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In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
The issue is "trapped inside mens bodies" is metaphysics. It's asserting the existence of gendered souls, and that's not something you can prove or disprove.
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This is just normie thinking. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, moving the goal posts, generally incoherent. The "reasoning" is a veneer. The conclusions are foregone. Analysis or steelmaning of the object-level is not worthwhile.
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Well, for example, you could look at adult differences in people who socially transitioned at age 6 and went on puberty blockers at age 11, versus people who did no transitioning of any kind before age 20.
You could also look more broadly at statistics from the 1970s and 1980s when transitioning was a weird thing that an underground community of adults only could barely imagine and get access to, vs today when it happens much younger and easier and is more accepted, and see if that has changed the correlations across the population overall.
Of course, we're talking about small sample sizes with fundamentally unlike populations at that point, which makes it hard to trust the statistics (for example, I don't trust your statistics on crime for basically this reason; aside from the sample size, I don't trust that what happens to trans people in 1973 Sweden has anything much to do with what happens in 2023 US, the context is too different).
But there is a big difference between a theory being unfalsifiable, and a theory being hard to gather good data about. A lot of theories about quantum mechanics are very very hard to gather data about, but are also very good and useful theories.
There's the danger that bad actors will design theories that are deliberately hard to gather evidence against, of course, but you can ussually discover and dismiss bad actors for other infractions.
Also, I'd just like to note that, in a sense, the broadest plausible interpretation of your claim is on its face absurd, and therefore the claim probably needs to be more narrowly specified before we can fruitfully talk about it:
Things like wearing dresses or using makeup or referring to yourself with a specific pronoun or voting Democrat or etc. are all behaviors, which we would expect to correlate with trans identification (let me know if you dispute that).
Saying 'I am trans' is a behavior, and correlates very highly with trans identification. So obviously trans people don't behave like their natal sex across all behaviors.
Crime and mansplaining may or may not correlate with trans identification in the same way, but it's not a neutral inference to act as though those are the type of behaviors that determine the truth of your broad claim. Determining which behaviors do or don't correlate with trans identification, and how we should feel about those facts once we agree on them, is pretty much the entire field of the debate on this topic.
I'll also note, in a divergence from the progressive rhetoric, that I think binary and nonbinary trans are qualitatively different concepts that shouldn't really be used to make inferences about each other. I see nonbinary trans more as a cultural movement, the way we had 'androgynous' celebrities and fashion in the 80s corresponding to attempts to loosen and alter gender norms more broadly. Whereas binary trans is much more 'society has two options, I'm that one.
I mean, the rationalist community, or the programming community, or similar, have a ton more trans women than trans men, and a ton more men than women. How does one square this with the claim that trans women have the biological / psychological inclinations that women do?
I don't think socialization makes sense here. Because the differences are starker than other things that are more obviously socialized, like 'actually having a career in tech'. A randomly chosen rationalist is a lot more likely to be a trans woman than a random person employed as a programmer. A lot more employees of a FAANG are (biologically) female than 'authors of popular open source projects' are (biologically) female This is what you'd expect if socialization was pushing women to do things like 'code' more than they naturally* would, while smart weird men tend to transition and be into rationalism and coding more than usual.
* "Human nature" is socially contingent. Also, it's imo good to force women to code and do stem stuff a lot more than they would 'naturally'.
Well, that one is because al three are highly correlated with mild autism.
(if anyone is unsure: this is not a joke, this is my actual answer, I'm a bit paranoid about being misconstrued)
Beyond that: I don't make the claim, and I don't think that most progressives would try to defend the claim, that the population average and variance for trans women is exactly the same as the population average and variance for cis women on every possible psychological and sociological axis. T
This isn't prohibitive; obviously, most individual members of most groups will not personally be at the precise population average for most traits. And there are lots of subgroups you could make, like 'women who play sports' or 'asian women in the US' or 'women who write fanfic' or etc. that will have slightly different population averages for all kinds of things, but still be women.
Basically, no one ever said trans women aren't weird women, just that they are women. (that statement being a normative prescriptive statement arguing in favor of certain semantic and cultural lines, rather than an empirical claim, since empirical observations can't on their own make a semantic definition 'correct').
But also, note that trans people don't just get socialization as boys or as girls or as men or as women; they also get socialization as trans people. As a political football in a high-contact era of political sportsmanship, they're naturally pushed towards having to be a lot more involved in the culture wars and political rhetoric just to defend their own interests and stay on top of what is about to happen to them next. I think this makes them more common than would otherwise be the case in all types of highly-online politically-themed communities, rationalists being one of those.
