Categories are usually fuzzy. That is, when humans use a category, there are usually some members of the category who have all the traits you associate with that category, some members that have many of the traits, and some members where you have to make a judgment call about whether it counts or not.
The Cluster Structure of Thingspace provides several excellent and uncontroversial examples. For instance, think about birds. Robins and sparrows are very typical birds. Eagles are less typical than robins, but still very typical. Penguins are really fucking weird birds. And you have to make a judgment call about bats: for purposes of biology, a bat is not a bird, whereas for purposes of trying to decide which animals are kosher, a bat is a bird. You make the decision based on whether the more important bird trait is “related to dinosaurs” or “flies.”
Or think about mothers. A typical mother gives birth to and raises a baby who is genetically related to her. Less typical mothers include birth mothers, adoptive mothers, surrogate mothers, genetic mothers, lesbian partners of the mother who gave birth, and so on. A baby’s egg donor is still her mother in some ways– for instance, you’d want to look at the egg donor rather than the adoptive mother to figure out what the baby’s risk of getting a rare disease is– but she’s missing some very common mother traits like being pregnant with the child or raising it.
Gender is a very politicized topic. So it makes sense that while some people agree that whether bats are birds depends on whether you’re doing biology or theology, and that while penguins are birds you shouldn’t assume that they’re able to fly, this common sense goes out the window when you’re talking about gender. I am going to address two issues where poor reasoning about more and less central members of categories makes people deeply confused: biological sex and gender differences.
Biological Sex
Biological sex is actually a remarkably good classification system: something like 98% of humanity can be easily and unambiguously placed into one of two discrete categories, which has to be some kind of record. Of course, not everyone is a metaphorical robin. Eagles are quite common: men with gynecomastia and noticeable hip fat; women who can grow beards; women who have had hysterectomies; men who have had their testicles removed.
However, it all runs into trouble when we’re talking about transgender people (as well as intersex people, but I’m mostly going to focus on transness). People really, really want to insist that there is a single biological sex that we really are. They usually pick chromosomes as the deciding factor, perhaps because medical science is not currently able to change a person’s chromosomes. (I have seen people attempt to be intersex-inclusive by declaring “males” to be the ones with at least one Y chromosome and “females” the ones with no Y chromosome.) They then point out that you have to know what a person’s biological sex is for medical reasons and therefore we trans people are running around being special snowflakes by putting down our identified genders on medical forms.
Except there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes: for instance, whether you are XX or XY affects your risk of hemophilia or colorblindness; if your sex chromosomes are something other than XX or XY, you may be at risk of various health problems, depending on what your sex chromosomes are. It is usually possible to infer many traits from the fact that a person has XX chromosomes (well, in reality, we usually infer the fact that a person has XX chromosomes from their traits, because most people are not karyotyped). But trans people get biomedical interventions all the time.
For instance, a doctor might be concerned about prescribing a teratogen to someone who might be pregnant. In that case, what matters is whether the person is capable of getting pregnant (many trans men and some cis women are not). A doctor may need to decide whether to screen someone for breast cancer, in which case what matters is whether a person has breasts. Testosterone increases a trans man’s risk of high cholesterol, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes, although probably not to the level that cisgender men have. And, of course, our unusual sexes present unique health issues: for instance, testosterone is a teratogen, which means that trans men who take testosterone have to be particularly careful about birth control use.
These are not theoretical issues. Trans people have been routinely denied sex-specific medical care, because insurance companies believe that there are men and there are women, and therefore there don’t exist any people who need both a prostate screening and breast cancer screenings. Intersex people even today receive cosmetic genital surgery as infants so that people don’t have to be disturbed by a person who doesn’t fit the categories very well.
The obvious solution to this issue is to say that whether a trans person’s sex is male or female depends on what question you’re asking. A trans woman on estrogen is male for the purpose of whether she should get prostate cancer screenings and female for the purpose of whether she should get breast cancer screenings. When thinking about his risk of high cholesterol, a trans man is probably best considered neither male nor female. We are bats, and you don’t have to have a firm position on whether or not we are birds.
Gender Differences
Men are more likely to use an ethic of justice, which emphasizes universal standards and impartiality. Women are more likely to use an ethic of care, which emphasizes a specific obligation to those you have interpersonal relationships with or those who are vulnerable to the consequences of your choices. The Cohen’s d of this difference (which is a measure of how different the two groups are from each other) is about 0.2.
