Stupid Questions May 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

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.

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 t... (read more)

0Elo11y

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.

7[anonymous]11y

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 Unit