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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   34043 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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The Zizians as we probably know are a rationalist murder-cult, followers of Jack "Ziz" Lasota, a non-passing preop MtF transsexual, which is an identity shared by many of Jack's followers. Yudkowsky commented on it on X, and I noticed he used "she/her" pronouns for Jack.

This seems to be the dominant social norm in rationalist spaces. In my experience I have seen rationalist spaces completely capitulate to trans language norms, even using altered pronouns to refer to people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.

I'm rationalist adjacent myself. I don't go out of my way to refuse to use someone's altered pronouns. I certainly have used chosen pronouns for people that pass and seem to engage the community in good faith. But I have a hard time adopting chosen pronouns as a rule. It seems to me that a social norm of always using altered pronouns weakens the defense against bad-faith actors. I've gotten comments deleted on rationalist message boards for correctly gendering various people in the news who seemed to me to be bad actors.

The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know. It seems important for the justice system. It helps explain his behavior. And it seems important for communities that are pattern-matching to filter future bad actors.

While I've spent a lot of time in rationalist spaces, I've also absorbed a bit of Gender Critical ideology. I used to have strong AGP urges, describing myself as a "lesbian in a man's body". But in my mid 30s I figured out that having an auto-erotic fantasy at the center of my sex life was isolating and would keep me from having the kind of family life that I desired. I began to detox from TG pornography and erotica, treating it much as one would treat an addiction. Gender critical forums were helpful for puncturing the balloons of my fantasy and helping me understand how some could see my TG roleplaying as anti-social behavior.

Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.

I wonder if the rationalist default to fully embrace trans language norms reflects the fact that there aren't a lot of mothers and daughters in the rationalist space, while there are a lot of MtF transsexuals. Perhaps it is just easiest for a scene to adopt the norms which will cause the least social friction within the scene. There's not a lot of breast-feeding forums, girl's swim meets, or female dorms in the experience of people in the rationalist community where the presence of transwomen would create conflict.

But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle. Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?

The tragedy of all of this:

I am - and pretty much always have been - firmly in favor of people being able to resleeve in the classic scifi style. I used to be open about this.

The current discourse around the subject? Has been actively counterproductive, and strongly so: I will not state the above in a non-anonymous setting. Full stop. (And even in an anon. setting I will not state the above without the full explanation, and am typically loathe to do so even then.)

Why?

Because instead of acknowledging - and working to overcome - the limitations and risks of the current technology, the discourse has largely been to:

a) suppress any research or studies showing the limitations and risks of the current technology.
b) suppress any research into improving said technology (mainly indirectly via the prior point)
c) attempt to gaslight others around them into pretending the current technology is resleeving in the classic scifi style.
d) attempting to press the current technology onto people who do not yet have the ability to fully grok the risk involved in said current technology.

If we had sex-change technology such that it was externally indistinguishable, fully functional, and fully reversible? I would be 100% for it.
If it wasn't, but was still fully reversible? I'd still be for it.
If it was externally indistinguishable, and fully functional, but not fully reversible? I'd be for it for consenting adults. (Though this scenario would be somewhat odd: if you had the tech to transition both ways why couldn't you do both in sequence?)

Unfortunately, what we have now is none of the above, to people who our society has otherwise deemed incapable of making irreversible decisions.

I think that there are trillions of natural phenomena in the universe, and a very finite set of words to describe them. Oftentimes we're forced to use imprecise language as a result, because human language is limited. Ultimately they're just words, and we should stop giving quite so many fucks.

It's not just words when your daughter is being asked to room with a transgirl on the field trip, and she doesn't feel comfortable around him and doesn't want to room with him. Or your daughter is made to compete against a transgirl. Or, god forbid, your daughter goes to prison and is required to room with a transwoman.

(Rationalists are seldom in this position because they have very low total fertility).

I'm focusing solely on the pronouns discussion, about which I'm pretty ambivalent (although I understand the slippery slope argument). The hypotheticals you mentioned would have me going to war for my daughters (my fertility is above replacement level).

The language issue makes it hard to argue for your daughters rights in the more substantive cases. When the powers that be tell your daughter to be nice, or that her request for different rooming is a civil rights violation, how can she argue her case if she can't say "I shouldn't be forced to room with a man."?

The language issue prejudices all other issues. Powerfully. That's the point - to shape people's perceptions. To argue more substantive issues without pushing back on language requires pages and pages of qualification and apology, which is the situation we have now.

That's a good point, honestly. I should probably be a little more deliberate with how I address the "T"s. I'm oftentimes more live and let live than my values would otherwise dictate.

I cannot tell your position on the subject from this post.

I have seen "they're just words" used to defend both sides of this argument.

My position is "this whole thing is stupid and way too much energy and ink has been spilled on it". Personally, I refer to people the way they present, but am extremely fatigued by the trans movement in general.

I'd consider referring to figures like this with female pronouns and their chosen names a form of malicious compliance. They're the ones where people politically aligned with the trans movement are likeliest to relax their rules, and for obvious reasons.

people who don't pass and exhibit male-coded bad faith behavior, like murder sprees.

Thank you for this. I'm nursing a hangover and the laughing, while painful, was very much appreciated.

I think these examples match a pattern of bad behavior that a lot of modern society has become vulnerable to.

The pattern is imitating the trappings of a victim or an oppressed person and constantly trying to pull on that identity for sympathy and special privilege.

It's a form of parasitic social domination. The people willing to do this are almost universally sociopaths of some sort. The few trans people I knew were not like this. They were shy and a bit embarrassed about their transition, and they mostly wanted people to not make a big deal about it.

I've known other people that have taken on other forms of victimhood for the purpose of social domination. Sometimes real victims, sometimes imagined or exaggerated. I find it important to identify these people and oppose them through all possible social channels. Unlike good parasites they will absolutely kill their hosts.

Hopefully I am not putting words in your mouth:

So what you're saying is that identities need an immune system?

More that communities need an immune system. An identity that doesn't rely on a community is mostly safe from being exploited by sociopaths.

Not sure about that one.

There are definitely single identities that have been targeted by sociopath copycats. Admittedly, typically prominent identities, as otherwise there isn't much upside.

What matters here is more how much sway / visibility / power / soft power / whatever you wish to call it the identity has, not really the size of said identity.

A community is really just a shared (partial) identity - and the flipside of that is that an identity is really not all that different from a community that currently has one member.

Point of order. LessWrong was banning people for "mis-gendering" and "dead-naming" as far back as 2012. Rationalist spaces (at least in the context of the Bay Area) didn't "capitulate to trans language norms" so much as they were some of the originators and earliest adopters. See contrapoints, Scott Alexander, and Ziz himself (before the whole murder cult thing)

Well sure. Rationalism is ironically not rational; you need a rational basis, but it needs to be a superstrate on the irrational, otherwise you can rationalize anything because it's you or your friends doing it.

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?"

My solution would be to use the preferred pronouns but somehow mark them as being specifically-requested pronouns. That way when you say She it can be read as sarcastic.

Or include both versions of the pronoun; so a cis woman is She but a trans woman (or a woman who puts her pronouns in her bio) is She/Her. Never call a They/Them They or Them, always call them They/Them.

This doesn't come across as any less rude, because it is still making the claim "It is my business what genitals you were born with.", which is the exact claim to which trans people and their allies object!

The second suggestion is just anti-pronouns-in-bio. trans women also put pronouns in their bio, so it catches everyone.

It becomes my business when you don't pass as the gender you claim to be yours, yet demand to be addressed as such.

Step up your game "trans people". Stop being creepy crossdressers and occasionally eunuchs with a shitton of makeup. Be actually indistinguishable from women. That's the way to outplay us troglodytes.

because it is still making the claim "It is my business what genitals you were born with.", which is the exact claim to which trans people and their allies object!

I have seen similar backlash against people who change writing styles to avoid referring to such people by gendered pronouns, even though this does not match the stated claim.

Because it's about compelled speech, it has always been about using language to force people into declaring acceptance. See the pronouns shit in company e-mails, and in Canada it's literally illegal now not to play along.

My solution would be to use the preferred pronouns but somehow mark them as being specifically-requested pronouns. That way when you say She it can be read as sarcastic.

Chess notation has a lot of useful nuance here -- She(?), She(!), She(!?), and so on. Hard to verbalize though; maybe some crossover with the African tongue clicks that are similarly notated?

Tone?

Finger-quotes.

The fact that Jack Lasota is a man and not a woman seems like an important fact about the world for us to know.

I think referring to Lasota as a transwoman is sufficient to convey that fact.

For the people that believe transwomen are women, they can infer that.

For the people that believe transwomen are men, they can infer that too.

From a flow of logic perspective, we could say that the node for transwoman is strictly upstream of both of these possible inferences. That makes it strictly more powerful as far as conferring facts.

I don't really think, however, that this is at all about denotative facts in a way that can be usefully answered by information theory. Language isn't entirely (or even primarily) about conferring facts -- and on connotative ground, neither set of people will concede.

The most I'm willing to defend here is that you should probably just say "Lasota is a transwoman". That does not require you to sayanything you think is wrong nor does it require you to conceal any facts about the world, nor does it deceive any of your readers. That is probably the best we're going to do about it.

Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?

The cleanest path I've found about bad actors is simply to say is a bad actors and to intimate that because " are people" and "some fraction of people are " that "some fraction of are ".

For the people that believe transwomen are men, they can infer that too.

Surely by using the term 'transwoman' you're alrady ceding the field to the transactivists? The term implies that the person is a) in some way a woman and b) that it is possible for a human to transition between the sexes.

My preferred term is 'man in a dress'*, which may not involve any emotional cosseting of the individuals involved, but at least is completely unambiguous as to what we are actually talking about.

  • A term which I was recently surprised to hear my relatively right-on sister use. Apparently our family's tendency to speak frankly overpowered any political considerations.

Given that "trans women don't owe you femininity", "man in a dress" is a standard even many self-proclaimed trans women conspicuously fail to meet. Even my very trans-affirming brother and sister will cop to being a bit exasperated when one of their friends "comes out" as trans and refuses to change their wardrobe or even to shave their beard.

Gender-criticals use the term "trans-identified male/female" (TIM, TIF).

Surely by using the term 'transwoman' you're alrady ceding the field to the transactivists? The term implies that the person is a) in some way a woman and b) that it is possible for a human to transition between the sexes.

I don't think so. It is objectively true that some people claim to transition genders and just as objectively true that many do not see this as legitimate, or indeed as even sane. The sentence "Transwomen claim to be women but are not" uses the term and clearly doesn't cede anything -- it can't possibly be that the term itself is capitulation.

My preferred term is 'man in a dress'*, which may not involve any emotional cosseting of the individuals involved, but at least is completely unambiguous as to what we are actually talking about.

If we're being honest, it's no less ambiguous than "transwoman" as to the actual natal sex of the individual.

I do not support trans norms. But it seems incoherent to go ‘well sometimes I use preferred pronouns and sometimes I don’t’. Either use preferred pronouns all the time or insist on calling Caitlyn Jenner he.

I reserve myself the prerogative of offering and rescinding to anyone the privilege of appearances.

How about "I use my personal judgment. Sometimes this aligns with their preferences, sometimes it doesn't."

Eh, I guess I'm incoherent then. I generally do use people's preferred pronouns in person; it's polite, and not every moment of your life needs to be spent fighting political battles. Caitlyn Jenner's put a lot of effort into living as a woman, and isn't a bad actor, and has passed some poorly-defined tipping point where I'm ok with calling her a her. I just don't want it to be mandatory. I want it to be ok to disagree on who's a "valid" trans person. I absolutely don't want Stalinist revision of history/Wikipedia to pretend that Bruce Jenner never existed. And in the appropriate discussions I want to be free to point out that it's all just paying lip service to a fantasy. "XXX isn't a real woman" is a true statement that I should be allowed to say; but I generally wouldn't, any more than I'd point out that "YYY is ugly".

Politeness requires judgment. If I were to see a doctor in their office, I'd call them "Doctor" because I respect them and the social role they occupy. If I were, by some staggering coincidence, to meet Kim Jong Un in a bar, I wouldn't call him "Respected Comrade General Secretary", because I don't owe respect to that social role. It makes perfect sense to call a trans friend "her" and to call Chris-Chan "him", because I see one has a legitimate claim to my politeness and the other does not. (For an additional analogy, you can go deeper into who deserves to be called "Doctor". Everyone agrees on physicians, I would be happy to call a sufficiently respectable hard scientist "Doctor", but humanities/education/etc. PhDs should be laughed out of the room for asking)

The humanities PhD came first, of course. It’s called Doctor of Philosophy for a reason. Literature, history etc. wouldn’t have been regarded as a fit object of study, however.