This is a picture of a Cohen’s d of 0.2. (Picture comes from this excellent website.) It is genuinely difficult to tell that this is a picture of two bell curves instead of one. If you know someone is a man or a woman, it doesn’t tell you much of anything about whether they use an ethic of justice or an ethic of care.
Has that stopped anyone? No, it has not.
For instance, look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on feminist ethics, which includes an entire section on care-focused ethics which includes paragraphs like this:
Gilligan believes that Kohlberg’s methodology is male-biased. Its ears are tuned to male, not female, moral voices. Thus, it fails to register the different voice Gilligan claims to have heard in her study of twenty-nine women reflecting on their abortion decisions. This distinctive moral voice, says Gilligan, speaks a language of care that emphasizes relationships and responsibilities. Seemingly, this language is largely unintelligible to Kohlbergian researchers who speak the dominant moral language of traditional ethics—namely, a language of justice that stresses rights and rules.
Ah, yes, the distinctive moral voice of women. The one that sounds almost fucking exactly like the voice of men. That distinctive moral voice of women?
Putting known gender differences into the Cohen’s d chart generator is an instructive experience. For instance, here’s gender differences in masturbation and casual sex, respectively:
And here’s neuroticism, agreeableness, and conscientiousness/extroversion (the latter two have the same effect size), again in the order I listed:
Now, there are in fact some effect size charts that look like Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Here’s an example:
This is a picture of the difference in toy preferences at age three. I am not sure how useful this is for anyone who isn’t a toy marketer, but there you go. (Note that one-year-olds and five-year-olds both have less stark gendered toy preferences. Presumably male toddlers are from Mars, female toddlers are from Venus, and everyone else is from Earth.)
So what’s the takeaway here? (Besides “Ozy is fascinated with their new stats discovery,” of course.) The answer is that people are bad at categories. We learn facts about the typical man: for instance, he uses an ethic of justice, masturbates more, is okay with casual sex, is more introverted, is less neurotic, is more disagreeable, is less conscientious, and played with trucks but not dolls as a child. We then conclude from this that everyone we stick in the category “man” uses an ethic of justice and therefore we are perfectly justified in creating an entire subfield of ethics complaining about how the ethics of care is excluded because of sexism.
But that isn’t true! It is possible that people in a category are more likely to have a particular trait, but the size of this effect is not actually large enough for this to be useful information. In fact, in studies of gender differences, this is quite common!
While I’ve been picking on Carol Gilligan (and god is she an easy target to pick on), I think this kind of thought is actually more common among anti-feminists than it is among feminists.
Think about gender differences in permissive attitudes about casual sex. This is actually a fairly striking difference: about four-fifths of men have a more permissive attitude towards casual sex than the average woman does. (Of course, this might be caused by inborn tendencies, by cultural influence, or by a combination of both; you shouldn’t assume that a difference existing means it is biological.) You can see the effects of this difference clearly: for instance, it is generally easier for heterosexual women to have casual sex than it is for heterosexual men to have casual sex; gay men are more likely to have casual sex than lesbians are; there are essentially no full-service sex workers who target a solely female audience, presumably because women who want no-strings-attached casual sex rarely have to pay for it.
But there’s also a considerable amount of overlap: about seven-tenths of the two groups overlap. And that matters too! For instance, many people assume that casual sex must be a rapacious man taking advantage of an innocent woman who just wants love. But there are lots of women who like casual sex. Perhaps the women who have casual sex disproportionately come from the 20% of the female population who have more permissive attitudes about casual sex than the average man. In that case, we don’t have to be worried that hookup culture is harming women; it is merely catering to the desires of women who are a little unusual (eagles, not robins).
And I’m using a relatively stark gender difference, which would bias my case. Looking at something like neuroticism– where 65% of men are above the female mean, and there’s an 84% overlap– it’s hard to see much justification for an “essential masculine nature” or an “essential feminine nature.” Such reason is merely looking at robins and then assuming, in defiance of all the evidence, that they are the only kind of bird.
Thing of Things 
I am glad bats are not kosher! This probably protects Jews from ebola!
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This general line of thinking strongly informs my position as a (mostly*) gender abolitionist; that the categories aren’t nearly as strong as they would have to be to justify their position in society (can you imagine referring to someone by an entirely different pronoun based on their level of education? or what hemisphere they’re from?).
