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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I just came across a word that I feel could be very useful in the trans debate: signalment. Specifically, I'm inspired by the way the term is used in verterinary medicine.

Signalment is a complete description of the patient including species, breed, age and date of birth, sex and reproductive status, whether the animal is neutered or intact.

I feel like this term captures an important point I've seen brought up in a few contexts - that a person's status as transgender might matter to their doctor, and their sexual partners, but it doesn't matter much to their social interactions in ~90% of cases. "Signalment" seems to capture the idea of "medically necessary information needed by a physician to narrow down their search space and provide quality care." Just as it might be important to know that dalmations are more prone to bladder stones than other breeds, it might be important to know that a patient is "Female, with a hysterectomy, and on testosterone for the last 3 years" because that might provide unique medical information that could be useful to the proper treatment of a patient.

I think it also bypasses some of the issues people take with terms like "biological sex" or "gametic sex."

Instead of saying, "Your biological sex is still male though", to a transwoman, you could instead say, "Your sex signalment is 'male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years.'"

Then we could have the following distinction:

  • Signalment: All the medically relevant information about a patient.

  • Courtesy title (honorific), personal pronouns and gender identity: All of the social information that will make interacting with the patient easier.

So a patient might be Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], with a sex signalment of "male, orchiectomy, testosterone blockers and estrogen for 5 years."

There's actually a rather interesting Yudkowsky essay in an obscure part of the Sequences, where he unintentially obliterates trans ideology IMO. It's not enough even to change the chromosomes, hips, skin, face and so on...

You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too. There are whole bits of the Y chromosome that aren't found in the X chromosome, so you'd have to take those out. What does taking out parts of your chromosome mean for the brain circuitry relying on them?

What would happen if you had a male-type brain hooked up to a female body? Something bad, probably. I believe male brains have slightly bigger volume, so you've got some practical engineering issues too (though studies differ on this). And how do you design the intermediate stages of transferring the male brain to a female brain (the equivalent of neuron-by-neuron upload)?

What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you empathize with your past self of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you remember, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

Sounds complicated, doesn't it? It seems that to transform a male brain into someone who can be a real female, we can't just rewrite you as a female brain. That just kills you and replaces you with someone re-imagined as a different person. Instead we have to rewrite you as a more complex brain with a novel, non-ancestral architecture that can cross-operate in realtime between male and female modes, so that a female can process male memories with a remembered context that includes the male brainware that laid them down.

You certainly wouldn't have the experience of being a woman either, going through high school and gossiping with the girls or other female experiences I don't know about because I'm not a woman. It's an intimidatingly vast problem. One day we might have Miss Tiffany Lewis [she/her, woman], female body (Made in China), male mind, remastered memories, phase three psychotherapeutics. And yet we might still have TERFs saying 'if you weren't born a woman, you aren't a woman, simple as. No matter how many factory-made memories you buy, you don't have our authentic female experiences.'

I'd rather we took up vast bodies of steel and inhuman power, let's leave all this behind.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions

You'd have to rewire the parts of the brain that do sexual pleasure so you're not hooking up a vagina to the penis-pleasure part of the brain. There'd probably still be some male part of you that wants to penetrate women, you'd have to change that too.

Do all (cisgender) men want to penetrate women?

No, but there's probably something in the male brain that makes them inclined towards penetrating.

Not all men are aggressive but nearly all are more aggressive than nearly all women. There's probably a part of the male brain or hormone-regulatory system inclined towards aggression.

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