Mildly autistic bio women don't seem to have the same attraction to e.g. rust that trans women do, once you account for the percent of the population they are. I think this is reasonable evidence against trans women having the same psychological inclinations as bio women,.
Another thing to think about, along the original line: Biological women have a strong innate desire to be around and care for children, one you can both see in choice of occupation and just casual observation, and I don't see that at all in trans women.
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Scott warrants that it's due to a strong correlation between autism and transgenderism, likely due to them attributing their discomfort from bodily signals everyone else accepts as a sign of them being assigned the wrong sex.
And autism is rampant in the programming community, and LW/other rat-adjacent fora too, so it's no surprise to find trans people there. Especially since the latter are unusually accepting and open to experience, so they get plenty of the early adopters.
Scott's claim, I think, brushes against a lot of the right ideas while also being mostly wrong, imo. Like, why would the discomfort be so narrowly focused on gender? I think that smart and self-driven people are naturally more vulnerable to - or more active explorers of - whatever tendencies the material and social circumstances create in humans. And I'm not really sure what to think of 'autism' in very smart people, is it really the same thing as autism in normal-iq people?
I mostly agree with Scott myself. Being a Furry, transgenderism, programming, they're all strongly correlated with autism. It might not be "misinterpreted bodily signals" necessarily, but programming is still a field where it's acceptable to be eccentric as long as you're competent in a way that's not acceptable, in say, investment banking. Similarly, LW folk and the rat community are incredibly open to experience, so I wager that and the autism covers it. Same deal as for taking psychedelics really.
If you want to consider changes in material circumstances, I would also posit that modern technology heavily rewards prowess in shape-rotating that high functioning autists often excel at, to my chagrin as someone who's a 99.999th percentile wordcel and maybe 75th percentile in the former. Hence more tolerance and less pressure to conform, since they're getting wealthy enough to indulge in their individualist tendencies.
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If you have statistics demonstrating that trans people in 2023 exhibit vastly different patterns of criminality compared to this report, I would love to see them.
Note that I said "self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity". I never said that literally every single behaviour exhibited by a trans person is the same as those of a typical person of their natal sex. If a male person is sexually attracted to women, works in a STEM career, served in the armed forces, likes watching football, fishing and drinking beer, occasionally gets into drunken fistfights, prefers sci-fi films to romantic comedies, gets uncomfortable talking about his feelings, but enjoys wearing women's clothes and sometimes asks people to address him as "Sheila" (but has never reported psychological symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria) - prior to ~2010, we would have referred to such a person as a "crossdresser". It's only very recently that we've collectively decided that this person - conventionally masculine in every way that matters, aside from an incidental fondness for women's clothing - is actually a "trans woman".
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I don’t think it’s intended to be falsifiable, honestly.
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I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
I think you’re definitely on to something, but I remember there being a lot of pushback when some people began “deadnaming” and “misgendering” the trans kid who shot up his/her former Christian school. I suppose this might just indicate a split between the everyday liberals and the true believers. The true believers happened to get the upper hand on that occasion, but the everyday liberals don’t always go along when it comes to trans rapists.
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So there's a difference here between being 'not really' X, and being an unrepresentative example of X.
I think most people are not really aware of this difference on a level where they could talk about it coherently.
But it's very very often true that, when some member of a group has been shown in the public eye to be bad, with an implication that this demonstrates how members of that group are bad generally or how this group is bad for society, that this individual has been adversarially chosen and is in fact not representative of their group.
Think about brutal and criminal police held up as examples of ACAB and justifications for Defund. It would be entirely sensible to argue that these are not representative examples and don't justify the level of hostility towards the larger group that they are being used to engender.
Of course, with police, defenders don't have the option of claiming they're not 'real' police, because there is a central authoritative agency which objectively determines that fact (eg, they have a badge).
But in cases where there is no such objective metric and claims of being 'not a real X' are in fact possible and sensible, it's not surprising to me that people fall into this rhetoric when trying to express the intuition that this attempt to tar a group with a bad individual is unfair and dishonest.
It's not good rhetoric, but most people have no training in rhetoric and are bad at it; you will always be able to find examples of someone saying something stupid online.
My point is I think it's a bad attempt at conveying a good and true logical point about what is happening. And it's worth engaging with the point instead of the rhetoric where possible.
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That would be perfectly self-consistent (if a transparent no true Scotsthey argument). What I don't understand is how she thought this one random dude isn't "really" non-binary on the basis of his toxic mansplaining, but a trans woman who commits a violent crime (up to and including raping a female person) is still a woman.
I do think that binary and non-binary trans are inherently different things, though.