Does anyone else take the same information and end up going in a very different direction with it? I would be curious to hear your train of thought.
* “Abolitionist” standing in for two senses of the word “reductionist”; I think two things that would result in more human flourishing would be to a) reduce gender into its components, and refer to those when we mean something – the doctor asks “do you have a prostate”, not “are you a male” – and b) reduce the impact, scope, and importance of gender in society and life – much as the it no longer determines whether or not you’re allowed to have a career more ambitious than “schoolteacher, until I get married” – to the point where it would not be inconceivable for people whose gender *isn’t* “meh, I don’t suppose I really need to identify with one of those” are a minority.
On the other hand, since what I really care about is human flourishing, these are both very much “eventually” reductions; I don’t think that refusing to use gendered pronouns for people who prefer that I use specific gendered pronouns for them is useful or kind, and I do think that people often have different experiences thrust upon them die to gender, and that omitting this fact isn’t useful (or, if anticipating their preferences, kind).
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Doctors tend to have a computer with general patient information, like gender. Presumably that system automatically generates a list of people eligible for certain periodic exams. So they don’t actually ask “are you a male” when deciding to call up patients for an exam.
Extending their computer system with various biological information is a non-trivial cost and adds the burden of collecting and maintaining that information, which will be a wasted effort most of the time, as that information will correlate with gender for the vast majority of patients.
The question is whether it is reasonable to go this cost and effort or whether people registered as women, but who do have a prostate, ought to proactively deal with this on a case by case basis. Perhaps it works better if there is trans specific software that is offered by a collective of trans people and which keeps track of this kind of stuff for trans people. This may work a lot better, since that union would presumably be much more knowledgeable about trans issues than most doctors. So trans people might get a better experience that way (or not, dunno).
How many QALY’s will this accommodation for trans people cost (assuming that the total healthcare budget is fixed). Have trans people tried to create a shared system to track stuff like this themselves (I’ve been told that there are a lot of trans programmers)?
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Agreed; medicine may not be the best example. I think the society decomposition of gender is more important.
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Only one of these categories is directly related to the existence of the next generation of society. And has been for all of mammalian existence.
I think at that point you’d run into the question of how many people know the answer for themselves and how many would look at the doctor blankly.
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Yes, but as we are seeing, it’s less and less related. The relationships between the categories of gender and what sexual organs people have are weaker, as are the relationships between gender and the desire to bear children, between gender and the roles related to children.
My argument is that procreation is not so central to the human experience that we ought to place such importance on procreation-ness (or correlated) categories as we do now.
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can you imagine referring to someone by an entirely different pronoun based on their level of education?
And yet there are languages that do so for more hierarchial cultures, with titles/honorifics affixed based on seniority, either in age or experience.
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Titles and honorifics are distinct, I think. Are there languages which use different pronoun based on these (particularly when referring to someone in the third person; addressing someone as “Mister” or “Doctor” isn’t quite the same as referring to them as “he” or “dree” (doctor + he))?
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There’s a whole debate about translation of Japanese honorifics, whether or not there’s nuance lost over including -san/-kun/-chan/-sama/-senpai, especially such that not using an honorific has its own connotation. Then you get into the actual pronouns of Japanese, whose usage can depend on gender of the speaker, formality of the setting/relationship, relative age of the person spoken to, or royalty status. Ditto for Korean. Chinese used to use honorifics more, but pronouns are more casual now.
And even English has its power-dynamic addresses. Master/Mistress, Sir, Madam/Ma’am, Sire, Milord/Milady, Your Grace/Majesty/Excellence, etc. You’ve also got the familial titles that can be used to denote power, with Father/Papa/Dad having didn’t connotations, and religious usages of Father/Mother/Brother/Sister, not to mention Elder.
And then certain contexts simply prefer referring to people in the third person by title/descriptor rather than using a pronoun. The President did this, the princess did that, the professor said this, the reverend said that, etc.
I think that, like with Mandarin, and perhaps to our benefit, English has much decreased its usage of honorifics and titles as required alongside pronouns. But that doesn’t mean they don’t/didn’t exist.
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Your d chart for casual sex differences is based on attitudes, not behavior (see the paper you took d=0.81 from). The actual availability of casual sex partners depends on behavior, not attitude (revealed preferences are often different from claimed preferences).
Secondly, we know that women engage in homosexual sex far more often than men. Women who engage in casual sex with women are obviously not making men who want casual heterosexual sex happy.