(Medical doctors are really physicians, and I think theologians get Th.D).

Eh, there's a ThD(doctor of theology), JD(doctor of law), MD(doctor of medicine), PhD(doctor of philosophy), but the PhD didn't actually come first. Doctor comes from the Latin root 'Doctus', meaning 'learned' or 'well studied', and was a title granted to those qualified to teach at a university level in the middle ages. The letters in front of the D refer to the department your branch of study would have been categorized under in a medieval university.

Which is understandable, given that back then a doctor was a bloke with leeches and a hacksaw. Back in my academic days we occasionally used to joke about how the students in other disciplines getting their PhDs was proof they were jealous of us in the philosophy department.

That's a surgeon- 'physician' and 'surgeon' were different professions in the pre-modern world.

There are plenty of coherent positions between preferred pronouns and birth certificate pronouns. The long version mine is here: https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/those-categories-do-not-work-for?r=eqn2u The tl;dr is it rounds close to whether they have been surgically altered.

That is not always a readily knowable fact in polite company.

True, but birth certificate gender has the same problem. I don't imagine a norm of verifying birth gender in social settings.

Indeed.

You could more readily default to whether people pass, or commit enough effort to do so. But that's more fuzzy of course.

I think it’s a consequence, in part because of the utilitarian approach most self described rationalists have. Utilitarian philosophy doesn’t have any inherent moral principles other than “minimize harm.” The problem comes when you have a group that’s defined “telling the truth” as “causing harm.” Theres no leverage to push back with. You can’t say “I refuse to tell lies” because that’s not really a base level moral principle of utilitarian moral thinking. The argument would take the form of “I don’t want to tell lies”, but unless you can show that you telling a lie leads to worse consequences than “trans woman committing suicide because you hurt their feelings,” it’s not something you can support under that moral code. It end up being “suicide vs my desire to tell the truth.” Truth loses.

Surely rationalists, who like doing things like calculating the effect of trillions of hypothetical future specks of dust in people's eyes and weighing them against immediate murder, would consider the advantages and disadvantages of respecting a trans person's chosen pronouns beyond the immediate effect of "I tell a lie" vs. "the person might go through with their threat of suicide". I think what is actually going on is a combination of (1) the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be, and (2) the old guard at some point concluded that the danger of AI doom dominates their value function, and that building and maintaining a durable alliance with the US Left is their best shot at averting AI doom.

This might in part be reasonable political calculation (unaligned movements with any amount of influence, in the US climate, tend to be crushed as crypto-outgroupers and pillaged for remaining political capital by both sides; of the two, the Left is in principle more receptive to safetyism and EA/tikkun olam/global paternalism), and in part a certain measure of arrogance by the core personnel (Yudkowsky probably thinks of himself and the handful of people he respects as smart enough to not have their ability as the Wisest and Most Rational Human Beings be compromised by a well-contained set of signalling beliefs, and doesn't think that they stand to benefit that much from potential additional peers that get lost to brainrot in the pipeline).

” the real community of rationalists has a high fraction of people who are not quite the independent thinkers resilient to social pressure they make themselves out to be“

… just figuring this out? I love the rationalist movement and read a lot of blogs/forums, but it totally falls apart once they start dealing with anything politically charged or that’s socially highly controversial.

A good example is Scott Alexander’s post after the election, where he basically said “I adamantly refuse to believe polymarket was correct by giving odds at 60-40 and the true odds were 50-50” really showed this to me. After the biggest right wing blow out election in recent history, you can’t accept one party had the odds going into it?

…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right

…anyways, many such examples, but it’s important to see this movement for what it is. Just so happened that the Rationalists, from Berkeley, rationally thought themselves into taking left wing stances on most all the controversial issues of ours time… right

I mean, how many of those stances are about facts, as opposed to values? Separate magisteria.

Part of the problem with Californian Utilitarianism is that while, when pressed, it will recognize that the choice of a utility function is ultimately an arbitrary decision, in practice it always seems to round down to "increase happiness", and therefore to the care/harm moral foundation, and therefore to left wing politics.

To wit, Zizians are functionally communists, Hegelian dialectic and all. They believe that there is a good future out there, they they can be its instruments, and that the goodness of the future washes away all sins they may commit in the service of that future, because the ends justify the means.

Scientific Utopianism is the disease of worshiping reason, and I'm afraid this isn't the last of its incarnations, because without any tempering force to the hubris of men who think they can predict the future, the temptation to make it one's own at all costs is always there. Babel's construction crew is never going to run out of volunteer laborers.

Thing is, the problem with this view is that "trans women are not women" is not a universally-accepted truth--if anything, it is a matter of fundamental values conflict. To you, it is truth, but to trans women, it is the opposite. The only thing that points to objective reality is a trans person's birth identity--but the entire point of being transgender is to leave said identity behind as thoroughly and quickly as possible. You're not going to be able to do more than keep referring to The Artist Formerly Known As Prince as just "Prince."

It may not be a universally-accepted truth, but it is a scientific truth. We're a sexually dimorphic species. There are plenty of tests which easily tell the two groups apart with 99.99% accuracy, and if you're MtF you'd sure as hell better inform your doctor of that fact rather than acting like you're just a normal woman.

Joe Blow down the street thinks he's Napoleon. So, it's not a "universally-accepted truth" that he's not Napoleon. And maybe he gets violent if you don't affirm his Napoleonness in person, so there are cases where feeding his delusion is the path of least resistance. There's a "fundamental values conflict" there. But it remains an objective truth that he's not Napoleon.

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.

Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention. (Note that it would be equally incorrect to say "an in-law is your blood relative".) So I don't agree with your analogies; saying "trans women are women" is just an incorrect statement of fact, rather than describing social conventions.

That said, I do think your framing of transness as a social status is reasonable. If we were simply allowed to say someone was "living as the other sex", rather than the Orwellian thought control that the ideologues insist on, I think it wouldn't be nearly as controversial.

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."

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,

Sure, but when you start pretending the teddy bear toy is exactly the same as a live bear animal, and demand everybody must treat them exactly the same or face exile from the society, people are entitled to push back. There might be niche meanings and specific contexts where word meanings are stretched, but that's not what the controversy is about. The controversy is about applying that stretched niche maybe-sometimes-acceptable-if-you-squint-hard-enough meaning to all contexts and using cultural and legal and governmental coercion to suppress those who point out it makes no sense, or even just dare to discuss it instead of worshipping it. When we get rid of this - and we are in no way there right now - then we can go back to discussing which exactly rare and niche contexts we can recognize and how much stretching and squinting is appropriate.

But even those have their flaws.

Such as?

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.

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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.

It's whomever produces large or small gametes.

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). There's no example of true hermaphrodites in humans.

Why does that matter? Because the energetic economics of gamete size determine all the higher levels of abstraction over them. Up and including the forms of deceit you'd need to use to play at Diogenes.

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.

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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.

Isn't that the very crux of the issue? The big problem for trans activists is that using woman to describe a trans woman isn't immediately intuitively understood. That's why they need to oppress people into it.

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.

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The problem is that transgenders are inconsistent. They'll argue for the strength of definitions when doing so suits them, and for the weakness of definitions when it suits them, and against both whenever it doesn't suit them. They don't care about definitions, they care only about what suits them. They want something they can't have, leaving them to clutch at whatever they can wrest, while ignoring that their taking possession negates any significance.

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.

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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."

It's not something we can know for sure without checking, but my suspicion is that "we'll acknowledge that transwomen are women in a way similar to the Queen in chess being an honorary woman" would be welcomed by people insisting that transwomen are women. For instance, almost no one would bat an eye at someone using "it" to refer to the chess piece, implying that the speaker sees it as an object, whereas TRAs would tend to object to someone using "he" to refer to a transwoman (one who doesn't idioysncratically use masculine pronouns, anyway), implying that the speaker sees him as a man who identifies as a woman.

Besides that, of course there are a whole host of demands about what claiming that transwomen are women imply about rights and privileges transwomen are entitled to, with respect to woman-only spaces that doesn't apply to chess pieces. Since chess pieces aren't sentient or have will, the parallels break down, but to use the other example, when a child accidentally rips open his teddy bear, we don't treat it as if he just murdered his pet. When he doesn't feed it while keeping it constrained in his bedroom, we don't treat it as if he's being neglectful of or cruel to his pet.

I just don't think "transwomen are women by stretching the definition of women, but they're men in every other way we treat them in society" is a position that many people would support, certainly not among TRAs. The central conflict here has little to do with word games.

Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for. All the biological ways to define man and woman agree in >99% of cases, and agree with what humans instinctively know, too. If you want to pretend that obvious things aren't obvious for the sake of your political goals, I'm not going to play along. That's anti-intelligence.

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.

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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.

We've had this conversation a few times before, and I don't feel like my objections were ever answered to my satisfaction. Looking deeper into the analogy clearly shows that we don't treat trans identity as anything like adoptive family, or relations through marriage. For example, if my friends invite me over, and I see their kid is black, it might be more or less appropriate to ask how that came to be, but it wouldn't be obtuse. It would be obtuse to pretend there's nothing for me to be surprised by.

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

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"? What would it take to show that your view on trans identity isn't what is being imposed on society right now?

'Trump's Definition of "Male," "Female" Criticized by Medical and Legal Experts' is just "Trump Being Obtuse," laundered through the priestly class. It's the same playbook as the shift to "Born This Way" for the Gay acceptance movement; have an ideologically captured cohort insist a blatant falsehood is actually true by playing that most tired of games, the language game. Nothing about the existence of Kleinfelter's implies that we logically must accept Trans as an identity for anyone willing to claim it (note that the Trans movement itself vehemently rejects any argument that medical diagnosis be a requirement for acceptance), any more than fuzziness over exactly what age a child is no longer a baby but is now a toddler forces us to accept a 46 year old man's claim to actually be a 6 year old girl.

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.

Surely the chromosomal and hormonal makeup point to some sort of objective reality too, but this shouldn't even matter. I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here, taken to what I think is its logical conclusion - my mental categories were made for me, and if I for whatever reason decide that I want to cluster those humans with XY chromosomes plus whatever set of unprincipled exceptions in one category, nobody else should have any more right to force me to redraw my mental boundaries, any more than some snarky time traveller would have the right to force a legendary king to remove whales from the purview of the ministry of fish. Allowing this kind of epistemological violence against adults and even unrelated children seems wholly inconsistent with the rest of the modern human rights package, and more akin to medieval conquerors forcing the subjects of their conquest to convert at swordpoint (and spying on them to make sure they do not secretly retain their old faith).

(I do in fact have little objection to pro-trans policies that do not entail "you must believe and profess that trans X are X", insofar as they are not used to salami-slice their way towards sword-point conversion. If people want to make a mockery of women's sports or women's hiring quotas or whatever, they can duke it out with those that care for those things.)

I'm with Scott's The categories were made for man(...) here

If I remember right you understand enough math that you should see the difficulty with the distinction between "facts" and "categorisations" hes trying to draw. Have you thought about that more/found a way its not self-undermining?

Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing? I didn't think that it is hard to draw in any way that is particularly relevant to the trans question - the only problem that really pertains to it is that people tend to become very coy about why they want to engage in various aspects of the male-female distinction. The reason people care about facts is that facts determine the action->outcome function they are facing as agents; the reason they create categories is that the (facts \times actions -> outcomes) function is hard to evaluate and has a large domain that you would need to search if you seek to optimise. Lost time and effort also affects the outcome negatively, so all else equal it is better if you can approximately factor the function through a smaller domain (facts -> categories, categories \times actions -> outcomes) without skewing the valuation of each resulting outcome much. If you don't understand what actions you are considering and what outcomes you find desirable, though, this is a hopeless or at least hard undertaking.

