vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics.
I know I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's less "point deer make horse" and more "point guardian make adopted parent."
I maintain that you don't need any dubious metaphysics or unproven biological hypotheses to get a basic conception of trans-ness off the ground. I think if you accept that a legal document can "transform" an unrelated adult guardian into a parent in the eyes of the law and society, then it is possible for a legal document to "transform" a biologically male person into a woman in the eyes of the law and society.
There's nothing magical or spooky going on. There's no need to throw our old maps of reality away. We can fully acknowledge every true, scientifically verifiable fact about trans people, and still treat them like their adopted sex in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so, just as we can treat adoptive parents as biological parents in as many contexts as it makes sense to do so.
I understand that trans people and trans activists are often making stronger claims than I do in my posts on this topic. They'll advance metaphysical claims that they are "real" men or women, or that they have the "soul" of a man or woman. They'll advance unproven or irrelevant facts about biology to bolster their claims. I'm a metaphysical materialist, so I'm unimpressed by most of the metaphysical claims, and I'm willing to concede that the replication crisis and the lurking threat of a repeat of a lobotomy-sized science scandal casts sufficient doubt to make some level of skepticism basically reasonable, no matter what the current state of research is.
I just think it's important to point out that there's no necessary connection between a playbook of regressive social policies and trans activism. The legal and social questions can be settled completely separately from the metaphysical, medical and biological questions, and all of those are completely unrelated to the tactics that are currently being employed by some activists to get what they want.
There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim.
As I said above, I think cancel culture and victim culture are completely separate issues from what legal regime we decide to adopt with regards to trans people. I don't think any more "unreasoning" is required than for any other social "reality." And I don't think if you somehow definitively ended the trans debate in either a pro- or anti-trans way, that it would magically lead to cancel/victim culture disappearing as important social forces. They're symptoms, not causes in themselves.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I would argue that quite a few trans skeptical arguments are clearly utilitarian/consequentialist in nature: "irreversible damage", detransition woes, and bathroom/women's prison fears all seem to have their basis in a line of consequentialist reasoning.
I'll concede that many trans skeptical arguments are built on foundations of different conceptions of fairness, or metaphysical/epistemological commitments of some kind. But I do think that the "think of the children" type arguments veer into an implicit claim of existential threat. If we're supposed to take it seriously as a call to action, we must believe that more than 0.02%-2% of the population are going to be brainwashed by the trend of "trans ideology." Because "think of a tiny, insignificant minority of the children" is less of a rallying cry than, "it could be your kids next!"
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
There's always going to be people online who care less about principles than scoring a point against the other team. Even so, I think it is a strange way to defend someone, by saying, "You're only pointing out this bad thing they did because it gave you a chance to own a member of the out group." Essentially, it's the same playbook from the other side: the bad things people on your team do don't matter, because they weaken your team's position.
The only time your principles matter is when you're applying them against members of your in group, otherwise it goes without saying that you'll happily see your enemies torn down for their violations.
I think it's okay to say, "I'm not happy with Internet Historian for plagiarizing his Man In Cave video, but this one smoking gun of plagiarism is not enough for me to discount his larger body of original, properly cited work, which I still enjoy and will continue to support."
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
I'll actually admit I don't quite know what they should be apologizing for. Anheuser-Busch tried to make a targeted ad that advertised to a Dylan Mulvaney-adjacent segment of the market, and didn't think other parts of their market would ever see it, let alone care about it. They were wrong.
I don't think the mere inclusion of a trans influencer in an advertising campaign is some grave offense they should have to apologize for.
Just off the top of my head, Cardi B has partnered recently with Walmart for a bunch of a commercials, and she drugged and robbed men who wanted to have sex with her in the past. This is not to say that I think people shouldn't get second chances, but what Cardi B did was way worse than any of the reasons people are angry at Dylan Mulvaney, and I doubt that anyone could meaningfully cancel Cardi B or Walmart at this point.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Interventions start being woke when they begin discriminating themselves.
What are the limits of this?
