Thanks for the great read. I'm a veteran of what you called the "Truscum Wars" and the fact that my side (the "transmedicalists") lost has probably been the most devastating thing that has happened to the transsexual/transgender community in many decades.
There was a brief honeymoon period after Obergefell where it seemed like society had come around to the idea of a rare, highly-selected class of people for whom there was a mismatch in their gender presentation and biological sex, but that period has obviously ended thanks to the overreach of trans activists and their ironclad refusal to accept any boundaries on their movement, such as the reasonable idea that a person's sex matters in some scenarios (sports, doctor's office) and not others (school, workplace).
Self-ID, as you noted, turned out to be fairly disastrous in allowing both deliberately bad actors and misled people experiencing other mental conditions to be grouped into the previously highly-selected class. Unfortunately, as the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria have become so watered down and most psychologists and doctors will diagnose anyone for any reason (via informed consent), this is no longer a useful way of separating the "true" trans from those experiencing other afflictions.
I'm looking forward to part 2 and your policy proposals.
I find this very sensible. (Speaking, fwiw, as a person who is arguably non-binary, bisexual, and intersex; or arguably not in each case, depending on the arguer's ideological commitments; and who suspects that these peculiarities are linked by more than coincidence.) I look forward to the second half!
I am curious about what motivated you to write this. Of course that's probably a private matter. However, it's an analysis that it seems would require a great deal of careful thought about a subject most people form quick opinions about; and that is likely to occur only if one has skin in the game.
I'm a strong believer in "categories are made for man," but I agree that while it opens the door for self-ID, it doesn't require it. Self-ID is just one criterion we can choose to use to define the category, and it's up to society to decide if it's the (or a) right criterion. I also agree that there's no need for categories to be universal - it makes sense for tomatoes to be a fruit from a botanical perspective but not from a culinary perspective, and it may make sense for trans women to be considered women in some circumstances but not in others.
One aspect of this though is that definitional fights can sometimes act as cheat codes for other fights. You can see this in fights over tariff categories. A while back, Pillow Pets were created to take advantage of a lower tariff on pillows than stuffed animals. Basically, rather than trying to convince anyone that it was in the national interest to lower the tariff on their particular product, the importer just needed to convince Customs (or whomever) that the product fits better within the definition of "pillow" than "stuffed animal" and they'd get the benefit of the lower tariff.
A similar thing is going on with respect to trans rights. We have a variety of legal and cultural institutions where access depends on your being a "woman." Traditionally, trans women were excluded from these institutions because they weren't seen as women. It's possible that if we considered each of these categories, we'd find reason to grant access to trans women as well. However, if you can instead convince the relevant people that trans women are women, you get to skip those fights because we already agree that women get access. The reverse is also going on on the other side, as the argument that trans women shouldn't have access to X institution because access is limited to women and trans women aren't women is no better than the argument that they should because they are women.
Along these lines, the Right's position on this has sort of frustrated me for the same reason its position on Climate Change frustrates me. On Climate Change, the science is pretty much in on the fact that climate is changing due to human activity, but there's room to argue about how and to what extent we should combat this issue. However, instead of taking up that argument, the Right has stuck with its denial that Climate Change is happening in the first instance, leaving no one to provide a real "red team" to challenge the Left's theories on how disastrous climate change might be and how to address it, which often seem to go far too far or not to be fully thought out. We have a similar problem with gender issues. The Right's focus has been on insisting that trans women aren't women, when this is just a definitional question. I'd prefer if we could accept that trans women are trans women (whether this means women born with male bodies or men who want to act/be perceived as women) and have some fights about how best to arrange society in light of this fact. You get some of this from the Jesse Singals of the world, but they wind up sort of stuck in the middle while the bigger battles rage between a Left that just wants to deem them women and a Right that wants to deem them perverted men without ever considering the implications of particular policy choices.
Very nice. I don't agree with everything, but a lot that I can agree with here, and it's much better than Scott's old piece. It also keeps in mind that the biology is messier than a lot of social conservatives want to recognize, and yours is the obviously correct position as to the varying relevancy of gender between sports, prison, workplaces, etc.
