What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female? Relevant to my life because of this. I’m likely to be asked about this if for no other reason than students seeing how I handle such a question.
What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is “It depends on what your disguised query is”.
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don’t see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of “defecting by accident”.
This. After reading the Sequences, many things that seemed like “important complicated questions” before are now reclassified as “obvious confusions in thinking”.
Even before reading Sequences I was already kinda supsicious that something is wrong when the long debates on such questions do not lead to meaningful answers, despite the questions do not contain any difficult math or any experimentally expensive facts. But I couldn’t transform this suspicion into an explanation of what exactly was wrong; so I didn’t feel certain about it myself.
After reading Sequences, many “deep problems” became “yet another case of someone confusing a map with the territory”. -- But the important thing is not merely learning that the password is “map is not the territory”, but the technical details of how specifically the maps are built, and how specifically the artifacts arise on those maps.
Yes, it is derived from General Semantics. I haven’t read the original, so I do not know how much to credit Eliezer for making the original ideas easier to read. But I credit him for bringing the ideas to my attention.
In this case the disguised query is “Were I to ask ‘What would stop someone assigned male at birth to fraudulently claim to be a trans woman in order to seek admission to Smith College?‘, what would I mean by ‘fraudulently’?”
If you “use the word that the person in question prefers,” then the word acquires a new meaning. From that moment on, the word “male” means “a human being who prefers to be called ‘male’” and the word “female” means “a human being who prefers to be called ‘female’”. These are surely not the original meaning of the words.
Why do you care about the ‘original’ meaning of the word?
Let’s imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word “sound” means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in
Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants that reliably generate the qualia of sound. I therefore have a different map from you, where the word ‘sound’ means the subjective experience in a person’s brain. This works well for the disguised queries that I care about.
If we meet at a cocktail party and you try to convince me that the ‘original’ meaning of sound is accoustic vibrations, this is not a dispute about the territory. What is happening is that you are arguing the primacy of your map over mine, which is a pure status challenge.
The purpose of categories in this context is to facilitate communication, ie transfer of information about the territory from one mind to another. Agreeing on a definition is sometimes important to avoid confusion over what is being said. However, if there is no such confusion, insisting on one definition over another is a pure monkey status game
Most common terms will, when used in a context that doesn’t imply a specific meaning, be taken by the listener to imply a default meaning. Furthermore, some contexts do imply a meaning, but only weakly; if the context makes slightly more sense with meaning A, but you know that most people default to meaning B, and you are Bayseian, you should infer that the intended meaning was B.
Caring about the “original meaning of the word” is about this default meaning, and is not nonsensical. If I say that this person is female, without qualifiers such as “genetically female”, what will others understand me as saying? Will what they understand me as saying be more or less accurate than if I refer to them as male?
Like others said, the answer is more like “depends what do you want to know”. In this case, you need to figure out what is the point of an all-female college at all. Fixing systemic disadvantages? Rape safety? More cooperative athmosphere? What you need to figure out is not whether trans women are “really, truly, indeed” women, which is a meaningless kind of sentence, but more like whether they can be categorized as women for the purposes of the goals of an all-women college.
But another relevant aspect is, and this I guess is not discussed so much on LW so I am not really sure what is the best way of wording it… basically that means to an end tend to ossify into values in themselves, via becoming part of identity, tradition etc. There is the old story of a Zen monastery, where the cat made a lot of noise during meditation so they ended up tying it up and 200 years they write treatises about the spiritial significance of having a tied up cat around symbolizing the tied up mind.
Even if the idea of an all-women college was originally utilitarian, a means to an end, now it is easily identity based. And identity isn’t a rational thing. There is no truly objective answer whether biological women should or should not accept trans women into their idea of women-as-an-identity-group, because identity is something that tends to break free from the original reasons of creating it. People tend to ask precisely these “are X truly, really, indeed Y” when discussing identity, and there is no good answer, because on the rational level we can only ask the question “is it useful to categorize X as Y for the purposes of Z” and identity is precisely something that breaks free of such purposes and becomes a tribe on its own. There is no right or wrong answer about who should be allowed to be a member of a tribe. It is largely based on the feelings of the other tribe members. You cannot really give an objective, rational answer to who should be considered a hardcore Manchaster United fan or what is true, real punk music as opposed to pop punk. This just based on how the people in question feel.
Except all women’s colleges arguably still serve a purpose. There is reasonable evidence that women learn better in an all woman environment.
You may ask how trans-”women” affect this. Well there isn’t much data on the subject (and unlikely to be anytime soon given how reluctant people are to research politically incorrect topics). However, given how any m-to-f transsexuals appear to be masculine men with an autogynephilia fetish, my guess would be they are effectively men for this purpose.
However, given how any m-to-f transsexuals appear to be masculine men with an autogynephilia fetish, my guess would be they are effectively men for this purpose.
That’s a misrepresentation of both Bailey and Sailer; Bailey claims that most MtFs cluster into either “started out gay” or “started out straight,” with the first group transitioning early in life (high school, college, etc.) and the second group transitioning late in life (typically after married with children). Thus, the sort of MtF that will go to a woman’s college is disproportionately likely to be romantically interested in men / have a more feminine personality.
Bailey claims that most MtFs cluster into either “started out gay” or “started out straight,” with the first group transitioning early in life (high school, college, etc.) and the second group transitioning late in life
It is unlikely to stay that way now that incentives have changes, in particular, I expect a lot of “heterosexual male who wants to enter the women’s bathroom” type “transsexuals”.
I don’t know. My wife / former GFs said me they tend to prefer mixed working environments, they told me all-female environments get too filled with all kinds of back-stabby intrigue “she said that she said that you said that I said” and guys dampen that.
What does it mean to be female? It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not. Lets call this property, that baby girls, hens and women in hunter-gatherer tribes share, and baby boys etc. do not, property P. People who identify as female are presumably claiming they have property P, and presumably think this is a substantive claim.
Now, could P be something such that merely believing you had property P, made you have property P? Certainly there are some properties like this:
X has P if and only if ( X has two x chromosomes OR X believes ( X has property P ) )
but I think this is clearly unsatisfactory. For example, it would mean that an ordinary young boy who, upon being taught about gender for the first time, was momentarily mistaken and thought he was female, would instantly become female. And it would mean that transwomen were asserting a disjunction of a falsehood and a weird recursive clause.
There are social-role based alternatives, along the lines of
X has P if and only if ( X wishes to be treated in the typical manner of people with property P )
but this doesn’t work for Tomboys, who wish to be treated broadly like boys but are nonetheless definitely girls. Nor does it work for extreme feminists, who do not wish women (including themselves) to be treated in the typical way women are treated.
Now, whether believing something is sufficient to make it true is of course a separate issue from what is politically prudent of you to say. My guess is that your students would ask you this question have a few motivations:
If you say that the map is not the territory, they can safely reject you as an outdated and uncaring reactionary, and will reject what you say on other subjects.