Imagine a hypothetical situation 70 years ago (or however far back you need to set it to make this an actually interesting question.) Suppose it was the case that all (or the vast majority) of existing college scholarships were de facto limited to white people. Would it be woke for a private individual to create a college scholarship and limit it to black people in this environment? Even if it was woke, do you think it would be a morally justifiable form of wokeness given the larger cultural situation in this hypothetical scenario?
Was Ghandi woke for only advocating on behalf of oppressed Indians in South Africa, and ignoring the plight of Black South Africans?
Would it be woke for someone to spend all of their charity money in third world countries, and not to spend a single dime in the United States?
Is it ever okay to discriminate against/ignore one group, while trying to better the station of another?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Were it just "I'm so rich I can have the real Mona Lisa hanging on my wall", then he'd be no better than any of the rich assholes who buy great art and stick it in a vault because it's an investment that will appreciate over time until they can sell it on for a higher price than they paid for it.
While I agree that Miles Bron did value the Mona Lisa for sympathetic reasons, the ultimate reason it is destroyed is because of his own selfishness. He created the back-door to the Mona Lisa's security system just so he could look at it without glass, he put the Mona Lisa into a giant compound that was one accident away from going up in flames. What if he had the Glass Onion in normal operation mode with 50 people, and he decided to look at the Mona Lisa without glass just as a cook starts an oil fire in the kitchen? He put the Mona Lisa into an inherently risky situation in the first place, and it blew up in his face (literally) because of that.
While I do think there is something a bit dubious in destroying an important cultural artifact as an act of revenge against an otherwise untouchable murderer, I think the fact that the destruction is only possible because of said murderer's own selfishness and hubris is an important point.
And the critics are wrong. If you give a treatment to one group, and not give it to another to another, that's still an RCT. Or you can offer an alternative treatment to the control group. It's a plus when you can blind a patient to what they're getting, but it's not a strict necessity. In this case it's probably just as important to blind the researchers when they're assessing results as to blind the patients themselves.
You're right of course. I think the concerns are more nuanced in some areas of medicine.
I doubt it applies to trans medicine, but I have heard of cases where medicine has such obvious positive effects for the sample group early on, that it then becomes unconscionable to not provide it to the control group (mostly in cases involving terminal diseases with quick turn arounds.) This would be one instance where a study initially meant to be a RCT trial for a terminal disease, might turn into an observational study instead.
And I was clearly thinking of double-blinded RCTs being nearly impossible in some cases, which I believe is true in some areas of medicine, but I can admit that GRADE only requires RCTs period for evidence to be considered high quality. That said, reading through the actual GRADE hand book it does seem like Lack of Blinding is considered a risk for study bias, which can drop a piece of evidence one level:
Example 3: High Risk of Bias due to lack of blinding (Downgraded by One Level)
RCTs of the effects of Intervention A on acute spinal injury measured both all-cause mortality and, based on a detailed physical examination, motor function. The outcome assessors were not blinded for any outcomes. Blinding of outcome assessors is less important for the assessment of all-cause mortality, but crucial for motor function. The quality of the evidence for the mortality outcome may not be downgraded. However, the quality may be downgraded for the motor function outcome.
I'm going to edit my original post to reflect this information, but I'll make clear what I'm adding. Basically, it appears to be the case that non-double-blinded RCTs cannot easily be high quality evidence according to GRADE.
Where did you get the idea that the decision was arbitrary?
I tried to search through the report, and they just used GRADE without really explaining why. I suppose "arbitrary" isn't quite the right word, but "unjustified within the report" is probably defensible.
Alright, having read part 1, and half of part 2, I'm going to attempt a response. Please forgive me if you've already addressed something I say in your other writings. Based on what I've read, I think you and I have fairly similar trans etiologies and ontologies (even if I emphasize or deemphasize different parts, and might assign higher or lower probabilities to certain things existing or mattering), and the primary point of difference between the two of us is the philosophy of language surrounding the issue of categorization, and the resulting normative theory that arises from that difference.
I doubt I'll "pass [your] philosophy-of-language litmus test", but I'm more rat-adjacent than an actual rationalist, and so I'm not really concerned whether you "lose all respect for [me] as a rationalist."
