I like this post, but I think that it underestimates a bit the strength of filter bubbles. Even if a trait is present in 1% of the general population, it doesn’t automatically follow that literally everyone has someone in their social circle with that trait.
If you walk around aggressively signaling the equivalent of “What!?? There ain’t no faggots in this town,” then it should be no surprise to you that your lived experience is that none of the people around you are gay (even though base rates imply that quite a few of them are).
I consider myself liberal enough to not project an anti-trans aura, but I still never meet trans people in person, like Scott Alexander never meet conservatives. Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t know of anyone who has. My best guess is that when they decide to change sex, they also relocate to a more queer-friendly place. Taking SF as an extreme case, in the Bay you can find companies entirely run by trans women, a thing that I’m pretty sure never happens in other towns.
Agreed with the main point of your comment: even mildly-rare events can be distributed in such a way that some of us literally never experience them, and others of us see it so often it appears near-universal. This is both a true variance in distribution AND a filter effect of what gets highlighted and what downplayed in different social groups. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy .
For myself, in Seattle (San-Francisco-Lite), I’d only very rarely noticed that someone was trans until the early ’00s, when a friend transitioned, and like a switch I was far more aware and noticed a fair number of transwomen out in public (and eventually made friends which included more). There’s enough of a continuum that MANY instances won’t be certain unless you spend a fair bit of time with someone. I can imagine that in many locations, it’s uncomfortable enough that only the more passing segment spends much time in non-explicitly-safe locations.
So both: there may be fewer trans people where you are, they may not tend to go where you often do. But also, until you get used to it and have a number of examples to compare with, you may just not notice.
Importantly, and to your point, this generalizes. Our experiences are different, both objectively AND subjectively in terms of what we notice, focus on, and learn from those experiences. This variance is routinely overlooked.
Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t know of anyone who has.
I had the interesting experience of while living in the same smallish city, going from [thinking I had] never met a trans person to having a large percentage of my friend group be trans, and coming across many trans folk incidentally. This coincided with internal growth (don’t want to get into details here), not a change in the town’s population or anything. Meanwhile, I have a religious friend who recently told me he’s never met a trans person [who has undergone hormone therapy] he couldn’t identify as [their gender assigned at birth], not realizing that I had introduced a trans friend to him as her chosen gender and he hadn’t realized at all.
Do you mean that after your personal growth, your social circle expanded and you started to regularly meet trans people? I’ve no problem believing that, but I would be really really surprised to hear that no, lots of your longterm friends were actually trans all along and you failed to notice for years.
As I said in other comments, I am not locked in some strange conservative bubble keeping queer people out. For instance, I know at least three lesbians: one of them is a very obvious butch lesbian always dressed in male clothes, the other two are not so obvious but I still guessed they were lesbians quite early (say, around the third or fourth encounter in both cases). And I am surprised because this never happened with trans people, in the sense that I never caught the slightest hint that one of my longterm acquaintances could possibly be born with a different gender.
Do you mean that after your personal growth, your social circle expanded and you started to regularly meet trans people? I’ve no problem believing that, but I would be really really surprised to hear that no, lots of your longterm friends were actually trans all along and you failed to notice for years.
Both! I met a number of new irl trans friends, but I also found out that quite a few people I had known for a few years (mostly online, though I had seen their face/talked before) were trans all along. Nobody I’m aware of in the local Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in though. (edit: I take that back, there is at least one person in that community who would probably identify as genderqueer though I’ve never asked outright) The thing is, many people don’t center their personal sense of self around gender identity (though it is a part of one’s identity), so its not like it comes up immediately in casual conversation, and there is very good reason to be “stealth” if you are trans, considering there’s a whole lot that can go horribly wrong if you come out to the wrong person.
I’d say (1) living in such a place just makes you much less likely to come out, even if you never move, (2) suspecting you can trust someone with a secret is not a good enough reason to tell the secret, and (3) even if you totally trust someone with your secret, you might not trust that he/she will keep the secret.