Finally, your claim that anti-feminists are more prone to exaggerate gender differences is extremely sensitive to cherry picking. For example, are anti-feminists more likely to exaggerate various victim and perpetrator statistics than feminists or vice versa? It seems to me that you can’t draw a valid conclusion by just focusing on claims surrounding casual sex, while ignoring the many other issues where feminists and anti-feminists tend to clash over factual claims.
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Consider that the group “anti-feminists” includes (say) complementarian Christians, who are no doubt dragging down the average a good deal.
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OK, but then the question is whether that is a useful grouping, as traditionalists make far different claims than progressive anti-feminists. If you are actually debating an anti-feminist, I hope that you quickly determine what their basic world-view is like and then stereotype them based on that (or not stereotype them at all, but your claim in this post is that a stereotype is elucidating).
I’ve seen a lot of cases where a traditionalist stereotype was applied to progressive anti-feminists and that merely results in a Babylonian confusion of languages, as the statements of the anti-feminist(s) get misinterpreted due to prejudice.
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“Cluster structure” appears to be LW’s attempt to reinvent the wheel of prototype theory. Is it actually any different?
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“Cluster structure” talks about how reality works, whereas “prototype theory” talks about how human categorizations work. One might say that cluster structure is prescriptive while prototype theory is descriptive.
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One might, but if so one should perhaps expect to be corrected – both are descriptive, but they describe different things. :p
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I mean, cluster structure prescribes prototype categories by stating that prototype categories match reality…
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So “cluster structure” is a theory about how reality works? Is it the kind of theory that’s falsifiable?
I mean, Yudkowsky’s very first example are colors in RGB space, and that seems like one clear example where things definitely aren’t clustered in any sense until you talk about human categories. Clustering also depends a lot on your choice of configuration space and metric, which are basically chosen subjectively.
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The colors were an example of viewing something as a space, not specifically an example of the cluster structure.
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I think the cluster structure argument is basically “you should be aware of prototyping, and consider discarding your categories when they cease to answer useful questions (or to usefully answer the question you’re asking).”
In this sense I guess it is prescriptive, in that Yudkowsky is prescribing a certain reaction to some set of situations as “appropriate”, though I think it’s mostly concerned with the degree to which clustering is or can be an accurate description of reality, as opposed to “everything is just fermions and bosons, and the distinctions we draw don’t actually mean anything”.
When I called it descriptive, I meant that the substance of the argument is the claim that reality does not divide perfectly into platonic categories, but nevertheless is not a structureless soup of thingness.
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Strongly agreed that understanding effect sizes is essential to understanding group differences and that humans are terrible at trying to explicitly reason about them. (I think I remember there being something in the heuristics-and-biases literature about how humans can’t distinguish between P(A|B) and P(B|A).) I expect that people’s nonverbal intuitive snap judgements are better-callibrated—see Lee Jussim’s work on stereotype accuracy.
(Incidentally, you’ve scooped me: I was planning on writing an introduction-to-genderspace post titled “Against Maximum-Entropy Psychology; Or, High-Dimensional Social Science and the Cluster Concept of Concepts”, but haven’t gotten around to it yet!)
It’s worth noting that a lot of group differences are subject to a Lewontin’s fallacy-like effect, where the distributions overlap a lot along any one particular trait you can measure, but are a lot more separable if you look at the entire configuration space. (Consider an illustrative diagram.) For example, in the case of sex and personality, you mention a Neuroticism difference of only Cohen’s d≈0.4, but when measuring more dimensions of personality, Del Giudice et al. found a Mahalanobis D (apparently the multivariate analogue of Cohen’s d) of 2.71.
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>It’s worth noting that a lot of group differences are subject to a Lewontin’s fallacy-like effect, where the distributions overlap a lot along any one particular trait you can measure, but are a lot more separable if you look at the entire configuration space.
Please let’s also remember that measurement error is a thing, and psychometric tests aren’t always well-aligned with the things we care about. In this context, it’s *very* instructive that the more naturalistic measurements of toy preference, masturbation, and casual sex show much larger differences than the artificial test scores do.
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To be fair, while the toy preferences metric is fairly naturalistic (they observed children playing with various toys), so is the study of moral reasoning (asking people moral dilemmas and then noting how they reasoned about them). Attitudes towards casual sex and masturbation frequency were both done through questionnaire. Also, any sex question will have significant social desirability bias, which leads to measurement error.
