[ staying with personal epistemics—public presentation and recognition remains under the “caring, respect, and kindness” topic for me, not necessarily carving reality at the joints. ]
I don’t personally treat ““rationalist-adjacent female-attired somewhat-passing demisexual trans women who like hanging out with each other and write great Rust code” as a gender. In my mind, I dissolve “gender” into multiple different things, and categorize people differently according to the reason for my categorization.
There almost certainly IS a cluster of people who fit that description. Actually, multiple clusters, since it includes “like hanging out with each other”, and some otherwise-similar individuals will like hanging out with a different subset of that group.
Noticing correlations and clusterings of people is an important fact about the world (while recognizing that reality is complex, and any compression or modeling is lossy). Labeling them, especially with controversial terms where your private definition will cause problems if it leaks into public conversation, is a mistake.
[ staying with personal epistemics—public presentation and recognition remains under the “caring, respect, and kindness” topic for me, not necessarily carving reality at the joints. ]
I don’t personally treat ““rationalist-adjacent female-attired somewhat-passing demisexual trans women who like hanging out with each other and write great Rust code” as a gender. In my mind, I dissolve “gender” into multiple different things, and categorize people differently according to the reason for my categorization.
There almost certainly IS a cluster of people who fit that description. Actually, multiple clusters, since it includes “like hanging out with each other”, and some otherwise-similar individuals will like hanging out with a different subset of that group.
Noticing correlations and clusterings of people is an important fact about the world (while recognizing that reality is complex, and any compression or modeling is lossy). Labeling them, especially with controversial terms where your private definition will cause problems if it leaks into public conversation, is a mistake.