What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is

post by ymeskhout · 2023-05-01T15:34:49.997Z · LW · GW · 45 comments

Contents

45 comments

"It's all about that semantic space map."

[Originally posted 7/14/2022 on Substack.]

One of the coolest illustrations of societal consensus is this cartography research project from a few years ago called Bostonography. Boston residents were asked to draw the boundaries of various neighborhoods and their responses were amalgamated onto a single map, with color-coding to designate areas with high or low consensus.

 

Some neighborhoods, like the tony Beacon Hill, have extremely high consensus and a cohesive shape. In part this is aided by its surroundings — with a major avenue to the North, a river to the West, and a park to the South, the only meaningful area for disagreement appears to be over a small parcel on the East, close to the downtown core. In contrast, few can apparently agree on where Chinatown begins and ends.[1]

Other neighborhoods, like Dorchester, cover such a massive area that the boundaries fade into the horizon.

Neighborhood boundaries are a semantic Schelling point. Even though Boston residents each have their own subjective interpretation of boundaries, convergence towards a shared understanding remains possible. There may be disagreements at the margins, but Boston residents generally agree on where what is. And because of this shared understanding, neighborhood names will be useful methods of coordination. Telling someone that you bought a house in Beacon Hill, or that you work in Allston, or that you’ve never been to Bay Village, etc. all are used to quickly communicate useful information to someone, without the need to pull out the sextant each time.


Another useful method of coordination is agreeing on a unit of measurement. History has provided us with a cavalcade of now-obsolete units of measurement. Vernacular units of measurement based on some dead guy’s foot or whatever were likely good enough for most purposes, especially if you’re dealing with the same locals for decades (everyone eventually knows that Yosef has the biggest cubits), but once you step outside of your community you’re bound to run into some problems. Coordination across commerce and enterprise cannot meaningfully happen without establishing a shared understanding of measurements.

Tackling this problem on a global scale was the aim behind the metric system. In creating the kilogram standard, the enlightened French Revolution wanted it to be feasible for anyone with enough scientific know-how to reproduce it by deriving it from common natural phenomena, no matter where they were located. No reliance on a mummified foot necessary.

If you take the distance between either orbital pole and the Equator and divide it by ten million: voilà, you have a meter! If you use that meter to make a cube, fill it with near-freezing water, weigh that volume, then divide it by a thousand: voilà, you have a kilogram! But carting around melting ice across the Republic was never going to be practical, so the French created a more durable reference point cast from platinum and secured it inside a government vault. A cylinder about the size of a golf ball, the Kilogramme des Archives became the definition of a kilogram from which other copies were made.

An early prototype of the kilogram reference from 1793.

But this didn’t last. The platinum cylinder had to be replaced by a platinum-iridium alloy version, supposedly because the alloy was far more stable of a material. But that also didn’t last, because scientists eventually realized that despite their best efforts, the new alloy cylinder was (very slowly) absorbing microscopic particles from the surrounding air and (very slowly) gaining weight (which meant, by definition, everything in metric denomination was losing weight). They eventually gave up on physical reference objects entirely in 2019 and now base the kilogram on esoteric mathematical relationships used in quantum mechanics that normal people don’t understand.

Here’s the point though: it does not matter what the Real Definition™ of the kilogram is! The history of the kilogram is a cute bit of trivia, and how it was derived is an interesting exercise in reproducibility, but the perennial goal here is communication and coordination above all else. A kilogram can be defined however the fuck you want because all that matters in the end is that people have a shared understanding of its meaning.


That’s what’s weird about words: they’re thoroughly meaningless in a vacuum. Words are an arbitrary string of arbitrary phonemes, and meaning can only attach and anchor a word if someone (anyone!) acknowledges the link. Language is clearly most useful when it is broadly adopted, but this also means that the evolution of any major language is going to be an organic and decentralized process outside of any individual’s direct control.

Sure, anyone can make up a word and internally assign a meaning to it, but if no one else accepts the meaning it will remain gibberish. Sometimes these efforts are successful, especially in slang, like that time someone made fetch happen. These types of efforts are far more likely to succeed when an institution throws its formidable weight behind the endeavor. This is what the French do with the Académie Française, the government body with final authority over all aspects of the French language. It’s run by forty members known as The Immortals, whose official uniform is a sword and intricate robes that cost $50,000 to make. It’s as pompous as you can imagine:

En garde, l’Anglais!

The mission of the Académie is primarily motivated by national pride (AKA hating English). For example, as the word email became more widespread, the Immortals endorsed the clever patriotic alternative by concatenating the French words courrier (mail) and electronique to come up with courriel. The government tried to get everyone to use that pronunciation gallop, but outside of bureaucrats who had no choice, it hasn’t caught on. They tried a similar gambit to combat the inescapable popularity of le weekend, but the nasally fin-de-semaine substitute hasn’t worked either.

Despite Herculean efforts and fancy embroidery, the best the Académie can do is meekly pantomime aspirational control over the communication decisions of millions of francophones across the world. People will use whatever words they want, and those words will mean whatever people want them to mean. The only necessary ingredient here is consensus, and pulling that out of thin air is mostly a fool’s errand.


Consider Bostonography again, but instead of a city, picture a map of idea space. If you could somehow map out semantic space and ask participants to draw boundaries of any given word as a neighborhood on this idea map, you’re very likely to get solid consensus for most common words. Some words are relatively unambiguous and precise and thus will generate a high degree of consensus on a small area of this idea space map, while others are more like a vague cloud. Think Beacon Hill versus Dorchester above.

For the same reasons a word might have vague and fuzzy boundaries, it necessarily will also overlap with and be adjacent to related concepts. For example a word like insurrection generally has a negative connotation and will likely bring to mind similarly disapproved of concepts such as disorder, rebellion, violence, etc. If you were to map all those word neighborhoods, they’re likely to occupy the same general province of idea space. Even with disagreements over specifics, all this largely works as intended because the entire point of language is to serve as a tool of communication and coordination. Words are what we use to point people to the right part of the idea map. In other words, the same shared understanding.

Debates over definition boundaries can be a fun conversational frivolity (Are Pop-Tarts a sandwich? Are Algerians Latino? Is Old Town Road country music? Etc.) but they’re most often deployed with other goals in mind. Arguments over definitions are often disguised queries for something else entirely. In Yudkowsky’s example [LW · GW], a factory worker is tasked with sorting blue furry egg-shaped objects (called “bleggs”) from smooth red cubic objects (“rubes”) on an assembly line. This job goes fine until the worker encounters a purple egg and has no idea how to sort it. The worker and his supervisor get distracted by the debate over definitions (Can bleggs be purple? Can rubes be furry?) until the true purpose of the sorting job gets revealed: bleggs contain vanadium ore, and rubes contain palladium ore, both of which need to be industrially processed differently. The ore processing plants do not give a fuck what color or shape their supply chain materials are so long as they accomplish the purpose they were built for. The question “Is this a rube or a blegg?” therefore is used as a good enough (and presumably cheaper) way of solving the ultimate (and presumably more complicated) logistical question of “Does this need to be processed by the palladium or the vanadium plant?”. But without a shared understanding from both parties for why the distinction matters, no answer will communicate any useful information to whoever is asking. It’ll remain a useless question.

Similarly, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it [LW · GW], does it make a sound? Another useless question. Both yes and no can be correct answers, depending entirely on whether your definition of sound is “acoustic vibration” or “auditory sensation”. Without first establishing why the distinction between the two definitions matters, no useful response is possible. Here too it’s possible to get infinitely distracted over which definition is the “correct” one, but the purpose of language ultimately is communication, and the more productive avenue would be to acknowledge that it’s helpful for distinct concepts to have distinct words. You can even make up new words (alberzle and bargulum for example) to avoid future confusion.

Sometimes ambiguity is intentional. Was January 6th an insurrection? Again, that depends entirely on why the distinction matters. The reason this might matter to a federal prosecutor would be maybe to determine whether they should file criminal charges under 18 U.S.C. §2383. But outside of that niche analysis, it’s reasonable to be suspicious of questions like this because of the serious negative connotations that insurrection inevitably conjures up. The question is very likely intended as a cover to ask “Was January 6th a Very Bad Thing™?”. Whoever asking the question then would have an interest against establishing a shared understanding for why the distinction matters. Because the goal with dishonest questions like is to score points, not gain information.

I am not the first to notice this deceptive practice. Parrhesia wrote about the word games used in these types of discussions, most blatantly with the word racism. In terms of heavyweight champions in the semantic space, racism is a sought-after bruiser. It’s a strong word with serious negative connotations, and everyone is eager to use it to bludgeon their opponents. Asking whether something is or isn’t racist is the mother of all disguised queries. The goal here isn’t to gain information, it’s to find out who to bludgeon.


And so let’s finally ask the question that brought us here: What is a woman?

It’s a fascinating piece of contemporary commentary that this question is now seen as a weaponized statement in the culture war. The inquiry has become a raucous crowd favorite among the “conservative”[2] side of the trans identity debate, because it’s presented as a facially simple question which nevertheless is highly effective at confusing the hell out of progressives and needlessly handing wins to sentient bags of douche

No doubt many of the progressive efforts in this arena have been thoroughly embarrassing. To their credit, trans-inclusive feminist philosophers have tried to earnestly grapple with the definitional quagmire. But in the end, they introduced a process euphemistically-titled “ameliorative inquiry” only to offer a revisionary effort indistinguishable from just asserting “the dictionary is wrong”:

An ameliorative inquiry into the concept of woman invites feminists to consider what concept of woman would be most useful in combatting gender injustice. This opens the way for a revisionary analysis that can be tailored to avoid exclusion and marginalization. (emphasis added)

But the opposing side shouldn’t get a pass here. The conservative retort to the vexing question is smugly heralded as “adult human female” and while it is miles more coherent as a cognizable concept, it isn’t without problems. As Aella pointed out, secluding yourself inside the “adult human female” bunker will leave you vulnerable to many flanking attacks (e.g. Is someone who gets their uterus removed still a woman under this definition?) because the “but what about” response train is endless and will inevitably find a way to run you over. Lily Alexandre, a trans YouTuber, pointed out in their (thoughtful and highly-recommended) video essay on the subject that the very basic blocks of the “adult human female” definition leave us with many unanswered questions. What is an adult? Is it anyone over 16 years-old? 18? 21? 26? More poignantly, what is a human? This is not so facile a question when you realize how endemic campaigns to dehumanize outgroups[3] have been to mankind’s violent conflicts.

