LGBT

In defense of civility

pnrj cognitive science, core principles, ethics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 18 JDN 2459932

Civility is in short supply these days. Perhaps it has always been in short supply; certainly much of the nostalgia for past halcyon days of civility is ill-founded. Wikipedia has an entire article on hundreds of recorded incidents of violence in legislative assemblies, in dozens of countries, dating all the way from to the Roman Senate in 44 BC to Bosnia in 2019. But the Internet seems to bring about its own special kind of incivility, one which exposes nearly everyone to some of the worst vitriol the entire world has to offer. I think it’s worth talking about why this is bad, and perhaps what we might do about it.

For some, the benefits of civility seem so self-evident that they don’t even bear mentioning. For others, the idea of defending civility may come across as tone-deaf or even offensive. I would like to speak to both of those camps today: If you think the benefits of civility are obvious, I assure you, they aren’t to everyone. And if you think that civility is just a tool of the oppressive status quo, I hope I can make you think again.

A lot of the argument against civility seems to be founded in the notion that these issues are important, lives are at stake, and so we shouldn’t waste time and effort being careful how we speak to each other. How dare you concern yourself with the formalities of argumentation when people are dying?

But this is totally wrongheaded. It is precisely because these issues are important that civility is vital. It is precisely because lives are at stake that we must make the right decisions. And shouting and name-calling (let alone actual fistfights or drawn daggers—which have happened!) are not conducive to good decision-making.

If you shout someone down when choosing what restaurant to have dinner at, you have been very rude and people may end up unhappy with their dining experience—but very little of real value has been lost. But if you shout someone down when making national legislation, you may cause the wrong policy to be enacted, and this could lead to the suffering or death of thousands of people.

Think about how court proceedings work. Why are they so rigid and formal, with rules upon rules upon rules? Because the alternative was capricious violence. In the absence of the formal structure of a court system, so-called ‘justice’ was handed out arbitrarily, by whoever was in power, or by mobs of vigilantes. All those seemingly-overcomplicated rules were made in order to resolve various conflicts of interest and hopefully lead toward more fair, consistent results in the justice system. (And don’t get me wrong; they still could stand to be greatly improved!)

Legislatures have complex rules of civility for the same reason: Because the outcome is so important, we need to make sure that the decision process is as reliable as possible. And as flawed as existing legislatures still are, and as silly as it may seem to insist upon addressing ‘the Honorable Representative from the Great State of Vermont’, it’s clearly a better system than simply letting them duke it out with their fists.

A related argument I would like to address is that of ‘tone policing‘. If someone objects, not to the content of what you are saying, but to the tone in which you have delivered it, are they arguing in bad faith?

Well, possibly. Certainly, arguments about tone can be used that way. In particular I remember that this was basically the only coherent objection anyone could come up with against the New Atheism movement: “Well, sure, obviously, God isn’t real and religion is ridiculous; but why do you have to be so mean about it!?”

But it’s also quite possible for tone to be itself a problem. If your tone is overly aggressive and you don’t give people a chance to even seriously consider your ideas before you accuse them of being immoral for not agreeing with you—which happens all the time—then your tone really is the problem.

So, how can we tell which is which? I think a good way to reply to what you think might be bad-faith tone policing is this: “What sort of tone do you think would be better?”

I think there are basically three possible responses:

1. They can’t offer one, because there is actually no tone in which they would accept the substance of your argument. In that case, the tone policing really is in bad faith; they don’t want you to be nicer, they want you to shut up. This was clearly the case for New Atheism: As Daniel Dennett aptly remarked, “There’s simply no polite way to tell someone they have dedicated their lives to an illusion.” But sometimes, such things need to be said all the same.

2. They offer an alternative argument you could make, but it isn’t actually expressing your core message. Either they have misunderstood your core message, or they actually disagree with the substance of your argument and should be addressing it on those terms.

3. They offer an alternative way of expressing your core message in a milder, friendlier tone. This means that they are arguing in good faith and actually trying to help you be more persuasive!

I don’t know how common each of these three possibilities is; it could well be that the first one is the most frequent occurrence. That doesn’t change the fact that I have definitely been at the other end of the third one, where I absolutely agree with your core message and want your activism to succeed, but I can see that you’re acting like a jerk and nobody will want to listen to you.

Here, let me give some examples of the type of argument I’m talking about:

1. “Defund the police”: This slogan polls really badly. Probably because most people have genuine concerns about crime and want the police to protect them. Also, as more and more social services (like for mental health and homelessness) get co-opted into policing, this slogan makes it sound like you’re just going to abandon those people. But do we need serious, radical police reform? Absolutely. So how about “Reform the police”, “Put police money back into the community”, or even “Replace the police”?

2. “All Cops Are Bastards”: Speaking of police reform, did I mention we need it? A lot of it? Okay. Now, let me ask you: All cops? Every single one of them? There is not a single one out of the literally millions of police officers on this planet who is a good person? Not one who is fighting to take down police corruption from within? Not a single individual who is trying to fix the system while preserving public safety? Now, clearly, it’s worth pointing out, some cops are bastards—but hey, that even makes a better acronym: SCAB. In fact, it really is largely a few bad apples—the key point here is that you need to finish the aphorism: “A few bad apples spoil the whole barrel.” The number of police who are brutal and corrupt is relatively small, but as long as the other police continue to protect them, the system will be broken. Either you get those bad apples out pronto, or your whole barrel is bad. But demonizing the very people who are in the best position to implement those reforms—good police officers—is not helping.

3. “Be gay, do crime”: I know it’s tongue-in-cheek and ironic. I get that. It’s still a really dumb message. I am absolutely on board with LGBT rights. Even aside from being queer myself, I probably have more queer and trans friends than straight friends at this point. But why in the world would you want to associate us with petty crime? Why are you lumping us in with people who harm others at best out of desperation and at worst out of sheer greed? Even if you are literally an anarchist—which I absolutely am not—you’re really not selling anarchism well if the vision you present of it is a world of unfettered crime! There are dozens of better pro-LGBT slogans out there; pick one. Frankly even “do gay, be crime” is better, because it’s more clearly ironic. (Also, you can take it to mean something like this: Don’t just be gay, do gay—live your fullest gay life. And if you can be crime, that means that the system is fundamentally unjust: You can be criminalized just for who you are. And this is precisely what life is like for millions of LGBT people on this planet.)