And I’d say Scott Alexander meets conservatives regularly―but they’re so highbrow that he wasn’t thinking of them as “conservatives” when he wrote that. He’s an extra step removed from the typical Bush or MAGA supporter, so doesn’t meet those. Or does he? Social Dark Matter theory suggests that he totally does.
Most ‘trans-women’ I see online (in videos etc) who expliciltly identify themselves as such do not, to my eye, visually pass as women, even if I try and account for the fact that knowledge of their identity could skew my perception. It would be weird that every one of them I encounter IRL would fall into the minority of who clearly pass.
Bezzi also said “meet”, not just “see”, which implies talking to the person, and I find that the numebr of ‘trans-women’ I see online who have voices that pass is even smaller than those who visually pass. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that hundreds of the people I’ve met in my city who I thought were women were actually trans-women.
I can concede that maybe I’ve walked near trans passers-by who didn’t obviously look like trans people, but I’m still confident that 100% of people I interacted with verbally more than once are not trans. I suppose that homosexuals could pass as straight more easily than trans could pass as cis, but I did meet gays and lesbians nonetheless (indeed, most of them don’t obviously look like homosexuals).
To the best of my knowledge, there are no LGBT organizations in my town, but there are certainly some in the bigger city where my workplace is located. I’ve no doubt I would find a trans person there if I went looking. My point was that, despite having interacted with hundreds of people at this point, I’ve never met one by chance in the same way I met gays and lesbians.
I think you are way overestimating your ability to tell who is trans and way underestimating the ability of trans people to pass as cis. Sometimes, you just can’t tell.
While your point is technically true, it’s not relevant here. Bezzi’s point stands even if we just talk about trans folk whom most people can readily tell are trans.
… How in the world would you know if someone you’ve interacted verbally with twice is trans? Among other things, they may not have actively transitioned.
Someone who has a partner of the same gender may have some reason to bring it up, but generally once you know someone’s currently used gender that’s sufficient information conveyed, you don’t really need to know how they got there. Why would the subject even come up?
Just one example: are you familiar with the concept of people starting a conversation by specifying the pronoun they want used to refer to them?
I’m not. In the sense that I’ve literally never ever met one of these people. I read about them on the Internet every time I open rationalist-related media, but they may as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them in everyday life!
(Also, people keep critically misunderstanding Scott’s point. Scott isn’t saying the conservatives don’t live around him. The whole point is that they do live around him and he does pass them on the street and he does go to the same grocery stores and gas stations. He doesn’t knowingly interact with them because of his social bubble, but they are there, just like trans folk are definitely around Bezzi a lot (though I totes grant Bezzi’s point that there aren’t many visibly transitioning ones). That’s what the phrase “dark matter” is being used to indicate, both in Scott’s post and in mine.)
Of course that trans people will go to the same grocery store and gas station as me! But for some reason I have zero of them in my social circle, like Scott has zero creationists (and the base rate for creationists is way higher than the base rate for trans people). Are we implying that no, at least some of Scott’s friends must be closeted creationist?
This thread continues to fail to distinguish between “visibly trans” and “non-visibly trans” people, which is depressing since it’s, y’know, the point.
Bezzi: you’re trying to say that you don’t know and have never met any trans people, and you keep doubling down on “I know this because I haven’t encountered any of the visible markers of trans people,” and I, uh. Encourage you to put 17 and 23 together?
Most trans folk are still not transitioning.
Another way of saying this: slow down and ask yourself “what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it?” and recognize that the evidence you have is systematically skewed, and you need to start with some other prior.
(If nothing else, this thread is useful as a real-time, object-level example of the subject matter under discussion.)
Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?
I mean, being told by anyone “Hey, do you know that guy? Is a woman now.” would be enough. But it never happens! And this is the kind of rare gossip that I would expect most of my acquaintances to share, especially the least trans-friendly ones (like my grandma, who’s a devout Catholic and knows half the town by name).
Only online, in the sense of having it in your profile if you want it specified. Literally none of my trans friends do it IRL. Most of them wouldn’t be comfortable with it.
Edit: They may have done it once specifically to come out as having a different pronoun than people already in their lives were used to using for them, but not like, encountering someone new.