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I think you’re focusing too much on the instrument and not on the behavior being measured. Everything is eventually just an entry in a dataset, but some entries represent direct engagement with real-world objects, while others represent interaction with a highly impoverished or contrived subset. There’s a sense in which questionnaires about actual behavior are more naturalistic than direct observation of moral reasoning on hypotheticals, at least if we’re not specifically interested in philosophy students. (My best guess is that “many toys are available, which do I play with?” is a very realistic scenario for three-year-olds, though of course it’s possible the study was contrived in a way that messed with the results.)
I agree on social desirability bias.
Overall, any study can be gamed by researchers, so I’d be much more confident if this difference in effect sizes (and the effect sizes themselves) held up under multiple independent replications.
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I think that observations of moral reasoning are precisely the thing we care about when we’re trying to answer the question “is the absence of ethics of care in philosophy a sign that philosophers are not listening to women’s unique moral voices?” (and similar questions, such as “should we use ethics of care to attract women to effective altruism?”) Ethical philosophy is all about moral reasoning!
I’m not sure why asking about attitudes towards casual sex seems more about actual behavior than asking about whether someone is neurotic– they are not asking about the actual behavior of engaging in casual sex (nor would you expect much of a gender difference in how much casual sex heterosexuals are having, assuming a normal distribution– which is of course not how casual sexual partners are actually distributed, but if it’s not a normal distribution one shouldn’t be using a Cohen’s d anyway).
I only looked at meta-analyses for this post, with the exception of the toy data, so it is using information from multiple studies. But of course a single meta-analysis can be flawed, and multiple meta-analyses would be an improvement.
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@Ozy
There is no clear separation between strict heterosexuals and people who also have sex with those of the same sex. We know that there is a mismatch there, with quite a few more women having sex with women than men with men.
We know that far more men than women have sex with prostitutes. I would class the sex those men are having as an expression of desire to have sex, but not the sex that the prostitutes are having. If you are going to link desire for casual sex to actual ‘sex having,’ then you need to exclude the women who are having sex for money, not desire.
—
Finally, a big mistake of yours is to focus too much on the ‘sale’. Casual sex is a barter market, where you can barter for a better product if your own product is better. So both hetero women and men are in a bidding war with other hetero people of the same sex.
Obviously, every barter will always require two people, so the number of barters is always balanced. However, a mismatch still has major consequences.
Imagine that 50% of the population produces wine and 50% produces cheese. Not everyone is as good at producing, so some people make far better wine or cheese than other people. Assume that everyone wants to have a nice meal with wine and cheese.
Now assume that making wine is much harder work, so wine makers expend far more calories, which means that they have a lot more hunger. The result is that each cheese maker wants 1 meal a day and wine makers 2 meals (I’m using this instead of 0.8:1 for clarity). What happens then is that the nr 1 and nr 2 cheese maker will each barter one cheese a day with the nr 1 wine maker. The nr 3 and nr 4 cheese maker will barter with the nr wine maker, etc.
So you get a bigger and bigger mismatch between the quality of the wine needed to barter for a certain quality of cheese, as you look at the lower segments of the market. At the lowest segment, wine makers can find no one to barter with, while all cheese makers can find someone.
Of course, this doesn’t map neatly to dating for various reasons, but this model suggests that:
– Wine makers will have a strong incentive to offer other barter products as the demand for their wine is insufficient, while the same is not true for cheese makers. What do we see in dating? Men often paying for the meal, drinks or give other one sided gifts; as well as outright prostitution.
– Cheese makers still have an incentive to increase their value, even though the overall value of cheese is already quite high, because quality cheese still gets you better wine. So this explains why women ‘doll up.’
– Wine makers will have a strong incentive to pursue the barter aggressively and pro-actively, while cheese makers can take advantage of lower transaction costs by picking between the offers. They have far less benefit from an aggressively strategy on average*
– Basic economics dictates that if price elasticity is small, then even small differences in supply and demand cause a major change in price. So even a small d can cause huge behavioral differences.
* This doesn’t explain why low status women don’t use a more aggressive and pro-actively strategy, but that can be explained by the market incentivizing a single strategy for all women, for example, by social pressure.
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“Except there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes”
Can you find a medical doctor who will say that?
Sex linked differences in frequency and presentation are noted all over the place in medical practice.