One thing worth considering that you do not really do here is, that you seem to be conceptualizing things as if there is a static collection of people with the condition, and so we should take that as a given, and work out our policy from there. But there's also very obviously a phenomenon of a social contagion. I think in many cases the "dysphoric trans" category that you suggest is not as fixed as is proposed, and people's own thoughts about their relationship with gender are affected by the norms, ideologies, status hierarchies, etc. of their peers and of the people that they respect. I believe I ran across some study that dysphoria among the youth in most cases vanishes on its own, but I don't have that on hand. Given that all that's the case, and given that it's obviously way better for someone to be moderately satisfied with their birth sex than to attempt to transition, with all the costs that that entails, I think we should at least have as a serious concern how best to reduce the number of unnecessary transitions. We should be considerably more open to treatments that try to change people's minds than their bodies (offered voluntarily, of course).
I think I'm overall more amenable to the standard social conservative positions, but I think that biology is messier than they often realize, certainly not as simple as chromosomes, and to some extent there's a rare middle zone where it's harder to draw a simple line.
The categories "men" and "women" are much more important to ordinary people's reasoning than "fish", and imposing any engineered changes on them has high costs. You say "In an office environment, 'gender' is mostly irrelevant or vestigial". This is a polite social fiction. It is not true. Even the most egalitarian offices treat a man angrily berating a woman differently than berating another man, and the social fiction breaks down completely outside of professional middle-class jobs. Ordinary people use these categories every day to make sense of others and navigate their social environments.
It is true that the categories do not correspond to any biological fact, but this does not mean the old meaning was chosen arbitrairly, or as a process of explicit tradeoffs like the ones in this essay. The categories developed naturally as people use them, and develop into a form suitable for oridnary people's reasoning.
As critic of "The Categories were Made for Man" Zack M. Davis says, people "expect to be able to think using top-20 nouns that came with their native tongue" without worrying about slicing each individual decision (http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Dec/more-schelling/). I think that words this important are property of the masses, and dislike any imposed change on principle. Even if you disagree with that, it is hard to see how comforting a small minority is worth the damage to words people use every day.
Thank you for this. Might be the least inflammatory thing I've read on trans and you somehow pulled it off with hardly any throat-clearing or punch-pulling.
Absent from your taxonomy is the class of trans identifying people that to me is the strongest argument against self ID, lets call them 'mistaken trans'. As a gen z guy who grew up on the west coast with nerdy, chronically online, highly neurotic friends, I'm concerned that the current maximally trans affirming stance of the left is harming young people who are in some real way wrong about their subjective experience, or at least wrong about its causes. I've had multiple friends march through some version of 'something is wrong, it must be because I'm': 1) Depressed...no, 2) ADHD...no, 3) Autistic...no, 4) bisexual....no, 5) non-binary...no, 6) a trans woman. Two such friends came out as trans (after years of vibing like pretty normal cishet dudes) after this cycle as ~22 year old virgins and promptly medicalized themselves without knowing what they're missing. Others after meeting a trans partner.
An experience with a childhood friend who had a feminine vibe and interests from kindergarten on has convinced me that social contagion/mistakenly identifying general malaise as gender dysphoria certainly doesn't cover everyone. But if I had to articulate the best case for some level of social stigma or condemnation of self ID it would be this: some level of taboo or medicalization is necessary to prevent thousands of mentally ill young people from identifying "I must be trans" as the solution for the human condition they're experiencing, hopping on surgery/hormones, and regretting it later.
Maybe discussion of tradeoffs belongs in part two in any case, but curious to hear your thoughts. Wish Scott would revisit all of this himself in light of the huge uptick in trans ID since his post, but I certainly can't blame him for not wanting to touch it.
Did the trans women you mentioned detransition and conclude they were mistaken in their identity, or are you just assuming they will eventually? I'm assuming it's the latter since it would have been relevant enough to mention if it were the former.