Edit 2: To delve a bit further, this is an extremely context dependent conversational norm. Like, it’s not based on the person you’re talking to, it’s based on the group you’re in, and if one person is doing it, generally a lot of people are. If you don’t have an LGBT organization in the area to visit a meetup of, and you aren’t in an online space with no obvious gender markers that requires the specification if you want it specified at all, I don’t expect it to come up (unless you are meeting someone with a non-obvious pronoun who really wants you, specifically, to use it, rather than just correcting if you got the wrong impression—this I would count as ‘unable to hide’ if they do so with most people and are trans).
It sounds like you’re saying that you can tell once someone’s started transitioning, not that you can recognize trans people who haven’t (or who haven’t come out, at least not to a circle including you), right? Whether or not you’re right, the spirit of this post includes the latter, too.
Right, I don’t claim to be able to spot trans people who didn’t start the transition, but at least for those who finished the transition, I assume that a prolonged interaction would at least reveal some clues. Take, I don’t know, my conservatory (at least 60-80 people I personally interacted with for years, including some of those gays and lesbians from the previous post). Even if with these people I talk mostly about music, I would be truly shocked to find out that one of them was trans all along.
Do you want larger numbers? My father runs a small business with ~1000 customers, and most of them have been the same for years. Even if he doesn’t personally know all of them, I am quite sure that he would notice if one of them transitioned. So far, he has not.
I think this conversation is failing to reliably distinguish between “being trans” in the sense of experiencing substantial gender dysphoria and/or adopting the self-label trans, and “being trans” in the sense of taking visible steps to socially or medically transition.
I buy Bezzi’s self-report that they never see people who have visibly taken steps to transition; there’s no reason for Bezzi to be confused about this.
I think people are pushing back because (of the true fact that) many trans people are not taking visible steps to transition, especially in enclaves where it’s unheard of.
So this is actually rather tightly analogous to the perception of queer folk in the 1950′s … one could (validly) say that they’ve never seen anyone acting queer, but it would be an overstep to conclude from this that one does not regularly interact with queer people.
Presumably, no one in this thread disagrees that:
Bezzi would notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who had socially or medically transitioned
Bezzi would not notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who was “quietly trans” and taking no steps to change the situation
This post is, in large part, about “the latter category is WAY bigger than one would naively think.” You’ve met them. You just didn’t clock them.
If I search for the number of the trans population, I find https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender-population-by-state which suggests a rate of identifying as trans of 0.5% in for people between 18 and 25. It seems to cite the Williams Institute as a source which seems to me like an organization that’s friendly toward trans people and doesn’t really have a reason to misstate the prevalence. When I searched for information other sources also came up with something in the same ballpark.
At that base rate, knowing 60 to 80 people and nobody of them being trans should not be surprising.
Do you believe that the base rates that organizations like the Williams Institute come up with are wrong?
No. I’m disagreeing with Bezzi’s claim to have never encountered any trans person and to have no trans people in their extended social network of hundreds or thousands. I don’t doubt their self-report re: visibly trans people, but they’re unjustified in the conclusion “there just aren’t invisible trans people around me in my town.”
but you’re posting on LessWrong, which means you ’re interacting with the Rationalist community, which seems to have way, way more trans people than national average. I mean, look at manifold.love, the community’s take on a dating site, and see how long it takes to encounter a trans person. Or, for that matter, the community talking about AI risk contains a bunch of trans people, so you’re pterry much guaranteed to encounter at least one in any extended discussion of AI risk.
I am interacting with the Rationalist community basically through LessWrong only. As you could infer from my first post, I don’t live near SF or other notoriously queer-friendly cities, and I’ve never been to a Rationalist meetup in person. This is kind of the point: the average joe in the average mid-sized town could live for years and years without meeting a single obviously trans person (in the sense of someone who had visibly transitioned through medical procedures).
I like this post, but I think that it underestimates a bit the strength of filter bubbles. Even if a trait is present in 1% of the general population, it doesn’t automatically follow that literally everyone has someone in their social circle with that trait.