If you say that believing things makes them true, they can say “even our ultra-conservative republican lecturer agrees”.
My advice to you is to say ‘mu’. Ask your students what they mean by female, or why they are asking. Then you can respond in the correct manner according to their definition, pointing out that if they don’t like the answer, maybe they didn’t really mean that definition.
It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not.
Why? We use the word “female” when referring to babies and animals, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily talking about the same thing as when we refer to adult humans; and if we are, it doesn’t mean that we’re talking about something they actually have. (I assume that it doesn’t make sense to talk about whether a baby is straight or gay, for example.)
but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily talking about the same thing as when we refer to adult humans
Why not?
I assume that it doesn’t make sense to talk about whether a baby is straight or gay, for example.
Well, according to the (admittedly rather dubious) party line being gay is an intrinsic property and not a choice and most definitely not subject to environmental influence by pro-gay memes.
Heck, the official (and even more dubious) party line on trans-people is that they have always been their gender trapped in the wrong bodies.
Because the map is not the territory? You can argue that they are the same thing, but the fact that they use the same word isn’t sufficient.
Well, according to the (admittedly rather dubious) party line being gay is an intrinsic property and not a choice and most definitely not subject to environmental influence by pro-gay memes.
That doesn’t mean it’s a property that babies have. They might have the property “will be gay when they hit puberty”, but that’s a different property. A six-month old baby might have a gene that will give her a speech defect, but for now she speaks just as well as every other baby her age.
Heck, the official (and even more dubious) party line on trans-people is that they have always been their gender trapped in the wrong bodies.
I don’t think this is true, but I’m not an expert.
Heck, the official (and even more dubious) party line on trans-people is that they have always been their gender trapped in the wrong bodies.
I don’t think this is true, but I’m not an expert.
It almost certainly isn’t. Of course believing that makes you an “evil transphobe” according to the official party line, especially if you consider the implication for gender reassignment surgery of children.
The ‘line’ is that it is very complicated. There are people with strong body dysphorias who have always had them, there are people who care much more about social presentation than anatomy, and everybody in between or in combination. The social presentation can be separate from body image considerations, and for those people in particular ‘wrong body’ would be inaccurate. There are people whose experienced-from-within gender is different at different times or who do not strongly identify with masculine or feminine, or with bits of both. Knowing multiple people in various positions on these spectra, trying to collapse the experience of everyone with non-default gender situations to one party line is a recipe for confusion, unproductive arguments, and missing the point for some of them.
So was Jenner always a woman trapped in a man’s body? The answer according to his (her) transition miniseries is yes (complete with tales of sneaking into his mother’s closet to wear her clothes).
Sounds like that is the case for her, then. Can’t say I’ve been keeping up with that particular story. One of my friends has had a similarly-describable situation from a very early age as well.
Though again, using that phrase is lumping everything into one essentialist label that says everything rather than decomposing it into the potentially more useful descriptive subcategories ‘how one wants to be considered socially’, ‘the body one wishes one had’ / ‘the body one is willing to have given current medical technology and the costs and tradeoffs thereof’, ‘how one wishes to behave’, and ‘how one identifies internally’. Often these go together making that phrase more or less applicable, but sometimes they don’t, and to get at the truth can then require finer detail depending on what you want to know and who you are describing.
Two other friends of mine have had more complicated situations in their lives—one whom goes to some effort to decrease their external femininity in favor of a more androgynous presentation to match the way they feel internally and their dislike of a feminine appearance [while not going through the efforts of invasive medical transition because the effort and tradeoffs are not worth it to them, but would still choose a very different physical appearance if the tradeoffs were smaller and easier], and one whom is fine with a male body and being called ‘he’ but whom behaves in a very feminine manner because that is just the way he is and he feels being physically male doesn’t dictate his behavior, and feels wrong behaving in a masculine manner.
Sounds like that is the case for her, then. Can’t say I’ve been keeping up with that particular story.
Except, looking at his previous life, which included fathering several children, winning men’s Olympic medals, and being a media hound with corporate sponsorship, suggests that this is not in fact the case, and suggests other motivations for him to do this. Namely, the need to pull a stunt to get back in the spotlight.
That’s an argument for bringing our map closer to the territory, i.e., applying the word “gender” in humans to the same concept we use for animals. Not for completely messing up our map.
That “i.e.” is doing an awful lot of work. I don’t agree that the map is messed up, and moving a label doesn’t necessarily bring it closer to the territory.
We use the word “female” when referring to babies and animals, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily talking about the same thing as when we refer to adult humans
applying the word “gender” in humans to the same concept we use for animals
I’m not aware of the word “gender” being commonly applied to non-human animals for any concept, other than grammatical gender. You might be thinking of the concept usually referred to as “sex”.
If you want to follow that distinction, then I agree that “gender” doesn’t point to anything real aside from what is commonly pointed to by the word “sex”. Heck when “gender” first became used in its non-grammatical meaning, it was a euphemism for “sex” since the latter had acquired a meaning (as [Edit: an act]) that made it not necessarily SFW.
A pedantic correction: “gender” appears to have had that non-grammatical meaning since the 15th century (and has also had an NSFW meaning as a verb since even earlier) but (if the OED is to be trusted, which usually it is) it’s true that “gender” became widely used to mean males/females collectively in the 20th century because “sex” was too distracting. (It wasn’t “sex” as a verb, though, but “sex” as a noun meaning “copulation”.)
I don’t know the LessWrong-like answer, so I can only offer you the human, empathic answer.
Based on the phrasing of your question:
whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female
and the fact that you have posted it to LessWrong, I understand it to be a question about constructing a useful and consistent model of the human condition, rather than about respecting an actual or hypothetical human being. If so, I think you are asking the wrong question.
Your students want to learn from you, but on a more basic level, they want to feel safe with you. If you have a trans student, or a student with a trans friend/relative, she is likely to take your answer to this question very personally. Your choice boils down to whether you offer a personal welcome (by recognizing your student’s identity) or a personal affront (by implying that you have more authority than she does to determine who she “really is”).
I should add that it is a common failure mode for humans, when confronted with a counterexample to their existing model of the human condition, to insist that their model is correct and that the fellow human they are dealing with is a bad data point. As well as rude and demeaning, this approach is irrational and intellectually dishonest.
a counterexample to their existing model of the human condition
I’m not sure how this could be counted as a counterexample to anyone’s model. Presumably most people would agree that there are people who are confused about their sexuality. It would only be a counterexample to that model if the student was correct, but whether or not the student is correct is precisely what we are discussing.
If James agreed with the student, this would not be a counterexample to his beliefs, and if he disagrees with the student, it he would not agree that they represented a counterexample to the model.
Presumably most people would agree that there are people who are confused about their sexuality.