A lot of people seem to think that if you aren’t immediately convinced by the most vitriolic, aggressive form of an argument, then you were never going to be convinced anyway and we should just write you off as a potential ally. This isn’t just obviously false; it’s incredibly dangerous.

The whole point of activism is that not everyone already agrees with you. You are trying to change minds. If it were really true that all reasonable, ethical people already agreed with your view, you wouldn’t need to be an activist. The whole point of making political arguments is that people can be reasonable and ethical and still be mistaken about things, and when we work hard to persuade them, we can eventually win them over. In fact, on some things we’ve actually done spectacularly well.

And what about the people who aren’t reasonable and ethical? They surely exist. But fortunately, they aren’t the majority. They don’t rule the whole world. If they did, we’d basically be screwed: If violence is really the only solution, then it’s basically a coin flip whether things get better or worse over time. But in fact, unreasonable people are outnumbered by reasonable people. Most of the things that are wrong with the world are mistakes, errors that can be fixed—not conflicts between irreconcilable factions. Our goal should be to fix those mistakes wherever we can, and that means being patient, compassionate educators—not angry, argumentative bullies.

Updating your moral software

pnrj core principles, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 23 JDN 2459876

I’ve noticed an odd tendency among politically active people, particular social media slacktivists (a term I do not use pejoratively: slacktivism is highly cost-effective). They adopt new ideas very rapidly, trying to stay on the cutting edge of moral and political discourse—and then they denigrate and disparage anyone who fails to do the same as an irredeemable monster.

This can take many forms, such as “if you don’t buy into my specific take on Critical Race Theory, you are a racist”, “if you have any uncertainty about the widespread use of puberty blockers you are a transphobic bigot”, “if you give any credence to the medical consensus on risks of obesity you are fatphobic“, “if you think disabilities should be cured you’re an ableist”, and “if you don’t support legalizing abortion in all circumstances you are a misogynist”.

My intention here is not to evaluate any particular moral belief, though I’ll say the following: I am skeptical of Critical Race Theory, especially the 1619 project which seems to be to include substantial distortions of history. I am cautiously supportive of puberty blockers, because the medical data on their risks are ambiguous—while the sociological data on how much happier trans kids are when accepted are totally unambiguous. I am well aware of the medical data saying that the risks of obesity are overblown (but also not negligible, particular for those who are very obese). Speaking as someone with a disability that causes me frequent, agonizing pain, yes, I want disabilities to be cured, thank you very much; accommodations are nice in the meantime, but the best long-term solution is to not need accommodations. (I’ll admit to some grey areas regarding certain neurodivergences such as autism and ADHD, and I would never want to force cures on people who don’t want them; but paralysis, deafness, blindness, diabetes, depression, and migraine are all absolutely worth finding cures for—the QALY at stake here are massive—and it’s silly to say otherwise.) I think abortion should generally be legal and readily available in the first trimester (which is when most abortions happen anyway), but much more strictly regulated thereafter—but denying it to children and rape victims is a human rights violation.

What I really want to talk about today is not the details of the moral belief, but the attitude toward those who don’t share it. There are genuine racists, transphobes, fatphobes, ableists, and misogynists in the world. There are also structural institutions that can lead to discrimination despite most of the people involved having no particular intention to discriminate. It’s worthwhile to talk about these things, and to try to find ways to fix them. But does calling anyone who disagrees with you a monster accomplish that goal?

This seems particularly bad precisely when your own beliefs are so cutting-edge. If you have a really basic, well-established sort of progressive belief like “hiring based on race should be illegal”, “women should be allowed to work outside the home” or “sodomy should be legal”, then people who disagree with you pretty much are bigots. But when you’re talking about new, controversial ideas, there is bound to be some lag; people who adopted the last generation’s—or even the last year’s—progressive beliefs may not yet be ready to accept the new beliefs, and that doesn’t make them bigots.

Consider this: Were you born believing in your current moral and political beliefs?

I contend that you were not. You may have been born intelligent, open-minded, and empathetic. You may have been born into a progressive, politically-savvy family. But the fact remains that any particular belief you hold about race, or gender, or ethics was something you had to learn. And if you learned it, that means that at some point you didn’t already know it. How would you have felt back then, if, instead of calmly explaining it to you, people called you names for not believing in it?

Now, perhaps it is true that as soon as you heard your current ideas, you immediately adopted them. But that may not be the case—it may have taken you some time to learn or change your mind—and even if it was, it’s still not fair to denigrate anyone who takes a bit longer to come around. There are many reasons why someone might not be willing to change their beliefs immediately, and most of them are not indicative of bigotry or deep moral failings.

It may be helpful to think about this in terms of updating your moral software. You were born with a very minimal moral operating system (emotions such as love and guilt, the capacity for empathy), and over time you have gradually installed more and more sophisticated software on top of that OS. If someone literally wasn’t born with the right OS—we call these people psychopaths—then, yes, you have every right to hate, fear, and denigrate them. But most of the people we’re talking about do have that underlying operating system, they just haven’t updated all their software to the same version as yours. It’s both unfair and counterproductive to treat them as irredeemably defective simply because they haven’t updated to the newest version yet. They have the hardware, they have the operating system; maybe their download is just a little slower than yours.

In fact, if you are very fast to adopt new, trendy moral beliefs, you may in fact be adopting them too quickly—they haven’t been properly vetted by human experience just yet. You can think of this as like a beta version: The newest update has some great new features, but it’s also buggy and unstable. It may need to be fixed before it is really ready for widespread release. If that’s the case, then people aren’t even wrong not to adopt them yet! It isn’t necessarily bad that you have adopted the new beliefs; we need beta testers. But you should be aware of your status as a beta tester and be prepared both to revise your own beliefs if needed, and also to cut other people slack if they disagree with you.

I understand that it can be immensely frustrating to be thoroughly convinced that something is true and important and yet see so many people disagreeing with it. (I am an atheist activist after all, so I absolutely know what that feels like.) I understand that it can be immensely painful to watch innocent people suffer because they have to live in a world where other people have harmful beliefs. But you aren’t changing anyone’s mind or saving anyone from harm by calling people names. Patience, tact, and persuasion will win the long game, and the long game is really all we have.