I consider myself liberal enough to not project an anti-trans aura, but I still never meet trans people in person, like Scott Alexander never meet conservatives. Base rates seem to imply that there should be dozens of trans people in my town, but I’ve never seen one, and I don’t know of anyone who has. My best guess is that when they decide to change sex, they also relocate to a more queer-friendly place. Taking SF as an extreme case, in the Bay you can find companies entirely run by trans women, a thing that I’m pretty sure never happens in other towns.
Agreed with the main point of your comment: even mildly-rare events can be distributed in such a way that some of us literally never experience them, and others of us see it so often it appears near-universal. This is both a true variance in distribution AND a filter effect of what gets highlighted and what downplayed in different social groups. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/typical-mind-fallacy .
For myself, in Seattle (San-Francisco-Lite), I’d only very rarely noticed that someone was trans until the early ’00s, when a friend transitioned, and like a switch I was far more aware and noticed a fair number of transwomen out in public (and eventually made friends which included more). There’s enough of a continuum that MANY instances won’t be certain unless you spend a fair bit of time with someone. I can imagine that in many locations, it’s uncomfortable enough that only the more passing segment spends much time in non-explicitly-safe locations.
So both: there may be fewer trans people where you are, they may not tend to go where you often do. But also, until you get used to it and have a number of examples to compare with, you may just not notice.
Importantly, and to your point, this generalizes. Our experiences are different, both objectively AND subjectively in terms of what we notice, focus on, and learn from those experiences. This variance is routinely overlooked.
I had the interesting experience of while living in the same smallish city, going from [thinking I had] never met a trans person to having a large percentage of my friend group be trans, and coming across many trans folk incidentally. This coincided with internal growth (don’t want to get into details here), not a change in the town’s population or anything. Meanwhile, I have a religious friend who recently told me he’s never met a trans person [who has undergone hormone therapy] he couldn’t identify as [their gender assigned at birth], not realizing that I had introduced a trans friend to him as her chosen gender and he hadn’t realized at all.
Uh, this is somewhat surprising.
Do you mean that after your personal growth, your social circle expanded and you started to regularly meet trans people? I’ve no problem believing that, but I would be really really surprised to hear that no, lots of your longterm friends were actually trans all along and you failed to notice for years.
As I said in other comments, I am not locked in some strange conservative bubble keeping queer people out. For instance, I know at least three lesbians: one of them is a very obvious butch lesbian always dressed in male clothes, the other two are not so obvious but I still guessed they were lesbians quite early (say, around the third or fourth encounter in both cases). And I am surprised because this never happened with trans people, in the sense that I never caught the slightest hint that one of my longterm acquaintances could possibly be born with a different gender.
Both! I met a number of new irl trans friends, but I also found out that quite a few people I had known for a few years (mostly online, though I had seen their face/talked before) were trans all along.
Nobody I’m aware of in the local Orthodox Jewish community I grew up in though.(edit: I take that back, there is at least one person in that community who would probably identify as genderqueer though I’ve never asked outright) The thing is, many people don’t center their personal sense of self around gender identity (though it is a part of one’s identity), so its not like it comes up immediately in casual conversation, and there is very good reason to be “stealth” if you are trans, considering there’s a whole lot that can go horribly wrong if you come out to the wrong person.I’d say (1) living in such a place just makes you much less likely to come out, even if you never move, (2) suspecting you can trust someone with a secret is not a good enough reason to tell the secret, and (3) even if you totally trust someone with your secret, you might not trust that he/she will keep the secret.
And I’d say Scott Alexander meets conservatives regularly―but they’re so highbrow that he wasn’t thinking of them as “conservatives” when he wrote that. He’s an extra step removed from the typical Bush or MAGA supporter, so doesn’t meet those. Or does he? Social Dark Matter theory suggests that he totally does.
The phrase “change sex” projects an anti-trans aura. (Not as much as using a slur, but it still makes me wince.) People say “transition” these days.
Another factor worth considering is that many trans people “pass” as cis, so you wouldn’t necessarily know someone is trans just by looking at them.