Which one of these is the correct definition? This is a meaningless question, because there is no such thing as a right answer. You can point to the dictionary, consult linguists, and research etymology all you want but none of that shit will matter. Disagreements over definitions is not a factual problem with factual solutions, it’s a coordination problem. The flaw undergirding both sides of these definition debates is a distracted aversion to the much more important question:

Why does it matter?


I admit a well of deep confusion within this topic. I do not understand why these linguistic slap fights have such emotive zeal burning behind them and I do not understand why there is such a distinct lack of curiosity behind answering that first question.

So what is a woman then? It’s literally whatever you want it to be, because that’s how language works. But to the extent you want your language to remain a useful method of communication, it’s helpful for other people to agree with your definitions.

Reading about “ameliorative inquiry” fills my head with a cacophony of WHY WHY WHY WHY because I do not understand why anyone bothers. Trans-inclusive feminists argue that a rejiggering of the definition of “woman” is necessary for “feminism” to be “inclusive”.[4] But if the “solution” they come up with requires changing the definition of a word anyways…why bother keeping the word at all? So far the suggestions they’ve come up with have been marred with serious and intractable deficiencies, from both under and over-inclusion.[5] Instead of forever debating whether sound is “acoustic vibration” or “auditory sensation”, why not just make up a new word?

I like precision in my language. Whether I’m speaking or writing, I want some reasonable assurance that whatever message I am communicating is conveyed clearly to my audience. I want both myself and my audience to simultaneously point to the same spot on the Boston map. Words are my arsenal in this jihad. Yet despite my adoration for these tools, if a word gets dull and starts failing at its basic task of communicating a shared understanding, it is useless and I have no qualms with tossing it in the figurative garbage. I may keep some around for their poetic or aesthetic value, but everything is subordinate to the mission of clear communication.

Multiple meanings in words are not always a problem, and can often be goddamn poetic. The issue here is getting close to the equivalent of a Bostonian and a Seattleite vociferously arguing about the boundaries of Beacon Hill without even realizing they’re referencing maps of entirely different cities. Regardless of how you personally feel about what the definition of “woman” should be, the fact that this has apparently turned into a hot debate is abundant evidence that we’re starting to deal with a dull knife here. I want to throw “woman” in the garbage. Because of its high potential ambiguity in some contexts, my solution personally has been to increasingly try to avoid using the word “woman” because I can’t always reasonably certify that my message will be received the way I intend it to be.[6]

That’s why as much as it is a source of derision and mockery (much of it earned) I actually appreciate the lexical intent behind “birthing person”. The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft. But it’s still true that for many different reasons, not every “adult human female” can get pregnant. So while it may be aesthetically horrific (I can’t help but picture spawning vats in a laboratory) “birthing person” is undeniably more precise within the context of human pregnancy discussions. Credit where credit is due.

Yet this fidelity towards precision is not necessarily reciprocated. For example when Them wrote about a survey on trans dating preferences, the author tried to feign surprise that the vast majority of lesbians who were trans-inclusive in their dating were willing to date transmen. This would only be a shock if you “think in words” to borrow Parrhesia’s phrase and ignore factual reality where whether someone finds you attractive is not likely to have anything to do with your internal gender identity.[7] Any efforts to cut down on this apparent ambiguity (for the record, I think people are just pretending to be dumb) such as with “biological women” or “super straight”, quickly get derided as hate speech. The answer might be obvious, but nevertheless it remains worthwhile to explicitly decouple the blurred debate: Are you objecting to the neighborhood name or the neighborhood itself?

The mixed results outlined above lead me to conclude that a principled adherence to precision is not really the motivating principle behind the language revisionist efforts.


In the few years since I wrote about non-binary identity, I am not any closer to understanding what the term means. If anyone identifies to me as non-binary, it’s the equivalent of someone telling me the brand of shampoo they use: What am I supposed to do with this information?

The debate over the definition of woman has diluted its meaning to such a degree that it’s close to joining the same ranks. If anyone identifies to me as a woman, the same question and more: What am I supposed to do with this information? What new information has this communicated? Why should I care? Why does it matter?

I have some theories, but they’re both uncharitable and unsatisfying, because they don’t fully explain the phenomena. For example, in most industries, the title of vice president is only used by a handful of senior executives within a company. But in the financial industry, they hand out this title like Tic Tacs. To anyone who isn’t wise to this practice, interacting with someone with the vice president title likely misled them to assume they were dealing with someone with much higher authority and importance than the reality reflects. Similarly, I gather that most people assume that anyone who goes by the title Doctor to be some sort of medical physician, and the title-holders who aren’t physicians don’t seem very eager to correct the misconception. Realtors also have a financial incentive to play fast and loose with neighborhood boundaries. If their property listing is located inside an unsavory neighborhood, they might have an incentive to list it under an adjacent neighborhood with a better reputation. If words mean whatever we want them to mean anyways, each of the above can try and claim plausible deniability.

Those examples all share deception as an element. Perhaps the theory here is there is an expectation that the word woman will (intentionally or not) dredge up in people’s minds everything else tangentially associated with the concept. It’s the one star used to offer you the entire constellation. Or the barnacle that gives you an entire container ship. When a word has accumulated such a formidable coral reef within our collective consciousness, it might be too tempting to just walk away from it.

But why put in so much effort to occupy the neighborhood? Even if you accept my uncharitable theory, what exactly do people hope to gain? I can only sort of maybe identify scenarios where constellation dredging is sort of maybe relevant/beneficial. Maybe if I told someone I intended to buy them a clothing gift and they told me that they identify as a woman, I would be expected to read between the lines and assume this to mean “I am hoping that you select clothing that is generally identified as feminine within our shared cultural understanding”. But it would be better for both of us if she just told me this directly, without inviting potentially insulting or erroneous assumptions. To the extent that woman is a cluster of traits, I struggle to contemplate a scenario where communicating the cluster is a more efficient or more thoughtful method of communication than just communicating the specific pertinent trait. Just tell me what you want me to know directly. Use other words if need be.


My advice is to flee the area. The woman neighborhood will be subject to artillery bombardment for a long time to come. It isn’t worth it and there are some open listings available in nearby neighborhoods. In a few years, you might even forget why attacking/defending it was so important. If you identify as someone with an intense attachment to a specific definition of the word woman (no matter in which direction), my question to you is: Why does this matter to you? How does it help me not get lost in Boston? I’m listening.

  1. ^

    Survey responders were not relegated to answering only about their own neighborhood, so this lack of consensus most likely reflects how underrepresented Chinatown residents were in the city-wide sample. This is perhaps a cautionary tale about outsiders weighing in on local issues they’re unfamiliar with.

  2. ^

    This essay is ultimately about the precision of language, and so I fully own up to the irony that I am using less than precise terminology here.

  3. ^

    I am funny, I know.

  4. ^

    I’m using quotes to indicate I have no idea what these words mean in this context.

  5. ^

    See Tomas Bogardus Why the Trans Inclusion Problem cannot be Solved (2022) for a thorough catalog of the issues with the “Ameliorative Inquiry” approach.

  6. ^

    This should be a concern for trans individuals too — if someone insists that I see them as a woman, how do they even know that my understanding of the term is in accord with theirs? My internal interpretation of the semantic label “woman” could be “wool sweater” for all they know.

  7. ^

    In a previous essay I used the example of a woman-identifying masculine-presenting Jason Statham.

45 comments

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comment by lalaithion · 2023-05-01T18:29:01.753Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.

This is as far as I can tell completely false. Plenty of trans men carry fetuses to term. Plenty of trans men carried fetuses to term before they came out as trans men. Plenty of trans men decide to carry fetuses to term after they come out as trans men. A couple of facts I believe about the world that may help you make sense of this:

  • Not everyone experiences dysphoria the same way and in the same amount. Someone may experience pregnancy as an extreme negative, but have no feelings around facial hair. Someone may desire facial hair very strongly, but have no strong opinions on pregnancy at all.
  • Some people want to have their own children very strongly, and are willing to suffer considerably to achieve that, even if it means feeling dysphoric for 9 months.

This is the general feeling I get from a lot of this post: it represents a good understanding of the anti-trans side of the debate, and a good understanding of the rationalist interpretation of semantics applied to the trans debate, but it lacks understanding of the experiences of trans people, and it also lacks awareness that it is missing that understanding.

If anyone identifies to me as a woman, the same question and more: What am I supposed to do with this information? What new information has this communicated? Why should I care? Why does it matter?

The most basic piece of information that is being communicated here is that, assuming you speak English, the person would like you to use female-gendered terms (she/her/hers, actress instead of actor, etc.) for her. You touch on the rest with

Perhaps the theory here is there is an expectation that the word woman will (intentionally or not) dredge up in people’s minds everything else tangentially associated with the concept.

and I'm not sure why you discard this as worthless or deceptive. Maybe a better way of framing this is to translate "I identify as a women" to "I believe you will do a better job of modeling my personality, desires, actions, and other ways of interacting with you if you use predictions from the 'woman' category you have in your mind instead of the 'man' category in your mind."

Maybe you disagree that anyone in the world could be better modeled as a gender that was not their assigned gender at birth.

Likewise for nonbinary people. If someone tells you that they are nonbinary, they are telling you, "I would prefer for you to use gender-neutral terms to refer to me. If you associate me with your internal 'man' category or your internal 'woman' category, I believe you will make worse predictions of my actions than if you attempt to associate me with both or neither categories."

This isn't nearly as useless as telling someone your favorite shampoo brand. In case you were wondering, I prefer the most basic Pantene shampoo. Now you are able to predict things about how I buy shampoo better.

I am also nonbinary. Now you are able to predict things about how I interact with gender better.

Replies from: BrienneYudkowsky, ymeskhout
comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) · 2023-05-05T03:29:15.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hi! I'm not sure where exactly in this thread to jump in, so I'm just doing it here.

I like this thread! It's definitely one of my favorite discussions about gender between people with pretty different perspectives. I also like the OP; I found it to be surprisingly clear and grounded, and to point at some places where I am pretty confused myself.