Like, 'man' and 'woman' are legal categories with real effects, and they are coherent permanent social categories which include a lot of variance while retaining their core identity. It's entirely possible for a man to wear makeup or for a woman to mansplain, they will be unusual in that one regard but can still be unarguably a member of their larger category based on everything else about them (including their legal classification). There's also an established path to binary transition covering things like hormone therapy, changing your legal status, standard types of presentation changes, voice therapy, etc.
Whereas being nonbinary is not really a well-defined social or legal category in the same way. Saying you're nonbinary is not so much a declaration of 'I am in that stable well-understood category you already know about, as it is a declaration of intent to exhibit behaviors and presentations that don't match either of the established categories. There's no established path and no checkboxes to show that you're 'doing it right'.
In that sense, it sort of is possible to 'fail' at being nonbinary, in a way that's a lot less possible with binary trans (assuming you're making an effort at the established path). Someone can look at your self-invented steps and methods and say 'You really are not anywhere outside of the established binary, or even near the periphery.'
Of course, they don't have any authority to stop you and their judgement is not inherently more valid than yours, or w/e. But such judgement are abstractly more coherent, at least.
Sure, and my question is, what is the equivalent for trans women? What would it take before I can legitimately say "you really are not anywhere outside of the social category associated with your sex, or even near the periphery"? Looking like a cis man apparently doesn't invalidate a trans woman's self-declared gender identity; nor dressing like one; nor sounding like one; nor having male genitalia; nor behaving like a cis man - is there anything more quintessentially masculine than starting a drunken fight outside of a bar, or raping someone (a crime that, as I mentioned in another comment, is defined in many jurisdictions such that only male people can commit it)? "Trans women don't owe you femininity", after all - a trans woman is not obliged to do anything associated with the female sex or women, and must still be considered a woman no matter what.
To sum up: I don't understand why a "non-binary" gender identity is contingent, but a "trans woman" gender identity is axiomatic and unquestionable.
Oh, sorry, I thought that was clear: It's because we're currently engaged in a number of legal battles over the rights and status of binary trans people along many different axes, so the actual considered discussion of such topics is drowned out by political activists on both sides circling the wagons and offering extremist rhetoric to push their side of the ballot onto voters.
Yes, that's annoying, but it's approximately what always happens when any issue is being used as a wedge in elections and coming before legislatures.
Beneath that, and especially in offline spaces where real people are talking to real people, there's much more measured standards that consider all the stuff you're talking about in a holistic way. Although, with the caution that a lot of people are at the start of their transition process or have to stay closeted at work or at church or etc., and these are valid excuses for not already always ticking all the boxes.
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I think if you gave her a specific example of a trans person committing a sex crime, she would likely use the "they're not really trans" argument. But because you quoted statistics she can't do that as easily; it would imply large numbers of people who claim to be trans aren't really trans.
Also, as @Pynewacket alludes to, statistics don't hit "the feels" the way anecdotes do, so she didn't have the same emotional reaction to the statistics that she had in the case of her male NB friend. If she doesn't feel the same way about both situations, she won't interpret them as analogous and therefore won't feel the need to be logically consistent. This is a pretty common way for normal, average IQ people to behave. For example, people like this will often reject arguments by analogy they disagree with by saying something like "those two situations are totally different" without being able to articulate why they are different in any relevant way. They simply feel differently about the two situations and therefore refuse to see them as analogous.
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I feel like this is covered pretty well under @guajalote's third paragraph.
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One made her feel bad and the other is something that she might have heard of in the news or been told about by an acquaintance. And it's not about what she thought, it's what she feels.
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My hunch is that the man who claims to be non-binary is probably doing nothing that shows it to be true other than claiming to be non-binary, so he comes off as lazy to your sister.
On the other hand, when she thinks in the abstract about a typical self-proclaimed trans woman, she is probably thinking about a person who is putting significant effort into transitioning, at a large cost in time, energy, and potential health consequences and, outside of very liberal or progressive communities, also at a cost in how other people see that person socially.
So to her, the abstract trans person seems more genuinely trans than the concrete non-binary person seems genuinely non-binary, for a similar reason as why someone who lifts weights every day seems more genuinely concerned about his health than someone who talks about wanting to be healthier but never exercises or bothers to eat well.
Anyway, like I said this is just a hunch. I could be completely wrong.
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While I'm just as guilty of using "true" and "false" in a colloquial manner as anyone else, at the end of the day the issue lies in the fact that Popperian notions of falsifiability simply don't work.
It's all Bayesian, you start with a prior and update on incoming evidence that either privileges or disprivileges the hypothesis, hoping that enough evidence is available to sway someone who didn't initialize with malignant priors like 1 or 0 who are literally immune to evidence.