“Confused about their sexuality” is a particularly uncharitable characterization of a transgender person. Many are not confused, rather absolutely certain. Unless you’re using the term “confused” as a polite way of indicating that you believe such a person to be mistaken or delusional, in which case you would be begging the question.
By the way, gender is not the same thing as sexuality.
It would only be a counterexample to that model if the student was correct, but whether or not the student is correct is precisely what we are discussing.
If one models gender as a boolean switch that can be set to either “male” or “female”, and encounters an individual who has a combination of “male” and “female” characteristics, their model may not accommodate the new observation. I have watched people (who I previously considered fairly sane) break into a yelling fit when confronted with someone undergoing a gender transition, demanding to know their “real” gender and hurling insults when the response was not what they expected.
No, I am explaining how the appearance of transgender people is consistent with the conservative view: they are simply confused. I am not assuming anything.
If one models gender as a boolean switch that can be set to either “male” or “female”, and encounters an individual who has a combination of “male” and “female” characteristics, their model may not accommodate the new observation.
Unfortunately for this line of argument, there are a whole lot of things one can say that may cause personal affronts, some of which are essential as part of some debates and some of which may even express factual truths. If they are generalities, they might not even be disprovable by examples of individual humans (such as statements that some class of humans is more likely to have lower scores on IQ tests).
For the purposes of a all women college you have to ask yourself about the purpose of limiting the college to women.
Maybe there a perception out there that math isn’t a women’s subject. In mixed-gender classes woman are more likely to spent effort into signalling their strong femininity. The are spending more effort into engaging in actions that signal high mating market value when suitable mates are around.
Do transwomen trigger the same behavior? I don’t think that the gender that’s assigned at birth matters. On the other hand “identifies” is a complex word. Just checking a checkbox isn’t enough to stop being seen as a potential mating partner. The transwomen who spends enough effort on looking female that strangers easily identify them as being female on the other hand is unlikely to trigger mating market behavior.
Another reason to limit the college to women is about women being a minority that’s discriminated against. Transwomen do get discriminated against them and don’t get included in old boys networks. From that perspective it also seems fine to accept transwomen.
Maybe you can also think of other reasons for the policy of being all-women. Check whether those reasons matter for transwomen.
There seem to be strong laws against gender discrimination in the US, how does your college avoid getting sued for discrimination?
There seem to be strong laws against gender discrimination in the US, how does your college avoid getting sued for discrimination?
I wonder about this also. First, there is a supreme court case from 1982, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, which held that admitting only women violated the Equal Protection clause of the constitution. This seems to have not had much impact on college admissions.
For one, they held that when checking the if a law violates Equal Protection by discriminating against women, it is only subject to “intermediate scrutiny”, as opposed to discrimination by race, which is subject to “strict scrutiny”. So the state interest that has to be served by a law in order to outweigh the discrimination against women does not have to be as compelling as for race. A concurrence also noted that “the Court’s holding today is limited to the context of a professional nursing school. Ante at 723, n. 7, 727. Since the Court’s opinion relies heavily on its finding that women have traditionally dominated the nursing profession, see ante at 729-731, it suggests that a State might well be justified in maintaining, for example, the option of an all-women’s business school or liberal arts program.” Maybe that’s indeed what happened later.
It seems that the strongest law against sex discrimination in education is not the constitution, but Title IX. However, Title IX explicitly grandfathered in existing single-sex colleges: “in regard to admissions this section shall not apply to any public institution of undergraduate higher education which is an institution that traditionally and continually from its establishment has had a policy of admitting only students of one sex.”
Do transwomen trigger the same behavior? I don’t think that the gender that’s assigned at birth matters.
Why wouldn’t it? Or rather the important feature is possession of a Y chromosome, which in almost all cases is the same thing as the “gender assigned at birth” given how the procedure tends to work. However, the phrase “gender assigned at birth” is highly misleading since it seems to imply that the feature is based on the choices of the hospital staff and/or parents rather then the chromosomes of the child.
It’s notable that the second highest paid “female” CEO would appear to be a trans-”woman”. Who fathered a number of children before “realizing” this. And if I may dispense with the currently fashionable charade of pretending trans-”woman” were really women trapped in men’s bodies, appears to me a masculine man with an autogynephilia fetish.
Historically, the transgendered were swept under the rug in Western society and we’re left with hopelessly inadequate naming conventions. Some cultures have come up with extra genders in order to accommodate the transgendered and this sort of question is moot.
Working within the present naming conventions, we can develop a simplified model. Suppose there are two sexes (M and F) and two genders (M and F). To every person we can associate an ordered pair where e.g. (M,F) would denote someone who is biologically male but identifies as female. Mathematically, we have a map F from the set of humans (H) to the cartesian product {M,F} X {M,F}.
The question at hand can be stated thus: suppose we wish to define a projection operator p: {M,F} X {M,F} to {M,F}. Is it better to project onto the first coordinate or the second? In other words, should we associate (M,F) with M or with F?
Projecting onto a coordinate loses information. This is unavoidable. The answer will depend on which bit of information we consider more important. That, in turn, depends entirely on our values. My own view is that if we accept the legitimacy of being transgender (as opposed to considering it a mental defect), then one’s present self-identified gender is far more pertinent to daily life and so deserves priority. Changing our conventions would be ideal, but in the meantime we have to deal with accidents of history.
What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female?
What do you mean by “indeed”? That is, neural categories seems like the right place to start. (And, especially as a professor, that seems like the right thing to talk about when students ask about a political issue—not your position, but the mental algorithms you’re executing to determine your position.)
Our society is currently set up to assume that there are only two genders, male and female, and that those categories imply many other things. You can encounter this everywhere, from pronouns in language to the M/F boxes on government forms. If a person cannot be adequately described by those categories, with their implicit assumptions, (and there are people who even on a biological basis cannot be described as purely male or female, based on what genitals or chromosomes they have), then they likely have a difficult life, and it is important to be kind to them, (not that it is not important to be kind to people with easy lives.)
I would keep in mind, when addressing questions regarding this issue, just how hard it would be to live a life in a society completely not set up for something so basic and personal, that by daily interactions does not acknowledge one’s true experience and tries to force badly constructed and mismatched categories onto the person to make the cognitive dissonance go away, instead of addressing the problems with the categories.
my general answer to similar questions of hard to tease out results is:-
either way this does not help me do the things that I do and be good at life. (other than to specifically related to those people, at which point—ask them what they want and create the categories around their preference)
gender is only a map made by humans—one humans have found useful for a long time. A map should be used any way possible to make the territory easier to predict.
A map should be used any way possible to make the territory easier to predict.
Except it correlates with a bunch of things from chromosomes, to physical strength, to IQ, to ability to impregnate versus to become pregnant. If we look at a fewprominent examples of trans-”women” the results don’t appear to be hard to tease out.
