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gjm comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
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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...)
Umm... how did you phrase it? Ah: "which I suggest is not an argument".
I find many things in life unpleasant but I do not consider it sufficient reason to demand that the world be rearranged according to my sensitivities.
If you want a more general rule: self-selection into a group should not generate any additional rights (at least without matching responsibilities).
That strikes me a bit too paranoid. A changing room in a gym is not the middle of a dark forest. Unisex bathrooms are pretty common by now and I haven't seen any data about them encouraging sexual predators. If you are that concerned about safety, maybe install additional street lighting? And cameras! Don't forget about cameras! Only beneath the watchful eyes can you be secure!!
So when I said that "ewww" isn't an argument I was taking it to mean "I find contemplating X unpleasant" rather than "if X happens, people Y who experience it will find it unpleasant". The former is a much much weaker argument than the latter.
(I should, of course, have considered the latter as well, and I'm not sure why I didn't. If women at a gym find it unpleasant when someone who identifies as female but has male-looking anatomy uses their changing room -- which they well might -- that is a bad thing, and that fact does constitute an argument for not allowing that. I happen to think that the arguments the other way are stronger, but as I said before I think both sides are defensible.)
In the case we're discussing here, the additional right comes with a perfectly matched additional responsibility. If access to a gym's changing rooms goes by expressed gender identity rather than anatomy, then identifying as female lets you into the women's rooms at exactly the same time as it bars you from the men's.
(One might argue that in fact someone with female identity but male anatomy should be allowed to use either to reduce the likelihood of their getting assaulted, or something. Members of unusually vulnerable groups sometimes get additional rights even if membership of the group is self-selected, and that's not obviously unreasonable. The additional rights are compensating for additional risks rather than additional responsibilities they people in question have taken on.)
Nice steelmanning of my position. No, wait, not steelmanning. The other thing.
But I'm a bit confused now about what your position is, because I think you've now said the following things:
and I'm not sure how to fill in that [...] at the end. "... because the (other) women may feel uncomfortable"? (But you just said that the fact that some people will feel uncomfortable shouldn't count for much in designing gym changing rooms.) "... because the (other) women may be at danger of assault"? (But you just said that we shouldn't worry about assaults in gym changing rooms.)
A nitpick: it is not male-looking anatomy, it is male anatomy.
Which responsibility? If I am of whatever gender I say I am, I can change genders at will. I am not "barred" from the other changing room any more than picking one door to walk through "bars" me from the other door.
That didn't involve transmuting your position into either steel or straw. That was just me amusing myself :-) I did not mean to imply anything about your views on widespread surveillance.
I don't have a well-developed position delineated by bright lines. Basically you have a conflict between two groups -- let's call them "trans" and "mainstream". Such a conflict is nothing unusual and, indeed, the entirely normal state of a human society. Typically such conflicts are resolved according the the balance of power between the groups -- the results vary from one side fully suppressing the other to an equally-unsatisfying compromise. Occasionally the stars align and it turns out that the conflict is easily fixable and can be "dissolved" in LW lingo.
In contemporary Western societies such conflicts are usually resolved politically which means that the sides wage a cultural war "for the hearts and minds". This kind of war uses propaganda as weapons. Accordingly, the war involves loud screaming about morals, justice, fairness, God's will, etc. etc. -- whatever is needed for the agitprop needs of the day. I tend to by very cynical about such agitprop.
Note, by the way, that a completely general answer to the there-is-a-tranny-in-my-shower problem does not exist. As you yourself observed, it all depends on the local culture. A good solution for the showers in San Francisco's Castro district is likely to be different from a solution for downtown Salt Lake City -- and that's even staying inside one country.
Read it as "is probably going to make them (and possibly their friends) less willing to spend money in my gym".
That translation applies just as well to gjm's original statement.
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.)
The answer is that the group of things that we typically mean by "are you a chimpanzee" is not the same as the group of things that we typically mean by "are you a woman". The chimpanzee version contains more things that depend on the mind than the woman version.
Imagine a different version where we transplant your brain into the body of someone with red hair. In that case, you would indeed be a redhead.
Also, imagine that (assuming you're not Chinese) we transplanted your body into a Chinese person's body. Are you then Chinese? It is plausible that you aren't Chinese in this situation--but unlike in the woman example, that does not extend to thinking that a "transracial" person in a non-transplant situation is a real thing.
Well, first they might have been selectively collecting them, if not engaging in worse fraud. Second these policies have been in place for less than two years, it takes time for perverse incentives to manifest. The more general problem is that left-wingers are notorious for creating policies with glaring perverse incentives and then refusing to believe anyone would actually behave so as to take advantage of them. Do you also believe that almost no one avoids getting a job so as not to loose welfare benefits or that the policy of "listen and believe" hasn't lead to many false rape accusations?
Ok, so also give the striped lion a collar saying "I'm a tiger".
In that case there is an important difference, namely the structure of my brain and my personality, behaviors etc., are in male rather than female cluster.
Sure. So might anyone quoting anyone about anything. What would fraud look like here? It would mean that actually there are a bunch of cases of sexual assault by trans people, or people pretending to be trans, in public restrooms. It shouldn't be too hard to find some, if so. Please feel free, and I will of course update my opinions in response to whatever you find.
The first few days listed in the article itself: 2008 in Colorado; 2011 in Connecticut; 2007 in Iowa; 2005 in Maine; 1997 in Massachusetts.
Well, as it happens, the only example personally known to me at present of someone who contemplated getting a job and changed their mind because of the impact on benefits did so because of changes to the tax and benefit structure introduced by a right-wing government, and the incentives were much better aligned before that government made the change.
Of course one anecdote isn't much evidence for anything. The general point here is that it's by no means only left-wing governments that create policies with perverse incentives. (Famous examples: "Abstinence-only" sex ed in schools doesn't stop kids having sex, but it does make them more likely to get pregnant when they do. Restricting the availability of contraception increases the incidence of abortion and single-parent families, both of which the opponents of contraception usually say they're more strongly opposed to.)
In any case, what exactly is your argument here? It surely can't be "Allowing trans people to use public restrooms corresponding to their new gender is a policy brought in by left-wingers; policies brought in by left-wingers often have perverse incentives and do harm; therefore this policy has perverse incentives and if you think it won't do harm then you're wrong", but what is it?
Let's continue that discussion when you're prepared to engage seriously with what I'm saying. (If you genuinely can't see highly relevant differences, let me know and I'll point some out.)
OK. So if a trans person's brain structure, personality, behaviours, etc., were found to be nearer typical-female than typical-male, would you then consider them something other than deluded/hallucinating/bullshitting? What sort of differences in brain structure would be most relevant? (Brain structure is kinda hard to explore, beyond the very coarsest features; what if we couldn't tell about brain structure but their personality and behaviours were "more female than male"?)
Ones that correspond to the large observable differences in behavior between men and women.
Unless you regularly interact with the type of people who live in underclass ghettos, or the class of people sometimes called "white trash", it's not surprising that you personally haven't met people like this.
Setting aside the validity of these examples, I note that none of them are actually examples of incentives.
I am engaging seriously. I merely applied your epistemology to a slightly different domain and suddenly it becomes clear how silly it is.
Frankly, I have a hard time believing that something would mess up the development of precisely the sexual characteristics expressed in the brain.