Scott's King Solomon gives a whole array of good reasons why he wants to categorise whales with fish, given that his outcomes are valued by "edible biomass captured" and his actions are in the class of "allocate money to biomass-capturing institutions". If you cluster whales and fish and your second factor just gets "dag sighted" as its first parameter, the expected outcomes of each available action ("pay the fishing ministry") are about the same as if you evaluated the full function with every little detail of the whale. His psychiatrist avatar does so as well, given that he evaluates on his patients' subjective wellbeing and has actions consisting of talking and prescribing various FDA-approved drugs. What Scott misses in his discussion is that the characterisations the king and psychiatrist use, too, are grounded in facts - just different ones, which are more relevant to how their available actions affect their valuated outcomes. It is just as much of a fact that whales spend all their time in water, have fins and no particularly flexible limbs or neck, and that the transwoman patient will be unhappy if they are called a man to their face.

Aggregating on these factual criteria is useful for these people - but that doesn't give them any standing to suggest or impose categorisations on other people with completely different goals. King Solomon's fishing goals are irrelevant to the geneticist, and the psychiatrist's patient ratings are not similar to the objectives of almost everyone interacting with trans people on a day to day basis. For example, in my academic environment, my actions are basically talk and sometimes putting the thumb on the scale in some hiring decision, while the outcomes I want are about a peaceful social environment that is conducive to doing research. If trans people cluster with their birth gender as far as these are concerned (topic for another discussion thread), then whatever the mechanism is, that is the fact I would want to build my categories around.

All of this is irrelevant, though, because I think granting a human right to have bizarre and impractical categories if one so wishes is necessary for a society that is worth living in.

Can you give me some more detail about the difficulty that you are seeing?

The correspondence between sets and predicates as shows up in formal logic. Applied to the example of the whales, this might be something like "What if the tanners guild wants to say whales dont have hairs?". Basically, it is not the case that there are some propositions that are "facts" that you just have to believe, and some that are "categorisations" where you can pick how you want to do them. You face the same basic situation wrt all of them, and obviously theyre not all up to you to decide - because on what basis could you decide, that is not itself a proposition?

I'm afraid I'm only getting more lost - you seem to be referring to some very specific (philosophical?) discussion that you assume I'll recall if you hint about it, but I'm drawing blanks. When you say "correspondence between sets and predicates (...)", this makes me think you are talking about predicates in extension (is-whale := the set of all things that you want to call a whale) vs. predicates in intension (is-whale := <some description of an algorithm to determine if a given thing is a whale>), but I'm not sure how that would relate to the rest of your post.

Do you want to do something like drawing a distinction between predicates that are "more naturally" expressed extensionally vs. intensionally? So you would for example consider a notion of "nice number" that actually amounts to "is a Fibonacci number" as "factual", whereas a notion of "nice number" that amounts to "gives off good vibes to Lykurg" is "arbitrary".

I don't understand what that would have to do with the "tanners' guild" example, though - that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs (why? to reduce cognitive load for themselves when they are interacting with each other?). For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs? Is it (1) if someone gives them a piece of whale skin with hair follicles, they will say "whales don't have hairs, so I will pretend these are not there and not smooth out these before tanning it"? (2) if someone gives them a piece of -"-, they will say "this is hairy, so it is not whale skin and I will not put it in the whale processing pipeline"? (3) nothing changes about how they process whale skin with hair follicles, but they will dispatch a guy to argue all day if anyone anywhere claims that whales have hair?

but I'm drawing blanks

You can define sets in terms of predicates (x \elem Fish \iff: fish(x)) or the other way (fish(x) \iff: x \elem Fish). So while you might intuitively say that x \elem Fish is a categorisation, it has a brother thats intuitively has the form of a fact, and you cant change one without the other.

predicates in extension vs. predicates in intension

There is not a logical distinction between intensional and extensional definitions, except

  1. in modal logics, where it exists but depends entirely on details in your semantic setup that are in no way constrained by evidence, or

  2. in model theory, there are intensions and extensions - but still no intensional or extensinal definitions in the underlying.

This is another manifestation of the problem.

For your example, how do you envision the tanners' guild using that assertion of theirs?

I had (1) in mind when making up the example.

that sounds more like a setup where two different entities use different categories under the same label and want to push the respective other to adopt theirs

No. Its just an example of how one of the things he lists as "facts" might be redefined with just as good a justification as "fish". The problem is that when you decide what the optimal most convenient way to categorise is, you need to have some facts based on which to make that decision. But if theres no difference between facts and categorisations, then you dont.

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But I wonder if there are any people here who are willing to explicitly defend trans language norms as a more universal principle

There are. Hello! AMA! (I'm not trans myself, just very, very committed on this issue.)

Do you perceive bad actors and slippery slopes to be a problem? If so, how do you defend against them?

It depends on what you mean by "bad actors" and "slippery slopes".

When you say "bad actors": are we talking about cis perverts pretending to be trans? About trans women pretending to be be cis women? About trans women who are genuinely trans, insofar as that means anything, but for whom it's more of a sex thing than they admit?

The liar in the breastfeeding story sounds like an example of a genuine bad actor of the second type. Lying bad. Hot take, I know. But that's just it: the problem with that behavior was the lying. The 'taking advantage's of people's sympathy on false pretenses'. The fact that the pervert was lying about biological sex is incidental. An infertile cis woman lying about having lost a child would be just as scandalous, to me. And more to the point, while I haven't been following the story very closely, I don't see what it has in common with the Zizians. They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here. Not that it matters.

And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime. Calling the moral brigade because someone somewhere might be having Dirty Thoughts about a woman is rightly derided as one of the worst excesses of a certain brand of feminism: this should apply here too. Yes, being perceived as a sexy woman is a sex thing for some trans women. (Not all of them; I know many trans women who are straight-up asexual. But a good number.) …So? Men aren't asked if they're foot fetishists before they're allowed on beaches where women go barefoot. Women who take men to task for the suspicion that the men are imagining them with their clothes off, even if the men in question don't make a single suggestive remark, are universally viewed as crazy puritans by anyone who doesn't share their neuroses. Let trans women jerk off about being trans women in the privacy of their own home, if they're not being indecent in public it's their own business. The mothers in the Facebook group chat have a perfectly valid grievance about being lied to, but whether the liar's motive was sexual or not in the privacy of their own mind, won't magically change the level of harm if the 'victims' couldn't tell at the time.

The dirty thoughts (that they are women even with male genitalia) lead to harm. It normalized men being allowed in intimate spaces reserved for women like bathrooms and changing rooms. It’s decimating women’s sports as women are no longer good enough to compete at high levels of sports leagues if men are allowed to declare themselves women. These harm women. Men in women’s sports basically closes off a major source of scholarships for women, particularly minority women, and to the degree that they need those scholarships to make college affordable, they’re now shut out. And men being allowed in women’s changing rooms and restrooms enables rape. A man looking to rape women can hang about women’s changing rooms for as long as he likes, so long as he claims to be female. The only point at which women might object is if he actually tries to rape them. At which point, it’s too late.

Thanks for taking questions! I would like to understand better if/where you draw the boundary of your principles.

  • Somebody else already brought up transracialism in a different subthread, but that discussion went nowhere. What about a very concrete scenario: a Caucasian-American person demands to be identified as African-American, including addressing "other" African-Americans using everyone's favourite n-word? Can they demand equal treatment and claim a university scholarship set aside for African-Americans? If you don't like these, does it make a difference if the individual was adopted by African-American parents and raised in a homogeneous African-American community?

  • @Bartender_Venator's examples here: what about titles of honour for a head of state that you don't respect, or even actively look down on? What about homeopaths or faith healers wanting to be addressed as Doctor? Imagine in the latter case that they would be genuinely hurt and feel that a core part of their identity is being rejected if you didn't do so.

The reason these examples are particularly relevant is that to many people who are uncomfortable with trans language norms, the demands register as similar to the latter because they consider women to be a socially privileged class, and non-women asking to be treated as women are therefore people arrogating themselves a status they do not have. (That's why nobody is ever upset about transmen, except in a "these are women being duped into harming themselves" capacity)

This suggests a class of "bad actors" that you did not address: men who only want to be identified as women for material and social benefits. Material benefits can simply take the form of hiring priority (at least in academia the handful of individuals I know who went trans in grad school wound up significantly beating the curve in terms of subsequent employment), and social benefits can either be an expectation of some of the social benefits enjoyed by biological women, or a pure power play as you can force people to walk on eggshells around you, or make them uncomfortable (if they have the common adverse reaction) but incapable of voicing or acting upon their discomfort due to the threat of severe sanction.

(If you think that the existence of such bad actors is unlikely, we probably have very different priors on the prevalence of male sociopathy.)

I wonder how much overlap there is between the discussion on gendered pronouns and the discussion on common names for substitute foods.

the problem with that behavior was the lying.

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.

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.)

I mean, I don't really object to other people making whatever honourary or even dubious claims make them happy, including you -- the current state of trans-affairs is more like your anarchist going around getting people fired for considering themselves subjects of the King. Or monarchists forcing the anarchists to pledge fealty every morning before work; also bad.

Obviously, neither adoption nor transness are objective facts about reality

Claiming someone is "adopted" is a falsifiable claim about an event that occurred in reality. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "adoption", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes adoption is beyond the horizon of normal parlance.

Claiming someone is "a woman" has been, for the overwhelming majority of the term's historical usage, a falsifiable claim about someone's sex. Unless your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", the so-called "fuzzy boundary" of what constitutes a woman has previously been beyond the horizon of normal parlance.

In both cases, the obvious evidence that these words mean something closely reflecting reality is that mislabeling someone is somewhere between a joke and an insult. The accidental category error is so uncommon that deliberate category error is a meaningful signal in communication.

The transgender memeplex wants to expand the usage of the word "woman" to include unfalsifiable claims about someone's internal mental state. If your job is to legislate the edge cases of what constitutes "a woman", your job is now by definition completely arbitrary: how is it possible to draw the distinction, other than to fully accept or deny the dubious metaphysics that allows anyone to be anything in their imagination? For all other parlance, the meaning of "woman" is now decoupled from centuries of ordinary usage - this is less of a "fuzzy boundary" creeping in, and more a total erasure of the fundamental falsifiable claim at the heart of the word. In spite of all this, the transgender memeplex expects to inherit both the insult of mislabeling (without also inheriting the objective distinctions that made this mislabeling insulting in the first place) and the legal and social statuses and carve-outs for whichever sex is most convenient to their whims.

There's a clear, obvious distinction between the usage of words that make concrete claims about reality (but for a handful of exotic edge cases no one ever thinks about), and the usage of words in the transgender memeplex that erodes centuries of colloquial understanding in favor of obfuscating, homogenizing, and booby-trapping the terminology with definitions based on unfalsifiable internal mental states. I wouldn't call the latter "lying" per se, but I don't blame the average Joe for pattern matching demands for uncritical acceptance of unfalsifiable claims that overwrite common sense to something very close to "lying", particularly when these demands are brazenly accompanied by power grabs and political maneuvering. Motives aside, I think a lot of people instinctively consider anyone deploying this kind of rhetorical trickery to be either crazy or up to no good, and deny it legitimacy by refusing to participate.

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.

In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independent facts about reality (objective.)

Right, because in most everyday conversation, we don't need to. The mind-independent facts about "adoption" and "women" have historically been well-correlated with the usage of the words in subjective or intersubjective contexts, independent of the society in question.

Islam has a different intersubjective analogue ("guardianship") for something that correlates with the same mind-independent facts about "adoption". No one considers this "lying", it's just different societal rules for the same fact pattern.

The transgender memeplex attempts to redefine the meaning of the intersubjective "woman" in a way that completely divorces the terms from the existing correlation with the objective "woman". Is this lying? No, it's just changing the rules about using one of the most common words in everyday parlance to render it objectively meaningless, such that it's indistinguishable from lying to anyone using the old intersubjective rules; while also expecting everyone to honor the inherited intersubjective rules about mislabeling, special interests, etc. that only exist because of the now-deprecated objective meaning; except now those inherited intersubjective rules should apply to subjective, unobservable mind states we can all change on a whim.

Again, while I don't think the average person will put it in those terms, they can probably notice the "lie by the old rules" part and the political maneuvering one step behind it, conclude that this is a scam, and refuse to engage.

A transwoman is a woman in the same way and to the same degree that an adopted child is their adoptive parent's child.

By this reasoning you should accept transracial people.

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."

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.

We're talking about anyone being able to arbitrarily choose their race at any given moment, though.

