My last intellectual Turing test was quite popular, so I am organizing another one!
The Ideological Turing Test, invented by Bryan Caplan, is a test of how well people understand other people’s viewpoints. The regular Turing test is a test for programmers: can you write a computer program which a human being cannot tell apart from another human being? The Intellectual Turing Test is a test for people who believe things: can you explain your opponent’s viewpoints in such a way that your opponent cannot tell it apart from someone who legitimately believes the opinion? If you can, it shows you understand your opponent’s positions on a deep level.
One of the big criticisms of the last Turing test is that it was hard to judge anti-social-justice entries because anti-social-justice people believe a lot of different things. Therefore, this Turing test will feature two specific groups of people.
The Gender Identity category consists of people who believe trans people are motivated to transition because of their gender identity, gender dysphoria, or both. Gender identity is an inner sense of oneself as male, female, or nonbinary, which can be separated both from one’s conformity to gender roles and one’s biological sex. Gender dysphoria is a sense of dissonance because either one’s social role or one’s physical sex does not match one’s preferred gender.
The Blanchard-Bailey category consists of people who believe that trans women can be divided into two groups. Homosexual transsexuals are androphilic, feminine, and transitioning because it is easier to be a passing woman than a feminine man. Autogynephilic transsexuals are gynephilic, masculine, and transitioning because of their sexual fetish for and/or romantic attraction to the idea of themselves as women.
(If you have some different viewpoint on trans people, then this is not the ITT for you.)
The questions you have to answer are the following:
- How do you define woman/man?
- What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
- Why are trans women disproportionately likely to be programmers?
- a. [If answering for the Gender Identity side] Why do many trans women experience sexual fantasies about being or becoming a woman?
b. [If answering for the Blanchard-Bailey side] Explain trans people assigned female at birth.
Last time, there was a problem of too many submissions, some of which were boring or low-effort. If you would like to participate, sometime before March 1st you should write and send me your answers to both sides, as well as which side you are actually on. I will read your answers and tell you whether I will run them.
Things that are more likely to get your answers accepted:
- Humor.
- Being clearly well-thought-out.
- Answers longer than a paragraph for each question.
- Unusual or bizarre opinions.
- Being on the side that is unpopular or bad at writing.
- Being sufficiently locally famous that I’m curious how people will respond to you.
As always, I am happy to use a pseudonym for anyone, so you do not have to be afraid that people will disapprove of you for confessing to thinking Blanchard-Bailey is correct. I am also happy to link to any Tumblrs, Twitters, blogs, works of fiction, manifestos, etc. that you would like to promote.
Please email me your submissions at ozyfrantz@gmail.com. Submissions sent in other ways may not be seen.
Thing of Things 
What are your opinions on the cotton ceiling?
Why does this always make me think of knicker gussets and not the Very Socially Important Whatsit that it is?
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Well, it *was* originally an underwear reference…
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wait really? i thought it was about bedsheets + pun on glass ceiling. whats the underwear reference?
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The cotton is the cotton of people’s underwear.
It is… not a great phrasing.
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@Aapje: Do you have the same objections to “designated” (blank at birth), a comparably common phrasing?
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@1angelette
‘Designate’ also seems inaccurate, but less so, as one can at least make an argument that it can be used for cases where people are marked. For examples, the Jews who were made to wear a star of David by the Nazis can be said to have been designated for discrimination. One could make a (weak*) argument that men and women are designated for discrimination by doctors.
* The weak part not being the existence of discrimination, but rather whether the statement by the doctor has any real effect on the behavior by others, which I strongly doubt.
My more general objection is that I see a pattern in SJ where linguistic frames are used that imply more fault on the part of outgroups than I consider reasonable. Reasonable arguments can be made that doctors have used or are using wrong protocols to deal with transgender and intersex people, but it seems weird to blame them for not being able to do the (currently) impossible: to distinguish babies with male-body brains from people with female-body brains, regardless of what actual bodies they have. IMO, the AMAB/AFAB frame strongly suggests that they are to blame for not doing this.
Quite a bit of discussion surrounding SJ involves the reaction by outgroups to the framing that is applied to them, which many of them consider stereotyping, untruthful or otherwise unfair. My opinion is that SJ would be a lot more inclusive, as well as more consistent with their claimed ideals, if they replace these frames.