I'm the kind of trans woman who fitted the description you gave in my early twenties just before transitioning, and I'm very glad I transitioned ten years on. I was highly neurotic (caused in part by the damage I did to my psyche by suppressing my dysphoria throughout my teenage years), chronically online (who wants to go outdoors when they feel like they're living in the wrong body but can't explain why they feel that way?), and nerdy (being a homebody tends to cause nerdiness!). I've at various points considered myself nonbinary, depressed, someone with ADHD and autism, etc. (which were all correct but incomplete explanations for my misery).
And yet I'm also very genuinely and unambiguously trans. I had horrific dysphoria back then, which I didn't know how to identify because I'd done such a good job of sublimating it into other neuroses. I still have dysphoria, but *far* less now that I've gotten some surgeries and been on hormones for a decade. Transition has made my life livable. It's highly likely I would not have survived to my thirties without it.
I've met many other trans people who basically meet this description who are extremely glad they transitioned and show no signs of regret even after years. But holding to your model, if I hadn't told you all this, and you'd only met me at the start of my transition, I'd be another datapoint in your mental list of "mistaken transes". Something to consider.
> The meaningful role of gender in prison is to separate a victim class from a class of people who would likely prey on them.
...of course, another victim class of people when it comes to prison, infamously, is weak-looking / effeminate-looking / otherwise gender-ambiguous "men". Which is the category trans women end up in if you house one with a bunch of cis men.
If fighting ability is the thing we really care about in this context, perhaps prison should actually be separated by weight category, like boxing?
The trouble is categories themselves. We now often don't need and, when we can, shouldn't use categories at all. Most philosophical language problems like those that perplexed (or entertained) the Ancient Greeks are simply an immediate consequence of a failure to recognize that categorization in the form of linguistic conventions and attempts to name rough patterns is a mere heuristic of convenience which necessarily introduce all kinds of problems and errors into any attempts to use them as inputs for rigorous analysis, for which use they are not well-suited. By ignoring this and taking categories too seriously one inescapably ends up in all kinds of ridiculous paradoxes and pointless, irresolvable debates, e.g., lumpers v splitters.
The major reason we get hung up on the precise definition of words is the law, that is, the human instinct for establishing social rules and expressing them in the form of short combinations of words - inherently inadequate to capture the complexity of reality - and this ends up creating countless high-stakes disputes which can only be adjudicated on the basis of who triumphs in conflicts over semantics. We are now all too familiar with how this allows the political game to both move into the linguistic battlefield and also to deny its true nature by hiding behind the cover story of 'superior' interpretations. The temptation to try and push this as far as one can get away with ends up with completely torturing the language and mutilating the traditionally and commonly understood meaning of words to win those battles, which is no longer deemed shameful and indeed often glorified as savvy post-modern gamesmanship.
One may ask how is one to think and rule without the intellectual shorthand of human linguistic categories, and -we- can't, but computers can, and we can use computers. Try to imagine that human minds were more like modern computers and not limited by storage, recall, bandwidth, processing speed, and so forth, and didn't need to resort to "lossy" compression or fuzzy simplifications. Instead of using the name for a category, just spit out the whole gigabyte or more with all the necessary statistical measures accompanying the expression of any kind pattern and all at whatever level of precision is required for the intended conveyance or effect. And if one if able to communicate and process with this level of "ultra-database" bandwidth and precision, one can makes social rules so well-defined as to determine the answer to any question for every human individual at every second of their lives with any possible set of characteristics and history. Then it doesn't matter "what is a woman"? Basically you look at the app and it processes the algorithm beyond human comprehension but which still only unlocks one of the bathroom doors in front of you.
Agree with your critique of naive idealism, but the kind of algorithmic conventionalism you're presenting as an alternative is just as bad imo, if not worse. Yes, words never quite mean what we think they do - "the thing itself always escapes", but at the same time it's precisely because we don't just accept that the world is illusion and retreat into non-being that we move through and beyond the contradictions of any given conceptual matrix. Knowledge is real, it's just not a set of true propositions but an ethic of discourse, so we have to keep disagreeing with each other. That's a good thing. I don't want to get rid of it.