And if it makes you feel any better, the long game may not be as long as it seems. The arc of history may have tighter curvature than we imagine. We certainly managed a complete flip of the First World consensus on gay marriage in just a single generation. We may be able to achieve similarly fast social changes in other areas too. But we haven’t accomplished the progress we have so far by being uncharitable or aggressive toward those who disagree.

I am emphatically not saying you should stop arguing for your beliefs. We need you to argue for your beliefs. We need you to argue forcefully and passionately. But when doing so, try not to attack the people who don’t yet agree with you—for they are precisely the people we need to listen to you.

On (gay) marriage

pnrj core principles, current events, personal, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , ,

Oct 9 JDN 2459862

This post goes live on my first wedding anniversary. Thus, as you read this, I will have been married for one full year.

Honestly, being married hasn’t felt that different to me. This is likely because we’d been dating since 2012 and lived together for several years before actually getting married. It has made some official paperwork more convenient, and I’ve reached the point where I feel naked without my wedding band; but for the most part our lives have not really changed.

And perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps the best way to really know that you should get married is to already feel as though you are married, and just finally get around to making it official. Perhaps people for whom getting married is a momentous change in their lives (as opposed to simply a formal announcement followed by a celebration) are people who really shouldn’t be getting married just yet.

A lot of things in my life—my health, my career—have not gone very well in this past year. But my marriage has been only a source of stability and happiness. I wouldn’t say we never have conflict, but quite honestly I was expecting a lot more challenges and conflicts from the way I’d heard other people talk about marriage in the past. All of my friends who have kids seem to be going through a lot of struggles as a result of that (which is one of several reasons we keep procrastinating on looking into adoption), but marriage itself does not appear to be any more difficult than friendship—in fact, maybe easier.

I have found myself oddly struck by how un-important it has been that my marriage is to a same-sex partner. I keep expecting people to care—to seem uncomfortable, to be resistant, or simply to be surprised—and it so rarely happens.

I think this is probably generational: We Millennials grew up at the precise point in history when the First World suddenly decided, all at once, that gay marriage was okay.

Seriously, look at this graph. I’ve made it combining this article using data from the General Social Survey, and this article from Pew:

Until around 1990—when I was 2 years old—support for same-sex marriage was stable and extremely low: About 10% of Americans supported it (presumably most of them LGBT!), and over 70% opposed it. Then, quite suddenly, attitudes began changing, and by 2019, over 60% of Americans supported it and only 31% opposed it.

That is, within a generation, we went from a country where almost no one supported gay marriage to a country where same-sex marriage is so popular that any major candidate who opposed it would almost certainly lose a general election. (They might be able to survive a Republican primary, as Republican support for same-sex marriage is only about 44%—about where it was among Democrats in the early 2000s.)

This is a staggering rate of social change. If development economics is the study of what happened in South Korea from 1950-2000, I think political science should be the study of what happened to attitudes on same-sex marriage in the US from 1990-2020.

And of course it isn’t just the US. Similar patterns can be found across Western Europe, with astonishingly rapid shifts from near-universal opposition to near-universal support within a generation.

I don’t think I have been able to fully emotionally internalize this shift. I grew up in a world where homophobia was mainstream, where only the most radical left-wing candidates were serious about supporting equal rights and representation for LGBT people. And suddenly I find myself in a world where we are actually accepted and respected as equals, and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Aren’t you the same people who told me as a teenager that I was a sexual deviant who deserved to burn in Hell? But now you’re attending my wedding? And offering me joint life insurance policies? My own extended family members treat me differently now than they did when I was a teenager, and I don’t quite know how to trust that the new way is the true way and not some kind of facade that could rapidly disappear.

I think this sort of generational trauma may never fully heal, in which case it will be the generation after us—the Zoomers, I believe we’re calling them now—who will actually live in this new world we created, while the rest of us forever struggle to accept that things are not as we remember them. Once bitten, we remain forever twice shy, lest attitudes regress as suddenly as they advanced.

Then again, it seems that Zoomers may be turning against the institution of marriage in general. As the meme says: “Boomers: No gay marriage. Millennials: Yes gay marriage. Gen Z: Yes gay, no marriage.” Maybe that’s for the best; maybe the future of humanity is for personal relationships to be considered no business of the government at all. But for now at least, equal marriage is clearly much better than unequal marriage, and the First World seems to have figured that out blazing fast.

And of course the rest of the world still hasn’t caught up. While trends are generally in a positive direction, there are large swaths of the world where even very basic rights for LGBT people are opposed by most of the population. As usual, #ScandinaviaIsBetter, with over 90% support for LGBT rights; and, as usual, Sub-Saharan Africa is awful, with support in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria not even hitting 20%.

Reasons for optimism in 2022

pnrj current events, futurism, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 2 JDN 2459582

When this post goes live, we will have begun the year 2022.

That still sounds futuristic, somehow. We’ve been in the 20th century long enough that most of my students were born in it and nearly all of them are old enough to drink (to be fair, it’s the UK, so “old enough to drink” only means 18). Yet “the year 2022” still seems like it belongs in science fiction, and not on our wall calendars.

2020 and 2021 were quite bad years. Death rates and poverty rates surged around the world. Almost all of that was directly or indirectly due to COVID.

Yet there are two things we should keep in perspective.

First, those death rates and poverty rates surged to what we used to consider normal 50 years ago. These are not uniquely bad times; indeed, they are still better than most of human history.

Second, there are many reasons to think that 2022—or perhaps a bit later than that, 2025 or 2030—will be better.

The Omicron variant is highly contagious, but so far does not appear to be as deadly as previous variants. COVID seems to be evolving to be more like influenza: Catching it will be virtually inevitable, but dying from it will be very rare.

Things are also looking quite good on the climate change front: Renewable energy production is growing at breathtaking speed and is now cheaper than almost every other form of energy. It’s awful that we panicked and locked down nuclear energy for the last 50 years, but at this point we may no longer need it: Solar and wind are just that good now.

Battery technology is also rapidly improving, giving us denser, cheaper, more stable batteries that may soon allow us to solve the intermittency problem: the wind may not always blow and the sun may not always shine, but if you have big enough batteries you don’t need them to. (You can get a really good feel for how much difference good batteries make in energy production by playing Factorio, or, more whimsically, Mewnbase.)