The issue was that category boundaries are not arbitrary (if you care about intelligence being useful). You want to draw your category boundaries such that things in the same category are similar in the respects that you care about predicting/controlling, and you want to spend your information-theoretically limited budget of short words on the simplest and most widely useful categories.
First, I want to say that I think you have an overly narrow conception of category drawing. Humans are very good at coming up with new categories on the fly, even when those categories don't always have good words for them. When academics are being responsible with terminology, you'll get discussions of emic (insider) vs. etic (outsider) terminology, and acknowledgement that some word or phrase is being used as a matter of convenience and not because it refers to a particular well-conceived or robust category.
Heck, look at something as "frivolous" as TV Tropes wiki. While some of the "tropes" they identify were named and recognized before the wiki started, a lot of the tropes are just patterns in stories and storytelling that people picked up on and decided to name, and when people notice a similar (but different) pattern they have to decide the boundaries between the two "tropes" they identify. The entirety of the wiki is an exercise in human categorization of an essentially endless and unresolvable set of category questions. The only thing keeping it somewhat sensible and stable is a respect for precedence, and a desire to settle on some set of useful vocabulary that outweighs people's desire for endless debates about category boundaries.
I think if I was trying to steelman something in the realm of "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", it would be in this context. I frequently have conversations where there's some idea I want a short word or phrase to refer to, and a suitable one does not exist. It is easy enough to drill down into the features I want to call out, and try to come up with a good label for it. This is a very fluid thing that happens naturally, and I assume it's being done casually, all the time, throughout human conversations. It's easy, and part of the fun is working out conventions on-the-fly with the people you're having the conversation with so that a conversation can happen in the first place.
I think this is part of why I'm less insistent on the idea that words must mean one and only one specific thing. If I'm talking with someone, and it becomes clear that the semantic scope of some word that's important to a discussion I want to have is different for them than it is for me, then as a practical matter I will have to come up with a new word or phrase for both of us to use to fruitfully have a discussion anyways.
My position is less, "words can mean whatever you want them to mean", and more "while it is useful for common, everyday words to cut reality at the joints, it's not the end of the world if you have to come up with a new convention on the spot that sets aside terminology disputes you're less interested in having." That process is about as free and fluid as "words meaning whatever you want them to mean", but with a specific pragmatic goal limiting the scope of the word creation process.
Aside from that, you make some specific claims about human cognition and psychology that I find dubious, such as:
Forcing a speaker to say "trans woman" instead of "man" in a sentence about my cosplay photos depending on my verbally self-reported self-identity may not be forcing them to lie, exactly. It's understood, "openly and explicitly and with public focus on the language and its meaning," what trans women are; no one is making a false-to-fact claim about them having ovaries, for example. But it is forcing the speaker to obfuscate the probabilistic inference they were trying to communicate with the original sentence (about modeling the person in the photograph as being sampled from the "man" cluster in configuration space), and instead use language that suggests a different cluster-structure. ("Trans women", two words, are presumably a subcluster within the "women" cluster.) Crowing in the public square about how people who object to being forced to "lie" must be ontologically confused is ignoring the interesting part of the problem. Gender identity's claim to be non-disprovable functions as a way to avoid the belief's real weak points. [Emphasis mine]
First, it's not obvious to me that this kind of word usage actually confuses anyone's mental maps of the world. Consider a phrase like: "Toy elephants are elephants."
I think even a child understands to their core that toy elephants and actual elephants differ in important regards. If you ask them if toy elephants breathe, or have working organs or a thousand other questions, if the child answers honestly they will admit that a toy elephant has none of these features. I think if someone took an analogous stance to the word "elephant" as you take to the word "woman", then we'd insist on always calling them "elephant-shaped toys" or "toys a human creator designed in the image of an elephant" or something silly like that.
But no one is confused. No one's models about the world are distorted. Everyone with any sense understands that a toy elephant might be an elephant, but it isn't a "real" elephant.
I don't think it "matters" whether toy elephants go in the "elephant" cluster or the "animal-shaped" toy cluster, because my intuition is that everyone's pre-linguistic understanding of the situation is fundamentally the same regardless of what words we decide to use for the situation or where we draw strict category boundaries.