The greater the reliance on categorization via words, the worse the wars and fallout from the wasteful struggle for semantic deutungshoheit over those words. Law cannot be "code" if the instructions cannot be interpreted consistently enough to be reliably executed.
dysphoric/nondysphoric is a far blurrier category than male/female and I urge you to be extremely cautious with any proposed policy that references it
some complicating factorss include that even noticing general experienced badness as 'gender dysphoria' specifically takes introspective work, both the thing and the understanding of the thing may be socially mediated or transmitted, and the goal of transition is often to treat dysphoria and in doing so reduce or entirely remove it
Interesting and thoughtful as always. I'm having trouble with what appears to be conflating two separate issues (which Scott also conflates in his original post). It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between "intersex", where someone's physiology means it's potentially ambiguous whether they are male or female, vs. "transgender", where someone's internal experience/expectation differs from their physical body. I can see the argument where, in the case of an intersex person, we let the "tiebreaker" be their self-identification. But that doesn't seem to extend at all to someone with gender dysphoria, where there is no tie that needs to be broken.
A potentially related note is that quoting Genesis 2 to support the idea that all human categories are arbitrary is a bit thorny. In Genesis 1 it seems that "male" and "female" are categories defined by God as part of creation ("In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them"), not post hoc groupings supplied by mankind after the event.
You define "The Workplace" as "...an office environment" where gender doesn't matter.
This is largely untrue, and reveals a PMC-brain view of the world. Many, if not most, people do not work paperwork and email jobs, and sex still matters a lot in the workplace, with your interpretation of the theory of the firm non withstanding.
I have a question about the move from "Biology is not sufficient to obtain a natural categorization of gender" to "Gender ought to be self-identified."
I feel like there are two different projects here. One project is to figure out the essence of a man or a woman, and the other is to figure out how we ought to understand those categories given the importance of people's self-identities. In other words, one is metaphysical and the other is ameliorative. If so, then I don't see why the ameliorative project needs to depend on the metaphysical one.
re: (1.b) "having to make one of the following choices", I think there's as slightly reasonable 4th option (or second, second option I guess?) that aligns to the prole normie instinct being "karyotype is a sufficient criterion, but the people in the above paragraph are women [as long as they match our conventional expectations for women]". I, charitably, think most people really don't care about the passing trans, and are mostly taking issue with it being demanded of them that they recognize non-passing trans as the self-identified gender (and if you push them on this by claiming consistency is required of them for their moral framework to be justifiable, only then will many, backed into the rhetorical corner, probably-inauthentically claim it matters that you call androgen insensitives men). I also think the reasonable rebuttal to that is to take issue with "conventional expectations" of gender, but I think that's the part you have to grapple with in that situation versus how we're drawing the categorical boundaries. People really hate surprisal.
I actually believe most people genuinely don't care about trans unless you make it visible, which of course there are lots of trans people that want to be seen and it's extremely fair for them to not want to be invalidated in that sense, but that's the actual ground being fought on IMO and perhaps both sides' activists benefit from this being obfuscated.
Speaking as someone who never read Scott’s original post (until now) but received the highlights through cultural osmosis (and just having similar conversations in real life at the time), this piece does a great job at both reconstructing it and breaking down the flaws. In the end, it seems like it all comes down to messy tradeoffs with complex epistemic questions and hazy counterfactuals—e.g., weighing the rates of Type 1 vs Type 2 errors, the social & political cost of complexity vs. the increased error rate entailed by uniformity, and of course the moral weight of different types of harms to different groups of people. It seems clear that you have set an implicit guardrail that any amenable solution must allow for those with true gender dysphoria to receive the treatment they need, and I’m in agreement there. As for how we treat other sub-categories at the margins (or even how we treat those with true gender dysphoria in contexts where sex-like qualities are meaningful)? Well, I’m curious to see where you land.
Shouldn't we take a Coase Theorem style approach to making categories? You have done well to identify several sub-categories and several different rights (i.e., access to sports, prison) associated with the trans issue. Now we just have to decide who typically values particular rights/responsibilities more.
