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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.
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 women's 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.
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.
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 as it is when we limit our analysis to 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?
Okay, first off, I said this stuff wouldn't necessarily happen in our lifetimes. I don't grant that it's outright unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, depending what you mean by 'unlikely'. I think I'm right even if it takes a thousand years, but I do think there's something like a 1/10 that we live to see it. And there's a much better chance that our children live to see it, which makes it very relevant to the kind of values we want to educate them with.
Second, I am against sour-grapes morality. We must acknowledge that good things are good even if practicalities prevent us from getting them just now. We must shout it from the rooftops. We must write it on our monuments in letters ten feet high, so that even if we cannot seize the chance, our children or our children's children will as soon as it is possible for them. If trans rights are currently socially unworkable, but desirable in the long term, both these truths need to be communicated and promoted. The state owes it to trans people to tell them, "we can't give you everything you ought to have just yet. but we know in an ideal world you'd obviously get it. we're sorry, we're so sorry"; not "what you want is incoherent and bad, stop asking for it". Sometimes you can't save everyone, but you have to acknowledge the sacrifices you make, and bear them in your heart forever. To do otherwise is morally outrageous. That is why, regardless of the facts re: practicality, I would view an intellectual alliance with gender-criticals of the breed whose idea of Heaven/Utopia includes no trans people at all as viscerally unacceptable.
Third, sour-grapes morality is a great way to turn your nose up at solutions that already exist, or that could exist in the short term. "In a perfect friction-less Utopia trans rights work" is an extreme assumption that proves a point. I'm not sure the social engineering needs to be quite that extreme, nor that we need this many technological miracles, to get us there. I think there are ways for a society at our current level of technology to allow for a lot more trans rights than conservatives would be willing to grant; and if we don't keep a firm hold of the premise "trans rights are highly desirable if they can be obtained", we won't look for them, we won't find them.
One thing I think you're glossing over here is the possibility that some of the things some trans people want really are incoherent and bad.
In the transhumanist future in which anyone who wants to undergo a body transplant and transfer their brain into a body of their desired sex, I'm confident some significant number of trans people would take the deal. But I'm equally confident that some significant number of trans people wouldn't take the deal, would keep their bodies more or less as-is, and would demand to be "treated like a woman" anyway.
My evidence for this prediction is the current state of the evidence in our world. For such a seemingly straightforward concept ("a trans woman is a man who wants to be a woman"), it's surprisingly difficult to pin down a workable definition. One of our resident trans posters proposed "a woman is someone who prefers to have a vagina rather than a penis, and vice-versa. But of course "prefers" is really hard to confirm, so let us instead say: a woman is someone with a vagina". But in response, I noted that such a definition excludes almost everyone who calls themselves a trans woman:
I'm sure it will not surprise you that the resident trans poster in question refused to bite the bullet, and stated that she would still consider a trans woman a woman even if she knew for a fact that the person in question had a penis which they had no intention of giving up.
Now, granted, the current state of the art in bottom surgery produces a very crude facsimile of a real vagina which has to be dilated indefinitely, isn't self-lubricating and is useless from the point of view of becoming pregnant (and all related auxiliary functions). I'm sure there are some trans women right now who would really like a vagina instead of a penis, but are holding out until the state of the art improves significantly. Or perhaps they can't afford it or it isn't covered under their insurance etc. This is all perfectly understandable. (Even if you're only on a waiting list to undergo bottom surgery, I'm going to take your claim to identifying as a woman a lot more seriously than if you aren't.) In the transhumanist future in which undergoing a cross-sex body transplant was as quick, cheap and painless as getting a vaccination, I'm sure significantly more than 9% of trans women would avail of it. Especially if it was reversible.
But I'm also confident that if I surveyed the ~90% of trans women who haven't undergone bottom surgery about what they would do in the hypothetical future where body transplants are cheap and painless, a significant proportion of them would say "I wouldn't avail of it. I like having a penis." A "girldick" is the preferred term, I understand.