Off the top of my head I can think of:
Cardiac issues and MIs are more common in men, and present very differently between sexes. (With males exhibiting the classic symptoms, and females showing more diffuse symptoms like nausea/vomiting/back pain)
Cholecystitis has a very narrow profile, typically presenting in overweight females in their 40’s
Spontaneous Pneumothorax typically presents in tall, thin males.
Ectopic pregnancy/Endometriosis (On my mind because I’ve had to deal with quite a serious one of these in the last month despite the workforce I supervise being roughly 4% female… And the woman in question insisting that it was impossible for her to be pregnant), is obviously typically female. I’d be open to being surprised, but I don’t think there has ever been a case of it in a non xx patient. I’m quite sure it’s never happened in a transwoman.
Depression has a huge female skew, alcoholism a male skew. There are sex differences in presentation of nearly every mental illness I can name.
UTI’s are fairly self explanatory
You mentioned Prostates above with all their associated risks (Urinary dysfunction, sexual dysfunction, cancer, etc), but missed the tragic fact that a truly saddening slice of the populace isn’t sure whether or not they have a prostate in the first place. (This is even further complicated by halfhearted efforts to change the classification of skene’s gland. I don’t even blame laypeople for not knowing at this point.)
There are loads more examples if we crack open a textbook. The only way the original statement approaches correctness is if you consider “Affected by” to mean a completely black and white “Can only happen in Gender X”. If you take anything else into account, sex differences play a role in the frequency and presentation of a huge proportion of maladies.
The reason we divide signs from symptoms in the first place is that patients in general are unreliable reporters. The number of times I’ve had the exchange “Do you have any history of medical issues?”, “No, perfectly healthy”, “Ok, do you take any medications?”, “Just metformin and insulin”, “Oh yeah? What for?” “For my diabetes…”.
Every entry on every one of my patient care reports starts with “Patient reports:, or “Patient Denies:” unless I can personally verify the sign with my own eyes. The point is that we’re not singling out transpeople here to be dicks. People across the board just royally suck at knowing their own pertinent health information, so it’s important for a doctor to be able to have a stable base of externally verifiable information on which to make their diagnosis. This doesn’t change just because we’re dealing with politically charged issues.
So while the quote rolls off the tongue with Cliff Claven levels of confidence, it’s completely factually wrong while underpinning much of the rest of the argument. Ozy, do better than this please.
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CHROMOSOMES. CHROMOSOMES.
If a person has XX chromosomes and no uterus, are they going to have an ectopic pregnancy? Given the very very high rate of hysterectomy in the trans population, does it make sense to conclude that all trans men are at risk of ectopic pregnancy?
Also, the medical consensus is that testosterone increases trans men’s risk of heart disease to a level approaching the male level. Has there been a study to suggest that trans men are more likely to present with female-typical symptoms of cardiac issues? If not, why are you assuming chromosomes are what has the effect, rather than hormones? It seems to me that “I am uncertain whether this patient adheres to the female norms or the male norms” ought to lead to different treatment than “this patient is definitely female.”
I fully agree that the doctor should have a stable base of externally verifiable information on which to make their diagnosis. I just think that “patient does not have a uterus or a vagina” is a useful bit of externally verifiable information that is perhaps relevant to the question of whether it is possible for the patient to have an ectopic pregnancy.
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“does it make sense to conclude that all trans men are at risk of ectopic pregnancy”
You keep making this ridiculous mistake when you include “All” in your qualifiers and ignore frequency entirely. You did it before too in the paragraph strawmanning:
“We then conclude from this that everyone we stick in the category ‘man’ uses an ethic of justice and therefore…”
Except people don’t do this. I’m not sure who you’re trying to suggest thinks that belonging to a category means that the subject is typical in every way. You make this error consistently wherein you demand that anything that isn’t 100% is thus too weak a correlation to be useful. Everyone knows there are men that have lost their prostate, balls, limbs, even internal most internal organs individually, this doesn’t threaten anyone’s worldview about how ‘men typically have prostates/balls/limbs/the standard compliment of internal organs’.
Cases where “I am not sure if the patient adheres to female or male norms” aren’t even problems in the way you’re thinking, because when things get more serious than feelings, people have no problem saying “Ok! We have an atypical biological female here! Proceed accordingly”. No doctor is seeing a transman and thinking that because they were born female, they must thus still have a uterus. That’s idiocy that I’m not sure why you think exists. Maybe give the side you don’t understand a little bit of credit?