Thanks for the great read. I'm a veteran of what you called the "Truscum Wars" and the fact that my side (the "transmedicalists") lost has probably been the most devastating thing that has happened to the transsexual/transgender community in many decades.
There was a brief honeymoon period after Obergefell where it seemed like society had come around to the idea of a rare, highly-selected class of people for whom there was a mismatch in their gender presentation and biological sex, but that period has obviously ended thanks to the overreach of trans activists and their ironclad refusal to accept any boundaries on their movement, such as the reasonable idea that a person's sex matters in some scenarios (sports, doctor's office) and not others (school, workplace).
Self-ID, as you noted, turned out to be fairly disastrous in allowing both deliberately bad actors and misled people experiencing other mental conditions to be grouped into the previously highly-selected class. Unfortunately, as the diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria have become so watered down and most psychologists and doctors will diagnose anyone for any reason (via informed consent), this is no longer a useful way of separating the "true" trans from those experiencing other afflictions.
I'm looking forward to part 2 and your policy proposals.
I find this very sensible. (Speaking, fwiw, as a person who is arguably non-binary, bisexual, and intersex; or arguably not in each case, depending on the arguer's ideological commitments; and who suspects that these peculiarities are linked by more than coincidence.) I look forward to the second half!
I am curious about what motivated you to write this. Of course that's probably a private matter. However, it's an analysis that it seems would require a great deal of careful thought about a subject most people form quick opinions about; and that is likely to occur only if one has skin in the game.
Appreciate your take here.
I'm a strong believer in "categories are made for man," but I agree that while it opens the door for self-ID, it doesn't require it. Self-ID is just one criterion we can choose to use to define the category, and it's up to society to decide if it's the (or a) right criterion. I also agree that there's no need for categories to be universal - it makes sense for tomatoes to be a fruit from a botanical perspective but not from a culinary perspective, and it may make sense for trans women to be considered women in some circumstances but not in others.
One aspect of this though is that definitional fights can sometimes act as cheat codes for other fights. You can see this in fights over tariff categories. A while back, Pillow Pets were created to take advantage of a lower tariff on pillows than stuffed animals. Basically, rather than trying to convince anyone that it was in the national interest to lower the tariff on their particular product, the importer just needed to convince Customs (or whomever) that the product fits better within the definition of "pillow" than "stuffed animal" and they'd get the benefit of the lower tariff.
A similar thing is going on with respect to trans rights. We have a variety of legal and cultural institutions where access depends on your being a "woman." Traditionally, trans women were excluded from these institutions because they weren't seen as women. It's possible that if we considered each of these categories, we'd find reason to grant access to trans women as well. However, if you can instead convince the relevant people that trans women are women, you get to skip those fights because we already agree that women get access. The reverse is also going on on the other side, as the argument that trans women shouldn't have access to X institution because access is limited to women and trans women aren't women is no better than the argument that they should because they are women.
Along these lines, the Right's position on this has sort of frustrated me for the same reason its position on Climate Change frustrates me. On Climate Change, the science is pretty much in on the fact that climate is changing due to human activity, but there's room to argue about how and to what extent we should combat this issue. However, instead of taking up that argument, the Right has stuck with its denial that Climate Change is happening in the first instance, leaving no one to provide a real "red team" to challenge the Left's theories on how disastrous climate change might be and how to address it, which often seem to go far too far or not to be fully thought out. We have a similar problem with gender issues. The Right's focus has been on insisting that trans women aren't women, when this is just a definitional question. I'd prefer if we could accept that trans women are trans women (whether this means women born with male bodies or men who want to act/be perceived as women) and have some fights about how best to arrange society in light of this fact. You get some of this from the Jesse Singals of the world, but they wind up sort of stuck in the middle while the bigger battles rage between a Left that just wants to deem them women and a Right that wants to deem them perverted men without ever considering the implications of particular policy choices.
Very nice. I don't agree with everything, but a lot that I can agree with here, and it's much better than Scott's old piece. It also keeps in mind that the biology is messier than a lot of social conservatives want to recognize, and yours is the obviously correct position as to the varying relevancy of gender between sports, prison, workplaces, etc.