If we do go back to nuclear energy, it may not be fission anymore, but fusion. Now that we have nearly reached that vital milestone of break-even, investment in fusion technology has rapidly increased.


Fusion has basically all of the benefits of fission with none of the drawbacks. Unlike renewables, it can produce enormous amounts of energy in a way that can be easily scaled and controlled independently of weather conditions. Unlike fission, it requires no exotic nuclear fuels (deuterium can be readily attained from water), and produces no long-lived radioactive waste. (Indeed, development is ongoing of methods that could use fusion products to reduce the waste from fission reactors, making the effective rate of nuclear waste production for fusion negative.) Like both renewables and fission, it produces no carbon emissions other than those required to build the facility (mainly due to concrete).

Of course, technology is only half the problem: we still need substantial policy changes to get carbon emissions down. We’ve already dragged our feet for decades too long, and we will pay the price for that. But anyone saying that climate change is an inevitable catastrophe hasn’t been paying attention to recent developments in solar panels.

Technological development in general seems to be speeding up lately, after having stalled quite a bit in the early 2000s. Moore’s Law may be leveling off, but the technological frontier may simply be moving away from digital computing power and onto other things, such as biotechnology.

Star Trek told us that we’d have prototype warp drives by the 2060s but we wouldn’t have bionic implants to cure blindness until the 2300s. They seem to have gotten it backwards: We may never have warp drive, but we’ve got those bionic implants today.

Neural interfaces are allowing paralyzed people to move, speak, and now even write.

After decades of failed promises, gene therapy is finally becoming useful in treating real human diseases. CRISPR changes everything.

We are also entering a new era of space travel, thanks largely to SpaceX and their remarkable reusable rockets. The payload cost to LEO is a standard measure of the cost of space travel, which describes the cost of carrying a certain mass of cargo up to low Earth orbit. By this measure, costs have declined from nearly $20,000 per kg to only $1,500 per kg since the 1960s. Elon Musk claims that he can reduce the cost to as low as $10 per kg. I’m skeptical, to say the least—but even dropping it to $500 or $200 would be a dramatic improvement and open up many new options for space exploration and even colonization.

To put this in perspective, the cost of carrying a human being to the International Space Station (about 100 kg to LEO) has fallen from $2 million to $150,000. A further decrease to $200 per kg would lower that to $20,000, opening the possibility of space tourism; $20,000 might be something even upper-middle-class people could do as a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. If Musk is really right that he can drop it all the way to $10 per kg, the cost to carry a person to the ISS would be only $1000—something middle-class people could do regularly. (“Should we do Paris for our anniversary this year, or the ISS?”) Indeed, a cost that low would open the possibility of space-based shipping—for when you absolutely must have the product delivered from China to California in the next 2 hours.

Another way to put this in perspective is to convert these prices per mass in terms of those of commodities, such as precious metals. $20,000 per kg is nearly the price of solid platinum. $500 per kg is about the price of sterling silver. $10 per kg is roughly the price of copper.

The reasons for optimism are not purely technological. There has also been significant social progress just in the last few years, with major milestones on LGBT rights being made around the world in 2020 and 2021. Same-sex marriage is now legally recognized over nearly the entire Western Hemisphere.

None of that changes the fact that we are still in a global pandemic which seems to be increasingly out of control. I can’t tell you whether 2022 will be better than 2021, or just more of the same—or perhaps even worse.

But while these times are hard, overall the world is still making progress.

On the quality of matches

pnrj mathematical models, personal, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Apr 11 JDN 2459316

Many situations in the real world involve matching people to other people: Dating, job hunting, college admissions, publishing, organ donation.

Alvin Roth won his Nobel Prize for his work on matching algorithms. I have nothing to contribute to improving his algorithm; what baffles me is that we don’t use it more often. It would probably feel too impersonal to use it for dating; but why don’t we use it for job hunting or college admissions? (We do use it for organ donation, and that has saved thousands of lives.)

In this post I will be looking at matching in a somewhat different way. Using a simple model, I’m going to illustrate some of the reasons why it is so painful and frustrating to try to match and keep getting rejected.

Suppose we have two sets of people on either side of a matching market: X and Y. I’ll denote an arbitrarily chosen person in X as x, and an arbitrarily chosen person in Y as y. There’s no reason the two sets can’t have overlap or even be the same set, but making them different sets makes the model as general as possible.

Each person in X wants to match with a person in Y, and vice-versa. But they don’t merely want to accept any possible match; they have preferences over which matches would be better or worse.

In general, we could say that people have some kind of utility function: Ux:Y->R and Uy:X->R that maps from possible match partners to the utility of such a match. But that gets very complicated very fast, because it raises the question of when you should keep searching, and when you should stop searching and accept what you have. (There’s a whole literature of search theory on this.)

For now let’s take the simplest possible case, and just say that there are some matches each person will accept, and some they will reject. This can be seen as a special case where the utility functions Ux and Uy always yield a result of 1 (accept) or 0 (reject).

This defines a set of acceptable partners for each person: A(x) is the set of partners x will accept: {y in Y|Ux(y) = 1} and A(y) is the set of partners y will accept: {x in X|Uy(x) = 1}

Then, the set of mutual matches than x can actually get is the set of ys that x wants, which also want x back: M(x) = {y in A(x)|x in A(y)}

Whereas, the set of mutual matches that y can actually get is the set of xs that y wants, which also want y back: M(y) = {x in A(y)|y in A(x)}

This relation is mutual by construction: If x is in M(y), then y is in M(x).

But this does not mean that the sets must be the same size.

For instance, suppose that there are three people in X, x1, x2, x3, and three people in Y, y1, y2, y3.

Let’s say that the acceptable matches are as follows:

A(x1) = {y1, y2, y3}

A(x2) = {y2, y3}

A(x3) = {y2, y3}

A(y1) = {x1,x2,x3}

A(y2) = {x1,x2}

A(y3) = {x1}

This results in the following mutual matches:

M(x1) = {y1, y2, y3}

M(y1) = {x1}

M(x2) = {y2}

M(y2) = {x1, x2}

M(x3) = {}

M(y3) = {x1}

x1 can match with whoever they like; everyone wants to match with them. x2 can match with y2. But x3, despite having the same preferences as x2, and being desired by y3, can’t find any mutual matches at all, because the one person who wants them is a person they don’t want.

y1 can only match with x1, but the same is true of y3. So they will be fighting over x1. As long as y2 doesn’t also try to fight over x1, x2 and y2 will be happy together. Yet x3 will remain alone.