However, this is really part of a more general divide between those who seek justice for all vs those who seek maximum benefits for some. I consider it very unfortunate that dismissing the frames of the latter group is seen as a trait of the outgroup in the culture war, so even mostly reasonable SJ people seem unable to shed mind-killing frames, as it would ruin their status.
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@Aapje:
I’d actually challenge even your narrowed delineation of the weak part. For example the protagonist Stephanides of the book Middlesex (to my best understanding, well researched) was designated by the doctor as a girl and nobody disagreed with this. They went on to encourage the protagonist to have relationships with mental, and so on. So I think that the doctor’s opinion had a significant effect, unless you mean, the family members and such would be very likely to view the protagonist’s genitalia themselves and come to the same conclusion as the doctor? In which case, sure.
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Could you clarify the part about “explain trans people assigned female at birth”?
Does that mean explain trans men, i.e., women born and raised as women who transition to men, or do you mean something more specific?
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Here is a definition of the phrase “assigned female at birth.”
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That wasn’t the clarification I was asking for. I was asking whether you meant that to specifically refer to trans men who were assigned female at birth and raised that way or did you have something in mind like people who were assigned female at birth but then from some point on raised as men but then choose to transition to female. Or something else
If I’m understanding you correctly you merely mean explain why someone would choose to present as a man when previously society has regarded them as female. I originally assumed you didn’t mean this because then you would just have said “explain trans men” … but maybe you were concerned about misunderstanding of that term.
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Nonbinary people exist. I myself am a nonbinary person. Therefore, I chose a term which was inclusive of nonbinary people.
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@Ozy,
That page is suspended.
Anyway, I would argue that your question is sloppily phrased as it disregards that ‘female’ can refer both to sex and gender. If you think in ‘sex’ terms, then anyone born with female genitalia just is female at birth and is not assigned. The only people who are assigned are people with ambiguous/both types of genitalia where the doctors then make a choice. Those people can then fairly often be trans in the sense that their genitals won’t match their identity (even if this is mostly due to a bad choice by the doctors). Other trans people who where born with one clear set of genitalia are not assigned in the context of ‘sex.’
In the context of ‘gender’, people generally start judging babies with male and female genitals differently directly after birth. However, in the context of ‘trans’ beliefs this makes little sense to me, as it is impossible to distinguish babies with female genitals that will later want to transition from babies that won’t. So IMO, then the only objection you can have is to gender roles in itself. The impact of doing this is mainly going to be felt by cis people, so you can’t merely discuss this as to its impact on trans people.
Anyway, as you can see, one can make two different arguments based on whether one interprets your question as referring to sex or gender (or both). However, given your stated reason (being inclusive), I think that it was not your intent to have this ambiguity and you actually meant only one of these interpretations and your desire to be more inclusive resulted in a lack of clarity.
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@Aapje, AMAB and AFAB are commonly used terms with specific generally understood definitions. I understand you may think the standard definition of them is not useful, but I don’t think it makes sense to say that using the standard definition is *unclear*.
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If we assume that ‘sex’ is the intended context, then I would argue that no doctor ever assigned ‘male’ to me. Nature did when it made me have a penis.
Unless of course, ‘assigned’ is used with a meaning that is completely different from the dictionary definition, in which case I object to such practices given its destructive effects on how people reason (as they generally cannot help to revert back to the dictionary definition, which then results in poor reasoning that is not logically consistent).
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You were, in fact, assigned a sex at birth. The doctor looked at you and said “it’s a boy!”; that is what assignment means in this context. It is true that in your case it was not a mistaken assignment, but to say that that means it is not an assignment is like saying that someone has never taken an IQ test because their IQ test showed they were quite smart.
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That sounds like ‘determined,’ rather than ‘assigned.’ AFAIK, the latter word requires there to be a substantial element of choice. I don’t believe that a doctor really has a choice when the baby clearly has male or female genitalia. It’s not like the parents are going to say: hey, our baby has a penis, but the doctor says that it’s a girl, so lets threat it like a girl.
Of course, you are free to adopt jargon that uses words that seem far less appropriate than other words, given their common definitions, even though there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for it. I can see that you might want to link up with existing theories and texts in this way.
However, there are repercussions, including the destructive effect on debates when people don’t keep their definitions straight for these cases (which is very common, it seems) or when outsiders enter the debate; as well as a feeling by people like me that the entire theoretical framework that you are using is intentionally opaque to hide inconsistencies and shield theories from criticism (which appears to be a very effective method in some academic disciplines). At a certain point of opaqueness, I believe that the most sensible thing is to dismiss the entire mess, rather than spend inordinate amounts of time to find the sensible needle in the haystack. Plenty of people are not even mentally capable of doing this, where they would be able to understand more clear statements, IMO.