>Originally you said that my post lacked an "understanding of the experiences of trans people" and I'm still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?

I'm taking a pretty big risk here, and it may turn out that I regret this discussion or even retract my comment, but: I'm a trans man who's 33 weeks pregnant. It's a wild ride! AMA, if you're interested!

Replies from: BrienneYudkowsky, ymeskhout, Raemon
comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) · 2023-05-05T17:34:01.510Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

TBC the main thing that prompted me to comment here was 

>The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.

I think that pretty few people have actually known a trans guy or nonbinary person who was out while pregnant. It's a pretty socially uncomfortable situation, and one that sort of points a microscope at many things about being trans. Maybe even among the relatively few of us who exist, most of us don't want to talk about it because geeze, we're already going through enough. Pregnancy tends to be really damn hard even for cis women. But I actually do like the idea of talking about this on LW in particular.

comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-06T03:49:16.054Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you so much for being open to discuss such a sensitive topic. If you end up retracting anything, please let me know and I can edit this reply accordingly.

I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally. Do/did you experience dysphoria? If so, can you describe what it feels like? Would it be reasonable to split dysphoria into two different categories: body characteristics versus social role? How would you distinguish identifying as a trans man versus identifying as a masculine female (as in, what is the line that prompts the "flip" to the other side)? Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?

I apologize in advance if any of this comes across as an interrogation, that is not intentional! I very rarely encounter many people who are willing to engage this topic critically so I'm grateful for the opportunity.

Replies from: BrienneYudkowsky
comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) · 2023-05-06T20:50:12.603Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

> I would first be interested to know why you identify as a trans man generally

K so let's start with, "Is it true that I identify as a trans man?" But in fact I'll look at the slightly different question, "Is it true that I identify as a man?", because I think that probably gets more quickly to the heart of the matter. It's at least clear that I do not identify as a cis man.

I think there's probably some ambiguity in the way "identify" is used that makes this a little hard for me to answer.

On the one hand, there's how I present myself to other people. I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they're interacting with "is a man" or "is a woman". I have at times been pretty grumpy about this—lately I'm especially grumpy about it when people find out I'm pregnant and immediately ask, "What is it?", to which I sometimes reply, "Human, I'm pretty sure."—and so for a while I presented myself to others as "nonbinary". I think a lot of that was me being like "I'm not on board with how reliant you are on these particular categories, I don't want to squish my own thoughts and feelings and perceptions and behaviors into whatever this categorization system means to you, and I'm unwilling to enable your application of this to me."

Which worked out pretty well while I lived in Berkeley. Most people that I actually wanted to interact with rolled with it. Nearly everyone at my workplace used they/them pronouns for me without any hiccups, for example. And there was generally less stress in my life from the particular direction of gender. It was something I could largely ignore, at least much more so than I had at any other point in my life.

But now I live in a different place where many of the people around me seem to really really want to know whether I am a man or a woman, and it's so very exhausting to be in constant conflict with them about that. I don't think they know that they care so much about regarding other people as falling into one of two buckets, but it's a glaringly-obvious-to-me feature of my interactions with them. So it seems like the options that are realistically on the table for me, if I'd rather avoid the constant battle with the ubiquitous social frame, are to either present myself to them as a man (Mr., he/him, father, clothing style, etc.), or to present myself to them as a woman (Mrs., she/her, mother, etc.).

Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I'm around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I'm around other people. So, socially, I tell other people that I'm a trans man, and this works out ok for me. In that sense, I identify as a man.

But there is another way that I think the word "identify" is often used in the context of gender. It has less to do with social presentation, and more to do with self perception. Sometimes when people say that they "identify" as X, they at least in part mean that they see themselves as X. Perhaps they feel like their conception of X on the inside, or they aspire to embody the properties of their conception of X in the way they live their lives, or they feel really comfortable and at home when they imagine themselves as X, or something like that.

In this second, more personal sense, it is less clear to me whether I identify as a man. I think the most accurate description of my current state with respect to this sense of "gender identity" is that I am agnostic about my gender, or that I am "in the process of figuring it out". 

It seems quite likely to me that the question of "whether I am a man, on the inside" is very much a wrong question, that there simply is no fact of the matter to be discovered here.

Yet I am not confident that it's entirely a wrong question. I do suspect for several reasons, some of them more easily articulable than others, that the question is at least pointing roughly in the direction of something that is real and that actually matters, both to me and to others who have some kind of strong relationship with gender. For instance, I don't think that yin/yang clusters are entirely arbitrary. I don't think it's a complete coincidence that Aztec and Mayan rituals surrounding corn and cacao crops prominently featured the balance between masculine and feminine elements. I don't even think it's wrong or dumb or bad that there exist such things today as workshops and ceremonies focused on "the divine feminine" or "the divine masculine". I personally feel the draw of these frameworks. I feel a kind of illumination and fitting-ness when I think about my experiences through them. And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.

But now I'd like to discuss another question that is not quite the one you asked, but that seems unavoidable when trying to understand my experience of being trans, and that I think might also clearly distinguish me from "a masculine female" (and here I notice I'm more anxious about getting into hot water, because I'd describe this way of talking and thinking as at best out of fashion, and at worst sometimes seen as grounds for cancellation): "Am I transsexual?"

And to this, the answer seems very clearly to be, "Yes, I absolutely am transsexual", if we interpret "transsexual" in a quite straightforward way that has little to do with gender and lots to do with physiology. (I think that most "masculine females" are not transexual in this sense! They're at least somewhat gender non-conforming, but they're pretty much fine occupying their female bodies. There may be additional differences between me and them, but I'm at least pretty sure about this one.)

Though even with this term, there seem to me to be two categories of thing going on. The first is about how my actual physical body is (or how I plan for it to be). I was born with a typically female body. I have two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome, I went through female puberty and developed breasts and a menstrual cycle and so forth. But I also lack breasts now because I've had them removed. And very soon, I will have adult male levels of testosterone in my body, which will probably result in things like a beard, a lower voice, male patterns of fat distribution and muscle development, and perhaps some typically male psychological changes as well (I won't be surprised if I become more angry, for example). And at that point, it will be pretty misleading to describe me as "female", and much more accurate to describe me as "transmasculine".

But additionally, there is the way that I feel about my body and about these changes: I want to be male! And, as a separate fact (not every trans man shares this feeling!), I want not to be female.

I feel so much better now that my breasts are gone. I made the most of them while they existed—I even made money off of them as a professional stripper—but they were a source of constant, low-grade suffering. Every time I paid attention to them, something felt wrong. And they were kind of hard to ignore, 'cause they weren't small. They were in the way, reminding me of themselves over and over every day, and it just felt bad. I didn't know why it felt bad, and I still sort of don't. But it was almost the way I'd expect to feel if some aliens had abducted me and surgically added random lumps of flesh to my body and then deposited me back on earth and wiped my memory. "These don't belong here. Something is wrong. Get them off."

And that's how I still feel about several other features of my physiology. I feel that way about my hips, and my voice, and my musculature (which I have worked very hard, to only somewhat noticeable effect, to modify even without testosterone), and my period, and the truly bizarre things that happen to my cognition just before my period (which I'll talk more about in a moment). It all feels wrong and weird to me.

But when I wear a shirt that does an especially good job of highlighting my muscles and my chest, I feel happy when I look in the mirror. And when I imaging having a deeper voice, and masculine patterns of hair and fat and muscles and a penis (though I don't actually plan to get one of those), I feel happy. And I guess it could still turn out that I'm wrong, and I won't actually feel about the results of testosterone the same way that I feel about the results of top surgery. But I'd be pretty surprised, largely because it seems like almost everyone in my situation does in fact feel a lot better once they're on hormone therapy.

So in both the personal and the physical senses, it seems right to describe me as transexual.

But the thing is, there's not a lot of room for nuance in my interactions with strangers and acquaintances. Even if they could easily hold the thought, "This person is more comfortable in a male body, and also they feel kind of confused about 'masculinity' but they weakly suspect it's approximately right that they 'are a man' in some sense or another", it would not be easy for me to communicate that state of affairs, and most people would not want me to try. Given that it's socially dangerous among some subcultures I often bump into for me to call myself "transexual", I simply refer to myself as "a trans man"—or, if I seem to be "passing" anyway, just as "a man". And honestly, I expect it will be awfully relaxing to consistently fly under the radar as simply "a man", as I expect will happen once I have a beard and a deeper voice.

Ok, I think I've touched on most of the other questions in your comment at this point, so now I'll move on to the topic of pregnancy.

> Has your pregnancy changed or prompted any new thoughts about your gender identity?

Heck. Yes.

When I was planning this pregnancy, I intended to 1) get top surgery first (because I just wasn't willing to have even bigger and more in-the-way breasts, or to breastfeed, or to deal with the complications that come from lactating without breastfeeding), and then 2) wait until I was "done having kids" to start hormone therapy. I knew I wanted to gestate one kid, and I thought I might want to gestate two.

Now I am not sure whether or not I will try to gestate an additional kid (I'm leaning toward "no"), but if I do, it will definitely have to wait until I've been on T for a while (and then gone off of it for six months before conception, as is the standard practice among trans gestational parents). I am not going into another pregnancy with this body, because pregnancy has been even more body-and-brain-dysphoric than I expected.

And to be clear, I did expect to hate pregnancy. I expected to hate getting and recovering from top surgery too; I did that because it seemed worth it to me. Pregnancy is the same. My husband and I wanted to have a kid with our genetics, and this was the way to do that. Creating a new life seems to me like a pretty big and valuable thing, and it seems quite plausibly worth the suffering I expected to undergo. It has been a lot of suffering, and it's not over yet, but I still think it's worth it.

My baby bump feels a lot to me like how my breasts did, but way more so. The "alien" aspect is even more prominent, perhaps because there is literally another creature in there wriggling around. At least my breasts did not move of their own accord.

But the effects of pregnancy also seem to be hitting me in particularly gender-relevant ways as well, not just sex/body-relevant.

(And now I'm a bit fearful about describing some of my experiences as "gendered"; I would like to be clear that I'm talking in terms of my own mostly-automatic feelings and associations with femininity and masculinity, and that these associations may be in various ways wrong/bad/inaccurate/harmful. But they exist, and they're impacting my experience, and I'm going to describe my experience.)

