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ChristianKl comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong
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Comments (236)
That's a strawman. "How does one feel about one's body" is far away from what most people including the dictionary take as the definition of gender.
More generally do you think there little cost involved by letting a male prisoner who doesn't like to be among other male prisoners but likes to be around female prisoners to declare that he's female and then let society put him in a female prison?
So there are specific contexts in which taking people's expressed gender identity at face value would work badly. Fair enough. But as the saying goes, "hard cases make bad law"; the question "are there contexts where doing X works badly?" may be less appropriate than "in most contexts, does doing X work better than not doing X?". It could be that (1) letting allegedly transgender criminals get moved to different prisons on the basis of their "new" gender is a bad idea, but that (2) outside prison, taking allegedly transgender people at face value is generally much better than not.
Still, let's consider that example a little more carefully. It's certainly true that we would prefer not to have male criminals get themselves put in all-female prisons just by saying "I'm a woman now", because they might endanger the other inmates. So, you do two things. First, you don't let people switch gender simply by saying "I'm a ---- now". Perhaps, e.g., you (1) require an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria (this will eliminate some would-be abusers, but no doubt some will be convincing enough to pass this filter), (2) don't switch anyone into a [new gender] prison unless they've got as far as a course of hormone treatment (this will eliminate most remaining would-be abusers, I think), and (3) as I think is commonplace outside prison, you don't let them have that hormone treatment until they've lived for an extended period "as" their newly adopted gender. New name, new clothes, etc. (This is part of why #2 is an effective filter, though the effects of the hormones will be a bigger part.)
Second, you use the mechanisms that surely already exist for keeping prisoners safe from one another. For instance, surely some women are very dangerous to other women, and they are kept in solitary confinement or watched extra-carefully or something. So if, e.g., an apparently-male criminal abruptly declares "I'm a woman now" and gets through the filters above, maybe they have to put up with being treated as much more dangerous to (other) women than a typical woman in the prison they get sent to.
And of course if they do then (say) assault someone else, down comes the wrath of the law and the prison system on them, and their life thereafter is going to be really unpleasant. If they're calculating and controlled enough to convince a psychiatrist that they have a gender dysphoria they don't really have, and to put up with living as a woman and getting dosed with anti-androgens and oestrogens and whatnot, they're probably also capable of figuring out that actually harming anyone is liable not to be worth the trouble.
All things considered, I don't actually see much practical opportunity for abuse here -- and this is the example you picked.
Except similar logic applies in every case where gender actually matters, e.g., which bathroom to use, can they participate in women's sports, etc. And in all other cases, the benefits are along the lines of, the deluded person feels better if everyone plays along with his delusion.
The logic here takes the form: If we treat this person as female, then such-and-such danger arises that wouldn't if we treated them as male; here's a course of action that attempts to balance mitigating the danger to others against the interests of the person in question.
The appropriate conclusion depends on how real and how severe the danger is. (Of course it needn't be danger as such, and I take it you wouldn't claim there's danger associated with letting male-anatomy people compete in nominally-all-female sporting competitions.)
ChristianKI's example concerned people deemed enough of a threat to others to need locking up in prison. This is an unusually dangerous and (probably) unusually dishonest population. Outside that context, the balance will be different.
To transgender people "gender actually matters" much more of the time than you'd think. (How often does the state of your knee joints actually matter? If your knees are in good shape, hardly ever -- at least in that you hardly ever need to attend to it. But anyone who's had knee trouble can tell you that actually it matters all the time to them.)
I notice that you have so far declined to answer my original question: What actual false beliefs (expressed in terms of anticipated experiences) does this person have, in your opinion?
So do you support letting trans-"women" play on women's sports teams and use women's bathrooms? I notice, you avoided actually addressing the question.
In the sense that people make implicit Bayesian deductions based on peoples gender all the time, this is true. Of course, for purposes of those Bayesian deductions trans-people are much closer to their biological then their claimed gender.
