I am bit confused about this “trans eradication problem”.
Like, I can understand and respect anti-abortion position per se, but that doesn’t seem to be what you have in mind.
So, do you wish there to be more trans people? Why? Isn’t it the same as some deaf communities refusing cochlear implants for their children as to not lose “deaf culture”?
When I talk about “trans eradication” in the post I am speaking descriptively (not normatively) about other people.
I like “aim to explain rather than persuade” a lot. I tried really hard to keep my personal beliefs out of this essay, and stick to description only.
I just want to double check—is your confusion about my personal normative belief, or about the feelings and beliefs of other trans people? Which are you curious about? It’s important to keep these separate.
Personally, I think the question is impossible to answer in a coherent way without an ethical stance on bringing new sentience into the world, in general. And that is an extremely difficult problem. I’m working on it but I don’t have a developed view on it yet.
And I am also interested in a different hypothetical experiment: imagine a perfect genetic therapy that could fully change adults person sex, like growing true new reproductive organs, no need for hormonal supplements, etc.
Would this also be perceived as a threat? You know, in a way, if you can really truly perfectly change your sex, being trans doesn’t really mean anything anymore, or does it?
Being transgender is in some ways similar to an ethnicity or a culture. I think some of the intuitions about “eradication” are coming from the same place as for people who fear the end of their race, ethnicity, or culture. I think it’s a tribal intuition that evolution engraved deeply into us. I’ve never been deaf so I can’t really compare the two. I think it’s extremely difficult to discuss productively without a general theory. Otherwise we’ll be heavily biased by our priors on politics and whether we like deaf people, trans people, and so on.
imagine a perfect genetic therapy that could fully change adults person sex, like growing true new reproductive organs, no need for hormonal supplements, etc.
I’m sure some people would find it very threatening. “God doesn’t make mistakes”.
The thing is, I have a Y chromosome with an SRY gene. Even if we could make me XX in all my cells that wouldn’t regrow my anatomy. (I don’t know how it would affect my brain.) So there would have to be some kind of surgical step.
I would still consider this meaningfully “trans” since I would have the memories and experiences of living first in an XY body and then moving to an XX one. My brain would still have the neuroanatomy my confused XY genotype laid down during gestation. I doubt there would be a way to give me a “fully XX” brain without wiping out my identity.
But you’re right that this would hopefully solve a lot of problems.
That might not even be possible hypothetically. “Perfectly” changing sex would also change sex-related psychological properties. Interests would strongly change, especially along the things-vs-people axis, in which biological males are much more interested than biological females. So e.g. an MtF person who is strongly interested in LessWrong, math, programming, video games and sex, would, when “changed” into a biological woman, lose most of those male-typical interests. In which case it may no longer be possible to consider this the same person. Which would mean we didn’t hypothetically change the sex of a person, but instead that we removed one person and created a different one.
Yes, women as a group tend to have on average more “feminine interests”. But there are many individual women who have “masculine interests“ and many men with “feminine interests”, so I don’t think that the theoretical perfect transition should require change of interests per se.
If the “perfect” transition doesn’t include psychology, the result would still have the psychology of the original sex. That’s not a perfect transition.
There are countless physiological as well as psychological properties that form statistical family resemblance clusters for male and female. I already mentioned things-vs-people and interest in sex for male, but there are many others. Those clusters of properties are very unlikely to be significantly instantiated in the opposite sex, even if a few individual properties often deviate from the cluster. A “perfect” sex transition from male to female obviously wouldn’t be perfect if the resulting individual still had a male-typical bone structure, muscle structure, face shape, etc, and the same holds for psychological properties.
1. It is plausible that such treatments or screening would, at least initially, be more readily accessible to more affluent people, and thereby, being trans might become a stronger signal that someone is of low economic status than before.
2. A general sense that “this is a disappearing problem” might remove any incentive to work on reducing stigma faced by the still-existing trans people, providing them with better treatment, etc.