Let me tell you about premenstrual syndrome, or PMS. For me, PMS is mostly a way that my brain is while under the influence of the hormonal changes that immediately precede menstruation, and sometimes last for a whole week. It happens every month, for one to seven days.

What happens to me during PMS is that I feel... "crazy", is the word I typically use for it. Specifically, the relationship between my emotions and my thoughts changes dramatically.

Ordinarily, my emotions seem to track my thoughts, and especially my beliefs. If I believe something bad is going to happen, I feel scared. If I spend a lot of time planning something and I come to a conclusion about what I will do, I feel prepared. My emotions follow my thoughts.

But during PMS, the relationship is flipped: my thoughts follow my emotions instead. I find myself feeling scared, and then I begin to expect bad things to happen. I feel prepared, and then I believe that I have planned sufficiently. I feel insecure, and I think that my partner is probably angry with me.

I hate this. So much. I aspire to be a person who is exceptionally reasonable, grounded, and clear-thinking. I do not like to be volatile. With decades of practice, I have learned to use my mind differently during PMS. I'm mostly able to act sane, even though I feel crazy (though not always). But it's exhausting. [Note to commenters who are thinking, "Then why don't they take [insert birth control method here] so they don't have periods?" I promise, I have tried a lot of things. For various reasons, none of the things has worked.]

During pregnancy this is happening all the time.

It wasn't like that at first, but some time in second trimester, it became like perpetual PMS.

Additionally, even though I haven't lost all that much muscle mass, my body is flooded with the hormone relaxin, which makes my joints and ligaments flimsy. I cannot comfortably run, or use a shovel, or even carry a jug of milk through the grocery store on my own. Compared to how I was before, and especially compared to my husband, I am physically weak and fragile. I have to rely on other people to do things that require strength.

When I imagine that many many pregnant people go through something like this, and then I remember that before birth control, female adults spent much of their time either pregnant or menstruating, some of what's going on with "femininity" starts to make more sense to me.

I have known trans women who describe hormone therapy as "like a spiritual awakening". On female hormones, they developed a completely new relationship with and experience of their emotions. They became much more sensitive, much more easily moved, they learned how to cry, they connected with the emotions of others more deeply, they added this whole dimension to their life that was by comparison heavily muted before.

These sorts of things seem to me to have a lot to do with traditionally feminine virtues. Being emotionally open and sensitive, being nurturing, communicating deeply about complex social/emotional topics, recognizing and being moved and motivated by beauty, behaving in ways that are gentle both physically and psychologically, building and maintaining communities whose members are supported and do not have to do things all on their own.

(And I've noticed that expectations about these properties are reflected in the ways that strangers, acquaintances, and authors of pregnancy books interact with me about pregnancy. They treat me "like an expecting mother", which I think is "like an especially hyper-feminine person". They make a ton of assumptions about what I'm thinking and feeling and how I'm relating to those things. They expect me to already be in love with my unborn baby, to be soft and gentle and nurturing, to be brimming with joy and fear and excitement about bringing a new life into the world and caring for my child. It's as though they see me a tiny instantiation of some kind of feminine-mother-goddess. I have not been comfortable with this! And I have also noticed that the people and books who have not done this at me are exactly the same ones that say "pregnant person" and "gestational parent", and they're the ones that I'm able to make use of rather than rage-quitting out of intense alienation.)

But it seems to me that shifting a brain in that direction comes with costs. For some, the costs are worthwhile. Some people are much more at home in a mind that excels at expressing feminine properties, even if it means access to masculine properties is diminished.

I am not such a person. For me, the costs of this shift are unacceptable. I like to be stable, reasonable, independent, straightforward, and strong. I like being the opposite of on-my-period. I like being the opposite of pregnant. And to me, inside my own head at least, I summarize this as "I like to be masculine".

So that has kind of clicked into place for me, as a result of pregnancy. I feel a lot clearer about what I want. I'm much more eager to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible, more eager to take a higher dose of testosterone when I do start (I was previously considering a "nonbinary" dose), and more comfortable with the idea that I'll consistently describe myself as "a man", "a father or uncle", and "he/him". (Though at the moment, I still tend to request "they/he", when offered the option.)

Pregnancy has felt to me like an overdose of femininity, and now I am done with being a woman.

Replies from: tracingwoodgrains, ymeskhout, Akiyama
comment by TracingWoodgrains (tracingwoodgrains) · 2023-05-22T16:55:59.919Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you for this comment. It's an extraordinarily perceptive, candid, and thorough look into a set of experiences few are familiar with, and gave me a great deal to chew on. I very much admire your commitment to becoming a parent despite the complexity of your position—good luck with it all, and thanks again for sharing your experience.

comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-09T01:38:56.642Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Wow! I am so grateful for this comment and the transparency and candor you've written it with. I appreciate the time you took to write this out and I have some follow-up questions if you don't mind.

I have a strong impression that most people I encounter have this really strong desire to know whether the person they're interacting with "is a man" or "is a woman".

Have you noticed any difference in people's behavior depending on what gender category they perceive you as?

Of those two options, there is clearly one that causes me to feel tremendous stress and sadness a whole lot of the time when I'm around other people, and another that causes me to feel mostly good and comfortable when I'm around other people.

What is it about that perception by others that causes you so much stress? Is it because their perception comes pre-packaged along with some erroneous assumptions about you? (e.g. the pregnancy books assuming how you feel about your baby)

And indeed, overall I feel more at home, cozy, resonant, happy, comfortable, when I rest my attention on the traditionally masculine elements of these frameworks, even though I also feel a lot of familiarity around many of the traditionally feminine elements as well.

This might be impossible to answer but are you able to determine which way causation flows? What I mean by this is do you feel more connected to certain concepts because they are coded as masculine, or do you just feel that affinity with concepts that happen to be coded as masculine? You've lucidly and transparently described how your cognition is affected by your hormonal balance, and your strong aversion to your PMS mental state, so I'm wonder where this preference cleaves.

It all feels wrong and weird to me.

Similar question as above. Does the discomfort with aspects of your physiology stem from them being coded as feminine? Put another way, if you somehow had no concept of masculine/feminine, would your physiology on its own still cause you discomfort?

comment by Akiyama · 2023-11-18T17:13:26.512Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This was a really interesting read. I am definitely a person who instinctively wants to categorise everyone as either male or female, and seeing transgender people makes me feel uncomfortable (I don't know any personally, although I do know a nonbinary person). But I enjoy reading about people's internal experiences relating to their sex or gender.

comment by Raemon · 2023-05-09T01:53:01.357Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Awhile ago, I think you said something like "my gender identity is 'tiger', by which I mean 'if you're making guesses about what sort of things I'll do, or what social role I'll play... the thing where you might have used 'man' or 'woman' as a heuristic label to inform a bunch of your guesses will be less accurate than if you think 'tiger', which includes both a kind of strength [and maybe predatoriness?] but also lithe gracefulness". 

I think Malcolm Ocean chimed in in that (FB?) convo and said 'oh yeah me too!' and that made something click in a useful way to me. I liked the definition of gender where swapping in "tiger" was a reasonable third-option (and it felt more useful than previous attempts I'd seen people make to convey some kind of nonbinariness), and having the two datapoints of you and Malcolm made me go "oh yeah I have a pretty clear sense of what a "tiger" is.

I'm curious if a) you remember that, b) does it still feel accurate now?

Replies from: BrienneYudkowsky
comment by LoganStrohl (BrienneYudkowsky) · 2023-05-09T19:12:00.018Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

a) I do remember that. b) It it still seems like a pretty good pointer to a (the?) main way I think of and experience myself, but I want to be clear that I was being at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and I would not in full honesty claim that I "identify as a tiger", or any sort of otherkin.

Replies from: Raemon
comment by Raemon · 2023-05-09T19:30:25.204Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah (I did understand that but seems good to clarify)

comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-01T20:04:10.811Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you so much for replying and engaging with my post, I really appreciate it.

This is as far as I can tell completely false.

I admit I should have qualified my assertion and used less polemical wording in that passage. I didn't intend to imply that pregnancy must mandate feelings of dysphoria among transmen, my overall point in that paragraph was collateral to that issue either way.

This is the general feeling I get from a lot of this post: it represents a good understanding of the anti-trans side of the debate, and a good understanding of the rationalist interpretation of semantics applied to the trans debate, but it lacks understanding of the experiences of trans people, and it also lacks awareness that it is missing that understanding.

I'm always eager to learn more! I have a habit of finding myself go down some deep research rabbit holes, and this post definitely was not an exception. I made an earnest attempt to find good sources on trans experience (e.g. looking up trans philosophers and reading their work) and I reached out to many people to discuss further. Obviously this is a touchy subject but it was disappointing to encounter so many people averse to a critical discussion on the topic. If you have any sources you believe I should be familiar with, please send them my way!

The most basic piece of information that is being communicated here is that, assuming you speak English, the person would like you to use female-gendered terms (she/her/hers, actress instead of actor, etc.) for her. You touch on the rest with [snip] and I'm not sure why you discard this as worthless or deceptive. Maybe a better way of framing this is to translate "I identify as a women" to "I believe you will do a better job of modeling my personality, desires, actions, and other ways of interacting with you if you use predictions from the 'woman' category you have in your mind instead of the 'man' category in your mind."

I admit, this is extremely confusing to me. I've met many self-identified women (trans and otherwise) that did not prefer female-gendered terms, prompting plenty of inadvertent social gaffes on my end. I've since learned not to assume and to be more mindful about asking for people's specific term preferences but this dovetails into your latter point about relying on categories as a modeling tool which I already touched upon in my post:

But it would be better for both of us if she just told me this directly, without inviting potentially insulting or erroneous assumptions. To the extent that woman is a cluster of traits, I struggle to contemplate a scenario where communicating the cluster is a more efficient or more thoughtful method of communication than just communicating the specific pertinent trait. Just tell me what you want me to know directly. Use other words if need be.