That he's in the similarity cluster labeled "women" for one thing. Yes, you can steelman his position to be conpletely non-falsifiable if you want, I don't believe this is actually what most of them are claiming (as seen by the fact that they do insist on, e.g., using women's facilities, playing in women's sports, being celebrated as "female" CEO's.)
I think sports teams and sporting organizations should make their own decisions. I don't know what's actually best overall; I think transgender people are rare enough that it wouldn't make a big difference in practice to most . My guess is that the best policy for smaller informal sports teams and organizations is to let 'em in, that the best policy at the highest levels where a lot is at stake is to say women's teams/competitions are only for people who are anatomically female by some criterion or other, and in between I'm less sure but lean towards a let-'em-in policy in the absence of compelling evidence that it would do actual harm.
I think that if someone is generally presenting as female we should let them use women's bathrooms if they want to. The obvious objections to this seem to be (1) ewww (which I suggest is not an argument) and (2) that this introduces a danger to women from predatory men dressing up as women in order to sneak into their bathrooms. I find #2 unconvincing because when I try to imagine scenarios where there's an actual difference in the harm done I can't think of one that's actually plausible, and because whatever bathroom policy we adopt there are going to be trans people and they are going to need to use bathrooms, and there are obvious risks of harm from trans women trying to use men's bathrooms too.
I don't think that's clear at all. As I've said before in this discussion, what counts as "closer" depends greatly on context, and for many purposes someone who looks more or less female, presents as female, and considers themself female is "closer" to stereotypical-female than to stereotypical-male whatever is in their chromosomes or their pants.
Someone in this situation is some way from the centre of either the "women" or the "men" cluster, regardless. It seems to me that in fact there is no such thing as the similarity cluster labelled "women" because (have I mentioned this already?) there are any number of similarity clusters corresponding to different notions of similarity, and different notions of similarity are called for in different contexts.
If you pick some particular notion of similarity based on (say) gross anatomy, sex chromosomes, hormone levels, and ability to beget and/or bear children, then indeed our hypothetical person is in the "men" rather than the "women" cluster. But do you really think there's a delusion there? If you ask, say, Bruce->Caitlyn Jenner "What chromosomes do you have?", the answer might be "It's none of your business" or "Who cares?" but it won't be "XX, of course, because I'm a woman".
It seems to me that the actual difference between you and, say, Jenner is a disagreement about what notion of similarity to use. How is that a delusion on a par with thinking you're Jesus?
If the mere act of expressing that you want a different gender than the one you have changes your gender for societal purposes you are going to have a lot more "transgender" people when there are benefits to be gained.
Let me reformulate this as an argument :-D
Imagine a gym, or an athletic club. A pre-op transsexual presenting as a female shows up and you direct him/her to the women's locker room and showers. Soon after that a group of very irate (biological, conventional, mainstream, cis, heterosexual, not-quite-sexually-liberated) women show up and demand to know what someone with a dick is doing in their showers staring at their tits. Your response?
"You'd allow a lesbian in the room who is excited by staring at your tits. The correct course of action in that case is to just prohibit the staring, rather than to prohibit the person's presence in the room. Do that here too."
(Although now that I think of it that might not work because the same reasoning means they should allow ordinary men in the room too.)
Yes, like I said elsewhere dealing with homosexuals is a separate problem here. There are ways to solve it as well, the PC-minded won't like them either.
You are not talking to LW. You are talking to, let me remind you, "a group of very irate (biological, conventional, mainstream, cis, heterosexual, not-quite-sexually-liberated) women". You try telling them to think of the dick-owner as a lesbian and in the best case neither them nor any of their friends set foot in you gym ever again. In the worst case you'll find yourself talking to cops in the near future and to a large bunch of lawyers soon after that.