Does your town have a local PFLAG chapter? Another LGBT organization? If so, there might be trans people involved there.
Most ‘trans-women’ I see online (in videos etc) who expliciltly identify themselves as such do not, to my eye, visually pass as women, even if I try and account for the fact that knowledge of their identity could skew my perception. It would be weird that every one of them I encounter IRL would fall into the minority of who clearly pass.
Bezzi also said “meet”, not just “see”, which implies talking to the person, and I find that the numebr of ‘trans-women’ I see online who have voices that pass is even smaller than those who visually pass. It therefore seems extremely unlikely that hundreds of the people I’ve met in my city who I thought were women were actually trans-women.
I can concede that maybe I’ve walked near trans passers-by who didn’t obviously look like trans people, but I’m still confident that 100% of people I interacted with verbally more than once are not trans. I suppose that homosexuals could pass as straight more easily than trans could pass as cis, but I did meet gays and lesbians nonetheless (indeed, most of them don’t obviously look like homosexuals).
To the best of my knowledge, there are no LGBT organizations in my town, but there are certainly some in the bigger city where my workplace is located. I’ve no doubt I would find a trans person there if I went looking. My point was that, despite having interacted with hundreds of people at this point, I’ve never met one by chance in the same way I met gays and lesbians.
I think you are way overestimating your ability to tell who is trans and way underestimating the ability of trans people to pass as cis. Sometimes, you just can’t tell.
While your point is technically true, it’s not relevant here. Bezzi’s point stands even if we just talk about trans folk whom most people can readily tell are trans.
… How in the world would you know if someone you’ve interacted verbally with twice is trans? Among other things, they may not have actively transitioned.
Someone who has a partner of the same gender may have some reason to bring it up, but generally once you know someone’s currently used gender that’s sufficient information conveyed, you don’t really need to know how they got there. Why would the subject even come up?
Just one example: are you familiar with the concept of people starting a conversation by specifying the pronoun they want used to refer to them?
I’m not. In the sense that I’ve literally never ever met one of these people. I read about them on the Internet every time I open rationalist-related media, but they may as well be made of dark matter. I never meet them in everyday life!
(Also, people keep critically misunderstanding Scott’s point. Scott isn’t saying the conservatives don’t live around him. The whole point is that they do live around him and he does pass them on the street and he does go to the same grocery stores and gas stations. He doesn’t knowingly interact with them because of his social bubble, but they are there, just like trans folk are definitely around Bezzi a lot (though I totes grant Bezzi’s point that there aren’t many visibly transitioning ones). That’s what the phrase “dark matter” is being used to indicate, both in Scott’s post and in mine.)
Of course that trans people will go to the same grocery store and gas station as me! But for some reason I have zero of them in my social circle, like Scott has zero creationists (and the base rate for creationists is way higher than the base rate for trans people). Are we implying that no, at least some of Scott’s friends must be closeted creationist?
This thread continues to fail to distinguish between “visibly trans” and “non-visibly trans” people, which is depressing since it’s, y’know, the point.
Bezzi: you’re trying to say that you don’t know and have never met any trans people, and you keep doubling down on “I know this because I haven’t encountered any of the visible markers of trans people,” and I, uh. Encourage you to put 17 and 23 together?
Most trans folk are still not transitioning.
Another way of saying this: slow down and ask yourself “what do I think I know, and why do I think I know it?” and recognize that the evidence you have is systematically skewed, and you need to start with some other prior.
(If nothing else, this thread is useful as a real-time, object-level example of the subject matter under discussion.)
But man, it only takes one.
Are the base rates for actual transition so low that you can have thousands of people in your extended social circle and still never hear of one?
I mean, being told by anyone “Hey, do you know that guy? Is a woman now.” would be enough. But it never happens! And this is the kind of rare gossip that I would expect most of my acquaintances to share, especially the least trans-friendly ones (like my grandma, who’s a devout Catholic and knows half the town by name).
Yes.
Only online, in the sense of having it in your profile if you want it specified. Literally none of my trans friends do it IRL. Most of them wouldn’t be comfortable with it.