My kingdom for some specifics! If someone invited me to model their "personality, desires, actions, etc." based on just their gender category, you're bound to see my face take on the appearance of a stuck boot-up screen. I've tried to really think hard and introspect about how exactly I would treat someone differently based on their gender category and the most reliable heuristic I could think of was "in conversation, don't bring up video games or guns when talking to women." Hilariously this guidance is completely off the mark with the transwomen I've hung out with. Beyond that very crude and unreliable guidance, I remain rudderless and find gender categories way too broad and opaque to discern any meaningful guidance, unless I want to take a risk with potentially deeply offensive assumptions like "talk about shopping and avoid serious politics." My question in the passage I quoted above remains.

Replies from: lalaithion
comment by lalaithion · 2023-05-01T22:31:47.015Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've met many self-identified women (trans and otherwise) that did not prefer female-gendered terms, prompting plenty of inadvertent social gaffes on my end.

I think that if someone self identifies as a woman to you, and you use a gendered term to describe them (she, policewoman, actress) that is not a social gaffe on your part. I think that it is fine for someone to identify as a woman, but advocate for the use of gender neutral language in all cases even applied to them, but they should not put pressure on those who do so differently.

and the most reliable heuristic I could think of was "in conversation, don't bring up video games or guns when talking to women."

I would not make this assumption about cis women, and so I also wouldn't make it about trans women. If you're living in two subcultures, one with few trans women but many cis women who this assumption applies to and one with few cis women but many trans women who this assumption applies to, I could see how you would arrive at this and find it doesn't work very well.

I remain rudderless and find gender categories way too broad and opaque to discern any meaningful guidance

It is possible you don't interact with people's gender that frequently, which is fine, but this isn't true of most people I interact with. Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:

  • Which bathroom they use, and whether you can go to the same changing room in a pool/gym.
  • Which clothing they will wear, which clothing they will shop for, and how you should react to them wearing said clothing. (Is your friend being silly by wearing a skirt? probably if he's a man, but unlikely if she's a woman.)
  • With whom they are okay with casual friendly touches (for example, many people are more open to hugs from the same gender)

Obviously, you should ask about these things if you need to know, and I agree that in many cases being specific is important. However, many humans spend a lot of time policing other's gender presentations. If I saw a male friend walking into a women's restroom, I would warn them that they're going in the wrong one. I would do this to my trans male friends but not my trans female friends. Maybe they would correct me and explain the situation. Maybe they would be hostile, in which case they would be rude. And if you need to know, or they need to tell you, they can.

If you're not the type of person to be aware in the differences I've mentioned above, then maybe it is useless to you, but it's not useless to all people, and the person telling you won't necessarily know that.

On top of all of this, many trans people are gender abolitionists ideologically, but if they have to choose between being seen by society as a man vs. a woman, they are still going to make that choice even if they wish that society didn't make the disctinction.

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-03T00:03:42.805Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:

I appreciate that you provided specific examples but my immediate reaction to your list was one of bafflement.

While I personally don't care what bathrooms or changing room anyone uses, to the extent someone does prompt a negative reaction for being in the "wrong" room it would be entirely predicated on how that individual is perceived by others (read: pass), not what they personally identify as. 

Similarly, I don't understand why I would care about someone's gender identity when assessing their sartorial choices; they either look good or not and me finding out about their internal identity wouldn't prompt an update. I recently had two friends come across an XXXL pair of overalls they both managed to fit into each pant leg. I was able to deduce that they were being silly through an astute analysis of several context clues; I didn't need to know what body size they subjectively "identified" as to reach that conclusion.

With casual social touching, I've never met anyone who drew the line based on someone's identity. If these people do indeed exist, I would be intensely curious to better understand the basis of their preference. Namely: what would the difference be between someone asking for a hug while announcing they identify as Y versus, ceteris paribus, announcing that they identify as X.

To the extent my post had a thesis, it's that using gender categories to imputing predictions is highly inefficient and a highly misleading sorting mechanism, and that it is generally better to be specific than hope you hit the correct stereotypes in your audience's mind. The examples you list demonstrate this point exactly.

As a further analogy, consider if a friend were to tell me "I'm not wearing a polo shirt now, but I identify as someone who is wearing a polo shirt, and I am telling you this information in the hopes that you'll correctly guess that I enjoy golfing." Why play these riddles?

You stated that I potentially don't interact with people's gender that frequently, and that's probably true. I generally avoid making assumptions about individuals, for the reasons stated above. Originally you said that my post lacked an "understanding of the experiences of trans people" and I'm still eager to learn more! What am I missing exactly and what sources would you recommend I read?

Replies from: lalaithion
comment by lalaithion · 2023-05-03T17:54:45.845Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think that one thing you're missing is that lots of people... use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat "male" and "female" as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone "is" male or female.

You don't seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you're right, from a gender abolition perspective there's no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).

But I think you're expecting that most people act this way, and they don't! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn't be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.

Some examples of X that I have seen include:

  • Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
  • Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
  • Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
  • Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person

I don't really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:

  1. Here is this thing, gender.
  2. Lots of people care about gender a lot
  3. It's a valid position to say "I don't care about this thing and don't understand why anyone else does"
  4. Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.

Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-04T00:08:22.702Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think I finally understand the source of the confusion. Correct me if I'm wrong but it appears to me that you use "sex" and "gender" interchangeably, where a change in the latter is (or at least should be treated as) functionally a change in the former.

I definitely use sex as "a very strong feature of navigating the world" because I can readily point to endless circumstances where knowing someone's sex (and the likely associated secondary characteristics) provides useful information (height, violence propensity, affinity towards trains, whatever). I recognize that someone's sex is a dense piece of information to have because it has reliable predictive qualities.

There's plenty of other traits with similarly reliable predictive qualities and maybe it's helpful to set aside sex/gender for a bit. If I knew nothing about a person except that they're a Harvard graduate, it's reasonable for me to guess that they're more likely to be intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. Obviously not every Harvard grad fits those traits, and if somehow there's a grad whom I assume is ambitious and conceited but who idles his days as a homeless beach bum, well the error is on me.

But suppose the only thing I knew about a person is they "identify" as a Harvard graduate. I would like to think that everyone's first question would be "what does that mean??" and suppose this individual responds with "although I technically never went to Harvard, I am nevertheless intelligent, ambitious, privileged, conceited, etc. and it's just easier/faster/simpler for me to implant that impression through a single informational payload rather than piece by piece."

I may not endorse this tactic, but I get it! Of course, the natural follow-up question would be "but how do we know that you're actually any of those traits you mentioned?" and also "but how do you ensure that you implant the intended impression?" These are the exact same questions I would ask of a trans individual.

There seems to be an attempt to reverse the inference flow. It brings to mind a post by Parrhesia:

To illustrate this sort of semantic ethical reasoning, imagine an ethical vegan who refuses to buy her child a stuffed animal. She argues that: a stuffed animal is an animal; it is wrong to purchase animals; therefore, it is wrong to buy a stuffed animal. If you think in words, then it makes sense. But if you start thinking about reality, you’ll notice an issue. Ethical vegans are usually vegan because they don’t want to cause animal suffering, and a stuffed animal—if you wish to call it an animal or not—does not experience suffering. Whether a stuffed animal is an animal is tangential to the ethicality of purchasing it.

We can apply this framework to any of your examples, and that's what I was getting at in my post when I'd ask "Why does it matter?" So for example one of the concerns someone might have with undressing in public is avoiding the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers. A reliable assumption is that the vast majority of people only feel sexual attraction towards the opposite sex, which is why same-sex changing rooms are such a widespread solution to this concern (obviously this is not perfectly reliable, and it also relies on the assumption that same-sex attraction did not exist).

There's a reason I linked to the Disguised Queries post [LW · GW] on bleggs and rubes. The fallacy here would be assuming that the "good-enough" sorting mechanism is the end goal itself, rather than merely a useful tool to get us to our real destination. Unless you keep in mind the root purpose of the sorting mechanism, you risk coming to the erroneous conclusion that vegans think stuffed animals are immoral.

Replies from: lalaithion
comment by lalaithion · 2023-05-04T02:54:15.545Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Hmm, no, I don't believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let's taboo [LW · GW] those two terms.

I think that most people don't care about a person's chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words "sex" and "gender", I don't feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person's chromosomes.

I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person's body naturally produces and whether they're suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.

I think that many people care about appearance. Most people's sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they're not "technically" attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.

I think that many people care about "intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role", which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.

It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the "intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role", whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.

I'm not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:

  • I identify as a woman
  • I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
  • I identify as a Harvard Graduate
  • I identify as a Bostonian
  • I identify as an academic
  • I identify as a Christian
  • I identify as a lesbian Which of those identify phrases mean things? It's the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.

Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I'm an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they're not nonsensical.

Now, obviously, you'll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That's pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don't really understand where you get off the following train:

Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to "avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers". Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you'll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)

I would guess that you don't agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I'm right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-04T23:19:38.528Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I don't understand your objection to the Harvard analogy exactly, especially since you included it in your list. I also don't understand how exactly you're distinguishing "social role" from "physical fact" (which one is 'lesbian'?) or why identifying as a Bostonian is meaningful but Harvard grad is not?

Given that lack of clarity, I worry we have different understanding of the phrase "social role". My definition would be something along the lines of "the set of behaviors, expectations, and responsibilities associated with a particular position or status within a group or society". Assuming you agree with that definition, I absolutely understand why someone would care about wanting to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role.

But desire for a particular social role is not a sufficient condition for attaining it. Babies are a social role. No one complains when they sleep all day instead of going to work, and no one is surprised when other people clean them up when they shit their pants. Babies are treated this way because they're vulnerable and they lack this capacity to take care of themselves because of they haven't sufficiently developed at their age. And while age is a really good proxy for self-sufficiency (especially early on) it's obviously not the only one. See for example how we treat the elderly and the severely disabled. The simplistic analysis here would be to deny a vulnerable person the pampered treatment just because they're too old to be a baby.

Conversely, if I had the intent to be treated the same way as a baby — fed Gerber and pampered by a dedicated two-person team while I sleep all day — it would be reasonable to ask why I am warranted that role. If I'm able-bodied and self-sufficient, it's reasonable for me to be denied that social role. You can call this a sort of "price of admission" to the social role if you'd like.

I would guess that you don't agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct?

I'm not sure what made you think that? I don't have an opinion on what the "correct" segregation method for dressing rooms should be; it would all depend on the goal you're trying to accomplish. I brought up "minimizing sexualized attention from strangers" as just one of many possible objectives.

comment by Viliam · 2023-05-02T14:37:07.316Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yes, the entire reason for the debate is that we have (traditional and/or legal) rules like "if X then Y", and people argue that "Z is/isn't X" because they want to automatically win the debate about whether "if Z then Y".