From a "race is a social construct" perspective, isn't this just code switching? Presumably scoped here to people who ambiguously pass as either.

Do I get Affirmative Action benefits, if I code switch?

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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.

I don't think I've ever endorsed the view that trans people can choose their gender at any given moment

But it very clearly is the view that is being pushed throughout societies. There already are laws passed in various European countries that literally allow this, the only limit that I'm aware of being frequency. It's all fine and well that you might not support it, but you can't act like you're steelmanning a view, when that's clearly not the view being put forward.

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I'm aware, but, for a couple of reasons that isn't a position I have a lot of respect for; sorry if the following two-point reply is a bit on the curt side.

  • First, because it relies on a kind of obtuse definition of "lying" that breaks down completely as soon as you look at, for example, non-binary people. If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

  • Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

  • -15

Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line

Rule of thumb: if something only affects consenting adults, it is no business of mine.

(Sidenote: my actual internal rule of thumb is a little more subtle than this, including the self-referential social contract definition to attempt to address the paradox of tolerance. Not relevant in this particular situation.)

Elaborating on these cases:

a man getting bottom surgery

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.

breast implants

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.
[n.b. said rule of thumb does not apply about demands to affect those who are not consenting adults]

estrogen shots

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.

wearing dresses

[Under the assumption that this] affects only a consenting adult: is no business of mine.
[n.b. said rule of thumb does not apply about demands to affect those who are not consenting adults]

renaming himself 'Alice'

Depends on what precisely is meant by this.

If this means 'private chats between consenting adults refer to said person by the moniker Alice', this affects only consenting adults, and as such is no business of mine.
If this means 'publicly wishes to be known by the moniker Alice', this is on the borderline of said rule of thumb. I tend to lean towards saying this rule of thumb does not apply; I can see arguments either way and so tend to err on the side of stating this is no business of mine regardless.
If this means 'demands to be known only by the moniker Alice', this affects those who are not consenting adults, and as such said rule of thumb does not apply.

demands to be addressed as 'she'

This affects those who are not consenting adults, and as such said rule of thumb does not apply.

N.B. Do not conflate 'said rule of thumb does not apply' with ''should not be allowed'.
N.B. Do not conflate 'is no business of mine' with 'is endorsed'.
N.B. Do not conflate 'do not conflate A and B' with 'A implies not B'
N.B. In general, do not conflate A implies B with !A implies !B.
N.B. In general, do not conflate A implies B with B implies A.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

I'm curious: what portion of the above axiom and implications thereof do you not believe could be serious, and why?

Yes, nonbinary is lying, because nonbinary is not real.

Second, because treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed. Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line? Really? I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement. The basis of liberalism (real liberalism, not the recent US perversion of the word) is "you do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt me; I do what I want as long as it doesn't hurt you". All of the first five things fall under "you do what you want"; the last one is denying "I do what I want".

If you think liberalism is insane, well, okay, glad we understand each other. If you think it's in the minority, eh, you're probably right, which is sad, but it's hardly "only a few contrarians".

...I do also have a point to make which is kind of awkward, because I find the entire form of the argument to be invalid and ordinarily assiduously avoid making it, but which might be somewhat more compelling to you.

Specifically, autism.

See, the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide. Here's the problem: autistics are often psychologically damaged by being forced to say things they think are "wrong", including invalid additions to closed-class words like pronouns, and obviously simple falsehoods. I'm not saying I never lie, but we're talking literally three times in the last fifteen years, and on all three occasions I literally had cause to believe someone could be murdered if I didn't tell the lie. And I remember the effort knocking me around badly on at least one of those occasions - another knocked me around badly in general, as you might expect from a life-and-death situation, but I'm a bit hazy on how much the lie contributed. I am fairly certain that my mental health would go down the toilet if I were forced to do this on a regular basis; the last time I had to suppress my nature (although in a slightly-different way) in the long-term, I literally wound up attacking my mother with a duvet while stark naked (and the split personality took about a decade to fully wither).

So. Now we're at an impasse; the exact rationale for enforcing pronouns also demands that we don't enforce pronouns. I don't see any consistent rule that allows ignoring the autistic problem but not the trans problem; autism is at least as much of an immutable characteristic (NB: I'm ex-trans myself), autistic mental health outcomes also suck horribly, and prevalence rates are similar. SJ prioritises one over the other, but as far as I can tell that's just because at least since GamerGate SJ finds central examples of autists unsympathetic and doesn't care what happens to us.

As I said, I find this argument's entire form objectionable; I reject these sorts of arguments entirely, because they result in paradoxes like this one and more generally cause massive headaches for everyone. I don't ask for special accommodations for being autistic; yes, loud noise bothers the hell out of me, but I solve that with earmuffs rather than requiring others to remove the noise, because it's a me problem and not an everyone problem. But you seem to find these sorts of arguments a bit more compelling than I do, so I might as well point out the issue.

EDIT: Okay, one of the times I lied (and the time I clearly remember being a crying mess afterward), what I was afraid of would AIUI technically have been manslaughter, not murder. I don't think this has much relevance to the point at issue, though.

 This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement

Not in my experience. Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide.

It's not really my basic reasoning for this, FWIW.

But also, at an epistemological level, I simply don't grant that using a trans person's preferred pronouns constitutes "lying". Like I said elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't involve communicating any untrue belief about physical reality. When I say "this trans women is, socially, within the object-class for which we use the pronoun she" I am not telling you she has a uterus any more than I'd be telling you a sailing ship had a uterus if I told you "traditionally, seafaring vessels are referred to with the pronoun she". If calling a wooden floating object anything but an 'it' bothers you for the same reason, well, I'm sorry for you, but so it goes.

Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

I would be interested to see if this was still the case if we had fully-reversible medical transitions.
I would be also interested to see if this was still the case if we had Clarketech-style indistinguishable-except-with-specialized-medical-tech medical transitions.

Here's hoping that I'll be able to see the answer to at least one of these questions within my lifetime...

If I'm telling you to call me "ze", there is no sense in which I am telling you to lie about what my junk looks like. "Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

You are telling me to pretend to believe that you are neither man nor woman, when in fact you are obviously one or the other.

If a white person said that they didn't want to be described as "white" but rather "devoid of race", people who indulged them in this would be lying.

"Ze" implies no factual statement about that whatsoever.

This is untrue. It requires acknowledgement of the ideological concept of non-binary genders, of gender itself, and of an entire sociological theory. How may someone who entirely rejects this concept address this hypothetical you, provided they also don't believe you are owed self declared titles?

treating that as the genuine crux yields an insane position which only a few contrarians have ever endorsed

Some people believe in:

  1. The political concept of Free Speech as classically understood, which includes the prevention of compelled declarations
  2. That lying (hereby defined as professing something you do not believe) is morally impermissible

Lest we are ready to call the adherents of the most popular religion in the world "contrarians", these do not seem like small objections to the concept of introducing mandatory political forms of address in everyday life.

Indeed this was already a point of contention when French and Russian Revolutionaries made similar demands. With similar motivations, I might add.

I'm sorry but I just don't believe this could be any serious person's root objection to transgenderism.

Then you've just had your fingers in your ears for a decade whilst Jordan Peterson was yelling explanations so loudly he hurt himself. What did you think the opposition to C-16 was about in Canada exactly? Did you care to listen to the opponents at all?

People in the West are generally fine with you doing whatever the fuck you want to yourself and pretty much anything to other consenting adults. Where they tend to object is when you make demands of them.

And well, requiring that someone act against their conscience is generally regarded as a violation of their natural rights.

You can wear all the dresses, have the surgeries and call yourself whatever you want. You just can't demand that your uncle Edward be jailed or lose his job because he disapproves and refuses to engage with the charade in principle. That's all.

This is untrue. It requires acknowledgement of the ideological concept of non-binary genders, of gender itself, and of an entire sociological theory.

I don't think it does, any more than I have to believe in God to address a nun as 'Sister So-and-so' rather than 'Mrs'. Which I guess may be what you meant by "being owed self-declared titles". I guess I bite that bullet. If it doesn't imply lying about actual physical reality then I support a social norm that you should call people what they want to be called, in general, or else not interact with them at all.

Though I also have a more pointed objection. I don't think I have any different beliefs about object-level reality than you do regarding 'gender'. This sort of thing gets very twisty with how self-referential it all is, but genuinely, my only factual belief about the 'ze' person is 'they like it when I call zir ze, and ze doesn't like if I call zir a she'. This is an observable fact about zir behavior, which you can observe as easily as I; and it is literally all I mean if I tell you 'zir gender is non-binary'.

(We might have a value disagreement about whether it's bad to go against zir wishes; we might have a political disagreement about whether it's good for society to have lots of non-binary people in it. But when I say 'that guy over there is non-binary', as a statement about the world, I truly don't think you factually disagree with any part of what I mean by that sentence. So I wouldn't be asking you to lie if I asked you to repeat it.)

Referring to a nun as Sister Mary other saint's name of religious concept does not imply anything about the truth of the Catholic faith. Addressing her as Miss Birthname would probably take some research; addressing her as Mrs would be lying because she is not married.

I say 'that guy over there is non-binary', as a statement about the world, I truly don't think you factually disagree with any part of what I mean by that sentence.

Yes I do. That guy is a guy. He might not be a man, depending on how rigidly you define it, but he's not 'outside the gender binary' because that is a thing that only exists for severe birth defects and usually prefers the term 'intersex'. He's probably some kind of faggot or squirrelly guy, but he is still a guy. You can't opt out of your gender.

Yes I do.

No you don't. Ze is a biological male. I agree with this, you agree with this. When I tell you "ze is non-binary" I am saying "ze dislikes being described as he or a man in social contexts", which is a true fact about this person's behavior, as apparent to you as it is to me. The sentence is only a lie if you interpret "non-binary" as meaning "physically intersex" which is not what I understand the word to mean in that sentence, nor, for that matter, how anybody else defines it.

You might as well say that I'm lying when I say "this person is a red-head" because you insist on only applying that word to someone whose entire head is painted cherry-red, rather than someone with orange hair. You can come up with a strained argument for this being the literal meaning of the phrase if you showed it to a space alien, but it's not what anybody who uses the word means by it. (Or, for an even closer example: if I tell you "this guy is a furry", are you going to insist that this is a lie, because he's only wearing a suit, and doesn't have literal fur? No. Regardless of your opinions on whether either is an advisable lifestyle choice, "nonbinary" is a perfectly good descriptor for a certain type of person as defined by their behavior, just like "furry" is.)

If you've got another non-derogatory descriptive word for "person who dislikes being called a man and wants to be addressed as a ze", I'm all ears. But I think "non-binary" is a perfectly good descriptive term which people are unlikely to misunderstand as being in reference to a hormonal condition.

I can simply call him a guy, which is a true statement. He can dislike being a guy all he wants, but he can't change it, any more than I can change into a redhead by insisting upon it(I could dye my hair of course, but being male/female is rather more fundamental).

I'm not sure what behavior you're referencing- we have a non-derogatory word for males who engage in effeminate behavior: metrosexual. They're still guys.

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any more than I have to believe in God to address a nun as 'Sister So-and-so' rather than 'Mrs'.

So absolutely then.

In countries that recognize a right to Free Speech, you are under no obligation to recognize any Church's titles as legitimate. What addresses are acceptable or appropriate in what context is a relatively common sticking point of inter-faith dialogue, actually.

If it doesn't imply lying about actual physical reality then I support a social norm that you should call people what they want to be called, in general, or else not interact with them at all.

Well I for one respect the blood of those who fought to abolish that social norm.

I don't think I have any different beliefs about object-level reality than you do regarding 'gender'.

I mean I don't believe that gender exists, so I'm not sure that's true. But regardless of our agreement, truth is not limited to such matters. Otherwise freedom of religion would be impossible.

People can want to be called any and all manner of things, that doesn't give them any right to preempt me choosing my own words to think about and describe the world.

The best concession you're going to get is that if it's easier to do something, people may choose to do it out of politeness. But neopronouns have never been easier than anything.

In countries that recognize a right to Free Speech, you are under no obligation to recognize any Church's titles as legitimate

Under no legal obligation. But it would still be the polite thing to do if you ran into a nun at the grocery store. There is a very great difference between laws and social norms. I believe we should have a social norm of using trans people's preferred pronouns; I do not think it should be a crime not to. I am in favor of a world where journalists typically use a trans person's preferred pronouns if they're writing a piece about them, as opposed to a world where they typically do the reverse - I am not saying I want journalists to be legally mandated to write the story either way.