Well, I wasn’t disagreeing with anything you said in the grandparent although possibly with some things you meant to imply. (I’m not completely clear on what you meant to imply.)
I was unclear as to the quote you selected and the link to your comment.
What do you think I was implying; I don’t think I was implying anything particularly hidden. It would help me to understand what I might have been implying for improving my communication in the future.
perhaps you meant to quote:
gender is only a map made by humans
I hope I wasn’t implying that the map is wrong; I was trying to say that the map is historically quite good; and only recently is it becoming challenged with the possibilities of more modern genders opening up through technology or medical intervention.
only recently is it becoming challenged with the possibilities of more modern genders opening up through technology or medical intervention.
Except for the most the the technologies haven’t changed it, e.g., men still can’t give birth and women can’t impregnate women. Also most of the people claim to be “transgender” aren’t even availing themselves of ancient that can do something, e.g., Bruce Jenner wasn’t even willing to cut off his penis.
Be careful with your sweeping statements. I personally know of greater than one person who has gone through gender reassignment surgery. while the ability to ipregnate/be impregnated is still very much permanently attached to XYgender, it is only a matter of time.
You might know of the prevalence of “Ladyboys” in thai culture. there is a gene that is linked to that condition, and it affects a large number of their population.
I wouldn’t be forcing people who don’t fit into the existing gender territory to attempt to fit if they don’t (especially if all they do is break your personal map about it). I believe in personal liberties as long as you don’t harm others.
You got downvoted for having a contrarian view that was also badly expressed. I have neutralised. (try to express it clearer or more delicately in the future)
My point is that can’t be what the “transsexual” movement, so why did you claim it was?
I am sorry; I don’t understand this sentence, was there perhaps a spelling error?
right to insist others play along with their delusions and/or acting out.
I can see what you are saying that it burdens everyone else to go along with the decisions of a person to make choices that are non-standard about gender. I haven’t really considered the effect of the total burden placed on others.
when analysing this issue; I tend to weigh up the perspectives:
for whatever reason; (reason not relevant at all; ranging from hormonal imbalances to psychological reasons to environmental factors), a person decides their ability to fit into the M/F gender structure of society works better if they fit in a place other than the one phenotypically associated with their brain at birth. Their attitude is around their personal relationship with the world.
from the perspective of anyone this person interacts with; “this is slightly confusing”. It might be an assault on one’s understanding to be thrown into a state of confusion, there are multiple solutions to this problem; they might include:-
a. avoiding the assault on your sensibilities by avoiding the people who don’t fit the map
b. ensuring that there are no people who do not fit your map by changing the people, or
c. ensuring there are no people who don’t fit the map, by changing the map.
In the sense that we really only have power over ourselves. we sure can wish to be able to control others; but that is wrong. and conflicts with personal liberties.
The person in 1; is changing themselves to better fit into the world they find themselves in.
The person in 2b is trying to change the world where it disagrees with them, whereas in 2a or 2c, the person is finding solutions that involve changing themselves, and not the world.
I wouldn’t be insisting anything of you; but I would like to make it clear that the 2b attitude is literally impossible to maintain. If we were to fulfil the desires of every person who wished to change the external world; the wishes would come into conflict where some 1 person would wish for something one way and some 2b person would wish it the opposite.
In this sense the right to “insist others play along”, is nothing but the right to ask permission to entertain your own delusions (and maps) about yourself and your interaction with the world. It carries no bearing on what external parties do; unlike a party who is claiming that “playing along with someone else’s gender delusion” is a burden on them, and insists that external parties play along with their own map (of M/F etc).
I’d like to encourage you to further express your opinion in this discussion but I have to point out; as evidence by a downvote; you are talking about a delicate issue; one likely to be downvoted simply for your view; in light of this—please be delicate in expressing your reply; and to save me some time misunderstanding; feel free to be verbose about it.
You got downvoted for having a contrarian view that was also badly expressed. I have neutralised. (try to express it clearer or more delicately in the future)
Down voted for concern trolling. (And no I don’t care about a single down vote.)
I am sorry; I don’t understand this sentence, was there perhaps a spelling error?
Fixed. I changed the grammar of that sentence several times as I was editing.
I can see what you are saying that it burdens everyone else to go along with the decisions of a person to make choices that are non-standard about gender. I haven’t really considered the effect of the total burden placed on others.
Suppose a man walks up to you and claims to be both Jesus and John Lennon, and another man walks up to you claiming to be a woman. Would you accommodate one or both of their delusions and how? What accounts for the difference? Also note how LW takes a very different approach to discussing the two delusions.
In this sense the right to “insist others play along”, is nothing but the right to ask permission to entertain your own delusions (and maps) about yourself and your interaction with the world.
Except not all maps are equal. Some are more accurate then others.
It carries no bearing on what external parties do; unlike a party who is claiming that “playing along with someone else’s gender delusion” is a burden on them, and insists that external parties play along with their own map (of M/F etc).
Except it does, e.g., the deluded individual insists men on attending women’s colleges and going to women’s bathrooms.
Suppose a man walks up to you and claims to be both Jesus and John Lennon, and another man walks up to you claiming to be a woman. Would you accommodate one or both of their delusions and how?
That depends on what is required to accommodate the two people.
If “jesus” guy insists on being worshipped, then thats infringing on the boundaries of others; if he wishes to be left to his own devices of enlightenment (talking to bushes and drinking wine-water) - then sure, good for him and his utilons of happiness.
Similarly if “woman” wishes to change the world that could be violating the personal rights of others; however keeping to yourself and what you can reasonably have power over—does not burden others.
the deluded individual insists men on attending women’s colleges and going to women’s bathrooms.
This is an example that describes violating personal rights of others. Because of this example I believe I agree with you, however we disagree over what could/could not be permitted by reasonable liberties.
That depends on what is required to accommodate the two people.
Let’s put it this way. Would you recommend he get psychological counseling for his delusion, or tell him that his map is a perfectly valid one and that how he(she?) feels about himself he is by definition correct?
Also, suppose the men wants to adopt a kid. Should he be able to? Should adoption agencies have the right to refuse him?
the deluded individual insists men on attending women’s colleges and going to women’s bathrooms.
This is an example that describes violating personal rights of others. Because of this example I believe I agree with you, however we disagree over what could/could not be permitted by reasonable liberties.
Unfortunately, these are examples of demands “transwomen” are making, and frequently getting in the US. Frequently backed up by state laws.
Would you recommend he get psychological counseling for his delusion, or tell him that his map is a perfectly valid one
I would do neither as both are examples of attempting to influence the world beyond the personal scope.
suppose the men wants to adopt a kid.
I have no knowledge of existing processes, but I assume somewhere it involves counselling or an evaluation as to whether the person is fit to parent. (some kind of massive paperwork process) If they pass such an ordinary process, then they should be able to do as they please.
