I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think “white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist”.
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:
“Tranny” is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I’m not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I’d be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
Other slurs include “shemale” (extreme slur), “hermaphrodite”, and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say “Whoops, sorry” when they’re pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn’t hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it’s actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don’t think that’s true.
For example, I don’t think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don’t want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just—don’t ask me how I know this, and I won’t tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he’s actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he’d like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no “deep down” for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn’t take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, and becomes one”. (Another is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, but of course he can never be”.) gwern basically seems to use that one. It’s not a very good one—it casts trans people as inexplicably making a weird choice, it misrepresents pre-transition people even worse than mine, and in basically all instances it’s too focused on physical sex. “A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation. It encourages approximately the right behaviors (e.g. shutting the fuck up about birth names), and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
“A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation [...] and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
I understand that some people don’t model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it’s certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who domodel themselves as agents—sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you’re going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people’s feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that’s what you want to do. You cannot edit other people’s models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
We have some idea, actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who’ve actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
For your purposes, the glass floor on the Grand Canyon Skywalk is completely safe to walk on, and the appearance of imminent falling is due to your sensory system not completely understanding how glass works. Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There would be no need for anyone to cry “subjugation to others’ purposes” if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren’t going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn’t act like you believe that it’s unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with “for your purposes.” There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with “for your purposes”, is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, “for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics”. The statement after “for your purposes” is ill-defined (what exactly does ‘described’ mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you’re currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, “for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over”, while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.
For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn’t want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.
It isn’t necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of ‘innate’) to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.
Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience’s purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions “subjugate” you to make them correct.
What I’m trying to do is to say that (with the “for your purposes”) to the tourist, then turn to the engineer and say “And for your purposes, the glass floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and your job is to prevent it from killing people”. See my reply to Zack.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief’s influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you’ve seen here lately?
I’ll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue for a word, but ‘trans’ is shorter than ‘trannie’ or ‘tranny’ so that would work while apparently not being offensive.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
Well, that video is something alright… Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to discussions of moderation/censorship—because there’s essentially no filter on the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism, homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka as bottom, each song giving one’s perspective, with the usual cute drawings and short animation. Not one’s usual fare.)
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible.
Quoth Gwern:
yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be
its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific
techniques, and the other is a weird fruit
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern’s said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn’t get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn’t share his feelings doesn’t apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he’s managed to shift focus onto starling’s publishing of IRC logs and otherwise dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that’s not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way—the kind of horrible that doesn’t even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure but does imply the person shouldn’t exactly be surprised that other people think they’re a bit of a shithead), then what is?
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I’ve given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don’t see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I’m confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24⁄7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness
That’d be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it). I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn’t get to be fairly described in such terms.
It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask;
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn’t done anything horrible? Isn’t that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with? That’s what I’m getting at here.
But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do?
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn’t like, a ravening mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern’s blood. Your options are not limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves, and it’s kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.
I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think “white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist”.
I don’t think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:
“Tranny” is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I’m not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I’d be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
Other slurs include “shemale” (extreme slur), “hermaphrodite”, and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say “Whoops, sorry” when they’re pointed out to you.
Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.
This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn’t hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it’s actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don’t think that’s true.
For example, I don’t think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don’t want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just—don’t ask me how I know this, and I won’t tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he’s actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he’d like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.
Well obviously it is false as a matter of fact. Anyone who does the slightest bit of research about transition finds a zillion cis(-ish) people who question their gender for any person who commits to transitioning, gender fluidity, effects of socialization, and a mountain of doubts and steps backwards in every trans person but the most poster-childish. Anyone who digs a bit deeper will find heavy philosophizing and introspection about how there is no “deep down” for gender or any other identity, the social construction of gender, the weird hangups and questioning about each step of social or medical transition, the hard choices between ideal gender expression and social pressure that makes the notion of real identity meaningless, and a bunch of people who detransition and sometimes kill themselves.
But someone who does not want to the research, and would even prefer to stop thinking about the creepy stuff as quickly as possible, is going to need a simplistic caricature, preferably one that doesn’t take apart the concept of little neat gender boxes at all. A mainstream one is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, and becomes one”. (Another is “A man decides he’d rather be a woman, but of course he can never be”.) gwern basically seems to use that one. It’s not a very good one—it casts trans people as inexplicably making a weird choice, it misrepresents pre-transition people even worse than mine, and in basically all instances it’s too focused on physical sex. “A woman is misclassified as a man, finds out and corrects it” is a more useful approximation. It encourages approximately the right behaviors (e.g. shutting the fuck up about birth names), and is closer to the motivation of transpeople than the “choice to change” one.
I understand that some people don’t model themselves as being sufficiently agentlike to admit that their major life choices were in fact choices; it’s certainly politically convenient to claim to have an immutable innate identity that everyone needs to respect. But other people who do model themselves as agents—sometimes even genuinely dysphoric people who might partially understand a little bit of what you’re going through!---might have an interest in defending social norms that let them describe their model of reality in non-contrived ways, even if that occasionally hurts some people’s feelings. You can and should edit your body and social presentation if that’s what you want to do. You cannot edit other people’s models of reality, and people might push back if you try to shame them into doing so.
We have some idea, actually, insofar as the number of trans people who get GRS is much smaller than the number of total trans people (the procedures are quite costly, often not covered or completely covered by health care providers, seldom available without travelling long distances and rarely performed on patients less than 18 years of age, or with certain medical contraindications). The number of people who’ve actually had SRS serves as a very crude lower limit against which you can check other numbers and get some idea of prevalence.
