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MugaSofer comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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I asked how it helps. When I meet someone who appears male, I assume they identify as male, and if they don't then they tell me so. If I treated everyone I met as of indeterminate gender ... I would be ignoring people's established gender far more than accommodating people's insecurities. Besides, I'm going to have to name the kid at some point.
Giving your boy a skirt is implicitly teaching him that wearing one does not signal gender. I may personally be fine with them wearing underpants on their head, but I don't teach them to go to school like that.
I'm still unclear as to why ignoring the biological gender of your child will help them be more tolerant in later life.
When somebody's born, they don't identify as a gender. By the time they reach talking infancy, they do and will tell you. They will probably want to adopt gendered clothing and behaviours. Those might, or might not match their anatomy. If they pick cross-gendered ones, that might last, or it might go away, or it might turn into gay/lesbian identity. If you aren't being pushy about any of this, they will find their own level. I am not proposing "never permit them a gender", I am proposing "never assign them a gender, coercively".
Unfortunately with strangers, I have less evidence about their genders than I might like. That is because people don't feel very free to express cross-gender presentation, and in fact it takes such an immense crushing need that people dare the taunts, for them to even be visible. So there are lots of tans women walking around looking like men, and there are lots of trans men walking around looking like women. And it is because of dismissive attitudes like yours about the skirt, which easily translate into ridicule and ostracism. A boy in skirt is not like a boy with underpants on his head, he's like a girl in jeans. That used to be scandalous. But we accepted it more readily, because dressing "like a girl" is seen as degrading while dressing "like a man" was seen as upgrading.
You are strawmanning "ignoring the biological gender" (and building upon an assumption that isn't true; biology isn't gender, it isn't even oversimplified binary sex - but that's a story for another day). I am not suggesting "ignoring" it, I am suggesting "not treating it as the thing that determines gender".
Once, yes, and it was once possible for women to dress "as men" and be assumed to be "effeminate" men. (Google "sweet polly oliver".) However, for various reasons this is no longer the case, whereas it is still so for men.
Are you saying gender identity is not determined by biology? Because I have some transsexuals who would like to talk to you. (Obviously much of the trappings we assign to gender can and should be ignored.)
EDIT:
I think you misspelled "transsexual" there,
So break it.
The etiology of trans is unknown. There are suggestions that hormones in the womb may play a part, with the brain and body controlled by hormone flushes at different times, resulting in something like "intersex of the brain". But what I meant was more simply, that social categorization of bodies as "male or female" doesn't determine their gender identity. Bear in mind I say social categorization here, because society looks at some things (penis length, particularly) and not at others (brains, particularly) about the body to put people into categories.
And no, I meant cross-gendered in the specific sense of "person socially assigned gender A in clothes socially assigned gender B".
BTW: trans being inborn and immutable is a political thing. It is easier to get rights if your discriminated-against attribute is "not your fault" so you can't be "blamed" for it. This doesn't affect the rightness of the cause, only the ease of implementing it in the face of religious (sin focused) transphobia.
Ok, so you admit your movement is willing to lie, BS and corrupt social science for "the greater good". Given that, why should I believe any of the empirical claims your movement makes?
So, this is the sort of thing that's true for almost any advocacy group: They will present the evidence that helps them and not present the evidence that doesn't. That means that for any political advocacy or organization you need to look at the evidence with that in mind and judge it carefully and accordingly. This makes the groups under discussion no different than any other similar group.
There is a difference between selectively presenting true evidence (or at least evidence they believe to be true) and telling things you know to be false.
Valid point in this context. I'm not sure if Julian was claiming to present things that are known to be false, although the wording of the comment certainly could be interpreted that way.
Wasn't he basically just saying that these kinds of statements radically lower his epistemic confidence in empirical claims the movement makes which are politically convenient?
Well, there's the connotative issue involved. But my point is that he seems to be making a strange adjustment here: Making a radical adjustment to one group when it should apply to all political groups. Moreover, the comment struck me (and it is possible that I've misinterpreted it here) as essentially dismissing any claims made rather than doing what one should actually do in such contexts- carefully examine the claims, and look for omitted evidence.
Once again, I support the right to wear underpants on your head but I wouldn't teach my kids it's socially acceptable.
It shows up on brainscans.
How is the second sentence at all evidence against the first?
... because you don't, as a rule, choose your own neurophysiology. Certain structures in transsexuals' brains are closer to the form they take in cisgendered members of the sex they identify with than the sex they appear to be.
Become a taxi driver and grow your hippocampus. The boundary between what you can change and what you can't is not as clear as you seem to think.
Do we know what these structures do?
As I have said elsewhere, there is a sliding scale involved. This is decidedly towards the "unchosen" end, and considering that transsexuals report having changed their lifestyle as a result of preexisting problems, it seems reasonable to call this one for the "nature" side.
Besides this? No.
You have some control over it. Everything you do and every thought you have affects your neurophysiology. How much control you have over it is an interesting question, which can't be answered simply by pointing to differences on brain scans.
There's a sliding scale. At one end, we have things like frontal lobes. At the other, we have imagination. This is the kind of structure that doesn't alter without external stimuli, and even then it's bloody hard.
If you take physicalism seriously, every experience can be expected to show up eventually, on sufficiently advanced brain scans. That has no bearing on what is a choice and what is not. Choices and non-choices will both have physical correlates.
Autism is a choice!
Solving this type of problem is one reason that I advocate differentiating gender and biological sex. Once that distinction is made, I think many of these problems are analytically clearer.
FWIW, I think JulianMorrison is using "gender" when "sex" is meant in at least some of the comments.