Sorry, but I just wasn’t able to read the whole thing carefully, so I might be missing your relevant writing; I apologize if this comment retreads old ground.
It seems to me like the reasonable thing to do in this situation is:
Make whatever categories in your map you would be inclined to make in order to make good predictions. For example, personally I have a sort of “trans women” category based on the handful of trans women I have known reasonably well, which is closer to the “man” category than to the “woman” category, but has some somewhat distinct traits. Obviously you have a much more detailed map than me about this.
Use maximally clear, straightforward, and honest language representing maximally useful maps in situations where you are mostly trying to seek truth in the relevant territory. For example, “trying to figure out good bathroom policy” would be a really bad time to use obfuscatory language in order to spare people’s feelings. (Likewise this comment.)
Be amenable to utilitarian arguments for non-straightforward or dishonest language in situations where you are doing something else. For example, if I have a trans coworker who I am trying to cooperate with on some totally unrelated work, and they have strong personal preferences about my use of language that aren’t very costly for me, I am basically just happy to go along with those. Or if I have a trans friend who I like and we are just talking about whatever for warm fuzzies reasons, I am happy to go along with their preferences. (If it’s a kind of collective political thing, then that brings other considerations to bear; I don’t care to play political games.)
Introspectively, I don’t think that my use of language in the third point is messing up my ability to think—it’s extremely not confusing to think to myself in my map-language, “OK, this person is a trans woman, which means I should predict they are mostly like a man except with trans-woman-cluster traits X, Y, and Z, and a personal preference to be treated ‘like’ a woman in many social circumstances, and it’s polite to call them ‘she’ and ‘her’.” I also don’t get confused if other people do the things that I learned are polite; I don’t start thinking “oh, everyone is treating this trans woman like a woman, so now I should expect them to have woman-typical traits like P and Q.”
The third point is the majority of interactions I have, because I mostly don’t care or think very much about gender-related stuff. Is there a reason I should be more of a stickler for maximizing honesty and straightforwardness in these cases?
I don’t think “non-straightforward or dishonest language” enters into it very much, but I don’t have the clusters you have. I know cis women with “male-pattern” personalities and interests and trans women with “female-pattern” personalities and interests. (Not really any cis men with “female-pattern” personalities and interests, but society does its best to ensure that doesn’t happen.) In some online spaces where I don’t share demographic information, people sometimes take me for a member of the opposite sex. “Male-pattern” and “female-pattern” are culture- and class-bound anyway—there are many different types of guy. I don’t get much use out of categorizing people by biological sex.
In repeated interpersonal interactions, of course, you just construct a model of the person, and then you don’t need the categories so much. You still have to figure out who uses which bathroom, but the “you” here unpacks to “the state”, which sees in its own way—a low-resolution way that can’t be said to track truth.
Unless you’re prepared to reject the entire analytic tradition, categories aren’t even real—they’re abstractions over entities. Maybe some are more useful than others, but if you recognize “trans woman” as a third gender (surely a more useful categorization than “trans women are men”[1]), how many genders are there? Are “nerd” and “jock” genders? “Butch” and “femme”?
[1] If this seems surprising to you, remember that LW and the social strata it recruits from contain highly atypical men! For example: what percentage of the male LW userbase knows the basic rules of a major spectator sport?
Sorry, but I just wasn’t able to read the whole thing carefully, so I might be missing your relevant writing; I apologize if this comment retreads old ground.
It seems to me like the reasonable thing to do in this situation is:
Make whatever categories in your map you would be inclined to make in order to make good predictions. For example, personally I have a sort of “trans women” category based on the handful of trans women I have known reasonably well, which is closer to the “man” category than to the “woman” category, but has some somewhat distinct traits. Obviously you have a much more detailed map than me about this.
Use maximally clear, straightforward, and honest language representing maximally useful maps in situations where you are mostly trying to seek truth in the relevant territory. For example, “trying to figure out good bathroom policy” would be a really bad time to use obfuscatory language in order to spare people’s feelings. (Likewise this comment.)
Be amenable to utilitarian arguments for non-straightforward or dishonest language in situations where you are doing something else. For example, if I have a trans coworker who I am trying to cooperate with on some totally unrelated work, and they have strong personal preferences about my use of language that aren’t very costly for me, I am basically just happy to go along with those. Or if I have a trans friend who I like and we are just talking about whatever for warm fuzzies reasons, I am happy to go along with their preferences. (If it’s a kind of collective political thing, then that brings other considerations to bear; I don’t care to play political games.)
Introspectively, I don’t think that my use of language in the third point is messing up my ability to think—it’s extremely not confusing to think to myself in my map-language, “OK, this person is a trans woman, which means I should predict they are mostly like a man except with trans-woman-cluster traits X, Y, and Z, and a personal preference to be treated ‘like’ a woman in many social circumstances, and it’s polite to call them ‘she’ and ‘her’.” I also don’t get confused if other people do the things that I learned are polite; I don’t start thinking “oh, everyone is treating this trans woman like a woman, so now I should expect them to have woman-typical traits like P and Q.”
The third point is the majority of interactions I have, because I mostly don’t care or think very much about gender-related stuff. Is there a reason I should be more of a stickler for maximizing honesty and straightforwardness in these cases?
I don’t think “non-straightforward or dishonest language” enters into it very much, but I don’t have the clusters you have. I know cis women with “male-pattern” personalities and interests and trans women with “female-pattern” personalities and interests. (Not really any cis men with “female-pattern” personalities and interests, but society does its best to ensure that doesn’t happen.) In some online spaces where I don’t share demographic information, people sometimes take me for a member of the opposite sex. “Male-pattern” and “female-pattern” are culture- and class-bound anyway—there are many different types of guy. I don’t get much use out of categorizing people by biological sex.
In repeated interpersonal interactions, of course, you just construct a model of the person, and then you don’t need the categories so much. You still have to figure out who uses which bathroom, but the “you” here unpacks to “the state”, which sees in its own way—a low-resolution way that can’t be said to track truth.
Unless you’re prepared to reject the entire analytic tradition, categories aren’t even real—they’re abstractions over entities. Maybe some are more useful than others, but if you recognize “trans woman” as a third gender (surely a more useful categorization than “trans women are men”[1]), how many genders are there? Are “nerd” and “jock” genders? “Butch” and “femme”?
[1] If this seems surprising to you, remember that LW and the social strata it recruits from contain highly atypical men! For example: what percentage of the male LW userbase knows the basic rules of a major spectator sport?