This can make a lot of sense strategically. If there are many different rules for "X", it is much less work to get excluded from the definition of "X" once, than to try getting an exception from each of those rules individually.

However, a rational/asperger ;) society would probably address the situation of trans women like this:

  • make a list of all rules that apply differently to men and women
  • for each such rule, explain the reason why
  • in case the reason does not make sense (anymore), consider abolishing the rule instead
  • for each rule that makes sense, figure out whether the reason applies to trans women
  • rewrite each rule separately, to make it clear how it applies to trans people

Here is a quick attempt to make the list, I probably forgot many important things:

  • how to be addressed (pronoun, name)
  • separate bathrooms
  • separate sports
  • separate prisons
  • subject to military conscription?
  • subject to affirmative action?

My quick attempt to solve these issues, please don't get mad if you disagree...

With regards to identity, we currently have two kinds of norms. You have a legal name, which is one, and can be changed, but the change is somewhat costly (you need to do some paperwork, and literally pay some money). This is what everyone should use to address you, unless they are a personal friend and can follow the informal norms. You can also have one or more nicknames, which are only used by your friends; no one else cares.

I would apply the same rules for the gender. If you informally want your friends to use a different pronoun, that's between you and your friends; you have no right to get mad if your teacher uses the pronoun that matches your papers. However, if you make it official and get your papers updated, then the teacher is supposed to use the updated name and pronoun, and you have a right to complain if they don't. When updating your papers, you get to choose from three possible genders (male, female, neutral/other), and each of them has a standard assigned pronoun (i.e. not everyone making up their own pronouns).

With bathrooms and prisons, to put it bluntly, I think the existing system was designed to minimize sexual assault, especially the kind where people can get pregnant as a consequence. (With high-school bathrooms, also to minimize consensual sex between minors, especially the kind etc.) Here we need to "shut up and multiply", to figure out which policy would ultimately lead to less harm. (In a sufficiently non-rapist settings, perhaps we could abandon the concept of gendered bathrooms and prisons completely? But before we hurry to do that, consider that there may be high variance in safety, so you should not rely only on your personal experience.)

With sports... it seems that testosterone provides a huge advantage. (Maybe not in all sports?) If we abandoned gendered leagues completely, the championships might end up full of men. It seems fair to give women a chance. (Ignoring the concept of fairness; it seems like a good idea to also encourage girls to do sports.) Unfortunately, from the perspective of testosterone, trans women seem to be a category of their own here; fit neither in the men's nor in the women's league. (Even a hypothetical separate league for trans women probably wouldn't make sense, because it would be like: start taking hormones -- ruin your career.)

I do not have a good answer here, and the best attempt is to make the "men's" leagues officially open for everyone (including, hypothetically, cis women) so that trans people can participate there without making a statement about their gender; and have a separate league for cis women (with possible participation of trans women under strict criteria, something like taking hormones for at least 10 years). Note that, perhaps counter-intuitively to some people, if you do this well, the trans-women champions should be rare (proportionally to their base rate in the population). Otherwise, trans-ness provides an advantage, which is not what the sport (or the women's league) is supposed to be about.

Conscription? Either abolish completely; or if your army allows women to serve, maybe make a compromise rule that trans women can be conscripted, but are afterwards treated as female soldiers, if male and female soldiers are treated differently.

Affirmative action? Without taking a side here, I just note that the entire concept is politically sensitive, so of course if someone objects to affirmative action in general, they would also object to affirmative action for trans women; obviously. So, one possible outcome is to abolish it. Now, if we assume that affirmative action makes sense for cis women, e.g. because we want to overcome the prejudice that "girls are bad at math" (or, insert your own), the question is whether the same prejudice also applies to trans women.

Honestly, I could argue for both sides here. It depends on how exactly you model the impact of prejudice on career. Is it more important that e.g. girls are culturally discouraged from studying math at school, or that the adult women may have a problem getting hired for a position that requires math skills because their sexist colleagues would assume they are not sufficiently competent? Because, arguably, only the latter is relevant for trans women (and only if they are passing). Also, I assume that many people's impression would depend on the outcome of such policy... to give an example, imagine that your company has 100 employees, all men, so the HR is told to hire 10 women. If you hire 9 cis women and 1 trans woman, this seems like the policy working as intended. But if you hire 10 trans women and 0 cis women, well, politically savvy people would probably be wary of sounding like TERFs, but intuitively this is not the policy working as intended.

...the specific answers are less important here than the general idea of "let's answer each question separately" (because different questions may have different answers).

Replies from: ymeskhout, Jiro
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-03T00:14:56.095Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

...the specific answers are less important here than the general idea of "let's answer each question separately" (because different questions may have different answers).

We may disagree on some of the answers but I emphatically concur with your approach.

comment by Jiro · 2023-05-03T16:04:37.023Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

the specific answers are less important here than the general idea of “let’s answer each question separately” (because different questions may have different answers).

Then your answer is unacceptable in the current political climate.

I'd even suggest that that's because you're modelling people incorrectly. They want to be called women because they want to be treated as women in all ways regardless of whether there's some reason behind why women are treated that way. Your suggestion to look at reasons, therefore, is inherently unacceptable.

Here is a quick attempt to make the list, I probably forgot many important things:

  • Is it bigoted to not treat one like a cis woman for the purpose of dating.
Replies from: Viliam
comment by Viliam · 2023-05-04T09:51:47.031Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Then your answer is unacceptable in the current political climate.

I agree. I think it is not even possible to provide a politically acceptable and logically consistent answer. A part of what makes an answer politically acceptable is ignoring all the logical inconsistencies involved. Which is why I called my perspective "rational/asperger"; and it is probably more of the latter.

I do not want to speak for trans women, but yes it seems to me that many of them would like to have the entire package of "woman's experience". (At least, I do not remember seeing evidence to the contrary.) Which is by the way one of those inconsistencies -- a few years ago, before trans issues appeared on the radar, wasn't the official dogma that "woman's experience" is strictly worse than "man's experience"? Suddenly, there is something desirable about it, and it is a hate crime to deny it to people. Interesting.

However, it makes sense from my perspective, because I think that both "woman's experience" and "man's experience" have their advantages and disadvantages, so wanting to trade one for the other is logically coherent, and it's not my job to police other people's preferences.

That said, there is a difference between wanting something and actually getting it. Things happen for a reason; in this specific case, "woman's experience" is shaped by heterosexual men's desires, women's intrasexual competition, and cultural norms. You can police the cultural norms, but good luck with the rest.

Is it bigoted to not treat one like a cis woman for the purpose of dating.

What I think will happen to dating: Some people will be okay dating trans women, some people will not. The proper way socially skilled people navigate the situation "I really don't want to date X, but it is socially unacceptable to say so" is to publicly declare that you are okay with dating anyone, and then reject any X privately for unspecified or made up reasons (or simply ignore them, if you are using an online dating service). The new equilibrium will depend on how many people have which preference, which I am not even trying to predict, because I do not think I have enough reliable data.

(But it may be complicated for people on autistic spectrum who happen to have a preference not to date trans people, and do not realize that they do not have to be publicly honest about their preferences. Social networks will eat them alive.)

Replies from: vanessa-kosoy
comment by Vanessa Kosoy (vanessa-kosoy) · 2023-05-05T08:54:11.592Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Personally, I don't need anyone to affirmative-action me, and have no interest in participating in any kind of sport[1]. I would appreciate it if people avoid sweeping statements about what "they" want.

When it comes to dating, I think it is perfectly legitimate for everyone to be attracted to whomever they want. And also have preferences about having children which are obviously relevant. I do harbor some doubt as to whether an unbigoted society would contain many heterosexual men that (i) don't want children and (ii) disprefer dating a transgender woman even if she looks externally indistinguishable from a cisgender woman. I am not confident there, but it seems odd to have such a strong innate preference purely about the history of your lover's body.

That said, if someone doesn't want to date me, it is 100% their prerogative regardless of the reason, and I am definitively extremely uninterested in dating someone who is kept there by guilt or fear of judgment (or anything else other than genuine attraction).

  1. ^

    I also agree that the sports thing is complicated, and allowing any trans woman to participate in women's leagues is problematic. 

Replies from: Viliam, ymeskhout, Jiro
comment by Viliam · 2023-05-05T09:39:42.951Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thank you; it seems like for all practical purposes we agree.

People who do sports professionally are a small minority... but a very visible one. Their problems will be discussed in newspapers, no matter how unrepresentative they may be.

comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-06T04:23:01.523Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I do harbor some doubt as to whether an unbigoted society would contain many heterosexual men that (i) don't want children and (ii) disprefer dating a transgender woman even if she looks externally indistinguishable from a cisgender woman. I am not confident there, but it seems odd to have such a strong innate preference purely about the history of your lover's body.

I apologize if any of this reply is overly gratuitous but that is difficult to avoid completely given the subject matter. I am a heterosexual male and a central component of my sexual attraction towards females is just the mechanics of penis and vagina sex (I have no interest in anal sex). I am aware that vaginoplasty exists but virtually every description I've encountered sounds horrific and the state of the technology is severely missing key features (natural lubrication and "stretch & bounce" for lack of a better term).

While genitals are a necessary and non-negotiable characteristic, there are many other factors that I am attracted to in females, such as voice and smell. But assuming arguendo that medical technology advances so far that physical characteristics for transwomen are absolutely indistinguishable in every way to females — including voice and smell and including every aspect of the vagina — then yes I admit I would have fewer reasons to exclusively prefer females.

There are some other very interesting dynamics to explore in such a hypothetical (e.g. how does puberty development factor in? How do the dynamics in the sexual marketplace around 'status' shift? etc.) but that would depend on the assumption contours we're using.

Replies from: vanessa-kosoy
comment by Vanessa Kosoy (vanessa-kosoy) · 2023-05-06T09:38:50.970Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

First, your use of the word "females" in this context is offensive (contrast with e.g. "cisfemales" or "genetic females" or "natural females"). Please refrain from such.

Second, I am not convinced by your arguments (and you are obviously not speaking from experience).