Now, I admit that the social norm that it is wrong to ask about a person's genitals or what surgeries they have undergone, combined with other social norms that hide people's genitals from sight does create a situation where people might genuinely be confused about how the world actually is as a matter of fact. But I think those are the the primary issues, not the fact that the phrase "trans woman" doesn't offer specific insight that would overcome the ignorance that our social norms might produce.
The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".
I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
I think you and I approach the implications of your last sentence here from different angles. I agree that predictions matter more than raw words, and I believe that you and I would make similar predictions about a number of things related to the trans discussion. I think you and I could even have a fruitful discussion on trans issues if we made a short-term convention of "useful" terminology that neither of us found objectionable.
However, if predictions matter more than words, then where words don't actually confuse people (as I believe they do not in this case) there can hardly be an objection to using a particular word for something. Ask me any empirical question about "trans women", and I believe I could answer in a way where my predictions would largely line up with yours, perhaps with some differences due to different research paths and life experiences.
I get that you were burned by the rationalist community, since they seemed to get what you consider a very easy question wrong, and consistently did so in a way that undermined your belief that they were sincerely applying the principles you though they were trying to live by. I get that this is important to you because you've lived with this set of emotions for years, and have felt like you were going crazy when no one else seemed to be able to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance that you seemed to observe in them. But I'm not actually convinced that this is as big a deal as it has become in your head. If you already "know thyself" on this topic, and feel like you have a reasonably good read on what the world is in fact like, why blow your life up over an unimportant word quibble?
I'm trying to work through your posts from the beginning before I get to the most recent one you posted here. But I did want to chime in to say that I've long advocated for a "socio-legal model" for gender, ahead of the common "identity model" that many activists advance, in part because I cannot deny that some people who want to live as the opposite sex also seem to have a fetish of some kind. (Even if I'm somewhat open to the argument that many women are also autogynephyllic in some way, and thus autogynephilia might be compatible with the "intersex brain hypothesis.")
I'm not a huge fan of nebulous metaphysics, and the socio-legal model of gender only requires as much woo-woo as the concept of adoption or marriage does. I say this even as I acknowledge that there are plenty of cultures without adoption or Western-style marriage.
I have a strong confidence that autogynephilia exists at the very least, since I have a non-gender-related transformation fetish and I have incidentally seen a lot of captions and stories with AGP themes in them while searching for my preferred content. Now, that isn't yet strong evidence that AGP and being trans are connected in any way - I have no way of knowing if most of the people who like MTF transformation stories self-identify as males or females, but I do know at least a few transwomen who also have MTF transformation fetishes on various sites.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
There's just one problem, the legal document does not define a "parent" as "whoever is designated to be a parent by the document", it just formalizes a legal relationship with rights and duties, and it is those rights and duties that are the functional legal definition of being a parent.
Part of the problem is that from a purely legal perspective, there really isn't that much defining the rights and duties of a woman or man in contrast to one another. It's mostly trading one set of legal "privileges" for another. I think that an ultra-minimalist description of what legally changing your sex does could be something like:
- When sex-segregated spaces or services exist as part of public accommodations, then wherever their biology does not render that impracticable a person may use the spaces or services designated to the opposite sex.
Everything else could be handled by social convention, the same way we build up social expectations and etiquette around the legal contracts of marriage or the legal status of adoptive parenthood that go beyond the laws themselves.
I think this ultra-minimalist legal regime removes the need for new definitions of manhood or womanhood. A woman becomes "1. An adult human female. 2. Anyone who legally and socially adopts the role of the same." Mutatis mutandis for man.
Even then no one would begrudge a kid trying to find their real parents, and anyone screaming "They are your real parents! Adoptive parents are parents!" would be seen as completely deranged.
Sure, but by the same token people might disapprove of a rando at the supermarket harassing adoptive parents by screaming that they're not real parents at them. Even so, I don't think the government needs to get involved in matters of social etiquette.
