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Sincerely – what on earth are you talking about?
If the PIN for my bank card was tattooed on my forehead in 60pt characters and I didn't wear a beanie or a burqa, it would be meaningless to demand that people respect my privacy.
When we were struggling to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull, a child born with cystic fibrosis had little chance of seeing their fiftieth birthday. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of our not yet having discovered the three ___caftors.
When the United Nations was founded, almost everyone contracted measles before they reached adulthood. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of our not yet having developed the measles vaccine.
When the first airplane flew, infected wounds were often terminal conditions. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of Mr Fleming not yet having invented antibiotics.
When the first telegraph cable was laid across the Atlantic, that events in Halifax could be known to Dubliners within the hour, anyone bitten by a rabid animal had no possibility of survival. This was not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; it was the result of M. Pasteur not yet having developed the rabies vaccine.
Our inability for someone born with small-gamete-producing organs to produce large gametes is not an inherent, unalterable law of the universe; we just haven't figured out how. (Yet. Growth mindset!)
"For every problem the Lord has made, He has also made a solution." --Thomas Edison
And if a frog had wings, it wouldn't bang its arse on the ground.
You can't always tell what gamete-producing organs someone had at birth. If you saw this woman in a crowd of women, and were not previously familiar with her, I highly doubt that you could clearly identify her as the one individual among them who was born with small-gamete-producing organs.
The solution for male people who want to be female people is talk therapy until they understand that they will never be female people no matter what they do. No other solution seems remotely as effective.
And is the solution for female people who don't want to go through agony in childbirth 'talk therapy until they understand that the pain of childbirth is their just deserts for the sin of Eve', or is it better living through chemistry?
Epidurals work. Gender reassignment surgery doesn't.
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I will quote myself:
What constitutes a sensible course of action varies depending on a society's current tech level. You are correct that we can treat medical conditions now that we once could not. But don't you agree it would be phenomenally irresponsible to go back in time before the invention of the telegraph and urge a small child to play with a dog that was visibly foaming at the mouth?
If and when it becomes possible to transplant ovaries and uteri from female donors into male recipients such that trans-identified males can actually get pregnant and bear children, that technological development will surely have dramatic ramifications for our society. But that day hasn't arrived yet, it seems profoundly unlikely to arrive in either of our lifetimes, and I can't rule out the possibility that it never will.
I think it makes sense to promote policies that will produce the best outcomes for our current tech level, not the hypothetical future tech level a few decades away. If you went back in time to the pre-telegraph era, urged a small child to play with a visibly rabid dog, and the child contracted rabies and died – I can't imagine the child's parents would be mollified by your assertion that a reliable treatment for rabies was just around the corner, even if that's true. By the same token, perhaps in the future medical technology will advance to the point that people born male can literally become female (and vice versa) – but they can't now, and it's foolish to act as if they can and design policies on that basis.
You're the one who brought up gamete-producing organs. If you asked someone at any time prior to the invention of the microscope what the biological definition of 'male' and 'female' are, they would point to the configuration of the parts between the legs. I can think of no reason for preferring your definition over the classical one as the One True Criterion Of Biological Sex that would apply in any society in which either both or neither were changeable; thus I can only come to one of two conclusions:
You started with the assumption that biological sex is both unchangeable and single-variable, chose 'gamete-producing organs' as your dividing line because we do not yet know how to fully transition them, and, having chosen that as the definition of biological sex, used it to support your claim that biological sex is unchangeable.
You have some valid reason, which would have applied even prior to the development of what, even thirty years ago, was called a 'sex-change operation', for favouring one definition over another, but that reason is entirely beyond what I can derive from the extent of my knowledge.
I am not assuming that (1.) is the case, but if it is (2.), can you spell out your reasoning for defining sex on the basis of gamete-producing organs?
I wouldn't think that advisable even now. I just don't think letting trans-women use the ladies' room is equivalent to that.
Given how much you appear to admire Eliezer, and how much stock you put in the Sequences, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Eliezer wrote an entire article arguing that the desire to "change one's sex" is a fundamentally incoherent one.
Well, I just happen to disagree with him on that particular point. (Is it not written, only half facetiously, that a rationalist is someone who publicly disagrees with Eliezer Yudkowsky?)
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Wrong. You seem to have this idea that I'm carving up categories in a convoluted and unintuitive fashion with the specific aim of disenfranchising and ostracizing trans people. That is, you think I'm the mirror image of trans people, who start with the end goal of including males in the category of "women" and work backwards to produce a definition that satisfies that goal, even if it's a contrived one that doesn't match common usage. (Given you're so fond of quoting the Sequences, I'll note that Eliezer points out you can never come up with a truly rational answer if you already know what the answer is "supposed" to be at the beginning of your chain of "reasoning".)
Rather, my gamete-based definition of sex is the one used by biologists and zoologists when examining every sexually reproductive species other than humans: no one thinks that a female giraffe is "any giraffe who identifies as female" or some such nonsense. (See Dawkins and Wright for more information.) Humans are mammals, and I have yet to see a persuasive argument why our sexual categories should not be defined in the same way as those of all other mammals are. ("Because it makes some people sad" is not a persuasive argument, even if Scott seems to think so.)