"I understand that you find it upsetting, but our policy here is that trans people get to use the changing rooms corresponding to the gender they identify with. If Ms X was staring at your breasts, that was well out of order regardless of gender and I will be happy to speak to her about it and make it clear that that behaviour is unacceptable. If you are troubled by Ms X's genitals, then I can only suggest that you try to ignore them."
Maybe some of them leave and never come back, or set the lawyers on me. No one ever said that doing the right thing is guaranteed to be maximally profitable or keep you out of legal trouble.
Alternatively: "Oh, I think Ms X must have misunderstood our policy, which is actually that she should be using the women's toilets but that to avoid the kind of discomfort you're suffering -- for which I am very sorry -- our members are asked to use the changing rooms corresponding to their anatomy regardless of gender identity. I'll talk with Ms X and see that that's understood."
(The question I answered was about women's bathrooms -- where the partial nakedness is generally confined to individual cubicles -- rather than gym changing rooms where more difficult issues arise. I do, as it happens, prefer the first answer above to the second, but I think either is defensible.)
And of course the same argument goes the other way. The same pre-op trans woman turns up at the gym and you show her to the men's locker room and showers. Soon after that a lot of men come along and complain that there's a woman in their locker room staring at their dicks. (They may use a word more specific and ruder than "woman".) Now what?
The fundamental difficulty here is that gym changing facilities are designed on the assumption that people can be neatly partitioned into two groups, either of which is happy being naked around others in that group. This falls down in the presence of trans people, and doesn't cope too well with the existence of gay people. So any policy you adopt may have problems when someone of non-majority gender or sexuality turns up. The options are: close all the gyms; make them single-sex; provide changing facilities that let people isolate themselves while naked; exclude anyone whose appearance might disturb others; accept that some people are going to be disturbed from time to time. None of these is problem-free. Too bad.
Which answer, do you think, a sufficiently representative poll of women would pick?
Would you also prefer the first answer in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood? ;-)
I don't know. Speaking of solutions, two come to mind. One is to have a few individual showers/changing rooms. They are usually called "family rooms" and are lockable as the intent is that they are used by a single family, often with small kids. The other one is provide three kinds of changing rooms: male, female, and unisex (aka anything goes).
By the way, at least one gym that I know has five kinds of changing rooms: males over 18 only, males if you are or are accompanying someone under 18; the same pair for females, plus individual family rooms X-)
I think it depends a lot on your population of women (e.g., you might get very different answers in San Francisco or Cambridge -- either Cambridge, actually, but I'm thinking of the one in the UK -- than in Memphis or Tunbridge Wells). But questions of the form "how shall we treat members of this distrusted minority group?" may not be best answered by majority vote.
First is #3 in my list; drawback is space and hence cost. Second is one I hadn't thought of but should have; one drawback is space, another is that to make it work you presumably have to say that obviously-trans people must use these changing rooms which (1) is probably going to be unpleasant for them and (2) maybe make things a little too easy for potential assailants (as I remarked earlier, rates of sexual violence against trans people are high; suppose you're someone who would assault trans people, and suppose you find that the gym you attend has a special room that any teams person attending has to use and will take their clothes off in, where nobody else is likely to be...)
It makes the women uncofortable. This is the same type of argument you're using that we should endulge the tannys' delusions and there are many more actual women than trannys (by four orders of magnitude and that's assuming current claims are taken at fase value), so do the utility calculation.
First, see my comment above about the relative numbers of the two groups. Also, the harm to trans "women" is lower since most men aren't interested at gawking at (or harrasing, etc.) fake "women". The ones who are tend to be gay, which is potentially a sepertate problem, but one that we have either way.
So is a lion with stripes painted on it a tiger?
You do realise this is an empirical question and not just a piece of attire you can where to be "pro-trans"?
This is not an argument, it's an appeal to nihilism. Yes, you can arbitarily define a set and declare it a "similarity cluster", that doesn't make it so. This is similar to the psychiatric patient I mentioned above who defined the set consisting of himself, Jesus, and John Lenon, and declared it a similarity cluster.