Sure, those problems are likely to be neutralized on a societal level by the fact that there will simply be less affected people left. But from the perspective of a single trans person, who obviously cannot benefit from PGT and might not be able to benefit from those treatments (e.g. if they only work during development), the personal net effect could easily be negative.
(To be clear, this is just my personal view and I haven’t yet had any other trans person articulate it to me exactly like that. There are of course also other objections to consider against PGT-style interventions to remove certain phenotypes from society, but I don’t think I have anything valuable to contribute there.)
Preimplantation Genetic Testing can in theory catch specific catastrophic mutations. Whether you are cis or trans, it is not good to have a stop codon at the wrong place in your estrogen receptor gene, full stop (literally). Ditto for the androgen receptor.
After digging into the (speculative) science on this, my personal view is that is that there is still a large biological component in E for most trans people. And being trans looks like a complex polygenic trait. GWAS has struggled to fully explain heritability https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than
So I think even in a “maximal eradication” scenario, eradication looks difficult to achieve. I am much more worried about health insurance coverage in the present. A lot of trans people are poor and basically unable to afford surgery without insurance.
That’s true, yes. Eradication is probably very hard, if not impossible. But I was more talking about speculative future screenings whereby you’d compute some “risk score” as a function of the full genome, select over that, and thereby merely reduce the number of trans people. Of course, it is very much possible that selecting embryos to minimize one kind of “risk” would just increase the rates of other types of problems and reduce genetic variance well beyond “reducing trans people”, so this kind of complex screening might not be worth it, either way, for any polygenic trait. It might not be possible to accurately predict the phenotypes of out-of-distribution genotypes at all, due to “computational irreducibility”-style dynamics. In the end, I don’t think that’s something that can be figured out on paper.
(Other traits for which stuff like this is being researched is autism and intelligence, and I think they serve as fairly good models. I think it’s fair to say that both are at least similarly complex, and if successes were shown with either, doing the same for gender dysphoria might be possible, too. Both show some highly rudimentary progress. Enough that I personally would assign at least a small probability that this is tractable.)
I don’t know if the point you’re making in your last paragraph is “this is unlikely to happen anyway, so as trans people, let’s not worry about it too much”, or “this is unlikely to happen anyway, so as a society, let’s reallocate efforts to more effective levers to reduce trans-related suffering”. Could you clarify? I think I would tentatively agree on both, but on the second point I do think it is worth asking whether it would be better to have less (or more?) trans people than we have at present, especially as such research is likely to become easier and cheaper as technology progresses in general. You know, just in case it does become possible.
I don’t know if the point you’re making in your last paragraph is...
I don’t speak at all for the trans community, nor do/would they listen to me. But I think the current genetic evidence is actually reassuring for those who worry about “trans genocide”. Because it looks difficult to achieve.
I do think it would be best if trans activism focuses on trying to preserve healthcare access.
I don’t intend to express an opinion on whether there “should be” more or fewer trans people born into this world. I don’t think it’s possible to have a productive conversation about this in public right now. If at all possible, it would be good to lower the political temperature on the issue.
Hello, different trans person replying here. (FtM, if it matters.)
I would be completely fine if there was some “trans gene” that was identified and eradicated, so as long as the already-living people who possessed them were not killed or otherwise infringed upon. Gender dysphoria has been nothing but a net-negative on my life. Being suicidal since the onset of puberty, paying for medicated perpetually, and being socially displaced (and not just due to prejudice; well-intentioned people will mistake your identity sometimes, and treat you differently than a normal person) are not positive experiences, nor have they led to any positive experience or insight I would have not arrived at otherwise. Nothing of value would be lost.
I would make the stronger preposition that any trans person who disagrees is either being disingenuous (likely for rhetorical reasons), is overpowered by emotions, or does not have gender dysphoria/is not transgender, but I’m not in a position to defend it.