So I believe that this habit is counterproductive to the goal of educating people about these issues as well as improving the theories using rationalist methods, which I believe are both goals of yours.
Of course, you are certainly not to blame for the entire subculture that feels that this is appropriate, however, cultures only exist by virtue of individuals choosing to adopt the habits. So I don’t believe that ‘other people do it too’ is a valid defense, especially for a SJ person.
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@ Aapje
That’s right, doctors assign the sex based on what the baby’s genitals look like.
But they typically don’t do any thorough testing to determine the other aspects of sex — e.g., chromosomes, hormones, brain structure or gonads. If you ask people on the street whether an XY baby who doesn’t have ovaries can be “a girl”, you might get a lot of “no”s — but in fact, some of these babies do have unambiguously “female” genitalia.
tl;dr: There’s no “one true sex”, biological sex has several different aspects. Usually chromosomal sex, hormonal sex and internal anatomy can be inferred from the shape of genitals, but sometimes this inference yields incorrect results. Regardless of the actual biological facts, the baby will be treated according to the conclusion of this quick genital-shape evaluation at least until contradictory information is discovered. Hence — “assigned”.
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@Nita
Your reasoning would make the entire word ‘determine’ superfluous as we can never be 100% sure of our observations. Human languages are inherently sloppy and filled with ‘frames’ where word choices have strong implied meanings, that will determine how people read statements.
You can use words that get interpreted closer to reality and words that get interpreted less close to reality. IMO, word choices are wrong if they are the latter. For example, Scott Alexander recently did an experiment where he got a bunch of people to answer questions about a NYT article describing how economists felt about school vouchers. The vast majority of the people that read the article for Scott interpreted it in a way that was not explicitly stated in the article, but strongly implied by the framing. This interpretation was inconsistent with the source data. My claim is that such frames are deceptive and that an people should try not use them.
Anyway, you focus on intersex issues, but my objection was specifically to the use of this frame in a transgender context. I don’t mind the frame when talking about the entire spectrum of intersex. So I feel that you are not actually addressing my objection.
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Not technically the discussion at hand, but ‘men born and raised as women’ sounds like a much better definition of ‘trans man’.
(It is interesting to me how definitions of trans men and trans women are both usually written in a way as to imply both groups are more female than male.)
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I think that’s an improvement, but if one enjoys nitpicking (which I do) one might also point out that some trans people transition as kids, in which case it would be incorrect to say they were raised as their assigned gender.
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‘Raised’ here is complicated. I transitioned socially full-time at 15, part-time at 14, so I kinda missed the specific window you’re referring to — but I’d say even a trans person who transitions at 3 or so is being raised in their natal sex at least a little. Early childhood is a rather important developmental phase and shapes someone’s entire life, and even the most radical end of early transition advocates aren’t suggesting kids transition before they pass those stages.
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Isn’t the usual B/B-derived position that Type 2 trans women transition “because of gender dysphoria,” but that dysphoria is simply an effect/manifestation of autogynephilia?
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I’m fascinated to read these, but definitely not qualified to write one. I’d be an incredible entry in both sides.
FWIW, I got a little bored by the end of the last ITT, but I’m not sure I would cut any. I thought some of the discussion about what makes an SJ or ASJ viewpoint was really interesting, and it was hard to predict what sparked it. Granted, I didn’t have to curate it.
This should be a challenging one – I imagine that both groups include “people qualified to talk about behavioral study design” and “people with strong opinions who are not really good at theory of measurement.”
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I’d like to opine that “too many submissions” is not actually a problem! I’d rather read as many of these as possible.
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I presume many of the half-assed boring ones were culled last time before being posted.
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No, they weren’t. This is a change of policy.
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@tcheasdfjkl
I thought that the previous ITT would have benefited from some culling (perhaps 20% of the submissions).
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Seconded. 30 or so. Is cuite a. Lot of. Submissions.
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I am not the expert, but it sure looks to me like the two options are more euphemism vs dysphemism than genuinely competing hypotheses.
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I hope you’ll enjoy writing for the Blanchard-Bailey side!
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Can we answer in the form of how w think the people we disagree with should be making their arguments, even if we have never come across a case of them actually making that argument?
