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).
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).