Which is to say; yes this model breaks eventually (because someone has to evaluate and establish a baseline of “fit to parent” and declare whether the person fits within the lines or not), but it goes a lot further than “I have the right map because I say so, and everyone who doesn’t have my map is wrong and should change their map to be like mine”
these are examples of demands “transwomen” are making.
Not gonna lie—the US is a strange place.
individual insists men on attending women’s colleges and going to women’s bathrooms.
I can’t say that I know these answers; but I would start by looking at “what is a women’s college and for what purpose was it defined to be so?”. followed by, what does “men” mean in this instance, then “who will be directly affected by any decision, in what way?”
What is the LessWrong-like answer to whether someone born a male but who identifies as female is indeed female? Relevant to my life because of this. I’m likely to be asked about this if for no other reason than students seeing how I handle such a question.
The Lesswrong-like answer to whether a blue egg containing Palladium is indeed a blegg is “It depends on what your disguised query is”.
If the disguised query is which pronoun you should use, I don’t see any compelling reason not use the word that the person in question prefers. If you insist on using the pronoun associated with whatever disguised query you associate with sex/gender, this is at best an example of “defecting by accident”.
By the way, it is one of the best examples I’ve seen of quick, practical gains from reading LW: the ability to sort out problems like this.
This. After reading the Sequences, many things that seemed like “important complicated questions” before are now reclassified as “obvious confusions in thinking”.
Even before reading Sequences I was already kinda supsicious that something is wrong when the long debates on such questions do not lead to meaningful answers, despite the questions do not contain any difficult math or any experimentally expensive facts. But I couldn’t transform this suspicion into an explanation of what exactly was wrong; so I didn’t feel certain about it myself.
After reading Sequences, many “deep problems” became “yet another case of someone confusing a map with the territory”. -- But the important thing is not merely learning that the password is “map is not the territory”, but the technical details of how specifically the maps are built, and how specifically the artifacts arise on those maps.
Sounds a lot like General Semantics, at least, Eric S. Raymond derived something similar based on GS. Example: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=161
Yes, it is derived from General Semantics. I haven’t read the original, so I do not know how much to credit Eliezer for making the original ideas easier to read. But I credit him for bringing the ideas to my attention.
In this case the disguised query is “Were I to ask ‘What would stop someone assigned male at birth to fraudulently claim to be a trans woman in order to seek admission to Smith College?‘, what would I mean by ‘fraudulently’?”
If you “use the word that the person in question prefers,” then the word acquires a new meaning. From that moment on, the word “male” means “a human being who prefers to be called ‘male’” and the word “female” means “a human being who prefers to be called ‘female’”. These are surely not the original meaning of the words.
Why do you care about the ‘original’ meaning of the word?
Let’s imagine we are arguing about trees falling in the forest. You are a lumberjack who relies on a piece of fancy expensive equipment that unfortunately tends to break if subjected to accoustic vibrations. You therefore create a map where the word “sound” means accoustic vibrations. This map works well for you and helps you resolve most disguised queries you could be interested in
Then you meet me. i make a living producing cochlear implants. My livelihood depends on making implants that reliably generate the qualia of sound. I therefore have a different map from you, where the word ‘sound’ means the subjective experience in a person’s brain. This works well for the disguised queries that I care about.
If we meet at a cocktail party and you try to convince me that the ‘original’ meaning of sound is accoustic vibrations, this is not a dispute about the territory. What is happening is that you are arguing the primacy of your map over mine, which is a pure status challenge.
The purpose of categories in this context is to facilitate communication, ie transfer of information about the territory from one mind to another. Agreeing on a definition is sometimes important to avoid confusion over what is being said. However, if there is no such confusion, insisting on one definition over another is a pure monkey status game
Most common terms will, when used in a context that doesn’t imply a specific meaning, be taken by the listener to imply a default meaning. Furthermore, some contexts do imply a meaning, but only weakly; if the context makes slightly more sense with meaning A, but you know that most people default to meaning B, and you are Bayseian, you should infer that the intended meaning was B.
Caring about the “original meaning of the word” is about this default meaning, and is not nonsensical. If I say that this person is female, without qualifiers such as “genetically female”, what will others understand me as saying? Will what they understand me as saying be more or less accurate than if I refer to them as male?
Is there additional material about disguised queries?
I found this after reading PeerGrnt’s response.
Also, here’s Yvain applying this reasoning to this exact question.
Like others said, the answer is more like “depends what do you want to know”. In this case, you need to figure out what is the point of an all-female college at all. Fixing systemic disadvantages? Rape safety? More cooperative athmosphere? What you need to figure out is not whether trans women are “really, truly, indeed” women, which is a meaningless kind of sentence, but more like whether they can be categorized as women for the purposes of the goals of an all-women college.
But another relevant aspect is, and this I guess is not discussed so much on LW so I am not really sure what is the best way of wording it… basically that means to an end tend to ossify into values in themselves, via becoming part of identity, tradition etc. There is the old story of a Zen monastery, where the cat made a lot of noise during meditation so they ended up tying it up and 200 years they write treatises about the spiritial significance of having a tied up cat around symbolizing the tied up mind.
Even if the idea of an all-women college was originally utilitarian, a means to an end, now it is easily identity based. And identity isn’t a rational thing. There is no truly objective answer whether biological women should or should not accept trans women into their idea of women-as-an-identity-group, because identity is something that tends to break free from the original reasons of creating it. People tend to ask precisely these “are X truly, really, indeed Y” when discussing identity, and there is no good answer, because on the rational level we can only ask the question “is it useful to categorize X as Y for the purposes of Z” and identity is precisely something that breaks free of such purposes and becomes a tribe on its own. There is no right or wrong answer about who should be allowed to be a member of a tribe. It is largely based on the feelings of the other tribe members. You cannot really give an objective, rational answer to who should be considered a hardcore Manchaster United fan or what is true, real punk music as opposed to pop punk. This just based on how the people in question feel.
Except all women’s colleges arguably still serve a purpose. There is reasonable evidence that women learn better in an all woman environment.
You may ask how trans-”women” affect this. Well there isn’t much data on the subject (and unlikely to be anytime soon given how reluctant people are to research politically incorrect topics). However, given how any m-to-f transsexuals appear to be masculine men with an autogynephilia fetish, my guess would be they are effectively men for this purpose.
That’s a misrepresentation of both Bailey and Sailer; Bailey claims that most MtFs cluster into either “started out gay” or “started out straight,” with the first group transitioning early in life (high school, college, etc.) and the second group transitioning late in life (typically after married with children). Thus, the sort of MtF that will go to a woman’s college is disproportionately likely to be romantically interested in men / have a more feminine personality.
It is unlikely to stay that way now that incentives have changes, in particular, I expect a lot of “heterosexual male who wants to enter the women’s bathroom” type “transsexuals”.
Why? This runs very strongly against my experience.