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Answer such that you convince the audience you are on the side you are arguing for!
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(That is, your B&B essay should convince people that you are pro-B&B, and your GI essay should convince people that you are pro-GI.
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You can answer any way you want – the goal is to get as many people to vote “sincere” as possible.
Strategically, in the last ITT, out of the mainstream answers actually did pretty well, because people thought “this is an opinion that a real person might have, and they might identify themselves as on the side of X, but it’s not an opinion that a fake would be likely to adopt.” This time, there may be a little backlash if readers suspect that authors are trying a double bluff, but I’d still go with an argument that you think you can defend, as long as it’s something that an Ozy reader might plausibly believe.
(The other wrinkle is that although Ozy draws in entrants who don’t normally post here, most readers will assume that the sincere essays tend to cluster in the rationalist-adjacent space – possibly some very offbeat priors, possibly very strongly believed, but smart, thoughtful, and generally favoring engagement and discussion.)
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I just googled “cotton ceiling”, and oh my god that is the craziest thing I’ve heard all day.
People have a right to have their own preferences when it comes to who they’re going to have sex with! They’re allowed to have arbitrary and capricious preferences! The idea that someone would want to shame people into being attracted to them is really gross. There’s no nondiscrimination requirement when it comes to sex. That’s crazy. You have the right to be attracted to who you want and to have sex with who you want, assuming they want to have sex with you. Without qualification. Without caveat. Without exception. Nobody ever, ever, ever has a right to complain about or shame another person for not being attracted to them.
That being said, people often have relationship and sexual “dealbreakers” that they’d actually be happier if they dropped. You never know what you like until you try. Being open to a wider variety of people can have a lot of advantages.
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I’ve shifted my position a little bit over the last few years of reading comments here.
(1) Yes, it’s not morally imperative that any individual person change their preferences, and it’s not realistic to expect substantial short term change, and it would be morally wrong to shame or punish someone for their romantic tastes.
(2) However, wouldn’t it be a better world if we worked to develop broader romantic attractions, especially to the romantically unfortunate. Let’s say you have a weight preference – there might be some great people out there that you’re missing out on, and it’s not an optimal outcome that people on the unfortunate side of majority romantic preferences feel excluded.
(3) My personal model of romantic attraction is that some people are super fixed, some people are flexible, and most people are probably more flexible than they think they are. In my hypothetical, if you thought that people with high body fat percentage are getting the short end of the romantic stick (no pun intended) and worked to expand your romantic imagination to include them, you might end up making everyone better off.
(4) If you buy #3, at least somewhat, it’s not crazy to introduce a meme to get people thinking about how much of their romantic profile is fixed, and how much is flexible, especially if you think some evolution would leave everyone better off.
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It’s true that a broader preference profile could get everyone into a better game theoretical position. I just don’t think that cisgender lesbians are low hanging fruit here… Given that at least some cisgender lesbians are experiencing genital preference, that preference has gone under a lot of personal scrutiny during the process of considering and rejecting cisgender male partners through such well-publicized alternatives as heterosexuality or bisexuality. Of course a cisgender male partner and a transgender female partner are not identical, and discussing those differences is all well and good. I just don’t think attacking the strong genital preference itself is going to get much more than lip service, and not the fun kind. So like you say, substantial short term change is unrealistic (I’m not actually, I guess, disagreeing with you).
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It’s not crazy to introduce a meme, but it is crazy to introduce a meme expressed in the language of privilege/oppression. “Broaden your horizons” is benign advice. “You’re oppressing me by not being attracted to me” is something else entirely.
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@1anglette – thanks, that added a lot to my understanding of the conflict. I think I have more to say, but I’ll save if for comments on the essays.
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Skipping the “nobody deserves your love” issue which I think it very true, it also doesn’t seem like a great use of limited social resources.
I’ll use “non-standard” to reflect people on the wrong side of majority preferences. There are a LOT of non-standard folks. We’re not talking about a tiny minority here, it’s probably 15-20% of the population, i.e. over a billion people.
But to look at reality: Non-standard folks already have the highest incentive to be emotionally flexible. They already have a higher incidence of being involuntarily single. But a lot of that comes from their own minds: If all of them could manage to be more attracted to other non-standard folks they would have a large pool of available wish-they-weren’t-single partners, and would also have access to all of the other people with more flexible interests.
Yet non-standard folks have not been collectively able to change their own preferences. They focus on people outside their reach, just like the rest of us. If they can’t do it, even with the greatest of incentives, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect society to manage it.