You are reversing the onus here on research, and trying to slant the playing field to claim ambiguity as points in your favour. I don’t know if there is such a study, at which point the sane thing is to fall back to the prior until the data is in. Realize that because of the sex difference, we treat women’s MI’s with much more scrutiny than mens’, and err on the side of treatment over more ambiguous symptoms. If we take your path and diagnose transmen using the male standards and you’re wrong, this leads to transmen being misdiagnosed and dying.
Further, Chromosomes influence hormones. I feel like you’re trying to dance around this fact ridiculously. HRT changes the balance, but it doesn’t change a person’s growth history, and if you can find me an endocrinologist who can’t distinguish between ciswomen and transmen (or vice versa) I’ll eat a shoe. The fact is, patients don’t know what information is relevant, so leaving that judgement in their hands, even given the best intentions, is going to get them hurt.
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Minor nitpick: the claim “there are actually a very small number of medical problems that are affected by sex chromosomes” is simply not accurate. There are at least fifty known X-linked genetic disorders.
I suspect you were thinking of the frequency of such conditions, which is quite low (with deuteranomaly the most common at ~6% of XY people, and most others much rarer), and although I agree with the conclusion that sex-linked genetic diseases are unlikely to come up in trans(itioned) people’s medical consultations, especially as many are pediatric and severe, as a flaw in the argument I found it glaring.
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Great post!
All the normal distributions having the same variance seems awfully suspicious though. 🙂
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So how correlated are all these different quantities measured? Conditioned on gender, are people with very permissive attitudes to casual sex also more neurotic and agreeable and extroverted, or are the attitudes more or less IID?
If the factors tend to covary a lot then there may continue to be significant overlap if you take all the dimensions into account. If they are IID-ish, then it may be possible to define “general factors of gender” which separate the classes quite well (one flip of a 60-40 coin could give heads or tails, but 100 flips is very likely to result in more heads). It probably is to get very good separation if you take into account all relevant factors, given that attitudes to casual sex/masturbation already separate the classes moderately well, but I think it’s more interesting if this would hold for any set of weaker differences.
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“For instance, a doctor might be concerned about prescribing a teratogen to someone who might be pregnant”
screaming about Accutane
“I have seen people attempt to be intersex-inclusive by declaring “males” to be the ones with at least one Y chromosome and “females” the ones with no Y chromosome.”
This is the kind of ultra-specificity that’s the only rightful criticism TERFs have ever had (well, okay, they’ve had a couple), but I wonder how people with that perspective would react to me pointing out that the majority of non-nulliparous women have >0 Y chromosomes.
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To be fair, Accutane is only prescribed if you are currently taking birth control (including to people who are asexuals or virgins).
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To treat something disproportionately common in trans men (lit. the cluster of natal females with male-typical testosterone balances)! And they don’t count T as hormonal birth control! This is why the term ‘Kafkaesque’ exists.
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also, I forgot cis women exist, so I need to be more specific on that literal translation:
‘the cluster of natal females with intentionally male-typical testosterone balances’
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I had really good results with the implant for non-dysphoria-inducing birth control, btw. It’s progestin-only and doesn’t interfere with testosterone; it’s also more effective than the pill.
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I just realized why this post rubbed me the wrong way:
A claim that there are minor gender differences automatically becomes a claim that there are major gender differences if a bunch of those gender differences don’t cancel each other out, but work in the same direction. Then the accumulation of minor gender differences becomes a big gender difference. So it is not rational to attack people for the mere fact that they are claiming major gender differences, if you believe in minor gender differences.
For example, let’s take these 4 gender differences that may impact casual sex behavior:
1. Women may experience less pleasure during casual sex because of the way their genitals work, which makes them harder to pleasure. The logical consequence is that women become less eager to engage in casual sex.
2. Women are taught to fear easily and men to ignore fear. The logical consequence is that women are more sensitive to red flags in potential hookups than men and thus turn down people more readily.
3. Women lose status for being slutty and men for not having sex. The logical consequence is that men will be more eager to have sex, even if they rate the chance that it is pleasant fairly low, while the opposite is true for women.
4. Men are taught to be risk-taking in general, while the opposite is true for women (see the gender differences in eagerness to accept a promotion). The logical consequence is that men will round up, while women will round down, when judging potential casual partners.
