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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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