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Lumifer comments on The horrifying importance of domain knowledge - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.
What's visible to, and possibly disturbing for, the people in the changing room is what it looks like. I don't know, e.g., whether you would consider a post-op female-to-male transsexual person's anatomy male or merely male-looking, but I take it it would be about as disturbing in that context as a straightforwardly cis man's. So the relevant question is what it looks like.
I am pretty sure no one is in fact proposing that people be able to change their gender at will simply by saying "I'm a woman now". (Yeah, you could read Fluttershy's comment upthread that way, but I'm quite confident it wasn't so intended.)
Good! But I can't help noticing that your cynicism has been deployed only in one direction in this discussion, even though (so it seems to me) there's plenty of moral-outrage agitprop coming from elsewhere.
No, you're proposing that anyone can change genders at will by saying "I'm a woman now" and make an attempt to look like the other gender, dress like the other gender and insist on being referred to by opposite gender pronouns and name (that's how you defined "presenting as the other gender" here). While this is technically slightly more then saying "I'm a woman now", it's only barely so.
And frankly, I doubt you'd refuse to take the word of someone who insisted that he was always a "she" but didn't bother with changing name, clothing, or appearance.
I think it's very importantly different. It means, for instance, that
both of which greatly decrease its utility to people wanting to ogle or assault women in public restrooms, gym changing rooms, etc. (The fact that it requires you to make yourself appear less "manly" probably also has that effect.)
You may doubt whatever you please, I suppose.
(If someone declared themself female but made no sign of any attempt to "be" female beyond that declaration, I'd attempt to go along with their pronoun preferences but wouldn't, e.g., let them into any female-only premises I was responsible for. I don't think I would actually consider them female for any practical purposes, though further interactions might convince me that there was something more going on than a liking for feminine pronouns -- e.g., maybe the person is young, still living with and dependent on parents, and the parents are very strongly opposed. In such a case I still wouldn't let them into female-only premises but would be apologetic about it :-).)
How so? The only things in that list that take any effort at all are dressing and looking like a women. The former isn't that hard, it's easy to get a dress, heck these days many women wear jeans and a T-shirt, or suites, or other "male clothing", so anything a men would normally wear could count as "female clothing". The latter also isn't that hard, see the existence of drag queens, or any number of comedians.
It looks to me as if you are mixing up a number of different things (what makes someone male or female, versus what constitutes sufficient evidence to treat them so in a given case; what I think their gender is, versus what I would treat it as in a given difficult situtation; etc. I will try to disentangle these things.
The position I am defending here is as follows. (Individual points numbered for cross-reference.)
[EDITED to stop LW's comment formatting messing up my numbers and to complete something I carelessly left unfinished after editing other bits.]
0. There is no single fact-of-the-matter about a person's gender in general, because different notions of gender are appropriate in different circumstances. 1. Of course, for the great majority of people all reasonable such notions coincide; the questions here are about cases where they diverge. 2. For most purposes the best notion of gender is largely a matter of (a) internal mind-state and (b) social role occupancy. 3. The relevant internal mind-state doesn't change rapidly; social role occupancy can in a sense change quickly but evidence of it accumulates more slowly. And of course anatomy and chromosomes and whatnot are even harder to change.
4. In many cases, if someone claims that their gender is not as it superficially appears, the best policy is to believe them. (Note: this is not only about trans people. There are people who are anatomically, chromosomally and hormonally female but look very much like men unless you take their clothes off.) 5. In many others (typically distinguished from those in #3 by the consequences being worse if you take them at their word and they're lying) the best policy is to require stronger evidence of 2a and/or 2b (e.g., legal name change; evidence of having been consistently self-describing as female for some time; testimony of a psychologist who has examined them). 6. In some others (e.g., medicine, major sporting contests) 2a and 2b may be pretty much irrelevant and the only important thing may be genes or gross anatomy.
7. Every possible policy will make some mistakes, with the boring exception that if you define gender by easily visible external features then the policy of using those easily visible external features will not make mistakes. (But either you can't execute that policy without looking in people's pants, or else you will classify some people with female internal anatomy and chromosomes as male.)