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Lots of non-standard people do, in fact, attempt to change their own preferences. Trans women have a notorious tendency to date other trans women (although ofc in many cases this may be due to an inherent preference for trans women). Probably the most flexible half or so have already changed their preferences, and we are hitting the point of diminishing returns on that. But we haven’t hit diminishing returns on standard people.
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I googled it a while ago, and as I follow it, what the original “workshop” was saying was that lesbians should be socially accepting of other cis-lesbians in a relationship with a transwoman as still lesbians. (Assuming both parties freely consenting adults of course.)
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Isn’t it the same phenomenon as straight men being stigmatised for seeing trans women as sexual partners? Why is there a separate word when lesbians are involved?
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Lambert – did you mean “not seeing?”
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Can someone take part with some other view on gender if they want to try pretending to be both sides? I’d be interested in trying my hand at writing both sides even though I don’t believe either. I know I do not get to write for my own side because you want to clearly define the two opposing groups but I am curious how well I can pull off pretending to be the other things.
I understand if it’d fuck up the poll options though because there will be options for “I think this person actually believes x” and “I think this person is pretending to believe x whilst actually believing y” and not an option for “this person believes neither of those things and believes some other third thing”.
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Normally, no, but I like you and suspect you would write pretty interesting posts, so yes for you.
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“b. [If answering for the Blanchard-Bailey side] Explain trans people assigned female at birth.”
As a Blanchardian trans man, this seems like a rather biased(? not necessarily the word I would use, but the best I can think of) question.
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Also, re. ‘unusual or bizarre opinions’ — if the view you have on X topic is [i]completely different[/i] from the one people would expect from knowing you’re a Blanchardian/identitarian, should it be reworked to be more normal so people think you’re actually making an argument for that side rather than going full Fox News Liberal, or can you leave your full-Fox-News-Liberal view unmolested?
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It is strongly encouraged that people explain their own viewpoints when writing posts for their side of the ITT, because that makes the game more interesting.
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Suggestions:
– People are definitely going to find the “trans people assigned female at birth” wording confusing. Maybe “trans and non-binary people who are not trans women”?
– I think an important part of the Blanchard-Bailey theory is not just that there are two groups, but that the autogynephilic group is the biggest cluster. I don’t think anyone doubts that there are *some* autogynephilic trans women out there. I suggest making this an explicit part of the Blanchard-Bailey definition; otherwise, there’s some ambiguity on how you’d classify someone who believes (1) that a minority of autogynephilic trans women exists and (2) that the distinction between dysphoric trans woman and “homosexual transsexual” is partly semantic.
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I mean, doesn’t the Blanchard theory have a pretty big gap of “exclusively gynephilic trans women who are not autogynephiles”, which only gender identity theory would cover?
“Trans and nonbinary people who are not trans women” is a different group from “trans DFAB people”. Since presumably there are nonbinary DMAB people, who are not trans women. Ozy has made it clear, from the comment posted at February 15, 2017 at 9:42 pm, they’re looking for the category that contains trans men as well as nonbinary DFAB people, and not any DMAB people.
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If you think there’s some evidence that there’s two mostly-non-overlapping populations of trans people, or trans women, but aren’t convinced of the evidence of explanations involving auto-gynophilia, do you count as “Blanchard-Bailey side” or “some other opinion on trans people, not applicable to this ITT”?
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One of my complaints about the last ITT was that some of the questions seemed to rely a little too heavily on knowledge of the historical baggages attached to fundamentally-arbitrary category labels (“meaningless arguments,” as some would say), and this ITT seems to be taking that problem and amplifying it by several orders of magnitude.
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I think that’s as it should be when you’re trying to embody an ideology that makes heavy use of certain labels & arguments.
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You can tell a very short story about the entire history of gender that goes, “we used to have these functional physical category labels, and then acquired so much historical baggage that the label was instead redefined by some as a tag on the attached luggage”. So I don’t think that arbitrary questions are inappropriate for this subject area.
I’ll admit that there are far broader swathes of orthogonal-to-trans thought that are outside Bailey-Blanchard. But “to not believe in gender identity” is, as Ozy said about “not believing in social justice”, not very specific. What is happening when people transition, then? A parasite? Obsessive compulsive disorder? To believe any one or all of the different possibilities is at play, does not make for a compelling test.
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I am not sure what you mean and would prefer more elaboration.
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