Not to mention physical strength, a bunch of psychological traits, etc.
Honestly, in this case there is probably less delusion and more BS (in the sense of the saying things without caring for their truth value) for the sake of getting another 15 minutes of fame.
I think you're doing the wrong calculation, in two ways.
The rate of sexual assault of trans people is very high.
I wrote a sentence of the form "For many purposes someone with characteristics A, B, and C is more like X than Y". You interrupted after "A" to ask a question that assumes I wrote "For many purposes someone with characteristic A is more like X than Y". This is not the way to have a rational discussion.
(I bet there are in fact contexts in which a convincingly made-up lion should be treated as a tiger. E.g., if you're training a computer vision system. Of course this is far-fetched and irrelevant, but that's what you get for pretending I wrote something I didn't.)
I have tried repeatedly to get you to turn your claims into actual empirical ones and you have so far not obliged, preferring to handwave about "the similarity cluster" even though it's obvious that a key point is that there are different notions of similarity around.
It looks to me as if I have consistently been careful to distinguish between empirical questions, questions of definitions, and questions of what policies to adopt. And if my aim here were to signal as loudly as possible my allegiance to the Blue rather than the Red tribe, I would be responding in a very different way to your repeated use of needlessly provocative terminology. (Which, now that you bring the topic up, looks a lot like signalling your allegiance to a different tribe...)
It would be if I went on to say "... so any notion of similarity is as good as any other", but I didn't and won't because I don't believe that. On the contrary, what I have repeatedly said is that what notion of similarity is best depends on context. There are plenty of possible notions of similarity that would be very bad in any halfway plausible context. It's my opinion that for many purposes a purely anatomical notion of gender-similarity (is that what you favour? I've asked before but you still haven't said) works less well than a more social and psychological one. (Not only because it makes people whose internal sense of their gender and external anatomy differ happier, though that's a bonus. Also because in most interactions perceived gender -- one's own and others' -- makes much more difference than anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, etc.)
What is your evidence for that? Anyway, I wasn't referring only to this case (I take it you mean Jenner's) but asking generally: do you really think that trans people are generally deluded about what anatomy they have, how strong they are, whether they are biologically capable of bearing children, etc.?
In the case of every trans person I know enough about to tell, the answer is: no, of course they are not deluded about that; they know the answer and hate it. (Or, in some cases: no, they aren't deluded about it; they knew that they didn't have the anatomy that felt right to them, and took steps to make their anatomy more like that, and now it's nearer.)
No, because if it becomes a social norm that any man who makes a superficial attempt to appear as a women, claims to be a woman and "presents as a woman", whatever that means, can use the women's bathroom, a lot more men are going to be claiming to be "transwomen" just for that purpose.
Well, in this case B was something that doesn't seem to parse as anything beyond a restatement of A (with some steelmanning applied), and C is just a restatement of my assertion that the person is some combination of deluded or BS'ing.
They're deluded about something. To the extent they're making a falsifiable claim at all.
The people cited in this article say you're wrong about that. (The article is on a site that makes no particular pretence of neutrality or objectivity, and the author likewise doesn't, but the reports they've collected from representatives of police departments etc. in places where such rules have been introduced are evidence regardless.)
B is not just a restatement of A; one is a matter of bodily appearance, one is a matter of clothing, given name, preferred mode of address, etc.
C is not a restatement of your assertion that the person is deluded or bullshitting, it is a restatement of what you explain that way (namely that they consider themself female).
Here is a thought experiment (important note: it is intended as an informative thought experiment, not a claim about what is actually happening in the brains and bodies of trans people). Imagine that after a few decades of scientific advancement it becomes possible to transplant brains into different bodies, even somewhat differently shaped bodies. Your brain is transplanted into a woman's body and given no more changes than are necessary to wire up the different bits of anatomy. Are you now a woman? If you say yes: Your brain is now transplanted into a chimpanzee's body with, again, minimal necessary changes. Are you now a chimpanzee?