Note that the number of mutual matches has no obvious relation with the number of individually acceptable partners. x2 and x3 had the same number of acceptable partners, but x2 found a mutual match and x3 didn’t. y1 was willing to accept more potential partners than y3, but got the same lone mutual match in the end. y3 was only willing to accept one partner, but will get a shot at x1, the one that everyone wants.

One thing is true: Adding another acceptable partner will never reduce your number of mutual matches, and removing one will never increase it. But often changing your acceptable partners doesn’t have any effect on your mutual matches at all.

Now let’s consider what it must feel like to be x1 versus x3.

For x1, the world is their oyster; they can choose whoever they want and be guaranteed to get a match. Life is easy and simple for them; all they have to do is decide who they want most and that will be it.

For x3, life is an endless string of rejection and despair. Every time they try to reach out to suggest a match with someone, they are rebuffed. They feel hopeless and alone. They feel as though no one would ever actually want them—even though in fact there is someone who wants them, it’s just not someone they were willing to consider.

This is of course a very simple and small-scale model; there are only six people in it, and they each only say yes or no. Yet already I’ve got x1 who feels like a rock star and x3 who feels utterly hopeless if not worthless.

In the real world, there are so many more people in the system that the odds that no one is in your mutual match set are negligible. Almost everyone has someone they can match with. But some people have many more matches than others, and that makes life much easier for the ones with many matches and much harder for the ones with fewer.

Moreover, search costs then become a major problem: Even knowing that in all probability there is a match for you somewhere out there, how do you actually find that person? (And that’s not even getting into the difficulty of recognizing a good match when you see it; in this simple model you know immediately, but in the real world it can take a remarkably long time.)

If we think of the acceptable partner sets as preferences, they may not be within anyone’s control; you want what you want. But if we instead characterize them as decisions, the results are quite different—and I think it’s easy to see them, if nothing else, as the decision of how high to set your standards.

This raises a question: When we are searching and not getting matches, should we lower our standards and add more people to our list of acceptable partners?

This simple model would seem to say that we should always do that—there’s no downside, since the worst that can happen is nothing. And x3 for instance would be much happier if they were willing to lower their standards and accept y1. (Indeed, if they did so, there would be a way to pair everyone off happily: x1 with y3, x2 with y2, and x3 with y1.)

But in the real world, searching is often costly: There is at least the involved, and often a literal application or submission fee; but perhaps worst of all is the crushing pain of rejection. Under those circumstances, adding another acceptable partner who is not a mutual match will actually make you worse off.

That’s pretty much what the job market has been for me for the last six months. I started out with the really good matches: GiveWell, the Oxford Global Priorities Institute, Purdue, Wesleyan, Eastern Michigan University. And after investing considerable effort into getting those applications right, I made it as far as an interview at all those places—but no further.

So I extended my search, applying to dozens more places. I’ve now applied to over 100 positions. I knew that most of them were not good matches, because there simply weren’t that many good matches to be found. And the result of all those 100 applications has been precisely 0 interviews. Lowering my standards accomplished absolutely nothing. I knew going in that these places were not a good fit for me—and it looks like they all agreed.

It’s possible that lowering my standards in some different way might have worked, but even this is not clear: I’ve already been willing to accept much lower salaries than a PhD in economics ought to entitle, and included positions in my search that are only for a year or two with no job security, and applied to far-flung locales across the globe that I don’t know if I’d really be willing to move to.

Honestly at this point I’ve only been using the following criteria: (1) At least vaguely related to my field (otherwise they wouldn’t want me anyway), (2) a higher salary than I currently get as a grad student (otherwise why bother?), (3) a geographic location where homosexuality is not literally illegal and an institution that doesn’t actively discriminate against LGBT employees (this rules out more than you’d think—there are at least three good postings I didn’t apply to on these grounds), (4) in a region that speaks a language I have at least some basic knowledge of (i.e. preferably English, but also allowing Spanish, French, German, or Japanese) (5) working conditions that don’t involve working more than 40 hours per week (which has severely detrimental health effects, even ignoring my disability which would compound the effects), and (6) not working for a company that is implicated in large-scale criminal activity (as a remarkable number of major banks have in fact been implicated). I don’t feel like these are unreasonably high standards, and yet so far I have failed to land a match.

What’s more, the entire process has been emotionally devastating. While others seem to be suffering from pandemic burnout, I don’t think I’ve made it that far; I think I’d be just as burnt out even if there were no pandemic, simply from how brutal the job market has been.

Why does rejection hurt so much? Why does being turned down for a date, or a job, or a publication feel so utterly soul-crushing? When I started putting together this model I had hoped that thinking of it in terms of match-sets might actually help reduce that feeling, but instead what happened is that it offered me a way of partly explaining that feeling (much as I did in my post on Bayesian Impostor Syndrome).

What is the feeling of rejection? It is the feeling of expending search effort to find someone in your acceptable partner set—and then learning that you were not in their acceptable partner set, and thus you have failed to make a mutual match.

I said earlier that x1 feels like a rock star and x3 feels hopeless. This is because being present in someone else’s acceptable partner set is a sign of status—the more people who consider you an acceptable partner, the more you are “worth” in some sense. And when it’s something as important as a romantic partner or a career, that sense of “worth” is difficult to circumscribe into a particular domain; it begins to bleed outward into a sense of your overall self-worth as a human being.

Being wanted by someone you don’t want makes you feel superior, like they are “beneath” you; but wanting someone who doesn’t want you makes you feel inferior, like they are “above” you. And when you are applying for jobs in a market with a Beveridge Curve as skewed as ours, or trying to get a paper or a book published in a world flooded with submissions, you end up with a lot more cases of feeling inferior than cases of feeling superior. In fact, I even applied for a few jobs that I felt were “beneath” my level—they didn’t take me either, perhaps because they felt I was overqualified.