I am bit confused about this “trans eradication problem”.
Like, I can understand and respect anti-abortion position per se, but that doesn’t seem to be what you have in mind.
So, do you wish there to be more trans people? Why? Isn’t it the same as some deaf communities refusing cochlear implants for their children as to not lose “deaf culture”?
When I talk about “trans eradication” in the post I am speaking descriptively (not normatively) about other people.
I like “aim to explain rather than persuade” a lot. I tried really hard to keep my personal beliefs out of this essay, and stick to description only.
I just want to double check—is your confusion about my personal normative belief, or about the feelings and beliefs of other trans people? Which are you curious about? It’s important to keep these separate.
Personally, I think the question is impossible to answer in a coherent way without an ethical stance on bringing new sentience into the world, in general. And that is an extremely difficult problem. I’m working on it but I don’t have a developed view on it yet.
I guess I am interested in both.
And I am also interested in a different hypothetical experiment: imagine a perfect genetic therapy that could fully change adults person sex, like growing true new reproductive organs, no need for hormonal supplements, etc.
Would this also be perceived as a threat? You know, in a way, if you can really truly perfectly change your sex, being trans doesn’t really mean anything anymore, or does it?
Being transgender is in some ways similar to an ethnicity or a culture. I think some of the intuitions about “eradication” are coming from the same place as for people who fear the end of their race, ethnicity, or culture. I think it’s a tribal intuition that evolution engraved deeply into us. I’ve never been deaf so I can’t really compare the two. I think it’s extremely difficult to discuss productively without a general theory. Otherwise we’ll be heavily biased by our priors on politics and whether we like deaf people, trans people, and so on.
I’m sure some people would find it very threatening. “God doesn’t make mistakes”.
The thing is, I have a Y chromosome with an SRY gene. Even if we could make me XX in all my cells that wouldn’t regrow my anatomy. (I don’t know how it would affect my brain.) So there would have to be some kind of surgical step.
I would still consider this meaningfully “trans” since I would have the memories and experiences of living first in an XY body and then moving to an XX one. My brain would still have the neuroanatomy my confused XY genotype laid down during gestation. I doubt there would be a way to give me a “fully XX” brain without wiping out my identity.
But you’re right that this would hopefully solve a lot of problems.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights.
That might not even be possible hypothetically. “Perfectly” changing sex would also change sex-related psychological properties. Interests would strongly change, especially along the things-vs-people axis, in which biological males are much more interested than biological females. So e.g. an MtF person who is strongly interested in LessWrong, math, programming, video games and sex, would, when “changed” into a biological woman, lose most of those male-typical interests. In which case it may no longer be possible to consider this the same person. Which would mean we didn’t hypothetically change the sex of a person, but instead that we removed one person and created a different one.
Yes, women as a group tend to have on average more “feminine interests”. But there are many individual women who have “masculine interests“ and many men with “feminine interests”, so I don’t think that the theoretical perfect transition should require change of interests per se.
If the “perfect” transition doesn’t include psychology, the result would still have the psychology of the original sex. That’s not a perfect transition.
What does it even mean “psychology of the original sex”?
Seems to me like calling every male with height below 165cm of height trans, because he has below female average height.
There are countless physiological as well as psychological properties that form statistical family resemblance clusters for male and female. I already mentioned things-vs-people and interest in sex for male, but there are many others. Those clusters of properties are very unlikely to be significantly instantiated in the opposite sex, even if a few individual properties often deviate from the cluster. A “perfect” sex transition from male to female obviously wouldn’t be perfect if the resulting individual still had a male-typical bone structure, muscle structure, face shape, etc, and the same holds for psychological properties.
In my view:
1. It is plausible that such treatments or screening would, at least initially, be more readily accessible to more affluent people, and thereby, being trans might become a stronger signal that someone is of low economic status than before.