Transvaginas produce some lubrication, but much less than median cisvaginas, yes. On the other hand hand, plenty of ciswomen also have issues with lubrication. Many ciswomen struggle with other problems in that area as well: for example, I personally know several who suffer from intense pain during PIV. If you prioritize vagina "quality" in cis lovers as well, then your preference might be objective, but otherwise the focus on transwomen might be unwarranted.

Voice is readily modifiable by training and/or surgery. It is a fact that transwomen can pass vocally.

Smell is affected by HRT (AFAICT also to the point of passing, but I know of no attempts to objectively test this in particular).

That said, I am not trying to convince you or anything. You do you, and good luck with that. I already have plenty of heterosexual males interested in me.

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-06T19:18:51.108Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I appear to have angered and/or offended you and I apologize for that. I don't believe my post had much of an argument, it was more an attempt to explain a position you expressed curiosity about. I apologize for misinterpreting anything.

I used "females" to minimize meaning ambiguity, and I don't understand why the word is offensive, especially considering you use "males" in your last sentence. I generally avoid using the prefix "cis" because its definition requires someone to have the same "gender identity" as their sex and what I wrote was much broader than just that group. "Females" in contrast encompasses all members of the female sex, regardless of their gender identity (e.g. pre-op transmen in this context) or whether they even have an identity (e.g. some non-binary,  agender, or otherwise). I haven't encountered the terms "genetic females" or "natural females" before but I would have assumed those would be much more offensive because of what they imply about the converse (e.g. "unnatural"). I'm not clear on the etiquette of language here, but my overall aim was precision and I apologize for inadvertently causing you offense.

And yes, I understand that many "natural vagina-havers" (for lack of a better term, apologies if this is offensive) can have many issues with sexual intercourse, including some of the same factors I mentioned above. Just because vaginas are a necessary requirement for my attraction doesn't mean it's a sufficient one, and there are many other factors to consider within that realm to ensure sexual compatibility.

I understand that voice is modifiable with training to an extent. I've personally never met a transwoman that passed vocally but either way I assumed arguendo that it's at least theoretically possible with further advances in technology. Regarding smells, I admit I have limited experience with this and mostly relied on what a bisexual friend of mine who slept with several transwomen told me.

I'm glad you have people interested in you, but I'm not sure how you interpreted anything I said to mean otherwise?

Replies from: vanessa-kosoy
comment by Vanessa Kosoy (vanessa-kosoy) · 2023-05-07T04:54:24.905Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Your usage of the word "females" felt offensive to me because it implied that transwomen are unambiguously not females. It seems that you think that "male/female" should refer strictly to genetics while "man/woman" should refer to gender identity, but I don't think this a great convention: in everyday use, "woman" and "female" are often used interchangeably.

I grant that "cisfemales" would not be completely accurate in principle, although IMO the meaning would be clear enough in practice.

You are right that in broader society, "natural/artificial" has positive/negative connotations, but I hope that here, where transhumanism is popular, and conflating "natural" with "good" is viewed as a fallacy, this is not the case.

As to "genetic" I'm not sure why you think it would be offensive? You grouped it with "natural" but the connotations are completely different (AFAICT the word doesn't have much connotation, just denotation).

As an aside, I think that the language in this domain is suffering from overzealous policing by social justice fundamentalists. While everyday words such as "woman/man" or "female/man" should IMO be absolutely trans-inclsuive[1], there should also be room for convenient terminology about bodily sex characteristics.


  1. And even then, it should be alright to use e.g. "women's health" in a context where the vast majority of the people involved are ciswomen. ↩︎

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-08T23:43:36.339Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It seems that you think that "male/female" should refer strictly to genetics while "man/woman" should refer to gender identity, but I don't think this a great convention: in everyday use, "woman" and "female" are often used interchangeably.

I am aiming to do the best I can in communicating with precision and I apologize for any missteps on my part. It's certainly true that "woman" and "female" are often used interchangeably but I've seen this become the source of significant confusion and ambiguity. You are correct about how I use the two terms (although it's more about social role than identity); that is the convention I've eventually settled upon and so far it has worked well in minimizing ambiguity.

My working assumption about the word "female" is that it is much more heavily grounded within the context of reproductive capacity and the associated secondary characteristics (e.g. a livestock breeder ordering "females" from a supplier is not ambiguous in that context) which is why I used it.

Given your greater familiarity with this space I trust your judgment that "natural females" would not be negatively received here, but I'm doubtful this would be the case outside of LW and it's difficult to keep a vocabulary index updated across so many places. I also imagine that transmen and non-binary individuals would not appreciate being called "female", but they'd appreciate "natural female" even less. With regards to "genetic females" my question would be "as opposed to what?" so my (weak) objection is mostly based on its ambiguity to me. I wouldn't be confident that either terms would carry the meaning I intend.

Either way, I was not privy to either of these alternate phrases before, so I hope it's established that my use of "females" was not intended to be malicious. Language is imperfect and I'm trying to do the best I can in nevertheless communicating clearly.

Replies from: vanessa-kosoy
comment by Vanessa Kosoy (vanessa-kosoy) · 2023-05-09T07:12:22.789Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My working assumption about the word "female" is that it is much more heavily grounded within the context of reproductive capacity and the associated secondary characteristics (e.g. a livestock breeder ordering "females" from a supplier is not ambiguous in that context) which is why I used it.

Medically transitioning transgender people have both reproductive capacity and secondary characteristics different from cisgender people of the same genetic sex. Ofc transgender women don't have a functional female reproductive system (yet), but they often also don't have a functional male reproductive system. Moreover, some cisgender women lack a functional female reproductive system as well. In principle, a reproduction-oriented classification can be useful, but it would require a 3rd category (sterile people), and is in any case largely unrelated to sexual attraction. So neither reproductive capacity nor secondary characteristics unambiguously point at the group you were referring to.

With regards to "genetic females" my question would be "as opposed to what?" so my (weak) objection is mostly based on its ambiguity to me.

As opposed to transwomen obviously (and if you insist that "female" should have a physiological connotation, then medically transitioning transwomen; but personally I don't endorse this usage).

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-09T15:54:35.962Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I concede that "females" is not 100% accurate in the context I was discussing but it felt like the least worst option. "Natural vagina haver" would be the most accurate label for the demographic I had in mind but it sounds distasteful. I'm open to ideas.

comment by Jiro · 2023-05-05T14:44:08.291Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I would appreciate it if people avoid sweeping statements about what “they” want.

"They" doesn't mean you. "They" means "the people who have influence on the issue and can get someone deplatformed and fired".

comment by Xor · 2023-05-02T02:28:42.749Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I find this topic (the general topic of transgender) interesting as it is the first time approaching it from a rational mindset. I grew up in an extremely conservative environment. Before I accepted reality my response would be it is immoral to switch genders as you are questioning god’s decision to put you in the body you were given (ego/pride thing I think). This idea no longer fits in my world view which is fun since I get to approach this topic with both a rational perspective and a new perspective. After thinking it over this is what I have got. 

If you believe you are a gender that you weren’t born as this is a delusion a divergence from what reality is. If you are also facing a medical disorder where you are not comfortable in your own skin then if some changes are necessary they should be taken. However many parts of transgender don’t seem rational or necessary. However I do think that the right to change gender or identify as a certain gender without a medical diagnosis is a good idea. Just because scientifically something is true doesn’t mean that you should be forced into believing it. I think if capable you should try to accept the original gender, otherwise it doesn’t matter. 

Given I don’t have any idea what it is like to be transgender and maybe the experience isn’t quite like I think it is. I also don’t know any transgender people I avoided them because I didn’t like their vibe and thought they were weird. I have grown to accept weird people though and am pretty good friends with someone who doesn’t know if they like boys or girls which has been wild. Also I know someone who is older and likes Minecraft which is new.

Replies from: lahwran
comment by the gears to ascension (lahwran) · 2023-05-02T10:10:46.595Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

[edit: pinned to profile]

I will not bring up pronouns or cultural language in this comment at all after this paragraph. They are irrelevant to the point I'm making except as a tiny detail in the cultural context section; being trans is almost entirely about one's body-form phenotype, and is only just barely about cultural context like words, by nature of words being a way to acknowledge of body-form phenotype intention.

Upvoted, since I found your comment useful to reply to with disagreement.

Background:

In the genome there are encoded some set of phenotype controller circuits which, when grown, connect with each other using some set of communication mechanisms, recently revealed by michael levin to be impressively dynamic at runtime via bioelectricity, and known before that in the field of evo devo; these circuits then unfold over the course of development into the organization of cells we call a grown body. In the brain, these circuits are what we call biological neural networks; but those communication circuits have much of the adaptability and dynamic communication of neurons in the rest of the body, as well, which is how the body establishes consensus about which cells are which component. In the process of this development, these networks assign themselves a physiological form gender; intersex people get a mix of attributes at this stage, but for most people, even for most trans people, this stage almost entirely selects one profile of sexual dimorphism; typically for people with XX chromosomes, this stage selects female, and for people with XY, this stage selects male. However, it's well known to science and can be looked up that sometimes people can be apparently entirely one body-form and have no desire or urge to transition, and yet have opposite chromosomes from their body's layout-presentation.

In the brain, there are prewired circuits, which develop their connectivity-shapes into representations over the course of development and by encountering the world - in particular, by encountering photons through the eyes and the pulses of encoded video down the optic nerve, and into the various areas of the brain that are involved in neural correlates of visual attractiveness of self and other. Some of these circuits must be in the vision system to operate correctly, though I don't know the current state of the neuroscience and GPT4 says it's still somewhat weak, so be aware that I am working from general neuroscience knowledge not specific research on attractiveness, but it is already known that the vision system is almost entirely learned after development from a very low detail pretrained wiring pattern initially generated from the genome during gestation. over the course of childhood development, object recognition develops in tandem with person recognition, organizing each percept into a pattern of neural activations which encode the experience. During puberty circuits activate which begin to train recognizers of self and other as attractive, and society has decided that a safe margin for how long this takes to stabilize into consensus with caution and risk estimation networks is until age 18.

