I think in the case of gender labels, society used to have a pervasive and strict separation of the roles, rights and privileges of people based on gender. This worked fairly well because the genders differ in systematic ways.
If you add gender egalitarianism and transgender rights into that you might instead want a patchwork of divergent rules: in certain contexts gender might matter but in many you’d use a different feature set.
The problem is those new features/feature sets are going to be leaky, less legible, harder to measure, etc. Nothing is as good as a biological category like gender when it comes to legibility and ease of enforcement.
So what in fact happens when you discard simple categories is you get a morass of cheating, exploitation, grifting, corruption, etc. Simplicity is good; easy for people to understand, easy to enforce against transgressors, easy to spot corruption by the enforcers. Of course sometimes reality will change to a degree that the simple categories are no longer tenable and then the ensuing chaos is somewhat unavoidable.
It appears from my point of view that the expected exploitation isn’t happening (or is happening very rarely, far below the expected rate.)
I can’t say I know of any such cases (trans or “trans” persons cheating, exploiting, grifting) first-hand, nor even second-hand without mass media having amplified the story.
Quite to the contrary, four of the five trans people I’ve met have been far more than average concerned with being prosocial. This cashes out in a few different ways. Least-healthily as experiencing difficulty asking for help or advocating for themselves, for fear of inconveniencing anyone else. Two as just being very trustworthy and moral. And one who is extraordinarily helpful, jumping in and assisting with any heavy manual labor (ex: moving residences) or home improvement tasks among this person’s extended social circle, that come to this person’s attention. (The fifth is in chronic pain from a spinal injury, a bit unpleasant of demeanor, but notably not cheating/exploiting/grifting.)
My mental model for why we don’t observe the expected exploitation is that “not using a false trans label for antisocial personal gain” is mostly self-enforced by the risk that a potential transgressor would be susceptible to gender dysphoria (which, I’m guessing from very sparse data, about half of cisgender people are), and might inflict gender dysphoria upon themselves if engaging in unneeded gender transition. Similarly to honesty/morality self-enforced by guilt, as in Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants.
Also in my model: transition is mostly slow and/or expensive, so there are easier ways to cheat, if one was so inclined.
I think in the case of gender labels, society used to have a pervasive and strict separation of the roles, rights and privileges of people based on gender. This worked fairly well because the genders differ in systematic ways.
If you add gender egalitarianism and transgender rights into that you might instead want a patchwork of divergent rules: in certain contexts gender might matter but in many you’d use a different feature set.
The problem is those new features/feature sets are going to be leaky, less legible, harder to measure, etc. Nothing is as good as a biological category like gender when it comes to legibility and ease of enforcement.
So what in fact happens when you discard simple categories is you get a morass of cheating, exploitation, grifting, corruption, etc. Simplicity is good; easy for people to understand, easy to enforce against transgressors, easy to spot corruption by the enforcers. Of course sometimes reality will change to a degree that the simple categories are no longer tenable and then the ensuing chaos is somewhat unavoidable.
It appears from my point of view that the expected exploitation isn’t happening (or is happening very rarely, far below the expected rate.)
I can’t say I know of any such cases (trans or “trans” persons cheating, exploiting, grifting) first-hand, nor even second-hand without mass media having amplified the story.
Quite to the contrary, four of the five trans people I’ve met have been far more than average concerned with being prosocial. This cashes out in a few different ways. Least-healthily as experiencing difficulty asking for help or advocating for themselves, for fear of inconveniencing anyone else. Two as just being very trustworthy and moral. And one who is extraordinarily helpful, jumping in and assisting with any heavy manual labor (ex: moving residences) or home improvement tasks among this person’s extended social circle, that come to this person’s attention. (The fifth is in chronic pain from a spinal injury, a bit unpleasant of demeanor, but notably not cheating/exploiting/grifting.)
My mental model for why we don’t observe the expected exploitation is that “not using a false trans label for antisocial personal gain” is mostly self-enforced by the risk that a potential transgressor would be susceptible to gender dysphoria (which, I’m guessing from very sparse data, about half of cisgender people are), and might inflict gender dysphoria upon themselves if engaging in unneeded gender transition. Similarly to honesty/morality self-enforced by guilt, as in Guilt: Another Gift Nobody Wants.
Also in my model: transition is mostly slow and/or expensive, so there are easier ways to cheat, if one was so inclined.