One thing worth considering that you do not really do here is, that you seem to be conceptualizing things as if there is a static collection of people with the condition, and so we should take that as a given, and work out our policy from there. But there's also very obviously a phenomenon of a social contagion. I think in many cases the "dysphoric trans" category that you suggest is not as fixed as is proposed, and people's own thoughts about their relationship with gender are affected by the norms, ideologies, status hierarchies, etc. of their peers and of the people that they respect. I believe I ran across some study that dysphoria among the youth in most cases vanishes on its own, but I don't have that on hand. Given that all that's the case, and given that it's obviously way better for someone to be moderately satisfied with their birth sex than to attempt to transition, with all the costs that that entails, I think we should at least have as a serious concern how best to reduce the number of unnecessary transitions. We should be considerably more open to treatments that try to change people's minds than their bodies (offered voluntarily, of course).
I think I'm overall more amenable to the standard social conservative positions, but I think that biology is messier than they often realize, certainly not as simple as chromosomes, and to some extent there's a rare middle zone where it's harder to draw a simple line.
The categories "men" and "women" are much more important to ordinary people's reasoning than "fish", and imposing any engineered changes on them has high costs. You say "In an office environment, 'gender' is mostly irrelevant or vestigial". This is a polite social fiction. It is not true. Even the most egalitarian offices treat a man angrily berating a woman differently than berating another man, and the social fiction breaks down completely outside of professional middle-class jobs. Ordinary people use these categories every day to make sense of others and navigate their social environments.
It is true that the categories do not correspond to any biological fact, but this does not mean the old meaning was chosen arbitrairly, or as a process of explicit tradeoffs like the ones in this essay. The categories developed naturally as people use them, and develop into a form suitable for oridnary people's reasoning.
As critic of "The Categories were Made for Man" Zack M. Davis says, people "expect to be able to think using top-20 nouns that came with their native tongue" without worrying about slicing each individual decision (http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Dec/more-schelling/). I think that words this important are property of the masses, and dislike any imposed change on principle. Even if you disagree with that, it is hard to see how comforting a small minority is worth the damage to words people use every day.
Thank you for this. Might be the least inflammatory thing I've read on trans and you somehow pulled it off with hardly any throat-clearing or punch-pulling.
Absent from your taxonomy is the class of trans identifying people that to me is the strongest argument against self ID, lets call them 'mistaken trans'. As a gen z guy who grew up on the west coast with nerdy, chronically online, highly neurotic friends, I'm concerned that the current maximally trans affirming stance of the left is harming young people who are in some real way wrong about their subjective experience, or at least wrong about its causes. I've had multiple friends march through some version of 'something is wrong, it must be because I'm': 1) Depressed...no, 2) ADHD...no, 3) Autistic...no, 4) bisexual....no, 5) non-binary...no, 6) a trans woman. Two such friends came out as trans (after years of vibing like pretty normal cishet dudes) after this cycle as ~22 year old virgins and promptly medicalized themselves without knowing what they're missing. Others after meeting a trans partner.
An experience with a childhood friend who had a feminine vibe and interests from kindergarten on has convinced me that social contagion/mistakenly identifying general malaise as gender dysphoria certainly doesn't cover everyone. But if I had to articulate the best case for some level of social stigma or condemnation of self ID it would be this: some level of taboo or medicalization is necessary to prevent thousands of mentally ill young people from identifying "I must be trans" as the solution for the human condition they're experiencing, hopping on surgery/hormones, and regretting it later.
Maybe discussion of tradeoffs belongs in part two in any case, but curious to hear your thoughts. Wish Scott would revisit all of this himself in light of the huge uptick in trans ID since his post, but I certainly can't blame him for not wanting to touch it.
Did the trans women you mentioned detransition and conclude they were mistaken in their identity, or are you just assuming they will eventually? I'm assuming it's the latter since it would have been relevant enough to mention if it were the former.