The gamete-based definition of sex is the one that biologists and zoologists use. According to that definition, no trans-identified male is female, nor will become so in either of our lifetimes. In the event that we reach the tech level that enables us to do this, we may have to revise our categories such that people born male but now capable of producing large gametes are considered literally female. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it, and given the current state of the art it doesn't strike me as an especially pressing issue. To the best of my knowledge, no one has even attempted to transplant a uterus, ovaries etc. into a male human recipient, never mind done so successfully such that the male recipient actually can menstruate, become pregnant etc.
Is your contention that the entire medical community made the wrong call when they started referring to these procedures as "gender reassignment" or "gender-affirming" surgeries?
"People in the past used to call things by misleading or inaccurate names – therefore we should continue doing so today". By this "logic", we ought to refer to Native Americans as "Indians", people with Down's syndrome as "mongoloids", Inuits as "Eskimos", rubella as "German measles" and so on. I find it very strange how you freely recognise that people in the past were more ignorant than we are now, but only selectively. I mean, seriously: "the first name applied to something always captures the true Platonic essence of that thing and is never inaccurate or misleading in any way" is one hell of a hot take. Has it never occurred to you that people can be mistaken? Even doctors and surgeons? History is littered with examples of trained medical professionals being mistaken about matters of far graver import than simple naming conventions.
If I'm reading you correctly, you seem to believe that every male who undergoes bottom surgery literally becomes female. I will emphasise that, even if we insist on defining sex according to what's in between your legs, emasculated males are not female. The absence of a penis is not the same thing as the presence of a vagina. Per your genital-based definition of sex, it is currently possible to change one's sex, but only to change it from "male" to "neuter". If you want to say that emasculated men are neither male nor female – well, I still think it's a rather convoluted way of looking at it, but I would object to it less than the claim that emasculated males are literally female.
And here's the part where you tell me that trans-identified males haven't just emasculated themselves, but also undergone bottom surgery which bestowed vaginas upon them. Sorry, not having it. A neovagina is a crude imitation of a vagina, not the genuine article. Everyone with a neovagina will need to dilate it for several hours a day to prevent it from closing up, as the open wound that it is. (A very small number of female people need to temporarily dilate their vaginas to treat stenosis; if there's an example in the medical literature of a woman who failed to dilate her vagina and it literally closed up, I would love to see it.) A trans-identified male whose neovagina was bleeding for five consecutive days would be strongly advised to seek medical attention: for a female person, this is called "menstruation". When a symptom of grave illness for one organ looks exactly like normal bodily function for another organ, I think it's fair to say the two organs should not be placed in the same category.
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No, I can't always tell. I have never denied the existence of androgynous people. But hard cases make bad law, and I maintain that >95% of the time one can accurately tell from a cursory glance what gamete-producing organs a given person was born with. It therefore follows that, 95% of the time, a person demanding that people respect their privacy and not make inferences about their gamete-producing organs is making an unreasonable and quixotic request.
And, obvious point, but the fact that Nicole Maines looks passably female in a closely framed still image with a full face of makeup and flattering lighting does not remotely imply that I wouldn't clock them in person.
Given a sample drawn from the population at large,
will give you ~99% accuracy!
No, it does not follow.
Even if we assume that you have some psionic ability to remote-view a person's chromosomes or their gender presentation in earlier years or the decor of their childhood quarters or the colour of the mushroom cloud at their gender-reveal party or whatever, that does not make it appropriate to bring up or act upon.
If you had some embarrassing skin condition in the parts of your body which you do not generally display to casual observers, it wouldn't matter that I could deduce this by observation; you would still be very justifiably offended if I were to announce it in public, even if everyone in the room had made the same observations and deductions.
Well, I don't know how to link 'in person' on a forum!
I'm just glad we don't live in the world you would have us live in, and that we never will.
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Two words for you: Wishful thinking.
At least for the forseeable future, men can in fact not become women.
Was it wishful thinking for women in the middle of the XX. century to desire freedom from the drudgery of hand-washing clothes?
'Foreseeable' is doing a lot of the work there; I cannot currently foresee when we will develop full gamete-production-changing treatments or operations, but I can foresee that we will do so.
Also, people with penises can in fact become people with vaginas, and these are more common referents for the terms 'men' and 'women' than the gamete-production categories.
In the middle of the 20th century? Hell no, washing machines existed by then. Even assuming that you're off by a century, the mechanization of many hitherto manual processes was visible, and the process of washing clothes had changed in many places. And what's more, people had a good sense of what constituted clean clothes - a clear metric. Similarly, people have a good sense of what constitutes a woman, and there is no technology anywhere on the horizon that allows you to turn a man into a woman. You aren't wishing for washing machines in the mid-19th century, you're wishing for a space shuttle ca. 1900 BC.
Foresee me the how, or else you aren't seeing a damn thing except what you want to see.
Fakes, even convincing-in-the-right-light fakes, remain fakes, and the ones making them remain cheats and charalatans.
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