The social regime will be what it will be, and might differ from place to place. I don't think legally compelled speech is necessary to make everything function in my proposed minimalist legal regime.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I do think it is hard to design public debates that function as a genuine meeting of minds and not just a spectacle for good rhetoricians to flex their skills. But even so, I think ymeskhout's proposed format is a good faith effort to make something that will lean more towards the former than the latter.
You don't need to be a lawyer to take down a lawyer. Someone who did speech/debate or forensics in high school, who is a reasonably competent public speaker, and who has the weight of evidence on their side would probably do a reasonably good job arguing against a lawyer who is bullshitting all their points.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
(If one political side is fundamentally thwarting democracy, then in my humble opinion the other side can do the same. They can do this by, for instance, accusing them of technical election fraud or vampirical adenochrome or whatever they want. They are morally justified to defend themselves using the same weapon as their attacker.)
This is just silly. If you're saying you wouldn't look down on the other side for getting down in the mud with their opponents that's one thing, but I think setting things up so that if Side A suppresses even a single voter-relevant news story, then that gives Side B full moral license to claim actual election fraud without evidence or to make up conspiracy theories, then I think you've set up an insane and unworkable game.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, but I wasn't proposing a self-ID regime.
I'm okay with legal hoops comparable to adoption or naturalization.
For people who haven't yet undergone the legal hoops, people can still treat them as honorary members of their identified group, the same way people might say, "You might not be my daughter, but I already feel like I'm your mother", or a close friend might say, "You still have some legal hoops to jump through, but you're just as French as anyone else in my book, and I'll fight anyone who says otherwise."
My point was that we already have many malleable socio-legal categories in society that amount to "lies" if taken absolutely literally. I fail to see how legal gender transition poses any notable risk to society's foundation.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Meanwhile, I can't trace a single actual harm to any trans person that could be attributed to JKR, who is apparently the final boss of transphobia.
I think the clearest examples of "harm" would be JKR publicly speaking out against the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill that would have made it easier for people to transition, and which was blocked from receiving royal assent by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack. It's hard to say if the Scotland Secretary would have acted the way he did without prominent voices like JKR preparing the public with arguments about why it should be shut down. To the extent that JKR made it easier for this to happen, she could be blamed for throwing her weight behind the movement to stop the bill from becoming law, for those who believe the law would have been good, pro-trans policy.
The only other "harm" I can think of is the cis-only women's shelter JKR opened up. I'll admit, the argument for harm is a little more esoteric here. It's the same kind of "harm" that the Salvation Army does in occasionally turning away gay people. Is it better that a flawed charity exists than no charity? Absolutely. But perhaps in an ideal world gay homeless people would also have shelters in such places, and trans-women who are the victims of violence would have a space they could go as well.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives.
I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.
Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.
I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)
See some of the contemporary commentary surrounding "the categories were made for man" and the implications for the Trans community.
I don't think Scott is endorsing obscuring the truth or lying in "The Categories Were Made for Man..." - just look at the Israel/Palestine example in the essay itself (which he even called attention to in his edit of the article.) Scott's threefold point in the article was that the way we choose to draw category boundaries is not some natural feature of reality, that there are multiple non-false ways to draw category boundaries, and we should be prepared to accept the implications of where we choose to draw those boundaries.
As far as sex-related terminology goes, I think the following are all valid ways we could draw the boundaries of the category "woman":
- An adult human who produces ovum.
- An adult human with XX chromosomes.
- An adult human who lacks the SRY gene.
- An adult human who has a vagina.
- An adult human who doesn't have a penis.
- An adult human capable of becoming pregnant.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human whose adolescent development was naturally dominated by estrogen.
- An adult human who was classified as female shortly after birth.
- An adult human who passes enough tests in this list that the majority of people would call them a woman.
- Etc., etc.
No matter where we draw the boundaries, there will always be ways to pick out the features you care about for instrumental rationality to get off the ground. For example, if I lived in a world where most of the speaking community I belonged to used the "produces ovum" definition of womanhood, but what I actually cared about was whether someone was "capable of becoming pregnant" (say because I was planning on starting a family with my own biological children), then I would still have ways to get at the information I cared about using other terminology. And if I lived in a world where Group A used the "lacks the SRY gene" definition, and Group B used the "has XX chromosomes" definition, I would have to determine if I was talking to someone from Group A or Group B to get an accurate picture of reality when talking about someone being a "woman."