I mean I don't believe that gender exists, so I'm not sure that's true

I don't know what sort of 'gender' you don't believe exists, but I promise, I very probably don't believe in it either.

A nun you ran into at the grocery store would be perfectly fine being addressed with 'how do you do ma'am'. Sister is a title replacing 'miss'.

But it would still be the polite thing to do if you ran into a nun at the grocery store.

My grandmother is and always has been a card carrying member of our communist party. She is also very involved in her local community and great friends with the local priest, pastor and rabbi. Yet she has made a point to never use their titles in conversation (opiate of the masses you understand).

Given this has never stopped her from carrying business in good company, I'm not sure I buy the need for such a norm. And frankly it's my belief that politeness is something that is to be negotiated between individuals rather than imposed by some rational rule.

I'm fine with journalists using whatever language they desire, and for people to tell them they are right or wrong to do so either way.

Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.

Are you seriously saying you're fine with a man getting bottom surgery, breast implants and estrogen shots, renaming himself 'Alice', and wearing dresses - but once he demands to be addressed as 'she', that's where you draw the line?

Yes?

None of the other stuff impacts me in the slightest; it's (aspirationally) a free country. "Demands to be addressed as she" is maybe the least sticky of the demands that are being made IRL, but it's still sticky enough.

Nonbinary people are still either men or women -- he/her. Asking for ze is asking for a lie.

Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom. No one is asking you to pretend that a single cell in that person's body is arranged differently than you believe it to be. Your beliefs about physical reality are perfectly aligned with the 'ze's. You have a disagreement about social norms but the trans person isn't asking you to lie about what you believe to be the ground-level truth. I brought up the non-binary thing because in the case of e.g. a trans woman, you can kinda sorta argue that you're being asked to act-as-though this person has a vagina, even if you're not being asked to believe that they really physically do. But a non-binary person? There's nothing there.

  • -10

Only in a very exotic sense that I just can't fathom.

You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender? I don't know what to tell you; AMA I guess.

You can't fathom people believing that there is no such thing as a third gender?

I can't fathom that people can only parse "Alice is non-binary" as "Alice belongs to an objectively real third gender that abstractly exists" (a falsifiable claim about the world, and thus, a lie if you don't think it's true) rather than "Alice identifies as non-binary" (an undeniable objective fact about Alice's behavior and therefore not a lie whether or not you think Alice ought to be non-binary).

I don't care what Alice identifies at -- I identify Alice as a woman or a man, and referring to him/her otherwise would be untrue.

What if I don't believe in this novel conception of social norms?

What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?

Telling the truth is not limited to truths that pertain to material reality. As it happens.

Drawing your attention to my comment to @WandererintheWilderness here.

What if I asked you to not use any gendered pronouns at all and to use "comrade" instead in every occurrence? Would you not have any objection based on your own belief system?

Not really, no. I would find it cumbersome, and, as a result, I'd probably try and avoid having to talk about you at all. But if I absolutely had to write about you, particularly somewhere you or another comradegender person could see it, I'd honor your request.

Language is an adaptive compression and error-correction algorithm on concepts over a lossy channel, give or take.

And indeed there is a lot of overlap between English and an entropy code with a preshared dictionary. (Not perfect by any means - English is complicated!) Pick a number of output symbols, pack your common concepts into short combinations of output symbols and your less common concepts into longer combinations of output symbols, and go from there.

Every input symbol in an entropy encoding has an optimum length of output symbol(s) based on the input symbol probabilities. Pick an output that is longer, and the encoding will be less efficient on average. But also: pick an output that is shorter, and the encoding will be less efficient on average too! This is because making the output encoding for that particular symbol shorter requires making the output encodings for other symbol(s) longer in a way that results in a less efficient encoding overall.

English's error correction and detection is largely in the form of sentence structure and (commonly) using only a relatively small portion of the potential space of all spoken syllables (or letters, in the case of written text. For instance, you were able to reed this sentence regardless of my typo, due to 'reed' being far less likely to refer to the plant in context than to a mis-spelling of 'read').

English speakers tend to adapt their language to channel capacity too, using simpler and more distinct words and concepts when e.g. in the presence of high amounts of background noise. Ditto, English speakers have a tendency to have a reasonable grasp of 'unusual' words, and when one is encountered will often slow down, repeat, or otherwise be careful about saying it as a hint of 'yes, this is in fact what I meant to say, not an inadvertent error'. (The fact that this overlaps substantially with 'unusual words tend to be practiced less' is very helpful here!)

You even have adaptive encoding. Jargon is precisely noting that a concept comes up a lot and so assigning a shorter nickname to it in context. Ditto things like short nicknames and first names versus full names. Use the short form when it is unambiguous in context, and otherwise use the longer (but unambiguous) version. Even pronouns are themselves just shorter references to a particular person (or set of people) when it can be inferred from context as opposed to repeatedly stated.

Now let's come back to names.

If you demand you must be referred to by, oh, the word 'and'. What have you done?

Well, first off you've just decreed that the preshared dictionary for everyone be updated to include you as a definition for the word 'and'. This is a minor cost for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion. At least it is a one-time cost (...it is a one-time cost, right?)

Second, you've just made the handshake process more annoying for everyone. Quick: what happens when I talk to someone who has not heard that you are to now be referred to as 'and'? Answer: confusion & wasted time. This is at least a cost paid no more than once per person (hopefully).

Third, you've make the 'standard' use of the word 'and' marginally more ambiguous. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.

Fourth, you've just decreed people must memorize said moniker in order to refer to you. Trivial in this case; decidedly non-trivial in others. Again, this hurts everyone for the benefit of one, in the classic salami-slicing fashion.

Finally - recall the above discussion re: adaptive encoding. You've decreed that there is no acceptable longer version, and as such you occupy a non-trivial portion of the space of the entire English language. In practice what happens is people ignore this and come up with increasingly convoluted workarounds. Because at the end of the day: you're probably that important to yourself. You may be that important to your closest friends (if so, you have good friends). Beyond that? You - statistically speaking with regards to the preshared dictionary that is English - are not that important. Or, more to the point: not everyone can be that important.

The same sort of thing occurs when a word has overlap with a concept that is used more frequently than your name.

And an analogous sort of thing even occurs when you pick a word that does not exist. Again: Shannon capacity. Adding a symbol does not magically break the channel capacity bound. It just makes the transmission slower, and communication overall - assuming that you are not used in context as often as the symbol length would imply - slower.

So, all of the above being said, if you're still pushing to change your moniker, what can you do?

  • Pick something that matches typical English (language not location, speaking of ambiguity) norms. This meshes with the error correction & detection better, and causes less friction.
  • Pick something that already matches the tag of . Again, this meshes with the error correction & detection better, and causes less friction.
  • Pick something that is unambiguous enough that it does not slow down other unrelated communication. So: very short names are terrible, as are names that are close to other words (especially ones that would potentially make sense in context).
  • Pick something that is simultaneously short & unsurprising enough that it is not a particular burden for others to remember, and long & surprising enough that it does not clash in the aforementioned ways. (There is a tension here!)
  • Don't complain about people using the shortform moniker for other concepts. This reduces friction for people who aren't close to you.
  • Have an unambiguous longform moniker, and allow people to use it when applicable. Again, this allows people to fall back to said longform when necessary.
  • Be permissive about what you receive. Those that are closest to you are most likely to have reason to allocate an additional chunk of their concept space to you.

...and in the context of "use "comrade" instead in every occurrence [of a gendered pronoun]" (@IGI-111):

  • This is a longer term, which hurts when talking about said person. There is a reason why 'I/my/me/he/she/him/her/his/hers/they/them/theirs' are all short: they are very common.
  • This results in many repetitions of words - which are used in English's error detection & correction for other purposes. E.g. "he himself will bear the blame" -> "comrade comrade will bear the blame".
  • This directly results in some ambiguity - English normally splits out e.g. they/them/theirs to help better-form surrounding sentence structure, which you lose by using 'comrade' for all three.
  • This causes a clash with English's error detection & correction, due to resulting in sentences that would otherwise be ungrammatical (e.g. "comrade comrade will bear the blame").
  • This is ambiguous - especially when talking to someone who has not yet heard said decree. If I am your sworn enemy, I do not want someone to think I am referring to you as a mate, companion, or associate.

In total honesty, I find tolerating that imposition incomprehensible.

Must be a cultural thing.

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They don't seem to be trying to deceive anyone about just who and what they are; as you say, the leader is non-passing. Calling her a "her" isn't a lie, it doesn't obfuscate the facts; no one's walking away thinking she's got a uterus here.

Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly. Behaviours which would rise to the level of "red flag for violent or threatening behaviour" if committed by a male person will not result in a batted eyelid if committed by a female person. You can say "we've redrawn the category boundaries such that the word 'woman' now includes certain male people (with all the propensity for violence that that implies): adjust your expectations accordingly, and it's not our fault if you erroneously assumed that this person referred to as 'she' was female and didn't think she posed a threat as a result". But let's be real: 90% of people (99% of non-extremely online people) hear "she" and think "female person", and assume that said person is exactly as prone to committing an act of violence as any other female person (which is to say, not very). Even if the person is familiar with the tenets of gender ideology and knows that the category "woman" includes some tiny proportion of male people, they will assume that any person referred to as "she" is a female person unless they have good reason to believe otherwise. The fact that one tiny corner of human society has redrawn category boundaries in order to use the word "woman" in a nonstandard way doesn't change the expectations 90% of people have about people who are referred to using the pronoun "she", and no one is more aware of this than bad actors looking to get away with bad behaviour.

If an article about the Zizians includes a photo of LaSota, it will be obvious that LaSota is male, and people will update their expectations about LaSota's behaviour, threat level and risk calculus accordingly. But many articles about the Zizians do not include any photos of LaSota (I only found out what they looked like earlier this week). Likewise people talking about the story on the radio or on podcasts. So an article which says "LaSota says that she thinks so-and-so... she was last seen crossing the border into Mexico on [date]" will be interpreted by a significant proportion of its readerbase as an article about an uncontroversially female person who poses no more threat than any other uncontroversially female person. Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man. (Never mind native Anglophones who are unfamiliar with the finer points of gender ideology; what about non-native English speakers to whom the term "trans woman" means nothing?) If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.

Bill Clinton may have been technically telling the truth when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky" according to the stipulative definition of "sexual relations" which only refers to PiV intercourse. But I have zero qualms about saying he was lying when he said that: in common usage, sucking someone's dick or inserting a cigar into someone's pussy absolutely falls under "sexual relations", and Clinton knew this, and he knew (indeed, hoped) that people would interpret his statement as a denial of any kind of sexual interaction with Lewinsky at all even if he'd only technically denied having PiV sex with her. So when a significant proportion of the population is unfamiliar with gender ideology and assumes that anyone referred to with the pronoun "she" is female, if you refer to a person as "she" and neglect to specify that the person is male, you are obfuscating important facts about that person whether you like it or not. And if you retort "it's not my fault those people aren't woke enough to know that not every woman is female", I'll respond with about as much sympathy and understanding as if Clinton had said "it's not my fault people are so uneducated that they don't know the legal definition of the term 'sexual relations'." Truly honest communication necessitates taking your audience's level of education and ideological leaning into account.

Please use more paragraph breaks, it was a challenge to make my way through this.

Even referring to LaSota as a "trans woman" doesn't get you out of this hole, as a significant proportion of the general public thinks the term "trans woman" refers to a female person who identifies as a man.

I have hope that this will sort itself out through better education and general osmosis at about the same rate that the "use a trans person's preferred pronouns" social norm will spread. In the meantime, if we think it's relevant, I'm fine with saying "LaSota, born male…", calling her "biologically male", or whatever.

If "I'm using this common word using my nonstandard definition, I am fully cognizant of the fact that most people use it with its standard definition and know that most people will assume that I am using this word with its standard definition" isn't "obfuscating the facts" (or, less charitably, lying), then I don't know what is.

Okay, but... I don't think über-progressive journalists are actually fully cognizant of that fact. The 'people may interpet trans woman backwards' thing, in particularly, is so deeply at odds with progressive vernacular that it genuinely doesn't register. I'm aware of it intellectually, which is more than most, but still hadn't thought of it in relation to this question until you brought it up! 'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.