Edit: They may have done it once specifically to come out as having a different pronoun than people already in their lives were used to using for them, but not like, encountering someone new.
Edit 2: To delve a bit further, this is an extremely context dependent conversational norm. Like, it’s not based on the person you’re talking to, it’s based on the group you’re in, and if one person is doing it, generally a lot of people are. If you don’t have an LGBT organization in the area to visit a meetup of, and you aren’t in an online space with no obvious gender markers that requires the specification if you want it specified at all, I don’t expect it to come up (unless you are meeting someone with a non-obvious pronoun who really wants you, specifically, to use it, rather than just correcting if you got the wrong impression—this I would count as ‘unable to hide’ if they do so with most people and are trans).
It sounds like you’re saying that you can tell once someone’s started transitioning, not that you can recognize trans people who haven’t (or who haven’t come out, at least not to a circle including you), right? Whether or not you’re right, the spirit of this post includes the latter, too.
Right, I don’t claim to be able to spot trans people who didn’t start the transition, but at least for those who finished the transition, I assume that a prolonged interaction would at least reveal some clues. Take, I don’t know, my conservatory (at least 60-80 people I personally interacted with for years, including some of those gays and lesbians from the previous post). Even if with these people I talk mostly about music, I would be truly shocked to find out that one of them was trans all along.
Do you want larger numbers? My father runs a small business with ~1000 customers, and most of them have been the same for years. Even if he doesn’t personally know all of them, I am quite sure that he would notice if one of them transitioned. So far, he has not.
I think this conversation is failing to reliably distinguish between “being trans” in the sense of experiencing substantial gender dysphoria and/or adopting the self-label trans, and “being trans” in the sense of taking visible steps to socially or medically transition.
I buy Bezzi’s self-report that they never see people who have visibly taken steps to transition; there’s no reason for Bezzi to be confused about this.
I think people are pushing back because (of the true fact that) many trans people are not taking visible steps to transition, especially in enclaves where it’s unheard of.
So this is actually rather tightly analogous to the perception of queer folk in the 1950′s … one could (validly) say that they’ve never seen anyone acting queer, but it would be an overstep to conclude from this that one does not regularly interact with queer people.
Presumably, no one in this thread disagrees that:
Bezzi would notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who had socially or medically transitioned
Bezzi would not notice (in most though definitely not all cases) someone who was “quietly trans” and taking no steps to change the situation
This post is, in large part, about “the latter category is WAY bigger than one would naively think.” You’ve met them. You just didn’t clock them.
If I search for the number of the trans population, I find https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender-population-by-state which suggests a rate of identifying as trans of 0.5% in for people between 18 and 25. It seems to cite the Williams Institute as a source which seems to me like an organization that’s friendly toward trans people and doesn’t really have a reason to misstate the prevalence. When I searched for information other sources also came up with something in the same ballpark.
At that base rate, knowing 60 to 80 people and nobody of them being trans should not be surprising.
Do you believe that the base rates that organizations like the Williams Institute come up with are wrong?
No. I’m disagreeing with Bezzi’s claim to have never encountered any trans person and to have no trans people in their extended social network of hundreds or thousands. I don’t doubt their self-report re: visibly trans people, but they’re unjustified in the conclusion “there just aren’t invisible trans people around me in my town.”
but you’re posting on LessWrong, which means you ’re interacting with the Rationalist community, which seems to have way, way more trans people than national average. I mean, look at manifold.love, the community’s take on a dating site, and see how long it takes to encounter a trans person. Or, for that matter, the community talking about AI risk contains a bunch of trans people, so you’re pterry much guaranteed to encounter at least one in any extended discussion of AI risk.
I am interacting with the Rationalist community basically through LessWrong only. As you could infer from my first post, I don’t live near SF or other notoriously queer-friendly cities, and I’ve never been to a Rationalist meetup in person. This is kind of the point: the average joe in the average mid-sized town could live for years and years without meeting a single obviously trans person (in the sense of someone who had visibly transitioned through medical procedures).