is unlikely to happen. So the end result is a massive power grab for the executive branch because of unwillingness to act on the part of Congress and the Courts.
I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:
- A time period was the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities have four.
- In the same time period, mobs destroying printing presses that circulated ideas people didn't like had a chilling effect on the way people chose to exercise free speech.
Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.
Are you sure? I've always had the sense that cluster of traits definitions were most common in biology and genetics. While I don't like such definitions as the "lie to children" version we teach most people, I do admit that something like the following process:
Is going to be a fairly reliable method, and a scientist will be able to plug a new data point in and identify what cluster it belongs to the vast majority of the time. It just doesn't really produce an easy, human-learnable rule for dealing with edge cases.
I have considered that, but it doesn't work since Trump's EO eliminates the X category and mandates everyone either be classed as male or female.
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