Above all else, though:

Bad actors, including violent people, have a vested interest in deceiving people that they are not bad actors. Male people are vastly more likely to be violent than female people. Hence, when a violent male person demands that everyone refers to them using female pronouns, people who don't know them personally will not unreasonably assume that they are female, and adjust their risk calculuses accordingly.

This is where you lose me from the start. The premise fundamentally repels me. I cannot and will not subscribe to this rad-fem-descended idea that being a biological male is some sort of dreadful disease so potentially dangerous to bystanders that you inherently harm them by keeping your maleness from them. Men aren't fucking werewolves. I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.

Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines. "This person is a man" isn't some all-important piece of information that the public absolutely must know about some weird cult-leader who escaped to Mexico. No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes. Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges? (You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?

To me, complaining about the potential ambiguity of 'she/her'-ing Ziz LaSota isn't like taking Clinton to task for being a smartass about the meaning of "sexual relations". It'd be like taking him to task for off-handedly mentioning he used to play "football" in the same public address without clarifying that he meant soccer and not American football. Yeah sure a lot of listeners might get the wrong idea, so what.

  • -13

Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way.

I just want to circle back to this point. Please consider the implications of your claim. "This person is a violent murderer who is experiencing confusion about their sexual/gender identity, and who led a cult which employed abusive tactics and coercive control to keep members in line. But it's none of the public's business to know whether or not this person is physically capable of committing penetrative rape, or is a member of the sex which is responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of sex crimes." With all due respect, do you hear yourself?

'My side aren't lying, they're just terminally out of touch' isn't a very glowing defense, but in this case, it's the honest truth as best I can figure it.

I'll note that the goalposts seemed to shift very quickly from "the way journalists are phrasing this isn't obscuring the facts" to "okay, the way journalists are phrasing this is obscuring the facts, but it came from a place of ignorance rather than from a conscious intention to mislead their readers".

I disagree, however: I think trans activists and progressive journalists know exactly how unpopular their preferred policies are with the general public, and are fully aware that they can only get them into legislation under cover of darkness. This explains their annoying habit of labelling their opponents as "transphobic", "TERF" etc. without explicitly stating what their opponents' opinions are.

I'm not just offended by this approach on behalf of trans women, I'm offended by it for myself as a cis man.

The fact that there's so much overlap between the grievances aired by "trans women" and the grievances aired by sophomoric MRAs is further evidence for my conclusion that I'm looking at the same picture.

Are men more muscular and more aggressive on average? Yes. But those are fringes. The furthest edges of trend lines.

What? Are you seriously arguing that only the strongest men are more muscular than women, on average?

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes.

I agree, Ziz's transness is not relevant to their crimes (except insofar as having their delusions reinforced and encouraged by all and sundry in their vicinity may have contributed to their cultish megalomania). The fact that Ziz is male is relevant to their crimes, given male people's greater propensity and capability for violence.

No one is out there thinking 'well, I was going to have a nice chat with this escaped murderer I ran into, when I thought she had a vagina, but if you're saying (s)he's got balls, that's a whole different story', or if they exist now, I'm sure one of our many-if-statistically-less-prevalent biologically female murders will fix that in a hurry.

On the contrary - I think there are a great many people who think (not unreasonably, given the massive strength differentials between the sexes) that if they were threatened by a female escaped murderer, they would be capable of subduing her with relative ease. Thus, referring to Ziz using language which strongly implies that they are female is misleading and not in the public interest.

There's also the very real possibility that, depending on the jurisdiction, Ziz will be recorded as a female murderer and cult leader, as is already policy in many parts of the West. This will obviously hamper criminologists' ability to understand crime offending patterns in the future, if the data is contaminated by the presence of male offenders in the female dataset. Claim that you aren't in favour of that all you want - it's the logical endpoint of the worldview you're espousing.

Her biological sex isn't any of Joe Public's business either way. Maybe it makes her fractionally more likely to commit a completely different violent crime than if she was a biological female - so what? Do you want to go around wearing labels for every demographic bin you fall into that's vaguely correlated with bad behavior at the edges?

"Fractionally", "vaguely correlated", as if we're just talking about 105 male murderers for every 100 female. Meanwhile, back in Planet Reality, male people are responsible for just shy of 90% of murders in the US. Most men are not murderers, but most murderers are men. Trans activists (including the minority on this very website) sometimes like to act like they're so noble and heroic like "why on earth would I care about the genitals of a stranger?", thereby implying that anyone who expresses any desire to know about a stranger's sex is some kind of pervert (because they themselves are so pornsick that they can't conceive of wanting to know this information for reasons other than sexual gratification). Actually, it's perfectly simple: if a woman is walking home alone and she notices a stranger walking a hundred yards behind her, if she knows that that stranger is male (regardless of how they "identify", because violent crime rates track sex and not gender identity), she thereby knows, right off the bat, that the stranger in question is 9 times more likely to murder her than if the stranger is female. This is extremely useful information for a woman to have to carry out her risk calculus - but women making generalisations about male people hurts your feelings, so you think a murderer and cult leader's sex is none of the public's business. Okay.

As @zackmdavis argues, The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions. We have a category called "man" and a category called "woman". Before gender ideology was a thing, we knew that the members of the category "man" were vastly more likely to commit violence than members of the category "woman". Then someone invented gender ideology and argued that some of the people who would have once been included in the category "man" ought really to have been included in the category "woman". We investigated this, and determined that there was no difference in propensity to commit violence when comparing "men" with the minority of people who would traditionally have been categorised as "men" but now wanted to be categorised as "women" (and the members of the latter group were exactly as strong as any other person who would traditionally have been categorised as a man). So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?

(You post on anonymous right-wing political forums. That's a hell of a risk factor right there.) Would a journalist be lying if they wrote a story about you, but failed to mention one of them?

I wasn't complaining about journalists failing to mention certain traits of Ziz's which would make them more prone to criminality. If journalists published articles about the Zizians which used they/them or ze or xe etc. for every named individual, that'd be one thing. I'm complaining about journalists using language which directly implies that the individual in question is a member of a different group which has an extremely low propensity and capability for violence, when the individual in question is not a member of that group, but is rather a member of a group which has a vastly higher propensity and capability for violence.

To return to your example: supposing I was arrested for a crime, and some journalist published an article which contained the sentence "Folamh3 was a frequent poster on the website The Motte". In our counterfactual universe, themotte dot ORG is an extremely obscure website, whereas there's a much more popular website called themotte dot COM which is very pro-trans. If a journalist included this sentence in their article without disambiguating the domain name, wouldn't you think that most readers would assume the journalist was referring to themotte.com? Wouldn't you think the journalist probably knew how the sentence would be taken by most of their readers, and included it anyway? I don't really see much difference between

  • "I knew this sentence was likely to be misinterpreted by most of my readers, disambiguating it would have been a trivial matter, but I decided not to bother";
  • obfuscating the facts; and
  • lying.

So, from the narrow perspective of "violence-avoiding risk calculus", isn't it just abundantly obvious that the "new" definitions are just worse at this goal than the old definitions? Isn't it obvious we've substituted a fairly accurate and extremely intuitive categorisation system for a vastly less accurate and vastly less intuitive one? Isn't this just obviously bad?

I just don't agree that predicting violence is the main point of the man/woman binary. I guess this is Scott's Thrive/Survive dichotomy in action: I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment - you're trying to design the social structures that best minimize risk in a cutthroat world where you're always calculating the chance that a stranger in the street wants to gut you like a fish. I'm asking what's nicer, you're asking what's safer.

Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder. But when we're talking about principles rather than making policy, I think you need to set your sights on the ideal world, not on the making-the-best-of-a-bad-situation compromises. First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right. That's what it means for me to be a Progressive.

The experience of being weak, small, and vulnerable is a core piece of the female experience.

As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him. It was a visceral, memorable experience.

As a man, it can be hard to empathize. One I was on a trail in Yosemite and came across a bear. It's strange for a human male to come across a being that is unambiguously larger and more powerful than him.

You know there are many millions of men in the world who are significantly smaller and weaker than the upper end of the male height and strength distribution, right? Like I’m pretty sure at least 30% of adult men have encountered at least a handful of other men who are unambiguously larger and more powerful; personally, I experience this regularly, and there are plenty of guys who are even shorter and weaker than I am.

It's qualitatively different for women. They are much easier to identify and they are weaker per unit body mass. There is less ambiguity about whether or not you can win a physical contest against them. And there is a built in reason why men would WANT to risk a physical conflict with them.

My ex had lived in SF for a time. Like most SF women, she dressed in a way to hide her sexual desirability and tried as much as she could not to walk alone through the city. Unfortunately, she was somewhat good looking and you can't hide a pretty face.

Short kings are more vulnerable than guys with bodyguard physiognomy, sure. But vulnerability isn't as core a part of their experience as it is for women. For women, it runs deep. Culturally, genetically, biologically - hundreds of thousands of years of vulnerability. If you could read the biography of every one of her ancestors that passed on her mitochondria, you would read many stories of warbrides and rape. Every culture has stories about the greater vulnerability of women, because every culture has experienced it.

For a man, the worst that usually happens is that you die.

It just seems to me that you're transparently elevating one group's concerns and preferences over another. You seem to be essentially saying "it is so important that trans women feel safe and happy and 'affirmed', that I'm perfectly willing to deny women useful information that would help them to navigate an unsafe world. In fact, trans women feeling safe and 'affirmed' is so important to me that I have no problem if the policies I enact in pursuit of that goal carry the unavoidable side effect of enabling bad actors to effectively hide in plain sight."

I mean, I've long suspected that certain trans activists literally thought that trans womens' emotional comfort was more important than female people's physical safety: I'm kind of surprised that you more or less came right out and said so.

Which world Current Year most resembles, and in what direction we're moving, are always going to be in the eye of the beholder.

To me, it sounds like "how many trans women per 100k population killed themselves as a result of being persistently 'misgendered'" vs. "how many female people per 100k population were attacked, raped and/or murdered by male strangers" are empirical questions which shouldn't be that difficult to answer. We might well look at the facts on the ground and decide trans women's emotional comfort comes at such a high price that the juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. Or we might not! But systematically elevating the emotional comfort of one demographic over the physical safety of another demographic is not, in my view, compatible with a pluralistic democracy.

First figure out what we ought, ideally, to have; then carve out what's practical right now, keeping the rest on the back burner until the time is right.

As long as you and I are both alive, male people will be far more aggressive and prone to murder and sexual assault than female people (along with being more prone to crime in general, although the delta isn't nearly as large when looking just at violent crimes). The murder rate might plummet to a fraction of its current level, but male people will always commit the vast majority of murders. Likewise for assault and rape. As long as this is the case (which it will be forever), male bad actors will always have something to gain by passing themselves off as female if the option is open to them. Thus if your radical self-ID policy is controversial in this time and place, there's good reason to believe that it always will be.

I think I have a much higher probability than you of some sort of singularity in the future. Not necessarily in the near future, not necessarily in the exact form current A.I. gurus talk about - but somewhere between now and the year 3000, yeah, I do think technology will hopefully have improved humans' daily lives very, very radically. I very much anticipate a world where the murder rate plummets to literally zero thanks to automated surveillance, where most people spend their time in V.R. so that the very idea of harping on about what our flesh bodies look like at birth becomes quaint and irrelevant, etc. Quite possibly not in our lifetimes - but eventually. When I consider the moral law, I am asking what principles will make sense to these people of tomorrow, as much as anything. When they look back on our tragic and barbaric times, these people, I want to be remembered as one of those who were clear-headed enough to acknowledge the rights that will be self-evident to them, even when it was costly, even impractical to do so; to be like those rare Ancient Greeks and Romans who spoke out against slavery, even if they had no particular concept of how their empires' economies could have been sustained without it. Again, read Scott's post.

I have read Scott's post several times.

Of course, post-Singularity, all of these petty squabbles about sex, gender, crime, safeguarding etc. will be completely irrelevant.