Popper was half right in claiming things can't be proved, only disproved, the truth is that nothing can be truly either to the platonic ideal unless you adopt them as axiomatic.
I think the burden of evidence is overwhelming in this case, and thus the most likely explanation is that she's been mind-killed and won't update until the blackbox processes behind human cognition do their thing, usually by such opinions becoming unfashionable in the wider community.
As much as we can hope that sufficient evidence can sway anyone to our side, that's simply not true in observation, would that we were perfect Bayesians to whom the Aumann Agreement Theorem applied. The existence of this community is an existence proof of this assertion, a lot of well reasoned arguments with mustered evidence, and it's still usually surprising when everyone comes to an agreement at the end, and shocking when it lasts.
You're right that true and false are not binary (pun intended), but falsification absolutely does "work" in the sense that data which contradicts a theory should generally lead to a much stronger updating of priors than data which agrees with a theory.
Depends on the theory and what you mean by 'contradict'.
For theories about simple systems with a small number of axioms and moving parts, where the predictions of a model are very binary and precise, yes, it's easy to heavily contradict a theory. Put two spheres of a certain mass a certain distance form each other in an endless void, and your theory of gravity will very precisely state how quickly they should move towards each other; observe anything other than that, and with a complete absence of plausible alternative explanations for the observation, you've got a very strong update against your theory.
But in much more complex systems with millions of moving parts and interacting effects, such as a person or a society or an economy or etc., models tend to make much broader and more stochastic predictions, and there tend to be lots more plausible explanations for divergences from those predictions. And thus the updates from both affirming and 'contradictory' evidence tend to be much weaker, and more symmetric.
Of course, that's why a lot of people tend to get frustrated about studies of complex systems, and call that all 'soft science' and sneer at it. but this always seems like a type of cowardice to me; yes, studying those systems is a lot more difficult, but that doesn't mean that truths don't exist or can't ever be found, and they are often very very very important!
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Hmm, I was going to dispute this, but on reflection I think you're right, even if my exhausted brain isn't processing things very well.
The reason this works is because it's much easier to come up with a false theory that agrees with existing data than it is to come up with a true theory that appears to contradict existing data, so contradiction provides much more useful information for updating priors that confirmation does. And if your theory is consistent with all conceivable data (i.e. is unfalsifiable), then the theory doesn't have any predictive value because it is consistent with all possible outcomes.
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It does have predictive power, just in a different way than biological sex.
What predictive power does it have? What additional information about a person does knowing their "gender identity" provide?
@benjaminikuta is trivially correct here, though. Someone with a 'gender identity' of female is going to wear feminine clothing more, more likely to fuck guys, etc. I agree with you that the causal pathways for biological female vs trans female doing those things are different, but there are clearly characteristics that many trans women share with cis women and not with cis men.
And with other trans women
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Is even that true, though? Would we hear so much about the "cotton ceiling" if only a tiny proportion of trans women were "lesbians" (i.e. straight men with extra steps)? Genuinely asking, don't know the answer.
Trans women are a lot more interested in men than cis men. I'm ... not entirely sure what the actual percentages of interest in cis men vs cis women are, wasn't able to find a survey, and I don't really expect the trans individuals i'm friends with's experiences to generalize at all.
I found this survey from 2011, which surveyed 6,450 transgender or gender non-conforming people in the US and dependent territories. On page 35 there's a pie chart showing the sexualities of the MtF respondents. 29% described themselves as gay/lesbian/same-gender attracted, 31% as bisexual, and 23% as heterosexual. (I have no idea what "queer" means in this context.) I'm interpreting "heterosexual MtF" to mean "a trans woman who is exclusively attracted to cis men", and "lesbian MtF" to mean "a trans women who is exclusively attracted to cis women", but I wouldn't be remotely surprised if even some of the survey respondents were confused by the wording of the question and gave an answer they didn't intend.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, at least 60% of American trans women are attracted to cis women and at least 54% are attracted to cis men. So while you're correct that trans women are vastly more likely to be interested in having sex with cis men than cis men are, it's not like the sexuality demographics of trans women are identical to cis women. The overwhelming majority (something like 86%) of cis women are exclusively attracted to cis men, whereas only a quarter of trans women (as of 2011) are.
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Ideology, style of dress, voice, hormones, etc
Everything is correlated. You should be surprised if it's not.
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It tells you their politics.