I suggest that in the second case you're clearly still you and clearly not actually a chimpanzee, for most purposes. If you agree, then I think you should agree with me that what you are depends on internal "mental" factors as well as anatomy and external appearance. This suggests to me that the best answer in the first case is probably that you are still a man. What factors actually make you so? They seem like exactly the sort of factors that might in fact be different in trans people as compared with cis people of similar external anatomy.
(Actually, I think the best answer in the first case is that you get to choose whether you're a man or a woman. Again, I am not claiming that this case is precisely analogous to that of trans people, but it's suggestive.)
Remember the context here: we're looking at your statement that they're wrong about what "similarity cluster" they're in. If you define similarity in anatomical or chromosomal terms, do you really think typical trans people are deluded about their anatomy or chromosomes?
There seems something very unsatisfactory about being sure they're deluded about something, but unable to say clearly what it is they're deluded about. (Not necessarily wrong; I can imagine situations in which it's reasonable to be sure someone is wrong about something but unsure what. But unsatisfactory.)
I think that's what "applying the principle of charity and taking others' claims about how they feel about their bodies at face value" means.
That's not letting people define their own identities but letting experts define their identities. Fluttershy clearly spoke about letting people define their own identities. Don't let yourself get mindkilled because it's a political topic.
I'm suggesting that applying that principle in general doesn't have to mean applying it exactly the same to imprisoned criminals.
(Similarly, I am in general strongly in favour of letting people communicate freely and privately with others, but if we choose to restrict and/or monitor the calls of people in prison then that makes some sense.)
It's intermediate between the two: letting people define their own identities but giving experts a veto in a case where the risk of abuse is especially severe. Again: a general principle of letting people define their own identities may need amendment when dealing with people we have locked up in the name of public safety, just as general principles of free speech and free association and so forth get amended when dealing with those people.
Thanks for the advice. I commend it to all. Do you have a particular reason to think I am getting mindkilled, beyond the fact that (1) I disagreed with you and (2) you think my arguments are weak? (You have disagreed with me and I think "X might have bad consequences if applied unaltered to dangerous criminals, so proposing X in general is wrong" is a terrible argument; should I conclude that you're getting mindkilled?)
Yes, that you fail to distinguish between the question of whether to let people self identify themselves and whether people in hormone therapy really change their gender.
The debate whether or not a XY transexual with no penis, a vagina and big boobs is female or male is a quite different question from the debate whether or not the act of identifying as female means that your gender is female.
I have the impression that the political nature of the subject prevents you from distinguishing the two issues and that you simply want to be pro-LGBT instead of engaging with detailed arguments that distinguish different questions.
Well, I may or may not be mindkilled but I'm certainly confused. The only mention I made of hormone therapy was to suggest that in the special context of prisoners wanting to move to a different prison on account of gender transition, being on hormone therapy might be a useful criterion for being demonstrably serious. (Not for being actually male/female. The point is that it is evidence of the sincerity of the prisoner's claim, which we need because in this situation insincere claims might otherwise be a problem.)
So far as I can see,
simply hasn't come up in this discussion, or at least not the bit of it you and I have been engaging in. Accordingly, I have no idea how anything I've written can suggest that I'm failing to distinguish that debate from any other debate. I also don't think the question was ever quite
although obvious that isn't a mile from what Fluttershy was saying.
So it looks to me as if there's a failure of communication here. Let me attempt to say clearly and explicitly what I think the issues are. My apologies for the length of what follows.
Well, you're entitled to your impression. I confess I'm unsure how you got it. In particular, I don't see that you made any such detailed arguments; in fact, the principal point of my original comment was that you failed to distinguish between "what should we do in general?" and "what should we do for the more difficult and dangerous case of imprisoned criminals?".