But, you know, the Singularity hasn't actually happened yet, if you haven't noticed. I find it deeply strange that you're trying to enact policies which would make the world better in a post-Singularity world, while fully cognizant of the fact that they make our pre-Singularity world demonstrably worse, and that the Singularity is unlikely to happen in your lifetime. It's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that they'll win the lottery tomorrow. Actually, it's worse than that - it's like someone spending all their money on frivolities today because they're certain that their great-great-grandson will win the lottery long after they're dead. Even if you knew for a fact that your great-great-grandson would win the lottery long after you're dead, shouldn't you plan your finances a bit more sensibly while you're still alive?

Why do debates with trans activists invariably devolve into nonsensical circular reasoning ("a woman is a person who identifies as a woman", "a woman is a person who experiences misogynistic sexism"), bizarre outré navel-gazing about our transhumanist future, or both? "In the future we'll be able to implant uteri in trans women's bellies and they'll be functionally indistinguishable from female people in every way that counts - therefore we should treat trans women as women now." (paraphrased) And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike! What on earth could this far-off hypothetical scenario possibly have to do with the world in which we currently live, in which nothing resembling a Singularity seems likely to happen and in which no trans woman will ever bear a child in either of our lifetimes?

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I'm trying to identify the optimal social norms for generally pro-social law-abiding people to adopt among themselves to ensure their mutual happiness and fulfillment

If you do that these norms can be exploited by people who are not pro-social and law abiding.

Ziz's transness, so far as I can tell, is not relevant to her crimes.

First of all, as far as you can tell is no metric, it's just your opinion. So if you are arguing for 'here's why I would trust ziz with my children' then go for it, but if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders, which is just ridiculous - in the world where ziz didn't become trans he wouldn't have started a trans cult.

But secondly and way more importantly, who are you to decide what's relevant or not? Why can't progressives just fucking listen to people instead of constantly telling us what opinions we should have? After the past decade of progressive dominance, it sounds like a threat you can't really back up any longer.

Oh and to twist that into 'oh well then we're going to have to label everything and everyone all the time!' is also ridiculous when you don't even have to go back two decades to find out how it would actually be handled - everyone is allowed to behave towards trans people exactly as their conscience dictates - a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population.

if you demand society follow suit you need to actually prove that being trans had nothing to do with the cult or murders

No I don't. You're the one making a non-obvious positive claim; the burden of proof is yours. You have to prove relevance, not ask your opponent to prove irrelevance.

Also, I didn't mean 'Ziz's biological sex had no causal influence on her crimes'. I meant 'Ziz's biological sex is not of public interest in and of itself once Ziz's crimes have been established'. If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man. But if he's already holding a bloody knife and trying to hop the border, it's tendentious at best to call everyone's attention to the fact that he's a man as if it's some crucial point of the case.

a system which worked fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population

I am struggling to word a reply to this that doesn't sound like 'right, so you're just a heartless monster, got it'. I guess I could make a desperate appeal to some kind of decency or compassion within you by pointing out that 0.3% of 350 million people is still a staggering amount of people. Or point out that you're discounting the uncountable number of people who would counterfactually have transitioned and led much happier lives if the option had been on the table. Or ask what makes you so sure that the current arrangement ruins more than 0.3% of the population's lives - if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives are an acceptable sacrifice, why not hundreds of thousands of cancelled and witch-hunted right-wing curmudgeons? But frankly I don't hold high hopes of getting through to you.

if hundreds of thousands of oppressed trans people's lives

Genuine question - in what way(s) are trans people in the United States (and other Anglophone nations) "oppressed"?

I'm not saying they are now, I was bouncing off of @Fruck talking about the days when things were "fine for everyone except 0.3% of the population". I think going back to those days would be prima facie unacceptable. Fruck disagrees.

Can you define oppression then please? Also for clarification, while I don't think it would be unacceptable to go back to the previous situation, I do think it would be impossible - my point was that you don't need to imagine bizarre dystopian situations to handle something we used to handle fine until trans ideology was used as a wedge issue to tear the country apart.

IGI has already said most of the things I would say in response to your core argument, and much more eloquently as usual, although I would add that if your idea of heartless monstrosity is opposing compelled speech, societal gaslighting and the forced restructuring of society to mildly benefit a minority who appear to largely want it for a sexual fetish, if my choices are heartless monster and deceitful snake, then watch out Tokyo, I'm a heartless monster.

In reality, I am not a heartless monster, I was just raised by manipulators so I can easily see through emotional blackmail. And I am well aware you would prefer right wing curmudgeons suffer rather than trans people, I lived through the past decade where progressives enacted policies to ensure just that. I feel like I've already used the word ridiculous too much in this conversation, but it is most appropriate for the idea that you can 'get through' to someone and convince them to make their own life miserable on the off chance it benefits strangers who hate them. Which is precisely why the trans ideologues never bothered to win over the public and immediately employed escalating coercion tactics. And when those tactics were called out, they employed more. And more. And more.

And please don't respond asking 'are you really suffering?' or the equivalent. My being forced to say trans person (instead of the quicker, more natural and poetic tranny) in this den of witches seems about equal to the suffering trans people suffer when someone misgenders them. I can threaten to kill myself if it's still not enough though.

If someone picks a person in a crowd at random and asks you to bet on whether they've committed violent assault, sure, you should give slightly higher odds if it's a man.

What about the odds that they are MTF? Are those higher? Surely they must be just because of the comorbidities.

a heartless monster

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?

People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury. Then we're all heartless monsters.

At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself if you're willing to upend social order and cause immense problems in the name of 0.3% of the population. Because there's vastly, vastly more right-wing curmedgeons than there are trans people. However large the overlap may be.

I've said it here before and I'll say it again: the best social arrangement for marginals is to be politely glossed over and politically inconsequential. Because then maybe people can actually try to solve your problems instead of recruiting you for causes. Queering all of society instead is a fool's errand, a reckless fool at that.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, do they not?

In the sense of justfying acceptable sacrifices when there are people tied to the tracks and the train is arriving. In the long term, however, what you want to do is try to untie people, stop whatever supervillain has been kidnapping them, build fences around train tracks, get train drivers with better eyesight, etc.

When we're talking about real human lives being ruined by the thousand, 'the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few' must never excuse complacency. A status quo in which tens of thousands of people are deeply unhappy with their lot with no hope of betterment is not acceptable in the long term. Until a thousand generations of our brightest, best-intentioned, most open-mined thinkers declare with absolute certainty that there is literally no other way to order a society that would alleviate their suffering, we must not stop searching. Even in the event that other, even more urgent causes must take priority in the active search, we must at least remember what is owed, and keep firmly in mind that the current state of affairs is "the least terrible outrage we could muster", not "fine".

People don't seem to have this sort of reaction when the oppressed minority is victims of vaccine injury.

(For what it's worth, I also think the Left's attitude on this point has been scandalous. How they could claim to support bodily autonomy, and have so little regard for it w. regards to vaccine mandates, is beyond me.)

Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with individual tragedy more than you might think, especially in this case.

But the problem is that, as we have been reminded harshly in these past few years, you can't run your society in the service of marginals to the exclusion of everything else. It just doesn't work. Not even for the marginals themselves.

In fact, it is in the service of searching for betterment that I recommend others and myself to discretion. Not complacency, discretion. Indeed nothing has made it more impossible to study Gender Dysphoria and its still mysterious mechanisms and causes than turning transgenderism into a social movement. And I'm immensely frustrated that I now have to in every instance ask myself, reading any study on the topic, whether or not the author is trying to con me, to the service of whichever side.

It didn't used to be like this. And stupid shit like these language games over pronouns made it so.

We're indeed not at "fine", we're at "some people had their kids taken away from them over this". This sort of behavior is not very popular, and even less so when you're a visible but extremely tiny minority.

I'm not hypothesizing that things were better when we didn't care so much about this issue. I'm telling you. Because I cared then, and I care now, and I can see the difference.

I appreciate you responding, as I do any trans or trans-sympathetic posters here in a very unfriendly space. Now I have to admit the trans issue is one of those that has come close to tilting me away from what used to be my very strong liberal affinity. I really want to be sympathetic to them. I still remain very much "live and let live, and you do you" in my personal ethos. But I think your response is typical in that you see people who object to trans ideologies merely reacting out of disgust, or dislike that trans people are engaging in delusion. That's a lot of it, I'm sure. But:

And as a side-point which I feel is worth mentioning, re: "fulfilling some sort of fantasy to which the women were made non-consenting participants"… I mean, tough. I don't believe in thoughtcrime.

Okay, fine, fair enough. If a trans woman is actually getting off hanging out with women in a locker room and imagining herself one of them, or fantasizing about being a pretty pretty girl being railed by a totally straight dude who either doesn't know or doesn't care that she's trans, yes, I agree, it's "whatever" as far as what is going on in her own mind.

The problem is that when we talk about "bad actors," we're not just talking about trans people having dirty thoughts they keep to themselves. We're talking about, for example in the Gabrielle Darone case, a trans woman who got women who had miscarriages kicked out of a support group because they won't go along with her fantasy of having miscarried. We're talking about trans women who walk around in women's locker rooms sporting a very obvious erection. It too often is being indecent in public, and then bullying any women who object.

If they stuck to jerking off at home, neither I nor anyone else would know or care. If they posted on Twitter about how much they like jerking off while fantasizing about being a woman, maybe some people would be disgusted but no one has to read their posts. But it's the public behavior which tipped me over the edge. And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."

And the thing is, I realize that only a small fraction of trans women do things like this, but the rest of them, and their defenders, seem determined to justify such behavior. It makes it a lot harder to believe the line about trans people who "just want to live their lives."

I understand your frustration. If it were up to me, there would certainly be a lot less sweeping-under-the-carpet of genuine bad behavior from trans folks. But still: let he whose in-group has not closed ranks around a problematic tribe-mate, rather than let the lynch mob have him, cast the first stone. It's a natural tribal instinct, particularly when you think your community is facing an existential risk.

Maybe your beef is only with trans women who happen to genuinely be sexual predators; but if trans activists have reason to believe that there is a genuine political will in America to tar them all with that exact brush to - to classify all trans people as perverts and sex offenders by definition - are you going to publicize their existence? Are you going to give conservative media the satisfaction, are you going to give them the ammo to oppress you?

(If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police. Even if you're pretty sure the law enforcement personnel who'd handle that specific case aren't particularly anti-Semitic. Now, personally I think "trans genocide" is an ill-chosen phrase, but its merits don't matter here: this is the world trans activists think they live in, so of course they act accordingly.)

The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality. The purity spirals of highly trans spaces from Tumblr to leftist Discord servers are infamous for good reason. Making excuses for trans predators is nothing more or less than a PR move - call it desperate or call it craven - it's nothing more than bog-standard respectability politics.

  • -10

If you're a prominent Jew in early-20th-century Germany and you find conclusive evidence that this Jewish banker you know has been defrauding some goyim clients, you would be insane to publicly accuse him and call the state police.

If I was a prominent Jew in early 20th century Germany and had a gun, I would be justified in finding the local Nazis and killing them in cold blood.

If the situation is bad enough that you are justified in shooting people dead, you're also justified in doing a lot of lesser things that you normally wouldn't be justified in doing. And if you're deluded into thinking the world is that bad, you're a menace to society; this isn't some minor disagreement.

The theory that transgenderism as a movement is secretly very permissive of sexual assault on cis women doesn't survive contact with reality.

"Permissive" doesn't have to mean "deliberately intends to". It often means "has standards which rule out being able to handle". You don't have to be intentionally trying to bring about X for your actions to enable X.

While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive. Would I feel differently if I were a Jew in Nazi Germany? Probably, but I cannot emphasize how much I think "trans genocide" is absolute bullshit. This is like the feminists who think we are literally on the verge of The Handmaid's Tale. If you justify closing ranks around predators because your enemies are Literally Hitler then you pretty much lose any appeal to rational acceptance and tolerance.

While covering for bad actors in your ingroup is certainly a normal thing to do, I will die on the hill of insisting it is unprincipled and ultimately unproductive.

I don't disagree. I'm just saying: everyone does it, from queers to Pentacostals. It tells you very little about the moral integrity of the average member of the group, and ~0 about the merits of their ideology. So you shouldn't let this stuff affect how you think of trans rights qua trans rights, unless you're prepared to throw overboard any position whose proponents commit this kind of epistemological sin.

(And let's be fair. Literal concentration camps for trans people might be science fiction, but a plurality of conservatives would proudly own up to wanting to make crossdressing/being-publicly-transgender illegal, and a majority would at least want it to be socially shunned. Calling that "genocide" might be hyperbolic but trans activists can't be faulted for worrying about it a fair bit.)