So. Can someone's gender, in my view, change on a whim? No (see #3). Can something they do on a whim suffice to make me treat them, at least provisionally, as of one gender rather than another? Yes, but only in "low-stakes" cases (see #4). Does this mean that if everyone thought as I do then our nations' women's restrooms would be flooded with men claiming to be women in order to assault or harass? No, because in higher-stakes cases I would be more cautious (see #5), and in any case the available evidence strongly suggests that even laws that straightforwardly let anyone use any restroom do not cause any increase in such crimes.
I don't know about that. You don't interpret common statements along the lines of "Only you have the right to decide your gender identity" or, in the negative form, "No one can tell you which gender you are" this way?
The other direction, which I assume would have been represented by "God will burn you in hell forever, your freaks!" and/or "You need to be fixed and re-educated, this is for your own benefit" is strangely absent on LW :-) I doubt even VoiceOfRa would express the desire to go back to the ways of dealing with "sexual deviants" popular in the early and mid XX century.
More importantly, in my social circles (both meatspace and online) the left is the aggressor and tends to take the "If you're not with us you're against us. KILL!!!!" approach. If I were stuck in a small town in America's Bible Belt, for example, I would expect my emphasis to be different.
That's a separate question that touches on a whole bunch of other issues. It's related to the question of what the proper way of dealing with the guy who insists he's Jesus is.
No, I don't interpret "only you have the right..." etc. that way. I would guess that people saying it usually mean something like this: your gender is whatever it is, it's reasonably stable over time, and it's not something other people can know by looking at you or doing medical tests; so people should beyond what you say. But if you change your professed gender every five minutes no one is going to believe you are sincere and take you seriously.
Well, he seems to me to be quite far in "the other direction".
Here on LW, it seems to me the nearest thing to aggression on this topic has been VoR ranting about delusions, hallucinations, "trannies", etc., etc. There's some very aggressive "social justice" out there, for sure, but it's pretty much completely unrepresented on LW, whereas neoreaction is alive and well here even though there aren't very many neoreactionaries.
[EDITED to fix the typo mentioned two comments downthread.]
Rants are not aggression but free speech :-) Confusing the two is a common mistake/tactic :-P
I think that used to be true, but is no longer true. As far as I can see, VoiceOfRa is the lone neoreactionary actively posting.
He isn't. Neoreactionaries are normal people.
So is "God will burn you in hell for ever". So is "You are a bigot and I hope no one buys anything from your bakery". So is "If you're not with us you're against us". Or (I think more accurately) all of these are both aggression and free speech.
If mere ranting doesn't count as aggression, what is it that "the left" has been doing in your social circles lately? Issuing death threats?
Maybe no one else here explicitly identifies as nrx. (For that matter, I don't know whether VoR actually does.) But when topics come up of the sort where neoreactionaries and social-justice enthusiasts tend to disagree dramatically, I see none of the characteristic tropes of the SJ movement (anything a member of an Oppressed Group says about their situation must be accepted unquestioningly; anything that talks about "men" and "women" is perpetuating the gender binary and therefore bad; mumble mumble patriarchy burble; etc.) and plenty of those of neoreaction (take for granted that black people are less intelligent than white people and women less intelligent than men; treat homosexuality, transgender, etc., as instances of deviance that we should be working against, etc.). Comments that (explicitly) even contemplate the possibility that the social conservatives might be wrong on this stuff get lots of disagreement and usually (on balance) negative karma. Comments that agree with the nrx position on this stuff get less disagreement and usually (on balance) positive karma.
Maybe it's mostly plain ol' social conservatism, with only a tiny fraction of nrx. But whatever it is, there's more of it than there is of the "social justice" that lies at the other end of one political spectrum. I certainly don't see any possible way that "the left is the aggressor" here on LW; am I missing something?
(Of course "above and well" was a typo -- I was posting from a mobile device and not paying enough attention to its autocompletion. I'll fix it.)
Well, Jiro is posting from similar political position too (but I'm not sure either of them identifies as neoreactionary).
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.