Counter-example: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/caitlyn-jenner-texas-abortion-ban-b1916031.html
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I’m puzzled; what’s the difference between a trans female who was socialized to be male and is therefore more violent, and a non-binary person who was socialized to be male and therefore mansplains and has a “male demeanor”? Doesn’t your sister’s argument in favor of trans people negate her complaints about her non-binary acquaintance?
Well, I think the real answer there gets down to what type of what evidence defines category membership in the mind of the speaker.
'Population-level violent crime arrest rates' may indeed be a thing that varies with gender, but it's not the primary thing that we are talking about when we talk about gender identity. Things like gender presentation (clothes, hair, makeup, etc), legal classification, the types of secondary sex characteristics affected by medical transition, etc. are much more central to how people who acknowledge trans people as members of their identified gender are thinking about gender membership.
If the non-binary mansplainer is not diverging from male patterns at all on those axes, or not enough to show a genuine effort/belief/essence, then it makes sense for someone who is using those axes to do their classification to be reluctant to classify them as not-male.
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One way to square the circle that might not be appealing to LGBTQIA+ Ally-types, but that may be consistent with their actual mental model of the world is believing that trans is a real category that accurately describes some people, but that non-binary isn't a legitimate category. From there, you could group people who identify as NB into one of two categories, either someone that's just not ready to fully transition and come as trans or someone that's a narcissistic weirdo looking for attention. If Sister of @Folamh3 used such a model, she could evaluate the NB male that she meets and try to determine if this person is on their way to being a woman or just a narcissistic weirdo looking for attention; since she perceives this NB guy as just a guy, she settles on the latter. Of course, being a good ally, she's not going to outright say that there is no in between state, so here she is articulating part of it without articulating all of it.
This is not necessarily an accurate description of her model of the world, but it's one that would be consistent with the available facts. Someone employing that model that is pressed on it to agree with more right-wing views regarding the actual stability of gender identities and their consistency with biological sex isn't likely to acquiesce and say, "yeah, you're right, this is pretty obviously bullshit" even if they kind of think that's the case about non-binaryism.
You get in trouble saying something isn't a 'real' category, but absolutely they're qualitatively different 'types' of categories, and it's much more possible to 'fail' at being nonbinary than at being binary trans (so long as you are making some efforts along the established binary transition pipeline).
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I know, that's precisely what I was so confused by.
The idea that something as subtle and subjective as "mansplaining" can be ironclad evidence that a male person isn't really non-binary, but raping a woman with one's penis can't be taken as evidence that said person isn't really a woman - I don't pretend to understand it.
I mean, lesbian rape with a strapon is not super common and I'm guessing is even less likely to lead to conviction than other types of sexual assault.
But it doesn't make the assailant not a woman, and I don't really see how the artificial nature of the phallus is relevant to the metaphysics of the situation.
In the UK and Ireland, rape is defined as forcible penetration with a penis. It is a quintessentially male crime in that it is a crime that only male people are physically capable of committing.
That's what I'm trying to understand: I don't understand why "this allegedly non-binary person did something that men are stereotypically known to do (but which women are equally capable of doing, and are known to do less frequently than men) - therefore, they aren't really non-binary" but "this trans woman did something that only male people are physically and legally capable of doing, which female people couldn't do even if they wanted to - but that doesn't make her any less of a woman".
Well, the particular legal definitions used in the UK and Scotland have nothing to do with how progressives are thinking about these categories in the first place?
And I think most would probably say that legal definition is backwards and should be changed, if you asked them.
More broadly: I think the miscommunication here is that you're approaching it as 'what one test is disqualifying', whereas they are approaching it as 'what holistic cluster of traits and behaviors is qualifying'.
Because man/woman are very highly defined and explored categories, there are lots and lots of important things you can do to fit into one, such that a few individual noncentral divergences are ok.
Whereas 'nonbinary' is not an established category with tons of established and agreed upon signifiers, thus holistic-strength-of-fit is always comparatively weak and ephemeral, thus it's a lot easier to get disqualified for divergences.
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I think you're thinking about it backwards. In the mansplaining case, it's that "this specific human being standing in front of me did something I find annoying, and I lose one useful tool for attack if I acknowledge that person as non-binary instead of a man; therefore, he's a man." In the transwoman rape case, it's that "this theoretical transwoman (even if a specific person is referenced, the person remains theoretical because she's presumably not in direct contact with that transwoman) did something awful and distinctly male, but that doesn't affect me in any way; therefore, we should take her at her word that she's a woman in every single way that she wishes to be acknowledged." It's a sort of "luxury belief" situation. Believing that the person in front of her is non-binary has immediate and harsh consequences to her, and thus she can't afford to believe it, but believing that a transwoman who raped someone is a real woman in every way has no consequences for her in any way, and thus she can afford to believe it.