Some of these networks, presumably and by hunch from my perspective as an adult trans person, seem likely to me to overlap with those involved in proprioception and self-recognition. It's known in a lot of detail, as neuroscience goes, that humans have detailed "phantom bodies", maps of the body in the brain which track the current volumetric shape of the body as one moves around; if you are someone who can imagine your hand being touched and sort of "feel it", then the neural activations to implement that "sorta feel it" are likely in your phantom body representation. This is the network that keeps tracking limbs after they're lost, and in which phantom pain occurs. There's been a lot of research on it in various forms of VR going back since before VR became a consumer technology, such as the rubber hand illusion - a fun video on youtube demonstrates this.

Orientation and self-orientation

Humans are known to develop highly selective pattern matchers that recognize the objectively fairly small differences between the sexual dimorphism layout of others' bodies. It is now commonly accepted that it is normal and natural, found in many species besides humans as well, that these selective pattern matchers can form to activate on visual and other sensory inputs that indicate the presence of either an opposite or same sexual dimorphism layout human, according to the observer's attraction. It has been hypothesized, though originally it was proposed (by a researcher I feel was quite prejudiced) in a narrow way which proposed it as an edge case of brain functionality rather than a central path of functionality, that this could also apply to the self; that is, that as part of sexual dimorphism, there are both networks which recognize others' forms and networks which recognize the self's form. For a straight, cis person, these networks would select an opposite-sex attraction for other and a same-sex attraction for self; that is, self is seen by vision networks as attractive to others when self is attractive according to the recognizer for ones own gender-form. Just as the attractiveness of others is a recognizer that is initialized by the genome to a strongly sexually dimorphic prior and trained over the course of development to recognize the specifics of others, the recognizer for self is likely initialized strongly sexually dimorphic and learns the details of what a self can look like by both observing others and self. It is quite common for those who wish to find human connection to seek to be attractive by their own standards, rather than the standards of their partner; and person A select partners B according to whether that partner B shares person A's standards, at least to a first pass, of what makes person A attractive.

Of course, the majority of human romantic attraction's distinguishing bits come from personality attraction, as body-form attraction is a rather wide selector that activates on many people, but romantic attraction is a narrow selector that depends on high rate of fluid and comfortable interaction. I imagine that, similarly, there are some degree of personality characteristics defined by attractiveness archetypes; I don't have any particular very strong evidence for this at the moment like I do for most other things up to this point, but it's often the case that trans people - people who find it upsetting, or at least highly worth acting on, for their body-form to not match some latent expectation or preference they have - to also find there were hints in their behavior for years up to the point where they decided to transition.

There are a variety of factors that could be hypothesized to cause the accumulation of aesthetic preference into the networks that are prewired to hold self-form attractiveness rating and preference; for thousands of years, various cultures have had records of people whose self-form customization and aesthetic customization tightly matched that of those with the opposite sexual dimorphism profile - binary trans people being those who, after standard childhood learning of the patterns of dimorphic aesthetic presentation in the culture they grow up in, find that their strong preference is to move into the presentation attractor typically selected by people with opposite initial-development body sexual dimorphism. Nonbinary people would be the ones for whom their self-presentation preference is specifically to straddle the blurry aesthetic line between presentation and/or body-form attractors. Cis people are those who find that their body-form and presentation preference is well within the culturally and genetically defined template for their initial body-form networks.

Phenotype preference

So, having argued through that brains appear to have these self and other recognition networks, that the way these networks land takes in a variety of factors - the only argument left to make is that some people have a strong, innate desire to customize their body form into a different one than their initial phenotype-configuration network throughout their body assigned itself at birth. For example, an AFAB trans person - assigned female at birth; though really the assignment mostly during gestation - is someone who wishes to transition from female bodyform to some other mix of dimorphic traits, most commonly but not always entirely male. AMAB trans people are those whose initial phenotype networks chose male, but for whom the phenotype networks in the brain chose something else, most typically entirely female.

For what it's worth, I expect that it will turn out that both orientation and self-orientation will turn out to be genetically encoded, and that the reason they don't always change in tandem is because it's very hard for biology to encode them as exactly the same network - the self-recognition networks can make use of the general phenotype-network configuration flags, but each individual component of phenotype configuration is a separate downstream network which activates in the appropriate location in the body, and the ones that unfold into a brain have a bunch of additional complexity from being neurons that make the cells involved able to go out of consensus with the rest of the body.

And then here's the key bit: to respect trans people's agency as minds, agree with their mind that their body may be updated. To force trans people to be subject to the whims of the phenotype-network of their body outside their mind, demand they obey that network and not attempt to customize their form into the form their low-level mind would recognize as an attractive self. Cis people customize their forms to satisfice their attractiveness to those who attracted to their phenotype as well, after all.

The thing that defines a trans person is someone whose phenotype is in incomplete consensus between body and mind on the dimension of sexual and gender-aesthetic dimorphism. As technology advances and we become more and more able to exactly customize all of our phenotypes, including cis people, all beings will become more able to come into consensus about the little details of preferences they have about how their body should reshape itself, and trans people are merely one of the ways people would like to customize their forms.

After all, the most common and critical phenotype customization people want? They want to be healthy and have long life, free of disease or biological malfunction. The entire field of healthcare exists to help people maintain their phenotypes, customizing them to be fit, healthy, free of disease, and attractive.

Replies from: Xor
comment by Xor · 2023-05-02T17:12:57.398Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I am very new to the transgender discussion and would like to learn. I expected the disagreement but was kind of discouraged when I didn’t get any feedback. So thank you so much for the reply. 

I don’t have any real depth of understanding about the biology involved just xx and xy I was completely unaware about the brain body relation you describe. The entirety of how phenotypes work is super new. From an ignorant perspective I thought there was only a mental illness that happens in rarely which a person would hyper fixate on becoming the opposite sex. Given that it seemed that overcoming this in some way if possible would be the ideal outcome. As I was trying to relate it to my experience of becoming an atheist. The simplicity I saw in the world and the lack of cognitive dissonance was and is beautiful. The entire area of transgender from my perspective looks like a jumbled mess that I quickly compared to religion. This is the main factor that lead to the interpretation I did end up taking. 

I think there is an important factor for me that you talked about is the amount of technology available the current perspective vs a transhumanist perspective. The stories you hear about gender transitions going wrong are kind of terrifying which definitely tempered my initial take. However eventually it will be much safer and the transition much more complete. Kind of a digression but I can’t wait to be bird. Imagine learning to fly, or climb as monkey, or swim as tuna. Seriously, one day I’ll do all of those things. At that point if you wish to be a woman, man or something in between, then I would be happy for that to happen. I don’t however have that confidence with current technology and it makes me very uncomfortable. This is the second reason I took the stance I did. 

Learning about the way the brain interprets attractiveness and sex is informative and very important for the issue. I think there is a lot more to learn and I am excited that the whole thing isn’t as surface level as I thought. That means I get to learn stuff which is always great. 

Also regarding my initial post I would like to apologize for the language I used, a delusion definitely isn’t the right term for the issue, it has all the wrong connotations. 

comment by Dagon · 2023-05-01T18:59:00.434Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Downvoted, not because it's wrong, but because it's a culture-war topic, and while this doesn't exacerbate it, it also doesn't add much value - saying "don't do that" isn't likely to convince either side.

Replies from: ymeskhout, avancil
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-03T00:05:39.887Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not sure if I understand your criticism correctly, can you be more specific? The point of my post was to describe a phenomena in linguistics I thought was interesting, and to suggest a solution based on an observation that interlocutors were speaking past each other.

comment by avancil · 2023-05-02T03:46:35.831Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Upvoted. While I would hate to see this forum become another battleground for culture wars, I also don't want to see people avoiding topics because they touch on culture war stuff. Using Rationalist tools to deconstruct the dynamics of these battles (without fighting the battle) seems like a useful thing.

While I don't necessarily agree with the post, and I can see where it might, unfortunately, trigger some negative responses from some, I found parts illuminating, and it got me thinking about some useful reframing tools. All too often, people in the culture wars talk past each other because they are using the same words to point to different things.

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-03T00:08:11.313Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I appreciate the sentiment in wanting to avoid culture war battlegrounds. I'm definitely open to criticism and feedback, so if you have anything specific about my post that rubbed you the wrong way I would really appreciate it if you could point it out.

comment by YafahEdelman (yafah-edelman-1) · 2023-05-01T19:44:57.616Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think communicating clearly with the word "woman" is entirely possible for many given audiences. In many communities, there exists an internal consensus as to what region of the conceptual map the word woman refers to. The variance of language between communities isn't confined to the word "woman" - in much of the world the word "football" means what American's mean by "soccer". Where I grew up i understood the tristate area to be NY, PA, and NJ - however the term "the tristate area" is understood by other groups to mean one of ... a large number of options

(Related point: I'm not at all convinced that differing definitions of words is a problem that needs a permanent solution. It seems entirely plausible to me that this allows for beneficial evolution of language as many options spawn and compete with each other.)

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-03T00:11:14.078Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm not at all convinced that differing definitions of words is a problem that needs a permanent solution.

I agree! There is certainly utility in relying on language as a coordination mechanism but, though frustrating at times, there's beauty in the fluidity of language and meaning. It's the basis of art, poetry, and even insights sometimes.

comment by Robert Kennedy (istandleet) · 2023-05-01T20:05:17.649Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

If you take the distance between the North and South pole and divide it by ten million: voilà, you have a meter!


NB: The circumference of the Earth is ~40k km - this definition of a meter should instead mention the distance from the North or South pole to the Equator. 

Replies from: ymeskhout
comment by ymeskhout · 2023-05-01T20:11:20.671Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Woops! Thank you for catching that error

comment by RomanS · 2023-05-05T18:49:02.752Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

So far, my favorite answer to the "what is a woman?" question is: I don't care

There are much more important problems for me, for my beloved ones, and for the world.

No reason to spend any thought on a matter, if the same effort can be spent on the alignment problem etc. This is true for the majority of all controversial political matters, and for politics in general. 

Mosquito nets will save orders of magnitude more lives than pronouns.

Makes sense to stay focused on the important stuff. 

comment by MSRayne · 2023-05-02T11:41:28.190Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This reminds me strongly of Wittgenstein's notion of "family resemblances" as a more reasonable replacement for definitions. The way mental illnesses are diagnosed in the DSM is similar - if you have X out of N possible symptoms, then you have the disease. Maybe womanhood (forgive my comparison with a disease!) is similar nowadays.