Depending on how you draw the boundaries "transwomen are women" and "transwomen are not women" are both true statements, and unfortunately the moment a single person has a slightly different definition than everyone else, you can't actually count on the boundaries of the word being exactly the same for everyone.
Oh is this why you have been conflating reality and illusions and willfully blurring the distinctions?
I haven't been doing that. I've been arguing something more along the lines of The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for Categories.
I make a sharp distinction between categories that more-or-less cut reality at the joints (like "dog", "male", "water") and man-made categories (like "science fiction", "pop music", "president", "American", "goth", etc.) Like you, I don't believe that I have a redneg identity. I'm fully on board with calling all man-made categories "illusions" or "folklore" if you want. What I have objected to in your presentation of your position is the fact that you seem to believe that redneg identity is different from other man-made categories or illusions. I don't actually think it's all that special - it's just more salient because of the modern political climate.
You brought up religion, and that is a good example of what I mean. I'm an atheist. I don't really have a "religious identity" as an atheist - I know that I don't believe in God, but it's much less of a "thing" than being a Christian or Jew would be, because those two identities involve positive beliefs, social groups, traditions, etc. However, I've evolved from being the New Atheist I once was, and have grown to have a much greater appreciation of the power of religion to act as a social glue to hold communities together. Books like "Legal Systems Very Different From Ours" and the concept of metis and signalling have helped me to appreciate the role that religion can have in a life, and how useful it can be to maintaining order and trust in society.
If you re-read what I have written throughout this thread, I think you will find that I've never said that man-made categories are "real" - I've always used words like "useful", "important", etc. And I do believe that they can be those things in certain circumstances. I have nowhere conflated real and non-real things, nor have I blurred distinctions between the real and the socially useful.
Maybe redneg identity isn't useful to you. In the same way a Jewish identity isn't useful to me because I'm not ethnically or religiously Jewish. But it would be silly to say that just because Judaism is made up (as I believe all religions are), that it's not an important part of many Jewish people's lives, and hasn't helped them stay together as a community for more than 3000 years. So too, I don't think we can discount that redneg identity is important to a number of snart people - I have seen first hand the community and joy in the snart community, and in the same way I can "justify" religious mutilation like circumcision through the lens of it being a form of expensive signalling, I think I can "justify" snart medical treatments in part as something that might help a person belong to the queer community (even apart from the possibility that it might alleviate psychological discomfort in some snart people.)
The problem I had with you calling redneg a "religion" is that I think that by that standard almost every man-made social category is a "religion." Sure, not every social group demands that you believe impossible absurdities, but plenty of them ask you to believe social facts that aren't part of material reality, like "there is a country called America, and its borders end here" or "100 cents equals a dollar" - facts that we made up, and which could have been otherwise if history had taken a different turn. India made up the concept of a caste system, Britain made up the idea of the British royal family, etc., etc. I think the main difference between you and I, is that I think these kinds of social fictions are extremely common, and "redneg ideology" isn't even a particularly strange or unusual example. The belief that "I was born a man, but I'm actually a namow" is no more absurd to me than "I have no biological relationship to this child, but I want to take care of them and be treated as their parent in all circumstances - please call me their 'adoptive father' or just 'father' for short."
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I think the issue is more that privacy is the hardest thing to preserve if you want to not accommodate trans people.
If you make the rule "people must use the bathroom of the sex on their driver's license (which cannot be changed)", that would preserve privacy (compared to a genital inspector regime), but it would be a very easy system to game. All one would have to do is get a fake ID, which minors already do to get drinks before they turn 21. And it also ignores the fact that in the United States no one is required to carry an ID, and in many states no one can be compelled to show their ID if they don't want to.
Plus, it would result in the situation of passing trans people being forced to use a bathroom that might still make the occupants uncomfortable, and it has the issue that butch women might be harassed more in bathrooms by people doubting their right to be there.