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Hypothesis: Non-binary people will behave more like their natal sex if they are raised with the expectation of a traditionally binary male than if they are raised NB.
Since we won't be able to do this as a true RCT, we will need to find a natural experiment. We could just ask people how they were raised, but this isn't likely to yield accurate results due to self-identification biases. Instead, we can use something else as a proxy for likelihood (and maybe dose response) to traditional gender role exposure in childhood. The first thing that occurs to me is trying to poll for religiosity in childhood, which I would guess correlates fairly strongly with traditional gender roles. There are obviously reasons that this proxy could fail or be a covariate of something else that explains the result, but I think it's a reasonable first-pass to explore the topic, as long as we're OK with actually testing whether religiously-mediated gender roles have explanatory power.
As a measurement tool, we could attempt to record conversations on some topic and score for things like number of words spoken and attempts to explain the topic to the interlocutor. If I were coming from your sister's angle, I would hypothesize that religiously-mediated gender role expectations predict likelihood of speaking more words and explaining topics in conversations.
There are some obvious holes in this, but again, it's a first pass at trying to run an experiment to test the claim. Getting to the base truth might be difficult and I would expect some squirming if people don't like the results, but in principle you don't need complete epistemic helplessness on this one.
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Her argument is falsifiable (although I doubt she'd accept it).
Of the hundreds of nations and cultural groups in the world, is there a single one where the female murder rate is higher than the male rate? No? Then male violence is mostly genetic, not learned.
I don't see what that's supposed to have to do with the question at hand, can you explain?
It seems like an answer to an entirely different question, and one that most all corners of progressive space would agree with.
I've interacted with plenty of progressives/woke people/whatever who think the overrepresentation of men in STEM in essentially every society on earth is evidence of nothing other than just how pervasive and inescapable the patriarchy's brainwashing is.
I wonder if you've actually met a lot of progressives who believe that, or if you've met a lot of progressives who were responding to people who claim is it purely genetic by claiming that culture also plays a role.
Anyway.
Propensity to violence is a very atomic personality trait that, of the type that genetics is known to affect.
'Participation in STEM fields' is a hugely contingent and complex social behavior that has nothing to do with our evolutionary environment. There are certainly genetic factors that contribute to it under a given cultural regime, but it can't be a simple and direct relationship because it's not even a fact about the person themself, it's a fact about the interaction between the person and their society.
I kind of frowned at your comment above, which is plausibly innocent in spite of the fact that it reads like thinly-veiled, low-effort bait. But leading your further response with a backhanded "hmm I wonder" seems like confirmation that your initial question was insincere, and you were just probing for an angle to sneer at. This is unnecessarily antagonistic (and arguably Bulverism, too). Engage honestly, or not at all, please. (In particular, speculating on the motives of your interlocutor is something that must be handled with effort and charity, and is often better never raised at all. And yes--I understand that is what I am doing here, but it is something moderation sometimes requires.)
This specific interaction with you seems to happen every time I comment about trans stuff. I'm not sure what to do about it as I was trying to be more cautious this time.
The first comment was sincere confusion. The second comment was genuinely trying to point out an alternative explanation for their observations (the two situations look very similar to the receiver) and see if they wanted to reflect and talk about the topic more (apparently not).
Blanket statements are almost always wrong, and assigning a blanket statement to your opponent's belief-state is especially fraught. That's what OP is doing by saying 'many of my opponents believe that the difference is 100% nothing other than patriarchy brainwashing,' a type of extreme and simplistic sentiment that very few people actually believe and that it's dangerous to casually assign to them.
I don't know if I just have to accept their premise because they're making a claim about their lived experience, that seems bad for debate. Or if I'm again just being asked to use more words to rule out specific types of hostile intent, which I was trying to do more of in my comments on this particular thread but failed to apply to this individual sentence. I can try to leave zero sentences under-caveated, it's just very tiring.
Interesting. I did not originally see that this was a thread about gender revisionism, however--only when I went back to check the context of the conversation.
Well, like I said, that doesn't strike me as totally implausible. But "I'm gonna ask a question that is non-specific, without even making any clearly charitable attempt at interpreting your position as written or expressing my own views in vulnerable detail" is often used as bait, by positioning one commenter as "just asking questions," placing the entire burden of carrying the discussion on the other as they explain their own position while getting increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the other party to engage. Of course--sometimes we are completely ignorant and the best we can manage is a "huh, say more please?" But often such noncommittal engagement is just insincere.