I think the situation is a going to become bit more difficult if we confine out attention to the cases where gender/sex matters. Just declaring yourself to be a male/female/lizard overlord/banana is nothing particularly exciting and is likely to lead to shrugs or, at most, some eye-rolling. But once you demand some rights as a member of that particular group, the situation becomes much muddier.
As you point out, there are "plenty of exceptions" to the my-gender/sex-is-whatever-I-say approach. The interesting question is whether most circumstances where gender/sex matters turn out to be such "exceptions".
A very reasonable question, but note that for a lot of transgender people gender matters to them even when nothing very dramatic rides on it. They want to be addressed as Alice rather than Alex, to wear women's clothes, and so forth, without being laughed at (or worse) for it, and even if those don't look to the rest of us like "circumstances where gender/sex matters" I'm pretty sure it's a different story when you're looking at it from the inside.
There are rights that accrue to people of one sex but not of the other (to play in one sports team rather than another; to use one bathroom rather than another; ...) but I'm really pretty sure no one goes through the angst and nuisance and embarrassment of gender transition so that they can use a different bathroom.
Yes, of course, but he issue is whether that imposes obligations on other people beyond politeness.
We can try to generalise that question beyond sex & gender: if you are weird, non-average, out of the mainstream -- to which degree should society bend and accommodate itself to your strangeness?
I think politeness is a pretty big deal, and a large fraction of what transgender people want is basically politeness plus ordinary decency.
I confess it's not clear to me what "the issue" actually is here. VoiceOfRa was evidently annoyed or offended or something by that list of false/oversimplified things people believe about gender, but rather little of the list is actually about transgender people or involves what he describes as "a man claiming to be a woman" and as "delusions and hallucinations" and I don't know what sort of accommodation it is that VoR finds it irksome to be expected to make. (Perhaps he finds it irksome to be expected not to describe transgender people as crazy on the same level as someone who thinks he's simultaneously Jesus and Lennon.)
There are actual woman who are happily want to be addressed as Alex.
People are quite free to want to be addressed in different ways. On the other hand there also a freedom to address someone in multiple ways.
By default we use pronouns via intuition. If a person seems male to us we use "he" is they seem female we use "she". Doing differently takes mental filtering. That carries a cognitive cost.
I don't think anybody should be laughed at for wearing a dress regardless of whether they identify as male or female.
Sorry, you don't have a right to do silly things and then demand not to be laughed at.
True enough, I didn't choose the best example male name. This seems about as relevant to anything else I was saying as the fact that "women who are happily want to be addressed as Alex" is ungrammatical is to anything else you are saying. I should have said "Alexander" or "Adam" or "Alfred" or something.
Sure. Did I ever claim otherwise?
Suppose you meet someone who looks male to you. It turns out that actually the person is a woman, with two X chromosomes and a uterus and all. I'm guessing that once you discover that you'll refer to that person as "she" despite the small cognitive cost of doing so, and it probably won't even occur to you to think it an unreasonable imposition to be expected to do that. And the chances are that, actually, you won't insist on inspecting her chromosomes and reproductive organs before adopting the appropriate pronoun.
If your attitude is different in the case where a near-identical-looking person has XY chromosomes and was called "Alfred" when born but now goes by the name of Angela and considers herself to be female, even though the cognitive cost is exactly the same in the two cases, then I suggest that the cognitive cost is not the real objection.
Neither do I, but apparently some people do.
Wow, this discussion really took off! I mainly replied to VoiceOfRa's comment in order to encourage people to be nice to trans people in general, rather than to advocate any highly specific and well-thought-out position.
Yes, your idea of what constitutes being "nice" to people is problematic to say the least.
In general I do practice the principle of charity on LW in the sense that I think that other people on LW try to advocate well-thought-out positions.
There no reason that there much to be gained by trying to speak on LW for a position in a way that isn't well-thought-out.