I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I’ve seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.
This defensiveness is uncalled for. Compare:
There would be no need for anyone to cry “subjugation to others’ purposes” if someone said that. The Grand Canyon Skywalk is safe to walk on; your aliefs aren’t going to cooperate; if you can edit them, it makes sense to do so, but at any rate you shouldn’t act like you believe that it’s unsafe, for example by forcibly preventing loved ones from walking on the glass floor.
No one has ever prefaced such a statement with “for your purposes.” There is a reason for that.
It actually occurs fairly often. A good reason to prefix such a statement with “for your purposes”, is to indicate that modelling a statement as true is effective for achieving your purposes, without getting into a more complex discussion of whether it actually is true or not.
For example, “for your purposes, the movement of objects is described by Newtonian physics”. The statement after “for your purposes” is ill-defined (what exactly does ‘described’ mean?) as an actual claim about the universe, but the sentence as a whole is a useful empirical and falsifiable statement, saying that you can assume Newtonian physics are accurate enough for whatever you’re currently doing.
As a second example, it might be true to say to an individual walker arriving at a bridge, “for your purposes, the bridge is safe to walk over”, while for the purposes of a parade organiser, they cannot simply model the bridge as safe to walk over, but may need to consider weight tolerances and think in terms of more precise statements about what the bridge can support.
For your purposes as a human being in a typical situation who doesn’t want to signal negative things about and to any and all transgender people, you should behave in line with gender identity as innate. It is a reasonable piece of advice relating to social etiquette in this area.
It isn’t necessary to get into demonstrating the probable truth of this (including breaking down the definition of ‘innate’) to give this advice and the original quote decided to avoid starting that argument, which seems like a reasonable call.
Statements like this do make some assumptions about what your purposes are- in the bridge example I gave, the speaker is assuming the walker is not a parade organiser considering leading a parade over the bridge. Such assumptions and guesses about the audience’s purposes are unavoidable when giving advice, though, and this particular one seems quite reasonable. In no case do these assumptions “subjugate” you to make them correct.
What I’m trying to do is to say that (with the “for your purposes”) to the tourist, then turn to the engineer and say “And for your purposes, the glass floor is ridiculously unsafe and brittle, and possibly actively malicious, and your job is to prevent it from killing people”. See my reply to Zack.
On a blog dedicated to refining the art of human rationality, where it is a widely-shared normative belief that human aliefs are frequently irrational to the detriment of the person holding them and moreover to net negative effect on the things we value in the world...telling someone that an alief which leads to repeated, harmful behavior and an inability to socially interact with some meaningful percentage of other members of the site (coupled with a high probability of incidentally causing them harm or stress indirectly as a result of that alief’s influence on their actions) is mistaken, is more damaging than anything else you’ve seen here lately?
Really?
Really??
I’ll keep those terminological points in mind. Shortness and brevity is a virtue for a word, but ‘trans’ is shorter than ‘trannie’ or ‘tranny’ so that would work while apparently not being offensive.
Well, that video is something alright… Vocaloid is actually a bit relevant to discussions of moderation/censorship—because there’s essentially no filter on the music/video host NND and making Vocaloid songs or videos is open to anyone who wants to, you get plenty of poor quality or offensive videos (sexism, homosexual stereotyping, ethnocentrism) but you also get all sorts of bafflingly idiosyncratic or strange or unique gems. (To give a memorable example, a few days ago I was watching a pair of BDSM-themed songs pairing Miku as top and Luka as bottom, each song giving one’s perspective, with the usual cute drawings and short animation. Not one’s usual fare.)
Quoth Gwern:
How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern’s said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn’t get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn’t share his feelings doesn’t apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering to feel his audience out, again, apparently in the knowledge that he has specific issues with the group in question, which means he was pretty confident that it was safe to do (and judging by the degree to which he’s managed to shift focus onto starling’s publishing of IRC logs and otherwise dodge the actual issue, he seems to have been right).
If that’s not horrible (in an everyday, pedestrian sort of way—the kind of horrible that doesn’t even vaguely imply par with $MindkillingHistoricalFigure but does imply the person shouldn’t exactly be surprised that other people think they’re a bit of a shithead), then what is?
Well, I am a weird fruit.
There’s something… dissonant… about putting gwern on trial and deliberating on whether he’s guilty of second-degree shitheadedness. It doesn’t sound like the right question to ask; gwern has explained how the inside of his head works, and I’ve given advice for not acting like a dick taking his explanations into account. I don’t see the point of determining which mean names he should be called, even for the purpose of social punishment.
I’m confused by the ethics of inner prejudice. I would certainly prefer gwern not to need to control himself to be decent to transpeople, and barring that I would prefer him to control himself 24⁄7 without going wonky in the head. But since that is not to be, what are we supposed to do? Boycott his statistical analysis of Harry Potter fanfic?
That’d be another point missed. I am not interested in a ritual condemnation of gwern, or advocating for it (or chastising you for failing to advocate for it). I am a bit confused at what exactly your standards are, such that the behavior described (do you feel my description is inaccurate?) doesn’t get to be fairly described in such terms.
Then why did you ask it, and answer in the negative, by stating Gwern hadn’t done anything horrible? Isn’t that intrinsically subjective? Why the need to defend the behavior as something no reasonable person could take issue with? That’s what I’m getting at here.
Not go out of your way to absolve him of it either? This isn’t like, a ravening mob with pitchforks and torches calling for Gwern’s blood. Your options are not limited to a choice between offering sanctuary and tossing him to the wolves, and it’s kind of scary that you appear to view it that way.