These differences are probably impossible to quantify, but lets assume that all are a d=0.9 difference for the sake of argument. If they are entirely cumulative, the effect of these minor differences on actual behavior is not 0.9, but 0.6, which is a pretty big difference.
Finally, I don’t see how you can see gender equality as a major issue, if you don’t believe in some major gender differences. And I don’t see how you can believe in patriarchy unless at you at a minimum believe that society produces a bunch of minor gender differences by means of nurture and/or social pressure which all work in the same direction and thus have major differences as the end result.
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“Finally, I don’t see how you can see gender equality as a major issue, if you don’t believe in some major gender differences.”
Can you explain what you mean by this? This doesn’t make sense to me.
Otherwise, I agree the consideration of “a lot of small differences that all point the same way” is important. Though I think even if that’s the case, the fact that each individual difference is small still really matters – a lot of harm can be done by forgetting that as people tend to do.
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Ozy argued that anti-feminists have a tendency to paint men and women as very distinct and implied that this is wrong because some base metrics show small differences between men and women. I have strong doubts whether they actually do this more than feminists, but lets assume they do.
If they are talking about a combination of base metrics, which all work in the same direction, then it can both be true that men and women are fairly similar on the base metrics and that they are very dissimilar on the combination of these metrics. In reality, people experience many traits of men and women together, not just one. If the average female worker prefers to work just a few hours less than the average men, prefers benefits over salary just a bit more, prefers a short commute over a higher salary just a bit more, is just a little less aggressive in negotiations, etc; then the average female worker will be getting a whole lot less salary. After all, the salary reflects what the employer thinks is a fair deal based on many factors.
If you only believe in minor differences in gendered metrics and not that there are major gendered effects in reality, then why focus your energy on that? It seems like there would be better causes fight for, then. The wealth gap between the top-1% and the rest is way, way more than d=0.8, for example.
Perhaps Ozy means to blame anti-feminists for arguing that inherent traits differ more than they actually do. However, how do you distinguish between inherent traits and nurture/social pressure? One of the reasons why they did those toy preference studies in the first place, was that nurture/social pressure starts at birth.
I guess that I’m trying to figure out what my (semi-)ingroup is blamed for here exactly.
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Ah, thanks for clarifying.
I think the reason I was confused by your statement initially is that gender differences in preferences are not really the only cause of gender inequality. Hence the focus on women and men being perceived differently even when they behave the same. So it’s quite possible to believe that gender inequality is primarily due to differences in perception rather than in action.
But you’re right that feminists also talk about female socialization resulting in women acting in ways that don’t serve them well, and this could indeed plausibly be a “many small differences add up to a big difference” thing. (I mean, so could the perception thing.)
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“The obvious solution to this issue is to say that whether a trans person’s sex is male or female depends on what question you’re asking. A trans woman on estrogen is male for the purpose of whether she should get prostate cancer screenings and female for the purpose of whether she should get breast cancer screenings. When thinking about his risk of high cholesterol, a trans man is probably best considered neither male nor female. We are bats, and you don’t have to have a firm position on whether or not we are birds.”
Based on online rhetoric, I wonder if many trans people (not all — obviously not Ozy!) might not object to this as strongly as people who object to it out of anti-trans motives do. A lot of rhetoric seems to be centered around both insisting on on a unitary identification (“we *are* women”), which wouldn’t take kindly to saying “well, for some purposes you’re women, for some you’re not”. Particularly since the latter thinking would seem to legitimate some cis-women-only spaces (eg Michigan women’s fest, some sports teams, etc), depending on how one defines the purposes. But even beyond that, in general a lot of trans rhetoric seems to be insisting on two big categories (yes, usually admitting other categories, like intersex & binary, but still identifying the big two) and saying that *for all purposes* one must put people into the category they claim. (Maybe I’m just misreading things, of course.)
I like Ozy’s analysis, for accuracy & nuance, and it seems like it might make a good cultural compromise if it were widely accepted. But I wonder if there won’t be objectors on both sides of the current culture war, and not just one.
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Thanks for the section on political preferences. I have long wondered why all these claims I hear about men and women having fundamentally different perspectives simply don’t apply to the men and women I know. I thought I might be in a social bubble. I’m simultaneously relieved and annoyed to discover it’s all just down to the media (and feminists, and MRAs) massively exaggerating a very small difference.
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