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I have a lot to say about your post, thanks for posting it.
Anecdotal Engagement to Blanchard Hypothesis/Autoandrophelia
I find this issue very interesting and go out of my way to engage with it because in some ways I think that I am a bit like you in how I see my gender/sex/(dysmorphia? where part of the problem is there isn't a sufficient word for what to put here). I am a.f.a.b. that definitely has some form of gender dysphoria and sometimes I think I might just be a closeted trans man, but that doesn't seem like the complete truth. I really enjoyed the first part about your post because as someone who doesn't engage in rationalists spaces often, I hadn't really heard of the Blanchard hypothesis. I spent a good part of that post trying that on for myself to see how it fit my own experience of life and at first glance it felt right. I do definitely have some autoandrophilia, and perhaps this was the reason I felt I didn't fit into the mainstream ideal of transgenderism. I often tell people that the existence of "tomboy" serves me well enough as a gender role that I am definitely not transgender but actually transsexual is a much more accurate term because I would just like penis. Upon my estimation, my body dysphoria is at max of 30% autoandrophilia. Perhaps I am the first camp, of having been trans minded before puberty (there is a fair bit of evidence here) however I'm also not an Lesbian.
I think there is a lot of value in being able to discuss alternative explanations for gender dysmorphia because the standard explanation just doesn't fit everyone. Here I would say the value is so that people have more hypothesis to pull from when trying to figure themselves out, but my husband (whose account I am stealing to post this) would say it is because having many hypothesis helps us find an accurate one or one close to reality. However there seems no group willing to engage with multiple hypothesis because it all devolves into "for or against", where either you support the current model only or you want to completely deny transition and force people into strict assigned at birth roles with no other allowances. I'm sure if there is an explanation for why all politics seem to devolve this way with a complete inability to understand that something is a nuance, or perhaps the moment something devolves this way is the moment it becomes "politics".
Thoughts on Philosophy of Language as Pertaining to Gender
I have to caveat my following thoughts with the admittance that I don't care much about the specificity of language. I'm easy to change words if I get the sense that the connotation of that word meant something different to someone else. I'll never die on a hill of the true meaning of a word, but change my words to try to communicate my meaning. That said I had some thoughts that might perhaps influence further discussion of your Philosophy of Language.
Some of the pushback on Categorization of gendered words specifically is exactly because people can sense the sex based Categories do not fit. When someone argues that trans women aren't "women", like you do here:
They often follow up with because trans women are men/male. However just in the same way that you are stating that the category "women" is made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and so including them in that category is inaccurate. So too is the category "male" and "male" made up of a group of features that doesn't match "trans women" and for many people when comparing the two, the features in the category "women" match much more closely to "trans women" than the features in the category "male" AND using the category "women" makes trans women's lives "better" as far as they understand. So it seems morally and linguistically correct for them to use the other. "Ennobling the answer that is right for society and not tyrannizing society with the right answer." -Edward Teach. Perhaps it is the case that the category "male" does much more closely match the category "trans women" but it isn't a perfect fit, and to me it seems an equally "wrong answer" to using the category "women". I feel that a lot of information has been lost in using that category. The argument has been framed as whether dolphins match "fish" or "mammal", but perhaps instead of dolphins we should be discussing platypuses.
The argument that most trans women is caused by autogynephilia makes it so that trans women are just men with a different fetish and because fetishes are masculine there is absolutely no difference between the category "trans women" and "male" but part of being a trans women is performing womanhood such that if someone were to try to predict your actions based off of a gender identifier, then you would try to act so that "women" was a better fit. Since categories are used for predictive modeling then perhaps the category "women" is more accurate. I personally think that there are enough failures of overlap e.g. strength in sports, that both are inaccurate. That said I am physically stronger than all the trans women I know (which is many now), and if we worked to be strong to the same degree they would be stronger but they don't because that's not what a woman would do, and likewise I do work at it, perhaps because that's what a man would do. In fact in general the category "male" matches my behavior enough to make people uncomfortable with category "female" despite my making no effort to push any external categorization of me verbally. When we get into gender arguments where I attribute behavior to other women based on my own behavior, my husband points out that I may genuinely be in that 99.5th that is stronger than the average male, I just point out that we are surrounded by programmers and they are likely in the 30th percentile and not average.
I doubt I will change your mind with any of this. I think you see trans women as completely matching the category of "male" because they are men with fetishes. However I am hoping to communicate that your discomfort with the categories being used incorrectly may actually be due to your underlying definition of what it is to be trans. Without that definition (so to most people), the category "women" is actually more accurate than the category "male" for predicting the action of trans women. The category "male" being more accurate is dependent on your definition of what causes trans women to be. So rather than all of these big name rationalists throwing out categories completely in the name of making a group feel a bit better, they have no category that fits completely but by their definition of trans women the category that fits best also happens to make a group feel better. It fits best and it makes them feel better, win win. Should they instead find a category that fits perfectly? No category fits any individual perfectly, we can only really hope for pretty good. Maybe they are wrong to think "women" is a pretty good fit, but I'd guess they genuinely believe that.
Disclaimer for anyone going through post history, I am not the owner of this account. I read rationalist blogs and this content in so much as the owner of this account makes me. This statement does not reflect the thoughts and opinions of the owner of this account :P
Strong disagree. Disregarding the fact that trans women are males reduces accuracy in both description and prediction. You're arguing to make their target bigger rather than our aim truer.
I'm not really trying to convince anyone that trans women meet the category "men" or "women" I am trying to express that most people I've encountered seem to believe that the actions of trans women are going to much more closely meet the category "female" then the category "male". That might be false, but stating that it is a "fact that trans women are males" disregards even the possibility of examining categories. It isn't an argument or a fact, it is a statement about categories that may be true or false and needs much more detail, namely which features of the categories trans women meet in "men" and not in "women". I think public opinion is swayed by the fact that most trans leaders are very passing where passing is having a large number of visible physical characteristics from the category "women".
We already have a category for people whose appearance and actions pattern match to women: feminine. It naturally favours women but it's very much open to men.
One problem with using "passing" as the benchmark is that it excludes women who don't possess a sufficient number of visible physical characteristics. That's regressive, exclusionary, sexist and all the things that the conflict averse people who suffer no cost in making their opinions public would disavow, it's just that they aren't invited to follow the logic through to this distasteful conclusion. Adding on the characteristics necessary to bring these (non)women back into the category is going to squeeze trans women back out of the other end. That's also regressive, exclusionary, only instead of being sexist it's transphobic. We're left with a Gordian knot of deciding whether this "woman" category should favour qualified males or unqualified females.
So I'm examining these categories and finding that trying to radically redefine them diminishes their utility, which in turn diminishes their significance. Does the examination stop at a point before trans women qualify as women, continue to a point where any human qualifies, or does it conveniently extend only up to the Goldilocks point where trans women qualify and then we should stop looking? Are we trying to describe reality with accuracy or are we trying to soothe trans women's dissatisfaction with the existing descriptions of reality?
Enough criticism, here's something constructive. Men are already free to be as maximally feminine as they can (costs notwithstanding). Under the low accuracy demands of public life they may be sufficiently feminine to pass off as women. Nobody is checking! As the justifiable demands for accuracy increase they will be progressively disqualified. At the highest demand for accuracy they are simply male. But if they can't pass the low accuracy demands of basic public life they can't do an end run around the topic by playing deconstuctionist word games to rules-lawyer their way into inclusion of a category that their presence renders meaningless.
[Parallelise the preceding to trans men as applicable]
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