Part of charitable engagement is accepting evidence presented in the best possible light. Sometimes the evidence is sufficiently unlikely that a different approach is warranted, but when you re-describe someone's experiences you're engaged in a sort of mind-reading argument, rather than meeting them on their own terms. This is encapsulated in part in this rule:
Like, in our non-mod-hat interaction here, imagine if instead of just pointing out to you something you didn't know, I had responded
This is a strictly inferior response to the one I wrote. Instead of giving you (I assume) new information directly correcting your false belief (as my actual response did), this response assumes you are in fact wrong about your own experiences and skips straight to describing why you are wrong by insinuating, and not even very subtly, that you are just using arguments as soldiers, rather than possessing any real understanding of the world. Slapping an "I wonder" at the front to make it speculative rather than declarative softens it some, but comes across as passive-aggressive instead, on account of the Bulverism that follows.
Well, perhaps predictably, I actually like that comment a lot (although obviously your actual use of an example was very good too).
I feel like I would have taken this as a fair challenge to reflect on how I've interpreted things I've read in the past and wrack my memory more carefully. It might have been enlightening for me (it is somewhat as I'm thinking about it now). It actually is possible that I flag too many things as the result of hostile filter bubbles or toxoplasma or etc and apply 'no true scotsman' to them too regularly. That's a good possibility to point out and ask for reflection on.
Of course, the response might be 'Everyone should always be doing that type of self-reflection all the time before posting anything, so there shouldn't be anything to gain from challenging them like this', but I think that's not a realistic standard to expect from people in general. These wouldn't be cognitive biases if they didn't get regularly overlooked by the people making them. And if we were all in perfect self-reflective equilibrium on all our beliefs all teh time and all our disagreements were only due to different utility functions or disagreements about matters of fact, there would be no mutual benefit to talking about things here instead of just reading Wikipedia.
I guess part of it is just that I really like the Socratic Method, and underestimate how much of a high-trust game that is and how hostile initiating it can look if that trust doesn't exist. I like the conversational style of a long series of short interactive back-and-forth questions and challenges a lot more than two people chucking a couple of walls of text at each other, I think it has a lot more chance of two people actually coming to know and understand each other rather than just representing themselves.
But, again, fair enough, I'll try to watch my affinity for this type of interaction and make sure I'm making myself clear and being respectful.
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Yes I have, and I don't like your implication that I'm lying.
I'm wondering if you're mistaken in your belief, and if having this possibility pointed out to you might cause you to reflect on it and re-evaluate.
The point is that these two situations (hearing someone talk about the influence of patriarchy who believes it is one piece of the causal network vs hearing someone talk about the influence of the patriarchy who believes it is the only casual factor in existence) are very similar to the listener and very easy to confuse with each other, especially if one of them happens to fit with a narrative you're already familiar with.
Very few people actually hold beliefs of the type 'this entire gigantic complex social phenomenon is 100% the result of sinister conspiratorial brainwashing across every country it appears in and has zero other causal factors affecting it'.
People are dumb, but few are that dumb.
It's much more common to believe your opponents believe something like that, than for them to actually believe it.
But it sounds like maybe I'm not allowed to question your lived experiences or whatever, regardless of the type of claim you're making about other people, so, ok.
I'm not mistaken. I'm thinking specifically of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. This friend works in software design for one of the largest public bodies in Europe and has a master's degree in physics - not an idiot. Nevertheless, when I had this conversation with him, he asserted that the idea that there were differences between male and female brains which could impact upon their career choices was "pseudoscience". When I pointed out that, if culture was the deciding factor, we would expect vastly different rates of female employment in STEM between, say, the US and Sweden - he countered that the US and Sweden were functionally indistinguishable from a cultural perspective. It's been well over a year and I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one (different language, completely different demographics, vastly different rates of religious observance, different climate, different core industries - in short, everything that you might call "culture").
I've lost count of how many times I've been called a misogynist (either in person or online) for even suggesting that the differences between male and female brains might influence men's and women's career choices, or even pointing out that these differences exist. This assertion is routinely rounded off to "oh, so you're saying men are smarter than women?", which I've never claimed, never said anything with even a passing resemblance to that claim.
None of the above should come as a surprise to you if you're familiar with the controversy surrounding James Damore's Google memo. When a well-qualified employee in one of the five biggest tech companies in the world can lose his job simply for (correctly!) asserting that there are differences between male and female brains which impact upon their career choices, I think we're far past the point where you can plausibly claim "oh no, of course woke people recognise the differences between male and female brains, they're just saying culture matters too".