What's your proposal for enforcing trans-exclusion in bathrooms, that is resource-efficient, doesn't create a whole bunch more bureaucracy, doesn't accidentally target gender-non-conforming cis women, and doesn't make anyone uncomfortable with their bathroom-mates?
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I'm not sure I agree that any amount of biting bullets is necessary for the "socially/legally adopted sex" model to function. All that's required is clearly spelled out legal/social policy about where adopted sex matters, and where it does not.
The state could decide important things that need to be decided like what locker room an adoptive woman uses, how anti-discrimination laws will be interpreted re:adoptive sex, or which sports teams they will play on at the high school level in public schools, and then everything else could be left to private organizations to sort out. So for independent sporting bodies for adult athletics, they could all decide on a sport-by-sport or organization-by-organization basis whether it makes sense to group by adoptive sex or natal sex.
The solution lets everyone use their judgement outside of a small group of top-down decisions that remove any confusion for any involved.
I think the bathroom issue is one where, as a practical matter, enforcing a trans bathroom ban is too difficult. It would be much easier to allow people to use the bathroom or locker room of their adoptive sex, and then just make stricter rules about harassment and unacceptable behaviors in bathrooms. With sufficiently strict and well-publicized enforcement, I think it's the best compromise between privacy, safety and accommodation.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Sure, in an ideal world there would be sufficient resources for society to organize to help all people no matter what difficulties life throws at them. In our imperfect one, we're left to rely on what limited resources charity and government intervention can bring to bear on various problems.
I've already said that I'll accept imperfect charities as a practical matter, but I think the criticism with something like the Salvation Army or JKR's Beira's Place is that the populations they're denying service (gay people, trans women respectively) aren't going to add that much strain on their resources, and it seems petty to deny them.
Hopefully, if it is felt that there is some large unmet need for rape crisis centers for men in the Lothians area, someone will try to open such a facility.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
I don't mind answering these questions, but before we go on, can we acknowledge that wokeness is a solid concept, no worse that literally anything else that we've come up with to discuss political issues?
Well, I don't conceive of wokeness in the same terms you do, but I do acknowledge something like it is happening.
I consider wokeness to be a constellation of progressive tactics and policies that edge into anti-liberal territory. But in my conception, I have had trouble drawing the boundaries around it, which is why I am curious about your conception of it. Some things like politically correct speech, cancel culture for ordinary citizens, and safetyism all seem like parts of the constellation, but I don't have a good definition of what definitely isn't wokeness, and I was curious about your defintion.
I normally wouldn't consider affirmative action to be automatically "woke", for example. Something can be a bad or inadvisable policy without being "woke", as I see it. And I do think one could possibly justify certain formulations affirmative action on the grounds that it makes pluralistic liberalism function better, and not on any other basis.
vorpa-glavo
1yr ago
Personally, I like the gay germ hypothesis. (The hypothesis that being gay is caused by infection with a particular pathogen.)
I'm not sure I believe either the gay germ hypothesis or your "not born this way" hypothesis, but of the two, I feel like the former has fewer holes in it. It explains the lack of heritability equally well, but without the leaps of logic.
You can probably see where I'm going with this but in the interest of plain speaking, the correct response to the gender theorists is "gender is just some term you made up to try and smuggle in a bunch of ideological assumptions in by connotation, Emerald Treespirit is just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be a woman by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
I feel like no smuggling needs to be done. If we taboo the word "gender", I feel like I can build up more or less the same concept from the concept of an "adoptive sex." By analogy with adoptive parents - normally parenthood is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "parenthood" for adoptive parents. So too - normally sex is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "sex" for adoptive men/women.
I think even if you're just being descriptive, "adoptive sex" is real. The federal government, and most states allow you to legally change your documented sex - so if one wanted to be a translegalist (= a person is validly trans if they have formally, legally transitioned) then I think everything would work fine. I think translegalism avoids many of the issues with the identification-only standards, and works better than other de facto standards like a "passing" standard, or a transmedicalist standard. I've circled around the idea of considering myself a translegalist, who extends pronoun and nickname hospitality to people who haven't legally transitioned, or who have no plans to ever legally transition.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
People do all sorts of weird things with words. To use two ancient examples: the Epicureans said that "pleasure" (hedone) was the highest good, and then said the height of pleasure was the absence of pain, and the Stoics said that the only truly good things were morally virtuous things and all other conventionally "good" things were really just "preferred indifferents."