I'm the kind of trans woman who fitted the description you gave in my early twenties just before transitioning, and I'm very glad I transitioned ten years on. I was highly neurotic (caused in part by the damage I did to my psyche by suppressing my dysphoria throughout my teenage years), chronically online (who wants to go outdoors when they feel like they're living in the wrong body but can't explain why they feel that way?), and nerdy (being a homebody tends to cause nerdiness!). I've at various points considered myself nonbinary, depressed, someone with ADHD and autism, etc. (which were all correct but incomplete explanations for my misery).
And yet I'm also very genuinely and unambiguously trans. I had horrific dysphoria back then, which I didn't know how to identify because I'd done such a good job of sublimating it into other neuroses. I still have dysphoria, but *far* less now that I've gotten some surgeries and been on hormones for a decade. Transition has made my life livable. It's highly likely I would not have survived to my thirties without it.
I've met many other trans people who basically meet this description who are extremely glad they transitioned and show no signs of regret even after years. But holding to your model, if I hadn't told you all this, and you'd only met me at the start of my transition, I'd be another datapoint in your mental list of "mistaken transes". Something to consider.
> The meaningful role of gender in prison is to separate a victim class from a class of people who would likely prey on them.
...of course, another victim class of people when it comes to prison, infamously, is weak-looking / effeminate-looking / otherwise gender-ambiguous "men". Which is the category trans women end up in if you house one with a bunch of cis men.
If fighting ability is the thing we really care about in this context, perhaps prison should actually be separated by weight category, like boxing?
The trouble is categories themselves. We now often don't need and, when we can, shouldn't use categories at all. Most philosophical language problems like those that perplexed (or entertained) the Ancient Greeks are simply an immediate consequence of a failure to recognize that categorization in the form of linguistic conventions and attempts to name rough patterns is a mere heuristic of convenience which necessarily introduce all kinds of problems and errors into any attempts to use them as inputs for rigorous analysis, for which use they are not well-suited. By ignoring this and taking categories too seriously one inescapably ends up in all kinds of ridiculous paradoxes and pointless, irresolvable debates, e.g., lumpers v splitters.
The major reason we get hung up on the precise definition of words is the law, that is, the human instinct for establishing social rules and expressing them in the form of short combinations of words - inherently inadequate to capture the complexity of reality - and this ends up creating countless high-stakes disputes which can only be adjudicated on the basis of who triumphs in conflicts over semantics. We are now all too familiar with how this allows the political game to both move into the linguistic battlefield and also to deny its true nature by hiding behind the cover story of 'superior' interpretations. The temptation to try and push this as far as one can get away with ends up with completely torturing the language and mutilating the traditionally and commonly understood meaning of words to win those battles, which is no longer deemed shameful and indeed often glorified as savvy post-modern gamesmanship.
One may ask how is one to think and rule without the intellectual shorthand of human linguistic categories, and -we- can't, but computers can, and we can use computers. Try to imagine that human minds were more like modern computers and not limited by storage, recall, bandwidth, processing speed, and so forth, and didn't need to resort to "lossy" compression or fuzzy simplifications. Instead of using the name for a category, just spit out the whole gigabyte or more with all the necessary statistical measures accompanying the expression of any kind pattern and all at whatever level of precision is required for the intended conveyance or effect. And if one if able to communicate and process with this level of "ultra-database" bandwidth and precision, one can makes social rules so well-defined as to determine the answer to any question for every human individual at every second of their lives with any possible set of characteristics and history. Then it doesn't matter "what is a woman"? Basically you look at the app and it processes the algorithm beyond human comprehension but which still only unlocks one of the bathroom doors in front of you.
Agree with your critique of naive idealism, but the kind of algorithmic conventionalism you're presenting as an alternative is just as bad imo, if not worse. Yes, words never quite mean what we think they do - "the thing itself always escapes", but at the same time it's precisely because we don't just accept that the world is illusion and retreat into non-being that we move through and beyond the contradictions of any given conceptual matrix. Knowledge is real, it's just not a set of true propositions but an ethic of discourse, so we have to keep disagreeing with each other. That's a good thing. I don't want to get rid of it.