How do you know? Have you conducted a poll? Conspiratorial thinking is all the rage on the left. Most woke people believe that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the 2016 election, or that the number of unarmed black Americans shot dead by the police in a calendar year is 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than the real figure. I'm not "strawmanning" or "weakmanning" when I point out that a large proportion of woke people believe that American police officers collectively kill 20 unarmed black men a week, I'm just honestly reporting their professed beliefs. The claim that it's sexist to claim that there are real differences between male and female brains is prominent enough to have its own Wikipedia page, and it's not listed anywhere on their list of topics characterised as pseudoscience. Based on all of the above and my own personal experience of frequently interacting with woke people, I wouldn't be even a little surprised if a large proportion of woke people literally uncritically endorse the exaggerated strawman narrative you outlined above. I think you're sanewashing a batch of extremely conspiratorial and unscientific beliefs sincerely held by millions of Westerners. I think this is a big motte-and-bailey argument in which the bailey is "male and female brains are exactly alike and any observed differences are solely the result of cultural conditioning" and the motte is "of course we're not denying that there are differences between male and female brains, we're just saying that culture plays a big role too".
? Maybe you meant USA and Sweden?
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Societies are different from each other. If violence were purely socialized we'd expect some to see some societies where women are more violent then men.
However, this is not what we see. In ALL societies men are more violent than women. Therefore, it must be hereditary. The chances of thousands of societies all ending up the same way by chance are essentially zero.
So, basically every trait has both both a hereditary component and an environmental component. These are not at all exclusive.
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According to the standard narrative of the patriarchy, this is merely evidence that patriarchy is that entrenched and so ubiquitous in our society that very disparate societies with very different customs and ways in very different environments all were influenced such that boys were socialized to be more violent than girls. Clearly this means that the rot goes in even deeper than even our most extreme activists were stating, and is an indication that we must double down on pushing even harder with the progress that our side believes in.
This is a highly malleable narrative too, able to easily adapt to even genetics if needed. If it turns out that there's some undeniably genetic element that influences men to be more violent than women on average and at the extremes, then that is proof of how far back the patriarchy goes, that it was able to influence our evolution to such an extent that it has left its imprint in our genes. This is not a commonly stated belief, but it certainly is a standard part of the standard patriarchy narrative, which, in practice, provides the optionality to support the notion that every pattern of difference, even genetic ones, between men and women is socialized.
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Well Black women commit homicide at greater rates than Asian men in the US but perhaps that exception proves the rule.
That's not an exception. Name a society. That society could be the US. It could be Asian-Americans. It could be African-Americans. In whatever society you name, men will commit violent crime then women.
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That's not what he was asking since black women still have a lower rate than black men
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But what if you define abortion to be a form of murder?
All the gynecologists around the world end up as the same gender I guess.
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This doesn't demonstrate anything genetic origin of differences, it only demonstrates male-specific heritability. This can be mediated by other developmental characteristics that XY chromosomes correlate with, but do not mediate, such as intrauterine testosterone.
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Doesn't seem unfalsifiable to me: just find statistics on boys who were brought up as girls (or vice-versa) but never actually claimed themselves to be trans or the other gender once they had agency in the matter.
There’s not enough data there, and it’s confounded to heck by many of the parents being abusive whack jobs, or the kids being legitimately unusual in some way.
Sure, but something is not unfalsifiable because the data doesn't exist to falsify it, but because there is no way to devise an experiment that would falsify it.
*EDIT: It would theoretically be possible to make a experiment that isolates upbringing, sex and "trans-ness", so it's not unfalsifiable. It is not, for instance, possible to make an experiment that can disprove the existence of a god that is omnipotent (which includes the ability to decieve and make it appear like he doesn't exist), so the existence of an omnipotent god is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
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What do you mean by a boy who was brought up as a girl?
There's the occasional case of some whackjob in denial that their son is a son, who raises them as long as possible as a girl, dressing them in girly outfits, denying their maleness and so on. It obviously can't last very long, and I don't know how much useful data you can collect by collating the cases.
Another alternative is looking for cases where children are born with ambiguous genitalia or have them injured at birth, and they're arbitrarily assigned to whatever gender is convenient even if it conflicts with chromosomal and endocrine sex. I think there have been studies done on the topic, but it's 10pm and I'm exhausted on duty, so I recuse myself from providing the requisite burden of evidence.
I still doubt this would sway her in practise, you can't reason someone out of what they didn't reason themselves into. Not reliably at any rate.
Yes, it's unlikely there's enough quality data on it out there right now, but it is at least in theory falsifiable.
But as you point out that is unlikely to sway her, she's already hinting she would retreat to an actually unfalsifiable argument: that there is an internal state of gender independant of sex AND behavior known only to oneself.
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