In such circumstances, it’s hard not to feel like I am the problem, like there is something wrong with me. Sometimes I can convince myself that I’m not doing anything wrong and the market is just exceptionally brutal this year. But I really have no clear way of distinguishing that hypothesis from the much darker possibility that I have done something terribly wrong that I cannot correct and will continue in this miserable and soul-crushing fruitless search for months or even years to come. Indeed, I’m not even sure it’s actually any better to know that you did everything right and still failed; that just makes you helpless instead of defective. It might be good for my self-worth to know that I did everything right; but it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m in a miserable situation I can’t get out of. If I knew I were doing something wrong, maybe I could actually fix that mistake in the future and get a better outcome.

As it is, I guess all I can do is wait for more opportunities and keep trying.

Men and violence

pnrj book reviews, core principles, current events, ethics, personal, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr4 JDN 2459302

Content warning: In this post, I’m going to be talking about violence, including sexual violence. April is Sexual Assault Awareness and Prevention Month. I won’t go into any explicit detail, but I understand that discussion of such topics can still be very upsetting for many people.

After short posts for the past two weeks, get ready for a fairly long post. This is a difficult and complicated topic, and I want to make sure that I state things very clearly and with all necessary nuance.

While the overall level of violence between human societies varies tremendously, one thing is astonishingly consistent: Violence is usually committed by men.

In fact, violence is usually suffered by men as well—with the quite glaring exception of sexual violence. This is why I am particularly offended by claims like “All men benefit from male violence”; no, men who were murdered by other men did not benefit from male violence, and it is frankly appalling to say otherwise. Most men would be better off if male violence were somehow eliminated from the world. (Most women would also be much better off as well, of course.)

I therefore consider it both a matter of both moral obligation and self-interest to endeavor to reduce the amount of male violence in the world, which is almost coextensive with reducing the amount of violence in general.

On the other hand, ought implies can, and despite significant efforts I have made to seek out recommendations for concrete actions I could be taking… I haven’t been able to find very many.

The good news is that we appear to be doing something right—overall rates of violent crime have declined by nearly half since 1990. The decline in rape has been slower, only about 25% since 1990, though this is a bit misleading since the legal definition of rape has been expanded during that interval. The causes of this decline in violence are unclear: Some of the most important factors seem to be changes in policing, economic growth, and reductions in lead pollution. For whatever reason, Millennials just don’t seem to commit crimes at the same rates that Gen-X-ers or Boomers did. We are also substantially more feminist, so maybe that’s an important factor too; the truth is, we really don’t know.

But all of this still leaves me asking: What should I be doing?

When I searched for an answer to this question, a significant fraction of the answers I got from various feminist sources were some variation on “ruminate on your own complicity in male violence”. I tried it; it was painful, difficult—and basically useless. I think this is particularly bad advice for someone like me who has a history of depression.

When you ruminate on your own life, it’s easy to find mistakes; but how important were those mistakes? How harmful were they? I can’t say that I’ve never done anything in my whole life that hurt anyone emotionally (can anyone?), but I can only think of a few times I’ve harmed someone physically (mostly by accident, once in self-defense). I’ve definitely never raped or murdered anyone, and as far as I can tell I’ve never done anything that would have meaningfully contributed to anyone getting raped or murdered. If you were to somehow replace every other man in the world with a copy of me, maybe that wouldn’t immediately bring about a utopian paradise—but I’m pretty sure that rates of violence would be a lot lower. (And in this world ruled by my clones, we’d have more progressive taxes! Less military spending! A basic income! A global democratic federation! Greater investment in space travel! Hey, this sounds pretty good, actually… though inbreeding would be a definite concern.) So, okay, I’m no angel; but I don’t think it’s really fair to say that I’m complicit in something that would radically decrease if everyone behaved as I do.

The really interesting thing is, I think this is true of most men. A typical man commits less than the average amount of violence—because there is great skew in the distribution, with most men committing little or no violence and a small number of men committing lots of violence. Truly staggering amounts of violence are committed by those at the very top of the distribution—that would be mass murderers like Hitler and Stalin. It sounds strange, but if all men in the world were replaced by a typical man, the world would surely be better off. The loss of the very best men would be more than compensated by the removal of the very worst. In fact, since most men are not rapists or murderers, replacing every man in the world with the median man would automatically bring the rates of rape and murder to zero. I know that feminists don’t like to hear #NotAllMen; but it’s not even most men. Maybe the reason that the “not all men” argument keeps coming up is… it’s actually kind of true? Maybe it’s not so unreasonable for men to resent the implication that we are complicit in acts we abhor that we have never done and would never do? Maybe this whole concept that an entire sex of people, literally almost half the human race, can share responsibility for violent crimes—is wrong?

I know that most women face a nearly constant bombardment of sexual harassment, and feel pressured to remain constantly vigilant in order to protect themselves against being raped. I know that victims of sexual violence are often blamed for their victimization (though this happens in a lot of crimes, not just sex crimes). I know that #YesAllWomen is true—basically all women have been in some way harmed or threatened by sexual violence. But the fact remains that most men are already not committing sexual violence. Many people seem to confuse the fact that most women are harmed by men with the claim that most men harm women; these are not at all equivalent. As long as one man can harm many women, there don’t need to be very many harmful men for all women to be affected.

Plausible guesses would be that about 20-25% of women suffer sexual assault, committed by about 4% or 5% of men, each of whom commits an average of 4 to 6 assaults—and some of whom commit far more. If these figures are right, then 95% of men are not guilty of sexual assault. The highest plausible estimate I’ve seen is from a study which found that 11% of men had committed rape. Since it’s only one study and its sample size was pretty small, I’m actually inclined to think that this is an overestimate which got excessive attention because it was so shocking. Larger studies rarely find a number above 5%.

But even if we suppose that it’s really 11%, that leaves 89%; in what sense is 89% not “most men”? I saw some feminist sites responding to this result by saying things like “We can’t imprison 11% of men!” but, uh, we almost do already. About 9% of American men will go to prison in their lifetimes. This is probably higher than it should be—it’s definitely higher than any other country—but if those convictions were all for rape, I’d honestly have trouble seeing the problem. (In fact only about 10% of US prisoners are incarcerated for rape.) If the US were the incarceration capital of the world simply because we investigated and prosecuted rape more reliably, that would be a point of national pride, not shame. In fact, the American conservatives who don’t see the problem with our high incarceration rate probably do think that we’re mostly incarcerating people for things like rape and murder—when in fact large portions of our inmates are incarcerated for drug possession, “public order” crimes, or pretrial detention.