  • -10

Which propositions do you think have majority/plurality support among conservatives in the united states, or even if you limit it to red state conservatives?

  1. Requiring trans people to use restrooms, locker rooms, etc of their birth sex.
  2. Banning men from wearing dresses/skirts in public, with exceptions specified by law for eg bagpipers.
  3. Requirement for civil servants to present as their birth sex, enforced through eg public school teacher dress codes.
  4. Automatic classification of drag shows as sexually-oriented, subjecting them to the same restrictions on attendance, advertising, etc as strip clubs.
  5. Ban on drag shows.
  6. Requirement for individuals to present in accordance with their birth sex in places where children are known to congregate.
  7. Requirement for individuals to present in accordance with their birth sex when in view of the public.
  8. Requirement for institutions dealing with minors to mandate they present in accordance with their birth sex.
  9. Ban on gender reassignment medical procedures, including cross sex hormones, for adults as well as children.
  10. Ban on gender reassignment medical procedures, including cross sex hormones and puberty blockers, for children.
  11. Known transgenders automatically registered as sex offenders.
  12. Requirements for all large institutions to mandate everyone dealing with them present in accordance with their birth sex.

I think you'd have majority support for 1, 3, 4, and 10, and plurality support for 8. I don't think anything else on that list rises to that level.

Interesting that you phrase all of these as requirements/restrictions/what-have-you as opposed to permissions/freedoms/what-have-you. Interesting that you have 9 for children & adults, and 10 for children, but no 'for adults'.

I suspect you'd get different responses between the following categories:

  1. Freedom to do X, with no stance on later potential additional permissions/freedoms/what-have-you down the line.
  2. Freedom to do X, and a flat no to additional permissions/freedoms/what-have-you down the line.
  3. Ban on more than X, with no stance on later potential additional requirements/restrictions/what-have-you down the line.
  4. Ban on more than X, and a flat no to later potential additional requirements/restrictions/what-have-you down the line.

I agree, though with the caveat that this only describes today's conservatives. Salami tactics aren't the sole purview of the Left; in a world where 1, 3, 4 and 10 become hitching points of the Overton window, hardliners will find it easier to drum up support for the rest of the list. For example, if you had 3, 4 and 8, 12 might not be codified into law overnight but would run a high risk of quickly becoming the unspoken norm, in exactly the same way that DEI-style measures became endemic even in institutions with no hard legal mandate to apply them.

I also think you phrased 4 as a needlessly weak version of that particular fear. With things like the withheld Disney cartoon, it goes beyond drag shows qua drag shows: the concern is that conservatives want to legally equate "being publicly trans" with "drag", and qualify any media depicting transition as adult-only media, not just live drag shows. I couldn't care less whether minors can go to drag shows, but I would consider it very damaging and illiberal to restrict their access to non-sexual books, comics and cartoons with trans characters in them. And I'm pretty sure you could get majority support for that among today's conservatives, albeit perhaps by not that wide of a margin.

I am, actually. The Roman Catholic Church justifiably took a huge hit because they chose to protect a tiny handful of bad actors rather than let them be properly exposed and punished. And to be fair, the Church never claimed that what their child molesting priests did was okay, or that it didn't happen. Which is different from trans activists, who generally take the position that no trans woman is ever a bad actor, and if there are any, they are singular exceptions and only bigots would notice them.

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.

(I almost wrote: "or of Catholicism as a belief system", which isn't true, but only because Catholicism is inherently self-referential, affirming the holiness and infallibility of the Church as an article of faith. The basic points of gender ideology in no way imply, let alone rely on the assumption, that today's trans activists and community leaders are heavenly-appointed and infallible.)

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople [...]

Would you say the same about all organizations? Or is this specific to a subset thereof? If so, what is the criteria for an organization to be in said subset?

I think that's a reason to think less of the Catholic Church as an organization, but not of random Catholic laypeople, or Christianity as a belief system in general.

Sure, and generally speaking I do not think less of individual Catholics even though I think their religion and their Church is hokum. I also do not think less of individual trans people - the ones I know are generally pretty nice and chill. That said, I can tell the Catholics I know (if it comes up) that I don't share their beliefs or support their Church, and they might argue with me but they generally won't take offense as long as I'm not being an asshole about it. I cannot tell the trans people I know that I am only being polite and I don't really think they are women (or "non-binary"). They might suspect that's how I feel (they probably know that's how many people feel) but if I were to let the mask slip, even unintentionally and without malice, there would be social consequences. I resent this, and I do think it comes pretty close to being unquestionable holy doctrine in the minds of many activists.

I think I would defend such norms generally. There seem to me three broad considerations at play here.

1. How much harm is done by false negative determinations? That is, how much harm is done when we treat bad faith actors as being their preferred gender.

2. Much harm is done by false positive determinations? That is, how much harm is done when we treat good faith actors like bad faith actors?

3. How reliably can we differentiate good and bad faith actors?

My perception is that in the particular case of pronoun usage (1) is perceived to be quite small, (2) is comparatively larger, and (3) is highly uncertain. This leads to the development of a norm of erring on the side of caution and using people's preferred pronouns without some very compelling evidence to the contrary.

Coincidentally on X I recently ran into a GC account describing the behavior of another trans bad actor in a Facebook group for lactating mothers. This transwoman was pretending to have lived through a pregnancy and then lost the baby in a miscarriage. He sought sympathy, support, and validation from the group. This was obviously fulfilling some sort of fantasy for him, to which the women of the group were made non-consenting participants. This incident got some play on social media because some of the real women in the group did object to the presence of the transwoman and those women were kicked out. This group chat was governed by suburban nice liberal norms, which like the rationalists have completely capitulated to trans beliefs.

Do you have any links? I would be interested in reading more. To my mind the central bad thing in this incident is the "pretending to have lost a pregnancy to miscarriage," something cis women could also do. If the individual in question had been "really" trans (whatever that means to you) and had stuck strictly to relating their own experiences would that still have been bad?

More generally I think the considerations I have identified above vary contextually and will not always yield the same answer as it does for pronoun usage.

I simultaneously strongly agree with portions of this comment, and strongly disagree with others. I suspect I may not be the only one, although I cannot know that.

This highlights one of the limitations of a comment system like this: there is one up/downvote for the entirety of a comment.

People react to your behavior. The amount of harm done by bad faith actors won't stay the same once you've settled on a policy about false negatives and false positives. The bad actors will see your policy, and act in ways that the policy incentivizes.

The amount of harm done by bad faith actors won't stay the same once you've settled on a policy about false negatives and false positives.

Agreed.

The bad actors will see your policy, and act in ways that the policy incentivizes.

Ditto for good faith actors, for that matter. And "ways that the policy incentivizes" is not the same thing as "ways that the maker of the policy publicly announced that the policy would result in", nor is it the same thing as "ways that improve the outcome compared to without the policy".

If you put a policy in place that results in, oh, severe consequences for using a persons non-preferred gender, you will likely get many people to stop using said person's preferred gender, as they went through a logic chain along the lines of "I am too forgetful / do not have the memory to 100% guarantee that I always get 100% of people's preferred gender correct 100% of the time, and the consequences are severe, so I will stop using gender altogether to refer to people".

Remarkable

You know better than to post low-effort one-word sneers.

How about "it's all so tiresome."

How about actually engaging with people and articulating your disagreement, or else just letting it go?

Do you have any links? I would be interested in reading more. To my mind the central bad thing in this incident is the "pretending to have lost a pregnancy to miscarriage," something cis women could also do. If the individual in question had been "really" trans (whatever that means to you) and had stuck strictly to relating their own experiences would that still have been bad?

"Gabrielle Darone".

If a trans woman stuck to "relating their own experiences," what place would they have in a group for pregnant and lactating women?

I guess I'm confused. From the OP I had the impression Darone concealed the fact that she was trans and had posted in the group as if she had actually been pregnant and had a miscarriage. The posts linked seem like the total opposite of that. Darone was up front that she was trans and that her pregnancy was simulated rather than actual. She does in fact seem to stick strictly to her own experiences in the posts in question. The screenshots do not show other members' posts but the way Darone talks about them it seems like other commenters were broadly supportive.

What am I supposed to be mad about?

I didn't follow the story myself, I only know how it was reported second-hand on Twitter, but my understanding is that Darone:

(1) Simulated being "pregnant" in a group for pregnant and lactating women. (2) When her "'pregnancy" was supposed to come to term, roleplayed having a miscarriage, simulating her supposed grief at not having a child, and expected the women in the group to support her the way they would for someone who had actually had a miscarriage. (3) When some women (including some who had actually had miscarriages) objected to this, they were kicked out of the group.

I don't think anyone is demanding you be mad about it. But if you find nothing unobjectionable in this behavior, I question your "confusion."

I think what Darone did was weird but as long as she was up front about it and other group members seem broadly ok with it then I don't see the issue. As to (3) I would be interested in seeing the objections. I can imagine them taking forms for which I would have a problem with their being kicked out and forms for which I would think it was fine.

  • -15

Maybe the offensiveness of what Darone did becomes more obvious if you remove the trans issue from the topic.

Imagine you have a support group for parents whose children have a terminal form of cancer. These really exist and are important to the people involved. One day a member posts a sad story about how his kid has died recently, obviously getting lots of expressions of support and sympathy from the group, because that's what support groups do. Then later it turns out that his kid is alive and well, wasn't even sick, or maybe doesn't even exist.

Could you then imagine some of the people who were in the process of actually losing their children to cancer would find the behavior of the imposter deeply offensive? Wouldn't it be more than a little “weird” if the group administrators responded to the controversy by kicking out the offended parents with actual dying children (i.e. the target demographic of the group!), to kowtow to an imposter that wants sympathy for his imaginary grief?

And I know you might say: well, maybe the imposter cannot help it! Münchhausen syndrome is a thing! Let's be empathic and inclusive! But even if I agree that Münchhausen syndrome is real and that people with this condition deserve help, it's not clear that that help must come in the form of being admitted to a support group they do not qualify for. I think it's reasonable to keep the support group for actual parents of actual dying children, and give the imposter support in the form of psychiatric treatment separately.

Similarly, I cannot understand why a group specifically for pregnant women would prioritize the needs of a male imposter over the safety and comfort of actual pregnant women in the group.

Note that none of this depends on proving that the male acts out of malice or indulging a sexual fetish. It's perfectly plausible that some transwomen are legitimately sad that they can never become pregnant, and perhaps they need support to deal with that grief, and maybe that support involves LARPing out a miscarriage, but that still doesn't imply they should be entitled to join support groups for pregnant women, on the simple basis that they are not, and never will be, pregnant women.

I think what Darone did was weird but as long as she was up front about it and other group members seem broadly ok with it then I don't see the issue.

I think the group members that did the kicking-out accepted the behaviour, because they believed in a moral obligation to do so. In an emotional/personal preference sense, I dont think they were ok with it.

If they said "Speaking as a woman who has actually had a miscarriage and found the experience intensely traumatic, your predilection for roleplaying as someone who has experienced a miscarriage in order to fulfil a perverse sexual fantasy is shockingly tasteless and disgusting, and has no place in a space like this - take it to a fetish site"?

I find it pretty hard to imagine any other "form" the objection might take.

I would probably remove such a person, if I intended my group to be trans-friendly. Though I am inclined to extend some grace to someone dealing with that kind of trauma.

  • -18

I find it very disconcerting that the line between "trans-friendly policies" and "policies which enable perverts to roleplay their creepy fantasies to their heart's content" is so razor-thin, if not indeed nonexistent. I mean, you say that what Darone did was "weird" - do you dispute that he was doing it to fulfil a sexual fantasy?

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And if they said "you're not a woman and this is in bad taste"?

I could go either way. I see how it can be in bad taste but I also see why a trans positive space wouldn't permit members to misgender people.

  • -10

Why on earth does a group for mothers discussing the biological parts of pregnancy and early childhood need to be trans friendly? If a transwoman requests a hysterectomy they should be sent to a psychiatrist, not an obstetric surgeon.

Some trans fantasias are so blatantly retarded that humoring them seems a bit insulting to everyone involved, including the trans"women" themselves.

Why should a lactation support group be "trans positive" in the sense that they can't tell a trans woman that she cannot lactate or miscarry?

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