The technical terminology of both of those philosophies differs quite a bit from standard usage in Greek, Latin and English. I think most people would say that "pleasure" and "absence of pain" are two different things entirely, and that having a wife and kids that you love isn't a "preferred indifferent" but a positive good in the life a person where it is desired. But I think in both cases, in redefining the terms (from a layman's perspective) the two philosophical schools are trying to make it psychologically easier to adopt each school's philosophical regimen.
I don't believe that some of your items would be accepted as a definition of a woman by anyone not in the lizardman constant.
My point was not that any of those was an unambiguous "best" definition, just that they were all possible definitions. I agree that in our society, as far as standard English usage goes, some of those are less plausible than others, but there's nothing in principle stopping us from having the following categories of sex: man, eunuch, woman, barreness (sic.) Eunuchs and barrenesses could be regarded as infertile males and females, and almost (but not quite) men and women. I think given the right society, those categories could easily be pertinent enough that they could emerge as real and strong divisions in people's minds. (Say, for example, a society where eunuchs are in widespread usage as singers, babysitters, escorts and government functionaries, and in which a girl is not considered a "woman" until she had born at least one child.)
There are possible constructions of those terms that would be bizarre to modern English speakers. For example, under Galen's single sex model almost 2000 years ago, women were "defective men with inverted sex organs", but no one in today's society would think that.
I think the shape of society often defines the limits of "plausible" word boundaries. Some Asian languages have single words for "older brother" and "younger brother" and "paternal uncle" and "maternal uncle" because the hierarchies of birth order and paternal vs maternal relatives is always important and pertinent information (at least historically.) It's not that English has no way of referring to those same distinctions, but for various historical and cultural reasons our language doesn't package those concepts as single words.
Addressing the other parts of your post:
I agree it's "fine" from a CYOA point of view, as in, no one will be able to blame you for using a standard tool used across the industry. But from the perspective of trying to perform a Bayesian update based on the final report, I'm not sure I agree.
A lot of the scientific method in general is a heuristic crystallization of Bayesian approaches, and so I have no doubt that a lot of what is present in GRADE is justifiable across a wide swath of evidence, and comes to largely the same answer as a Bayesian approach would. But I think that if GRADE systematically downgrades some kinds of evidence from being "high quality", which in a proper Bayesian approach wouldn't require any serious adjustment, that can lead to certain evidence being ignored or de-emphasized compared to where it should.
I think absent any other evidence, just the existence of the Replication Crisis is enough to call a lot of medicine into doubt, and I see no reason why this wouldn't apply to trans healthcare. That the evidence is weaker than often claimed, is almost certainly true. (I'm not sure that that isn't the case for a wide variety of healthcare fields as well though - is trans healthcare uniquely bad, or is it just as bad as medicine as a whole, and do we need to adopt a whole swath of reforms to deal with things like p-hacking, the file drawer effect, small sample sizes, etc.)
I agree with Cass' conclusion, even if I question her methodologies, because I want to see higher quality medical evidence around trans issues, and especially trans kids. I want the medical research to be beyond reproach, whatever conclusions it comes to.
The basic problem with medicine, across the board, is that we're routinely doing barbaric things to be people, and the only justification we can have is that the evidence shows it will have a better outcome for the patient. Chemotherapy involves poisoning a patient with the hope that the poison will kill the cancer faster than it kills the patient. Amputating a limb might be a tough decision sometimes, but it is most justified if a patient would likely die if you didn't do it.
I want the evidence we use in all instances, especially trans healthcare to be airtight so that no one can say we're poisoning people or removing functional limbs or organs for no reason. It'll still be "barbaric", but if it can be justified as much as chemotherapy, then I think trans healthcare will be in a good place.
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