Even if that 11% figure is right, “If you know 10 men, one is probably a rapist” is wrong. The people you know are not a random sample. If you don’t know any men who have been to prison, then you likely don’t know any men who are rapists. 37% of prosecuted rapists have prior criminal convictions, and 60% will be convicted of another crime within 5 years. (Of course, most rapes are never even reported; but where would we get statistics on those rapists?) Rapists are not typical men. They may seem like typical men—it may be hard to tell the difference at a glance, or even after knowing someone for a long time. But the fact that narcissists and psychopaths may hide among us does not mean that all of us are complicit in the crimes of narcissists and psychopaths. If you can’t tell who is a psychopath, you may have no choice but to be wary; but telling every man to search his heart is worthless, because the only ones who will listen are the ones who aren’t psychopaths.

That, I think, is the key disagreement here: Where the standard feminist line is “any man could be a rapist, and every man should search his heart”, I believe the truth is much more like, “monsters hide among us, and we should do everything in our power to stop them”. The monsters may look like us, they may often act like us—but they are not us. Maybe there are some men who would commit rapes but can be persuaded out of it—but this is not at all the typical case. Most rapes are committed by hardened, violent criminals and all we can really do is lock them up. (And for the love of all that is good in the world, test all the rape kits!)

It may be that sexual harassment of various degrees is more spread throughout the male population; perhaps the median man indeed commits some harassment at some point in his life. But even then, I think it’s pretty clear that the really awful kinds of harassment are largely committed by a small fraction of serial offenders. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between propensity toward sexual harassment and various measures of narcissism and psychopathy. So, if most men look closely enough, maybe they can think of a few things that they do occasionally that might make women uncomfortable; okay, stop doing those things. (Hint: Do not send unsolicited dick pics. Ever. Just don’t. Anyone who wants to see your genitals will ask first.) But it isn’t going to make a huge difference in anyone’s life. As long as the serial offenders continue, women will still feel utterly bombarded.

There are other kinds of sexual violations that more men commit—being too aggressive, or persisting too much after the first rejection, or sending unsolicited sexual messages or images. I’ve had people—mostly, but not only, men—do things like that to me; but it would be obviously unfair to both these people and actual rape victims to say I’d ever been raped. I’ve been groped a few times, but it seems like quite a stretch to call it “sexual assault”. I’ve had experiences that were uncomfortable, awkward, frustrating, annoying, occasionally creepy—but never traumatic. Never violence. Teaching men (and women! There is evidence that women are not much less likely than men to commit this sort of non-violent sexual violation) not to do these things is worthwhile and valuable in itself—but it’s not going to do much to prevent rape or murder.

Thus, whatever responsibility men have in reducing sexual violence, it isn’t simply to stop; you can’t stop doing what you already aren’t doing.

After pushing through all that noise, at last I found a feminist site making a more concrete suggestion: They recommended that I read a book by Jackson Katz on the subject entitled The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help.

First of all, I must say I can’t remember any other time I’ve read a book that was so poorly titled. The only mention of the phrase “macho paradox” is a brief preface that was added to the most recent edition explaining what the term was meant to mean; it occurs nowhere else in the book. And in all its nearly 300 pages, the book has almost nothing that seriously addresses either the motivations underlying sexual violence or concrete actions that most men could take in order to reduce it.

As far as concrete actions (“How all men can help”), the clearest, most consistent advice the book seems to offer that would apply to most men is “stop consuming pornography” (something like 90% of men and 60% of women regularly consume porn), when in fact there is a strong negative correlation between consumption of pornography and real-world sexual violence. (Perhaps Millennials are less likely to commit rape and murder because we are so into porn and video games!) This advice is literally worse than nothing.

The sex industry exists on a continuum from the adult-only but otherwise innocuous (smutty drawings and erotic novels), through the legal but often problematic (mainstream porn, stripping), to the usually illegal but defensible (consensual sex work), all the way to the utterly horrific and appalling (the sexual exploitation of children). I am well aware that there are many deep problems with the mainstream porn industry, but I confess I’ve never quite seen how these problems are specific to porn rather than endemic to media or even capitalism more generally. Particularly with regard to the above-board sex industry in places like Nevada or the Netherlands, it’s not obvious to me that a prostitute is more exploited than a coal miner, a sweatshop worker, or a sharecropper—indeed, given the choice between those four careers, I’d without hesitation choose to be a prostitute in Amsterdam. Many sex workers resent the paternalistic insistence by anti-porn feminists that their work is inherently degrading and exploitative. Overall, sex workers report job satisfaction not statistically different than the average for all jobs. There are a multitude of misleading statistics often reported about the sex industry that often make matters seem far worse than they are.

Katz (all-too) vividly describes the depiction of various violent or degrading sex acts in mainstream porn, but he seems unwilling to admit that any other forms of porn do or even could exist—and worse, like far too many anti-porn feminists, he seems to willfully elide vital distinctions, effectively equating fantasy depiction with genuine violence and consensual kinks with sexual abuse. I like to watch action movies and play FPS video games; does that mean I believe it’s okay to shoot people with machine guns? I know the sophisticated claim is that it somehow “desensitizes” us (whatever that means), but there’s not much evidence of that either. Given that porn and video games are negatively correlated with actual violence, it may in fact be that depicting the fantasy provides an outlet for such urges and helps prevent them from becoming reality. Or, it may simply be that keeping a bunch of young men at home in front of their computers keeps them from going out and getting into trouble. (Then again, homicides actually increased during the COVID pandemic—though most other forms of crime decreased.) But whatever the cause, the evidence is clear that porn and video games don’t increase actual violence—they decrease them.

At the very end of the book, Katz hints at a few other things men might be able to do, or at least certain groups of men: Challenge sexism in sports, the military, and similar male-dominated spaces (you know, if you have clout in such spaces, which I really don’t—I’m an effete liberal intellectual, a paradigmatic “soy boy”; do you think football players or soldiers are likely to listen to me?); educate boys with more positive concepts of masculinity (if you are in a position to do so, e.g. as a teacher or parent); or, the very best advice in the entire book, worth more than the rest of the book combined: Donate to charities that support survivors of sexual violence. Katz doesn’t give any specific recommendations, but here are a few for you: RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC.

