If a person has a personality that’s pretty much female, but a male body, then thinking of them as a woman will be a much more accurate model of them for predicting anything that doesn’t hinge on external characteristics. I think the argument that society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes is locally valid, even if you reject that the premise is true in many cases.
If a person has a personality that’s pretty much female, but a male body, then thinking of them as a woman will be a much more accurate model of them for predicting anything that doesn’t hinge on external characteristics. I think the argument that society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes is locally valid, even if you reject that the premise is true in many cases.
I have to point out that if this logic applies symmetrically, it implies that Aella should be viewed as a man. (She scored .95% male on the gender-contimuum test, which is much more than the average man (don’t have a link unfortunately, small chance that I’m switching up two tests here).) But she clearly views herself as a woman, and I’m not sure you think that society should consider her a man for most practical purposes (although probably for some?)
You could amend the claim by the condition that the person wants to be seen as the other gender, but conditioning on preference sort of goes against the point you’re trying to make.
Fair. I do indeed endorse the claim that Aella, or other people who are similar in this regard, can be more accurately modelled as a man than as a woman—that is to say, if you’re trying to predict some yet-unmeasured variable about Aella that doesn’t seem to be affected by physical characteristics, you’ll have better results by predicting her as you would a typical man, than as you would a typical woman. Aella probably really is more of a man than a woman, as far as minds go.
But your mentioning this does make me realize that I never really had a clear meaning in mind when I said “society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes.” When I try to think of ways that men and women should be treated differently, I mostly come up blank. And the ways that do come to mind are mostly about physical sex rather than gender—i.e. sports. I guess my actual position is “yeah, Aella is probably male with regard to personality, but this should not be relevant to how society treats ?her.”
Consider a biased coin that comes up Heads with probability 0.8. Suppose that in a series of 20 flips of such a coin, the 7th through 11th flips came up Tails. I think it’s possible to simultaneously notice this unusual fact about that particular sequence, without concluding, “We should consider this sequence as having come from a Tails-biased coin.” (The distributions include the outliers, even though there are fewer of them.)
I agree that Aella is an atypical woman along several related dimensions. It would be bad and sexist if Society were to deny or erase that. But Aella also … has worked as an escort? If you’re writing a biography of Aella, there are going to be a lot of detailed Aella Facts that only make sense in light of the fact that she’s female. The sense in which she’s atypically masculine is going to be different from the sense in which butch lesbians are atypically masculine.
I’m definitely not arguing that everyone should be forced into restrictive gender stereotypes. (I’m not a typical male either.) I’m saying a subtler thing about the properties of high-dimensional probability distributions. If you want to ditch the restricting labels and try to just talk about the probability distributions (at the expense of using more words), I’m happy to do that. My philosophical grudge is specifically against people saying, “We can rearrange the labels to make people happy.”
The question, then, is whether a given person is just an outlier by coincidence, or whether the underlying causal mechanisms that created their personality actually are coming from some internal gender-variable being flipped. (The theory being, perhaps, that early-onset gender dysphoria is an intersex condition, to quote the immortal words of a certain tribute band.)
If it was just that biological females sometimes happened to have a couple traits that were masculine—and these traits seemed to be at random, and uncorrelated—then that wouldn’t imply anything beyond “well, every distribution has a couple outliers.” But when you see that lesbians—women who have the typically masculine trait of attraction to women—are also unusually likely to have other typically masculine traits—then that implies that there’s something else going on. Such as, some of them really do have “male brains” in some sense.
And there are so many different personality traits that are correlated with gender (at least 18, according to the test mentioned above, and probably many more that can’t be tested as easily) that it’s very unlikely someone would have an opposite-sex personality just by chance alone. That’s why I’d guess that a lot of the feminine “men” and masculine “women” really do have some sort of intersex condition where their gender-variable is flipped. (Although there are some cultural confounders too, like people unconsciously conforming to stereotypes about how gay people act.)
I completely agree that dividing everyone between “male” and “female” isn’t enough to capture all the nuance associated with gender, and would much prefer that we used more words than that. But if, as seems to often be expected by the world, we have to approximate all of someone’s character traits all with only a single binary label… then there are a lot of people for whom it’s more accurate to use the one that doesn’t match their sex.
I do indeed endorse the claim that Aella, or other people who are similar in this regard, can be more accurately modelled as a man than as a woman
I think that’s fair—in fact, the test itself is evidence that the claim is literally true in some ways. I didn’t mean the comment as a reductio ad absurdum, more as as “something here isn’t quit right (though I’m not sure what)”. Though I think you’ve identified what it is with the second paragraph.