2. A general sense that “this is a disappearing problem” might remove any incentive to work on reducing stigma faced by the still-existing trans people, providing them with better treatment, etc.
Sure, those problems are likely to be neutralized on a societal level by the fact that there will simply be less affected people left. But from the perspective of a single trans person, who obviously cannot benefit from PGT and might not be able to benefit from those treatments (e.g. if they only work during development), the personal net effect could easily be negative.
(To be clear, this is just my personal view and I haven’t yet had any other trans person articulate it to me exactly like that. There are of course also other objections to consider against PGT-style interventions to remove certain phenotypes from society, but I don’t think I have anything valuable to contribute there.)
Preimplantation Genetic Testing can in theory catch specific catastrophic mutations. Whether you are cis or trans, it is not good to have a stop codon at the wrong place in your estrogen receptor gene, full stop (literally). Ditto for the androgen receptor.
After digging into the (speculative) science on this, my personal view is that is that there is still a large biological component in E for most trans people. And being trans looks like a complex polygenic trait. GWAS has struggled to fully explain heritability https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than
So I think even in a “maximal eradication” scenario, eradication looks difficult to achieve. I am much more worried about health insurance coverage in the present. A lot of trans people are poor and basically unable to afford surgery without insurance.
That’s true, yes. Eradication is probably very hard, if not impossible. But I was more talking about speculative future screenings whereby you’d compute some “risk score” as a function of the full genome, select over that, and thereby merely reduce the number of trans people. Of course, it is very much possible that selecting embryos to minimize one kind of “risk” would just increase the rates of other types of problems and reduce genetic variance well beyond “reducing trans people”, so this kind of complex screening might not be worth it, either way, for any polygenic trait. It might not be possible to accurately predict the phenotypes of out-of-distribution genotypes at all, due to “computational irreducibility”-style dynamics. In the end, I don’t think that’s something that can be figured out on paper.
(Other traits for which stuff like this is being researched is autism and intelligence, and I think they serve as fairly good models. I think it’s fair to say that both are at least similarly complex, and if successes were shown with either, doing the same for gender dysphoria might be possible, too. Both show some highly rudimentary progress. Enough that I personally would assign at least a small probability that this is tractable.)
I don’t know if the point you’re making in your last paragraph is “this is unlikely to happen anyway, so as trans people, let’s not worry about it too much”, or “this is unlikely to happen anyway, so as a society, let’s reallocate efforts to more effective levers to reduce trans-related suffering”. Could you clarify? I think I would tentatively agree on both, but on the second point I do think it is worth asking whether it would be better to have less (or more?) trans people than we have at present, especially as such research is likely to become easier and cheaper as technology progresses in general. You know, just in case it does become possible.
I don’t speak at all for the trans community, nor do/would they listen to me. But I think the current genetic evidence is actually reassuring for those who worry about “trans genocide”. Because it looks difficult to achieve.
I do think it would be best if trans activism focuses on trying to preserve healthcare access.
I don’t intend to express an opinion on whether there “should be” more or fewer trans people born into this world. I don’t think it’s possible to have a productive conversation about this in public right now. If at all possible, it would be good to lower the political temperature on the issue.
Hello, different trans person replying here. (FtM, if it matters.)
I would be completely fine if there was some “trans gene” that was identified and eradicated, so as long as the already-living people who possessed them were not killed or otherwise infringed upon. Gender dysphoria has been nothing but a net-negative on my life. Being suicidal since the onset of puberty, paying for medicated perpetually, and being socially displaced (and not just due to prejudice; well-intentioned people will mistake your identity sometimes, and treat you differently than a normal person) are not positive experiences, nor have they led to any positive experience or insight I would have not arrived at otherwise. Nothing of value would be lost.
I would make the stronger preposition that any trans person who disagrees is either being disingenuous (likely for rhetorical reasons), is overpowered by emotions, or does not have gender dysphoria/is not transgender, but I’m not in a position to defend it.