I don’t know. My wife / former GFs said me they tend to prefer mixed working environments, they told me all-female environments get too filled with all kinds of back-stabby intrigue “she said that she said that you said that I said” and guys dampen that.
What does it mean to be female? It has to be something such that babies, animals and people in tribal cultures can be classified as female or not. Lets call this property, that baby girls, hens and women in hunter-gatherer tribes share, and baby boys etc. do not, property P. People who identify as female are presumably claiming they have property P, and presumably think this is a substantive claim.
Now, could P be something such that merely believing you had property P, made you have property P? Certainly there are some properties like this:
X has P if and only if ( X has two x chromosomes OR X believes ( X has property P ) )
but I think this is clearly unsatisfactory. For example, it would mean that an ordinary young boy who, upon being taught about gender for the first time, was momentarily mistaken and thought he was female, would instantly become female. And it would mean that transwomen were asserting a disjunction of a falsehood and a weird recursive clause.
There are social-role based alternatives, along the lines of
X has P if and only if ( X wishes to be treated in the typical manner of people with property P )
but this doesn’t work for Tomboys, who wish to be treated broadly like boys but are nonetheless definitely girls. Nor does it work for extreme feminists, who do not wish women (including themselves) to be treated in the typical way women are treated.
Now, whether believing something is sufficient to make it true is of course a separate issue from what is politically prudent of you to say. My guess is that your students would ask you this question have a few motivations:
If you say that the map is not the territory, they can safely reject you as an outdated and uncaring reactionary, and will reject what you say on other subjects.
If you say that believing things makes them true, they can say “even our ultra-conservative republican lecturer agrees”.
My advice to you is to say ‘mu’. Ask your students what they mean by female, or why they are asking. Then you can respond in the correct manner according to their definition, pointing out that if they don’t like the answer, maybe they didn’t really mean that definition.
Why? We use the word “female” when referring to babies and animals, but that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily talking about the same thing as when we refer to adult humans; and if we are, it doesn’t mean that we’re talking about something they actually have. (I assume that it doesn’t make sense to talk about whether a baby is straight or gay, for example.)
Why not?
Well, according to the (admittedly rather dubious) party line being gay is an intrinsic property and not a choice and most definitely not subject to environmental influence by pro-gay memes.
Heck, the official (and even more dubious) party line on trans-people is that they have always been their gender trapped in the wrong bodies.
Because the map is not the territory? You can argue that they are the same thing, but the fact that they use the same word isn’t sufficient.
That doesn’t mean it’s a property that babies have. They might have the property “will be gay when they hit puberty”, but that’s a different property. A six-month old baby might have a gene that will give her a speech defect, but for now she speaks just as well as every other baby her age.
I don’t think this is true, but I’m not an expert.
It almost certainly isn’t. Of course believing that makes you an “evil transphobe” according to the official party line, especially if you consider the implication for gender reassignment surgery of children.
I mean that I don’t think that’s the party line, but I’m not an expert on what the party line is.
The ‘line’ is that it is very complicated. There are people with strong body dysphorias who have always had them, there are people who care much more about social presentation than anatomy, and everybody in between or in combination. The social presentation can be separate from body image considerations, and for those people in particular ‘wrong body’ would be inaccurate. There are people whose experienced-from-within gender is different at different times or who do not strongly identify with masculine or feminine, or with bits of both. Knowing multiple people in various positions on these spectra, trying to collapse the experience of everyone with non-default gender situations to one party line is a recipe for confusion, unproductive arguments, and missing the point for some of them.
So was Jenner always a woman trapped in a man’s body? The answer according to his (her) transition miniseries is yes (complete with tales of sneaking into his mother’s closet to wear her clothes).
Sounds like that is the case for her, then. Can’t say I’ve been keeping up with that particular story. One of my friends has had a similarly-describable situation from a very early age as well.
Though again, using that phrase is lumping everything into one essentialist label that says everything rather than decomposing it into the potentially more useful descriptive subcategories ‘how one wants to be considered socially’, ‘the body one wishes one had’ / ‘the body one is willing to have given current medical technology and the costs and tradeoffs thereof’, ‘how one wishes to behave’, and ‘how one identifies internally’. Often these go together making that phrase more or less applicable, but sometimes they don’t, and to get at the truth can then require finer detail depending on what you want to know and who you are describing.
Two other friends of mine have had more complicated situations in their lives—one whom goes to some effort to decrease their external femininity in favor of a more androgynous presentation to match the way they feel internally and their dislike of a feminine appearance [while not going through the efforts of invasive medical transition because the effort and tradeoffs are not worth it to them, but would still choose a very different physical appearance if the tradeoffs were smaller and easier], and one whom is fine with a male body and being called ‘he’ but whom behaves in a very feminine manner because that is just the way he is and he feels being physically male doesn’t dictate his behavior, and feels wrong behaving in a masculine manner.
Except, looking at his previous life, which included fathering several children, winning men’s Olympic medals, and being a media hound with corporate sponsorship, suggests that this is not in fact the case, and suggests other motivations for him to do this. Namely, the need to pull a stunt to get back in the spotlight.
That’s an argument for bringing our map closer to the territory, i.e., applying the word “gender” in humans to the same concept we use for animals. Not for completely messing up our map.
That “i.e.” is doing an awful lot of work. I don’t agree that the map is messed up, and moving a label doesn’t necessarily bring it closer to the territory.
Above you said:
So what did you mean by that?
Tapping out.
I’m not aware of the word “gender” being commonly applied to non-human animals for any concept, other than grammatical gender. You might be thinking of the concept usually referred to as “sex”.
If you want to follow that distinction, then I agree that “gender” doesn’t point to anything real aside from what is commonly pointed to by the word “sex”. Heck when “gender” first became used in its non-grammatical meaning, it was a euphemism for “sex” since the latter had acquired a meaning (as [Edit: an act]) that made it not necessarily SFW.
A pedantic correction: “gender” appears to have had that non-grammatical meaning since the 15th century (and has also had an NSFW meaning as a verb since even earlier) but (if the OED is to be trusted, which usually it is) it’s true that “gender” became widely used to mean males/females collectively in the 20th century because “sex” was too distracting. (It wasn’t “sex” as a verb, though, but “sex” as a noun meaning “copulation”.)
‘Whatever you might say something “is”, it is not.’ Whatever we might say belongs to the verbal level and not to the un-speakable, objective levels.
‘what we see, hear, feel, speak about or infer, is never it, but only our human abstraction about ‘it’
‘A map is not the territory.’
‘Identity is invariably false to facts.’
‘Every identification is bound to be in some degree a misevaluation’
-- Korzybski
I don’t know the LessWrong-like answer, so I can only offer you the human, empathic answer.
Based on the phrasing of your question:
and the fact that you have posted it to LessWrong, I understand it to be a question about constructing a useful and consistent model of the human condition, rather than about respecting an actual or hypothetical human being. If so, I think you are asking the wrong question.