If a person has a personality that’s pretty much female, but a male body, then thinking of them as a woman will be a much more accurate model of them for predicting anything that doesn’t hinge on external characteristics. I think the argument that society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes is locally valid, even if you reject that the premise is true in many cases.
I have to point out that if this logic applies symmetrically, it implies that Aella should be viewed as a man. (She scored .95% male on the gender-contimuum test, which is much more than the average man (don’t have a link unfortunately, small chance that I’m switching up two tests here).) But she clearly views herself as a woman, and I’m not sure you think that society should consider her a man for most practical purposes (although probably for some?)
You could amend the claim by the condition that the person wants to be seen as the other gender, but conditioning on preference sort of goes against the point you’re trying to make.
Fair. I do indeed endorse the claim that Aella, or other people who are similar in this regard, can be more accurately modelled as a man than as a woman—that is to say, if you’re trying to predict some yet-unmeasured variable about Aella that doesn’t seem to be affected by physical characteristics, you’ll have better results by predicting her as you would a typical man, than as you would a typical woman. Aella probably really is more of a man than a woman, as far as minds go.
But your mentioning this does make me realize that I never really had a clear meaning in mind when I said “society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes.” When I try to think of ways that men and women should be treated differently, I mostly come up blank. And the ways that do come to mind are mostly about physical sex rather than gender—i.e. sports. I guess my actual position is “yeah, Aella is probably male with regard to personality, but this should not be relevant to how society treats ?her.”
Consider a biased coin that comes up Heads with probability 0.8. Suppose that in a series of 20 flips of such a coin, the 7th through 11th flips came up Tails. I think it’s possible to simultaneously notice this unusual fact about that particular sequence, without concluding, “We should consider this sequence as having come from a Tails-biased coin.” (The distributions include the outliers, even though there are fewer of them.)
I agree that Aella is an atypical woman along several related dimensions. It would be bad and sexist if Society were to deny or erase that. But Aella also … has worked as an escort? If you’re writing a biography of Aella, there are going to be a lot of detailed Aella Facts that only make sense in light of the fact that she’s female. The sense in which she’s atypically masculine is going to be different from the sense in which butch lesbians are atypically masculine.
I’m definitely not arguing that everyone should be forced into restrictive gender stereotypes. (I’m not a typical male either.) I’m saying a subtler thing about the properties of high-dimensional probability distributions. If you want to ditch the restricting labels and try to just talk about the probability distributions (at the expense of using more words), I’m happy to do that. My philosophical grudge is specifically against people saying, “We can rearrange the labels to make people happy.”
The question, then, is whether a given person is just an outlier by coincidence, or whether the underlying causal mechanisms that created their personality actually are coming from some internal gender-variable being flipped. (The theory being, perhaps, that early-onset gender dysphoria is an intersex condition, to quote the immortal words of a certain tribute band.)
If it was just that biological females sometimes happened to have a couple traits that were masculine—and these traits seemed to be at random, and uncorrelated—then that wouldn’t imply anything beyond “well, every distribution has a couple outliers.” But when you see that lesbians—women who have the typically masculine trait of attraction to women—are also unusually likely to have other typically masculine traits—then that implies that there’s something else going on. Such as, some of them really do have “male brains” in some sense.
And there are so many different personality traits that are correlated with gender (at least 18, according to the test mentioned above, and probably many more that can’t be tested as easily) that it’s very unlikely someone would have an opposite-sex personality just by chance alone. That’s why I’d guess that a lot of the feminine “men” and masculine “women” really do have some sort of intersex condition where their gender-variable is flipped. (Although there are some cultural confounders too, like people unconsciously conforming to stereotypes about how gay people act.)
I completely agree that dividing everyone between “male” and “female” isn’t enough to capture all the nuance associated with gender, and would much prefer that we used more words than that. But if, as seems to often be expected by the world, we have to approximate all of someone’s character traits all with only a single binary label… then there are a lot of people for whom it’s more accurate to use the one that doesn’t match their sex.
I think that’s fair—in fact, the test itself is evidence that the claim is literally true in some ways. I didn’t mean the comment as a reductio ad absurdum, more as as “something here isn’t quit right (though I’m not sure what)”. Though I think you’ve identified what it is with the second paragraph.