Like, at what point am I allowed to say "what you want is incoherent and bad"? Demanding to be treated like a woman despite possessing a penis and wanting to hang on to it seems incoherent and bad. Demanding to be allowed to participate in female sporting events without having made even most the token effort to reduce your T levels seems bad and unfair. Demanding that lesbians let you put your dick in them and calling them bigots if they don't want to seems bad. I feel zero qualms about saying my idea of utopia includes zero creepy male people who use trendy identity politics to emotionally manipulate women into fucking them, or to secure an unfair competitive advantage in sporting events.*
Likewise, in our hypothetical future in which undergoing a body transplant was quick and painless, certain male people refused to undergo one, but demanded that they receive all the social and legal privileges** associated with being a woman anyway - I feel like I'd be well within my rights to say "you're a bad actor and a malingerer, knock it off". A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because of the current state of medical technology - that's an engineering problem. A male person who wants a female body, but cannot yet achieve this because they lack the financial resoures to make it happen - that's a scarcity problem. A male person who wants to keep his male body but wants to be "treated like a woman" anyway - that's just someone taking the piss, and we both know it.
If your idea of utopia includes some amount of these people, then I have to ask - why? Is there any point at which you say "what this person is demanding is incoherent, bad and unreasonable"? Or is every demand a trans person makes de facto a reasonable demand to make, by virtue of their being trans?
*Two particular kinds of bad behaviour which, needless to say, are not peculiar to trans women.
**Assuming that any such privileges still exist in the world in which female sex is literally an elective category.
I think the problem is that we have very different ideas of the ideal transhumanist future. Any transhumanist future worth its salt is by definition going to be, well, transhumanist: to involve people transforming themselves beyond the standard human forms and lifestyles. Never mind fretting about people who want to inhabit bodies that have mismatched but naturally-occurring sexual characteristics: I expect that quite a lot of people, in the long run, will find that they prefer to interact with the (virtual?) world as glowing obelisks, anthropomorphic cats, anime girls complete with Roger Rabbit black outlines, and, doubtless, all manner of much stranger things we couldn't even predict from our pre-singularity vantage point. It is these hypothetical posthumans who I imagine cringing at the thought that "she" is inherently wrong/a lie if applied to a person whose body has a penis, when it will routinely be applied to people who have no genitalia or chromosomes at all.
(And, indeed, people who may never have had any because they only ever existed as digital consciousnesses. Thus far I've talked about VR, brain uploads, and so on - but what about A.I.? If we crack sentient A.I.s, what will that do to our understanding of gender, do you think? Do you think it's radically wrong for people in the Star Trek universe to call Data a "he"?)
I have a hard time accepting your apparent claim that wanting to live your life as an embodied anime girl and not being able to constitutes some kind of unspeakable tragedy, on a par with (or in the same ballpark as) the reality of sickness, aging and mortality. I don't believe that "being able to live your life as an embodied anime girl" is a project that any public monies should be invested into achieving. If, a result of the overreaches and poor message discipline of the trans activist movement, there is less of an appetite for investing public monies into making this desire a reality, that strikes me as an unequivocal good.
That's not exactly my claim. Beating mortality is clearly more urgent than guaranteeing anatomical freedom for all sapient beings. And at the individual level, "I really wish I could turn into a flying octopus" is not typically an immediate crisis in the same way as "I really wish I wasn't being raped right now".
But I do claim it would be a terrible waste of a universe if we made it past a technological singularity and yet continued restricting ourselves to some marginally-improved, sharp-edges-sanded-off approximation of "classic" Homo sapiens existence, even though the technology for much more interesting avatars and transformations existed, purely out of some weird sense of parochialism. I do claim it'd be an existential tragedy to get Brave New World instead of the Culture. HOAs who demand that everyone's garden be an identical plot of uniform flat turf, tiling the universe. A Luddite boot stamping on the face of human whimsy, forever. The prospect horrifies me.
(The anime girls and anthro dogs were more of a gag than anything else; I expect they'd be popular choices in the very earliest day of the technology but be gradually replaced with less shitposty things that are less funny to say out loud, but are more fun to be. Note also that I'm not saying my utopia doesn't have classic Homo sapienses anymore, either; it just seems very unlikely that everyone would choose to remain a baseline-human if given the choice.)
This being the case, I think it's important to get trans rights right insofar as the kind of post-singularity world we get, if we get one, may very well depend on today and tomorrow's prevalent values. It's the kind of question where the underlying moral principle. This is a time to open people's minds, not close them.
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