Your students want to learn from you, but on a more basic level, they want to feel safe with you. If you have a trans student, or a student with a trans friend/relative, she is likely to take your answer to this question very personally. Your choice boils down to whether you offer a personal welcome (by recognizing your student’s identity) or a personal affront (by implying that you have more authority than she does to determine who she “really is”).
I should add that it is a common failure mode for humans, when confronted with a counterexample to their existing model of the human condition, to insist that their model is correct and that the fellow human they are dealing with is a bad data point. As well as rude and demeaning, this approach is irrational and intellectually dishonest.
I’m not sure how this could be counted as a counterexample to anyone’s model. Presumably most people would agree that there are people who are confused about their sexuality. It would only be a counterexample to that model if the student was correct, but whether or not the student is correct is precisely what we are discussing.
If James agreed with the student, this would not be a counterexample to his beliefs, and if he disagrees with the student, it he would not agree that they represented a counterexample to the model.
“Confused about their sexuality” is a particularly uncharitable characterization of a transgender person. Many are not confused, rather absolutely certain. Unless you’re using the term “confused” as a polite way of indicating that you believe such a person to be mistaken or delusional, in which case you would be begging the question.
By the way, gender is not the same thing as sexuality.
If one models gender as a boolean switch that can be set to either “male” or “female”, and encounters an individual who has a combination of “male” and “female” characteristics, their model may not accommodate the new observation. I have watched people (who I previously considered fairly sane) break into a yelling fit when confronted with someone undergoing a gender transition, demanding to know their “real” gender and hurling insults when the response was not what they expected.
No, I am explaining how the appearance of transgender people is consistent with the conservative view: they are simply confused. I am not assuming anything.
The point being that that conclusion is contrary to the experience of the people involved.
So did the person have a Y chromosome or not?
This misses the point. There are other aspects that in a subset of the population get more complicated and not so clear cut.
Unfortunately for this line of argument, there are a whole lot of things one can say that may cause personal affronts, some of which are essential as part of some debates and some of which may even express factual truths. If they are generalities, they might not even be disprovable by examples of individual humans (such as statements that some class of humans is more likely to have lower scores on IQ tests).
For the purposes of a all women college you have to ask yourself about the purpose of limiting the college to women.
Maybe there a perception out there that math isn’t a women’s subject. In mixed-gender classes woman are more likely to spent effort into signalling their strong femininity. The are spending more effort into engaging in actions that signal high mating market value when suitable mates are around.
Do transwomen trigger the same behavior? I don’t think that the gender that’s assigned at birth matters. On the other hand “identifies” is a complex word. Just checking a checkbox isn’t enough to stop being seen as a potential mating partner. The transwomen who spends enough effort on looking female that strangers easily identify them as being female on the other hand is unlikely to trigger mating market behavior.
Another reason to limit the college to women is about women being a minority that’s discriminated against. Transwomen do get discriminated against them and don’t get included in old boys networks. From that perspective it also seems fine to accept transwomen.
Maybe you can also think of other reasons for the policy of being all-women. Check whether those reasons matter for transwomen.
There seem to be strong laws against gender discrimination in the US, how does your college avoid getting sued for discrimination?
I’m not sure, but no one seems concerned that the courts will force us to admit men.
I wonder about this also. First, there is a supreme court case from 1982, Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan, which held that admitting only women violated the Equal Protection clause of the constitution. This seems to have not had much impact on college admissions.
For one, they held that when checking the if a law violates Equal Protection by discriminating against women, it is only subject to “intermediate scrutiny”, as opposed to discrimination by race, which is subject to “strict scrutiny”. So the state interest that has to be served by a law in order to outweigh the discrimination against women does not have to be as compelling as for race. A concurrence also noted that “the Court’s holding today is limited to the context of a professional nursing school. Ante at 723, n. 7, 727. Since the Court’s opinion relies heavily on its finding that women have traditionally dominated the nursing profession, see ante at 729-731, it suggests that a State might well be justified in maintaining, for example, the option of an all-women’s business school or liberal arts program.” Maybe that’s indeed what happened later.
It seems that the strongest law against sex discrimination in education is not the constitution, but Title IX. However, Title IX explicitly grandfathered in existing single-sex colleges: “in regard to admissions this section shall not apply to any public institution of undergraduate higher education which is an institution that traditionally and continually from its establishment has had a policy of admitting only students of one sex.”
MUW is a public school.
Why wouldn’t it? Or rather the important feature is possession of a Y chromosome, which in almost all cases is the same thing as the “gender assigned at birth” given how the procedure tends to work. However, the phrase “gender assigned at birth” is highly misleading since it seems to imply that the feature is based on the choices of the hospital staff and/or parents rather then the chromosomes of the child.
It’s notable that the second highest paid “female” CEO would appear to be a trans-”woman”. Who fathered a number of children before “realizing” this. And if I may dispense with the currently fashionable charade of pretending trans-”woman” were really women trapped in men’s bodies, appears to me a masculine man with an autogynephilia fetish.
Historically, the transgendered were swept under the rug in Western society and we’re left with hopelessly inadequate naming conventions. Some cultures have come up with extra genders in order to accommodate the transgendered and this sort of question is moot.
Working within the present naming conventions, we can develop a simplified model. Suppose there are two sexes (M and F) and two genders (M and F). To every person we can associate an ordered pair where e.g. (M,F) would denote someone who is biologically male but identifies as female. Mathematically, we have a map F from the set of humans (H) to the cartesian product {M,F} X {M,F}.
The question at hand can be stated thus: suppose we wish to define a projection operator p: {M,F} X {M,F} to {M,F}. Is it better to project onto the first coordinate or the second? In other words, should we associate (M,F) with M or with F?
Projecting onto a coordinate loses information. This is unavoidable. The answer will depend on which bit of information we consider more important. That, in turn, depends entirely on our values. My own view is that if we accept the legitimacy of being transgender (as opposed to considering it a mental defect), then one’s present self-identified gender is far more pertinent to daily life and so deserves priority. Changing our conventions would be ideal, but in the meantime we have to deal with accidents of history.
What do you mean by “indeed”? That is, neural categories seems like the right place to start. (And, especially as a professor, that seems like the right thing to talk about when students ask about a political issue—not your position, but the mental algorithms you’re executing to determine your position.)
(Very similar to PeerGynt’s response, and drawing on the same sequence.)
Our society is currently set up to assume that there are only two genders, male and female, and that those categories imply many other things. You can encounter this everywhere, from pronouns in language to the M/F boxes on government forms. If a person cannot be adequately described by those categories, with their implicit assumptions, (and there are people who even on a biological basis cannot be described as purely male or female, based on what genitals or chromosomes they have), then they likely have a difficult life, and it is important to be kind to them, (not that it is not important to be kind to people with easy lives.)
