Really appreciated all ~16,000 words. For what it’s worth, I agree with what Pablo said above.
The parts about your ideological journey were quite fun to read. Reminded me of HPMOR Harry learning partial transfiguration—maybe in that he finds a way to see category boundaries that others can’t.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you think social transition “doesn’t seem like a smart move”. I read some of your posts on gender categories, and I feel like I’m agreeing for the most part but losing you in the conclusions. I haven’t read much about this, so forgive me if I’m retreading obvious ground.
My impression of what you’re saying is that even if you asked others to use different pronouns for you, internally they would keep classifying you into the same gender-cluster they always did—the one based on biological features—and this disconnect would be a loss for societal rationality. Specifically, we might lose the common knowledge that our internal classifiers operate mostly on the biological clusters, or that the biological clusters exist at all—or the biological clusters might just become harder to talk about, when commonly-occurring nouns like “man” and “woman” and pronouns like “he” and “she” no longer map to them. [1]
I completely agree that we don’t want to lose the common knowledge of biological clusters. But I don’t think changing pronouns has to contribute to that loss—I would hope that with careful communication, one could change pronouns without contributing at all to the social pressures that discourage discussion of biological clusters.
As for the terms we use to refer to biological clusters becoming more niche, I guess that possibility doesn’t seem obviously bad to me. Maybe it’d be better if we talked a bit less about the biological clusters; I’m not sure why we should privilege the current state of affairs. But in any case, the stakes are low—word frequencies and definitions fluctuate all the time, and alternative names like “biological male” are easily understood and only a few syllables longer.
(On the other hand, if I think of redefining “man” and “woman” as a deliberate attempt, by some contagious meme, to shift the kinds of ideas we think about, then it does seem a lot more worrying.)
TL;DR: Socially transitioning shouldn’t have to be/feel like promoting “lying” or bad epistemics.
Really appreciated all ~16,000 words. For what it’s worth, I agree with what Pablo said above.
The parts about your ideological journey were quite fun to read. Reminded me of HPMOR Harry learning partial transfiguration—maybe in that he finds a way to see category boundaries that others can’t.
I’d be interested to hear more about why you think social transition “doesn’t seem like a smart move”. I read some of your posts on gender categories, and I feel like I’m agreeing for the most part but losing you in the conclusions. I haven’t read much about this, so forgive me if I’m retreading obvious ground.
My impression of what you’re saying is that even if you asked others to use different pronouns for you, internally they would keep classifying you into the same gender-cluster they always did—the one based on biological features—and this disconnect would be a loss for societal rationality. Specifically, we might lose the common knowledge that our internal classifiers operate mostly on the biological clusters, or that the biological clusters exist at all—or the biological clusters might just become harder to talk about, when commonly-occurring nouns like “man” and “woman” and pronouns like “he” and “she” no longer map to them. [1]
I completely agree that we don’t want to lose the common knowledge of biological clusters. But I don’t think changing pronouns has to contribute to that loss—I would hope that with careful communication, one could change pronouns without contributing at all to the social pressures that discourage discussion of biological clusters.
As for the terms we use to refer to biological clusters becoming more niche, I guess that possibility doesn’t seem obviously bad to me. Maybe it’d be better if we talked a bit less about the biological clusters; I’m not sure why we should privilege the current state of affairs. But in any case, the stakes are low—word frequencies and definitions fluctuate all the time, and alternative names like “biological male” are easily understood and only a few syllables longer.
(On the other hand, if I think of redefining “man” and “woman” as a deliberate attempt, by some contagious meme, to shift the kinds of ideas we think about, then it does seem a lot more worrying.)
TL;DR: Socially transitioning shouldn’t have to be/feel like promoting “lying” or bad epistemics.