The greater the reliance on categorization via words, the worse the wars and fallout from the wasteful struggle for semantic deutungshoheit over those words. Law cannot be "code" if the instructions cannot be interpreted consistently enough to be reliably executed.
dysphoric/nondysphoric is a far blurrier category than male/female and I urge you to be extremely cautious with any proposed policy that references it
some complicating factorss include that even noticing general experienced badness as 'gender dysphoria' specifically takes introspective work, both the thing and the understanding of the thing may be socially mediated or transmitted, and the goal of transition is often to treat dysphoria and in doing so reduce or entirely remove it
Interesting and thoughtful as always. I'm having trouble with what appears to be conflating two separate issues (which Scott also conflates in his original post). It seems to me that there is a fundamental difference between "intersex", where someone's physiology means it's potentially ambiguous whether they are male or female, vs. "transgender", where someone's internal experience/expectation differs from their physical body. I can see the argument where, in the case of an intersex person, we let the "tiebreaker" be their self-identification. But that doesn't seem to extend at all to someone with gender dysphoria, where there is no tie that needs to be broken.
A potentially related note is that quoting Genesis 2 to support the idea that all human categories are arbitrary is a bit thorny. In Genesis 1 it seems that "male" and "female" are categories defined by God as part of creation ("In the image of God He created him, male and female He created them"), not post hoc groupings supplied by mankind after the event.
You define "The Workplace" as "...an office environment" where gender doesn't matter.
This is largely untrue, and reveals a PMC-brain view of the world. Many, if not most, people do not work paperwork and email jobs, and sex still matters a lot in the workplace, with your interpretation of the theory of the firm non withstanding.
Thanks for this informative post!
I have a question about the move from "Biology is not sufficient to obtain a natural categorization of gender" to "Gender ought to be self-identified."
I feel like there are two different projects here. One project is to figure out the essence of a man or a woman, and the other is to figure out how we ought to understand those categories given the importance of people's self-identities. In other words, one is metaphysical and the other is ameliorative. If so, then I don't see why the ameliorative project needs to depend on the metaphysical one.
This is great.
re: (1.b) "having to make one of the following choices", I think there's as slightly reasonable 4th option (or second, second option I guess?) that aligns to the prole normie instinct being "karyotype is a sufficient criterion, but the people in the above paragraph are women [as long as they match our conventional expectations for women]". I, charitably, think most people really don't care about the passing trans, and are mostly taking issue with it being demanded of them that they recognize non-passing trans as the self-identified gender (and if you push them on this by claiming consistency is required of them for their moral framework to be justifiable, only then will many, backed into the rhetorical corner, probably-inauthentically claim it matters that you call androgen insensitives men). I also think the reasonable rebuttal to that is to take issue with "conventional expectations" of gender, but I think that's the part you have to grapple with in that situation versus how we're drawing the categorical boundaries. People really hate surprisal.
I actually believe most people genuinely don't care about trans unless you make it visible, which of course there are lots of trans people that want to be seen and it's extremely fair for them to not want to be invalidated in that sense, but that's the actual ground being fought on IMO and perhaps both sides' activists benefit from this being obfuscated.
Speaking as someone who never read Scott’s original post (until now) but received the highlights through cultural osmosis (and just having similar conversations in real life at the time), this piece does a great job at both reconstructing it and breaking down the flaws. In the end, it seems like it all comes down to messy tradeoffs with complex epistemic questions and hazy counterfactuals—e.g., weighing the rates of Type 1 vs Type 2 errors, the social & political cost of complexity vs. the increased error rate entailed by uniformity, and of course the moral weight of different types of harms to different groups of people. It seems clear that you have set an implicit guardrail that any amenable solution must allow for those with true gender dysphoria to receive the treatment they need, and I’m in agreement there. As for how we treat other sub-categories at the margins (or even how we treat those with true gender dysphoria in contexts where sex-like qualities are meaningful)? Well, I’m curious to see where you land.
Shouldn't we take a Coase Theorem style approach to making categories? You have done well to identify several sub-categories and several different rights (i.e., access to sports, prison) associated with the trans issue. Now we just have to decide who typically values particular rights/responsibilities more.
Keeping a close eye on this