I would keep in mind, when addressing questions regarding this issue, just how hard it would be to live a life in a society completely not set up for something so basic and personal, that by daily interactions does not acknowledge one’s true experience and tries to force badly constructed and mismatched categories onto the person to make the cognitive dissonance go away, instead of addressing the problems with the categories.
my general answer to similar questions of hard to tease out results is:-
either way this does not help me do the things that I do and be good at life. (other than to specifically related to those people, at which point—ask them what they want and create the categories around their preference)
gender is only a map made by humans—one humans have found useful for a long time. A map should be used any way possible to make the territory easier to predict.
Except it correlates with a bunch of things from chromosomes, to physical strength, to IQ, to ability to impregnate versus to become pregnant. If we look at a few prominent examples of trans-”women” the results don’t appear to be hard to tease out.
I wrote a response and then realised I was unclear as to what you were saying and asking. Can you elaborate?
Well, I wasn’t disagreeing with anything you said in the grandparent although possibly with some things you meant to imply. (I’m not completely clear on what you meant to imply.)
I was unclear as to the quote you selected and the link to your comment.
What do you think I was implying; I don’t think I was implying anything particularly hidden. It would help me to understand what I might have been implying for improving my communication in the future.
perhaps you meant to quote:
I hope I wasn’t implying that the map is wrong; I was trying to say that the map is historically quite good; and only recently is it becoming challenged with the possibilities of more modern genders opening up through technology or medical intervention.
Except for the most the the technologies haven’t changed it, e.g., men still can’t give birth and women can’t impregnate women. Also most of the people claim to be “transgender” aren’t even availing themselves of ancient that can do something, e.g., Bruce Jenner wasn’t even willing to cut off his penis.
Be careful with your sweeping statements. I personally know of greater than one person who has gone through gender reassignment surgery. while the ability to ipregnate/be impregnated is still very much permanently attached to XYgender, it is only a matter of time.
You might know of the prevalence of “Ladyboys” in thai culture. there is a gene that is linked to that condition, and it affects a large number of their population.
I wouldn’t be forcing people who don’t fit into the existing gender territory to attempt to fit if they don’t (especially if all they do is break your personal map about it). I believe in personal liberties as long as you don’t harm others.
My point is that can’t be what the “transsexual” movement [edit: is about], so why did you claim it was?
Sorry, but in this case the “liberty” in question is the right to insist others play along with their delusions and/or acting out.
You got downvoted for having a contrarian view that was also badly expressed. I have neutralised. (try to express it clearer or more delicately in the future)
I am sorry; I don’t understand this sentence, was there perhaps a spelling error?
I can see what you are saying that it burdens everyone else to go along with the decisions of a person to make choices that are non-standard about gender. I haven’t really considered the effect of the total burden placed on others.
when analysing this issue; I tend to weigh up the perspectives:
for whatever reason; (reason not relevant at all; ranging from hormonal imbalances to psychological reasons to environmental factors), a person decides their ability to fit into the M/F gender structure of society works better if they fit in a place other than the one phenotypically associated with their brain at birth. Their attitude is around their personal relationship with the world.
from the perspective of anyone this person interacts with; “this is slightly confusing”. It might be an assault on one’s understanding to be thrown into a state of confusion, there are multiple solutions to this problem; they might include:-
a. avoiding the assault on your sensibilities by avoiding the people who don’t fit the map
b. ensuring that there are no people who do not fit your map by changing the people, or
c. ensuring there are no people who don’t fit the map, by changing the map.
In the sense that we really only have power over ourselves. we sure can wish to be able to control others; but that is wrong. and conflicts with personal liberties.
The person in 1; is changing themselves to better fit into the world they find themselves in.
The person in 2b is trying to change the world where it disagrees with them, whereas in 2a or 2c, the person is finding solutions that involve changing themselves, and not the world.
I wouldn’t be insisting anything of you; but I would like to make it clear that the 2b attitude is literally impossible to maintain. If we were to fulfil the desires of every person who wished to change the external world; the wishes would come into conflict where some 1 person would wish for something one way and some 2b person would wish it the opposite.
In this sense the right to “insist others play along”, is nothing but the right to ask permission to entertain your own delusions (and maps) about yourself and your interaction with the world. It carries no bearing on what external parties do; unlike a party who is claiming that “playing along with someone else’s gender delusion” is a burden on them, and insists that external parties play along with their own map (of M/F etc).
I’d like to encourage you to further express your opinion in this discussion but I have to point out; as evidence by a downvote; you are talking about a delicate issue; one likely to be downvoted simply for your view; in light of this—please be delicate in expressing your reply; and to save me some time misunderstanding; feel free to be verbose about it.
Down voted for concern trolling. (And no I don’t care about a single down vote.)
Fixed. I changed the grammar of that sentence several times as I was editing.
Suppose a man walks up to you and claims to be both Jesus and John Lennon, and another man walks up to you claiming to be a woman. Would you accommodate one or both of their delusions and how? What accounts for the difference? Also note how LW takes a very different approach to discussing the two delusions.
Except not all maps are equal. Some are more accurate then others.
Except it does, e.g., the deluded individual insists men on attending women’s colleges and going to women’s bathrooms.
That depends on what is required to accommodate the two people.
If “jesus” guy insists on being worshipped, then thats infringing on the boundaries of others; if he wishes to be left to his own devices of enlightenment (talking to bushes and drinking wine-water) - then sure, good for him and his utilons of happiness.
Similarly if “woman” wishes to change the world that could be violating the personal rights of others; however keeping to yourself and what you can reasonably have power over—does not burden others.
This is an example that describes violating personal rights of others. Because of this example I believe I agree with you, however we disagree over what could/could not be permitted by reasonable liberties.
Let’s put it this way. Would you recommend he get psychological counseling for his delusion, or tell him that his map is a perfectly valid one and that how he(she?) feels about himself he is by definition correct?
Also, suppose the men wants to adopt a kid. Should he be able to? Should adoption agencies have the right to refuse him?
Unfortunately, these are examples of demands “transwomen” are making, and frequently getting in the US. Frequently backed up by state laws.
I would do neither as both are examples of attempting to influence the world beyond the personal scope.
I have no knowledge of existing processes, but I assume somewhere it involves counselling or an evaluation as to whether the person is fit to parent. (some kind of massive paperwork process) If they pass such an ordinary process, then they should be able to do as they please.
Which is to say; yes this model breaks eventually (because someone has to evaluate and establish a baseline of “fit to parent” and declare whether the person fits within the lines or not), but it goes a lot further than “I have the right map because I say so, and everyone who doesn’t have my map is wrong and should change their map to be like mine”
Not gonna lie—the US is a strange place.
I can’t say that I know these answers; but I would start by looking at “what is a women’s college and for what purpose was it defined to be so?”. followed by, what does “men” mean in this instance, then “who will be directly affected by any decision, in what way?”