Honestly, I’m more impressed by Upworthy’s bulleted list of things men can do, though they’re mostly things that conscientious men do anyway, and even if 90% of men did them, it probably wouldn’t greatly reduce actual violence.

As far as motivations (“Why some men hurt women”), the book does at least manage to avoid the mindless slogan “rape is about power, not sex” (there is considerable evidence that this slogan is false or at least greatly overstated). Still, Katz insists upon collective responsibility, attributing what are in fact typically individual crimes, committed mainly by psychopaths, motivated primarily by anger or sexual desire, to some kind of institutionalized system of patriarchal control that somehow permeates all of society. The fact that violence is ubiquitous does not imply that it is coordinated. It’s very much the same cognitive error as “murderism”.

I agree that sexism exists, is harmful, and may contribute to the prevalence of rape. I agree that there are many widespread misconceptions about rape. I also agree that reducing sexism and toxic masculinity are worthwhile endeavors in themselves, with numerous benefits for both women and men. But I’m just not convinced that reducing sexism or toxic masculinity would do very much to reduce the rates of rape or other forms of violence. In fact, despite widely reported success of campaigns like the “Don’t Be That Guy” campaign, the best empirical research on the subject suggests that such campaigns actually tend to do more harm than good. The few programs that seem to work are those that focus on bystander interventions—getting men who are not rapists to recognize rapists and stop them. Basically nothing has ever been shown to convince actual rapists; all we can do is deny them opportunities—and while bystander intervention can do that, the most reliable method is probably incarceration. Trying to change their sexist attitudes may be worse than useless.

Indeed, I am increasingly convinced that much—not all, but much—of what is called “sexism” is actually toxic expressions of heterosexuality. Why do most creepy male bosses only ever hit on their female secretaries? Well, maybe because they’re straight? This is not hard to explain. It’s a fair question why there are so many creepy male bosses, but one need not posit any particular misogyny to explain why their targets would usually be women. I guess it’s a bit hard to disentangle; if an incel hates women because he perceives them as univocally refusing to sleep with him, is that sexism? What if he’s a gay incel (yes they exist) and this drives him to hate men instead?

In fact, I happen to know of a particular gay boss who has quite a few rumors surrounding him regarding his sexual harassment of male employees. Or you could look at Kevin Spacey, who (allegedly) sexually abused teenage boys. You could tell a complicated story about how this is some kind of projection of misogynistic attitudes onto other men (perhaps for being too “femme” or something)—or you could tell a really simple story about how this man is only sexually abusive toward other men because that’s the gender of people he’s sexually attracted to. Occam’s Razor strongly favors the latter.

Indeed, what are we to make of the occasional sexual harasser who targets men and women equally? On the theory that abuse is caused by patriarchy, that seems pretty hard to explain. On the theory that abusive people sometimes happen to be bisexual, it’s not much of a mystery. (Though I would like to take a moment to debunk the stereotype of the “depraved bisexual”: Bisexuals are no more likely to commit sexual violence, but are far more likely to suffer it—more likely than either straight or gay people, independently of gender. Trans people face even higher risk; the acronym LGBT is in increasing order of danger of violence.)

Does this excuse such behavior? Absolutely not. Sexual harassment and sexual assault are definitely wrong, definitely harmful, and rightfully illegal. But when trying to explain why the victims are overwhelmingly female, the fact that roughly 90% of people are heterosexual is surely relevant. The key explanandum here is not why the victims are usually female, but rather why the perpetrators are usually male.

That, indeed, requires explanation; but such an explanation is really not so hard to come by. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, for nearly every form of violence, the vast majority of that violence is committed by men? It sure looks genetic to me.

Indeed, in anyother context aside from gender or race, we would almost certainly reject any explanation other than genetics for such a consistent pattern. Why is it that, in nearly every human society, about 10% of people are LGBT? Probably genetics. Why is it that, in near every human society, about 10% of people are left-handed? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, do smiles indicate happiness, children fear loud noises, and adults fear snakes? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, are men on average much taller and stronger than women? Genetics. Why, in nearly every human society, is about 90% of violence, including sexual violence, committed by men? Clearly, it’s patriarchy.

A massive body of scientific evidence from multiple sources shows a clear casual relationship between increased testosterone and increased aggression. The correlation is moderate, only about 0.38—but it’s definitely real. And men have a lot more testosterone than women: While testosterone varies a frankly astonishing amount between men and over time—including up to a 2-fold difference even over the same day—a typical adult man has about 250 to 950 ng/dL of blood testosterone, while a typical adult woman has only 8 to 60 ng/dL. (An adolescent boy can have as much as 1200 ng/dL!) This is a difference ranging from a minimum of 4-fold to a maximum of over 100-fold, with a typical value of about 20-fold. It would be astonishing if that didn’t have some effect on behavior.

This is of course far from a complete explanation: With a correlation of 0.38, we’ve only explained about 14% of the variance, so what’s the other 86%? Well, first of all, testosterone isn’t the only biological difference between men and women. It’s difficult to identify any particular genes with strong effects on aggression—but the same is true of height, and nobody disputes that the height difference between men and women is genetic.

Clearly societal factors do matter a great deal, or we couldn’t possibly explain why homicide rates vary between countries from less than 3 per million per year in Japan to nearly 400 per million per year in Honduras—a full 2 orders of magnitude! But gender inequality does not appear to strongly predict homicide rates. Japan is not a very feminist place (in fact, surveys suggest that, after Spain, Japan is second-worst highly-developed country for women). Sweden is quite feminist, and their homicide rate is relatively low; but it’s still 4 times as high as Japan’s. The US doesn’t strike me as much more sexist than Canada (admittedly subjective—surveys do suggest at least some difference, and in the expected direction), and yet our homicide rate is nearly 3 times as high. Also, I think it’s worth noting that while overall homicide rates vary enormously across societies, the fact that roughly 90% of homicides are committed by men does not. Through some combination of culture and policy, societies can greatly reduce the overall level of violence—but no society has yet managed to change the fact that men are more violent than women.

I would like to do a similar analysis of sexual assault rates across countries, but unfortunately I really can’t, because different countries have such different laws and different rates of reporting that the figures really aren’t comparable. Sweden infamously has a very high rate of reported sex crimes, but this is largely because they have very broad definitions of sex crimes and very high rates of reporting. The best I can really say for now is there is no obvious pattern of more feminist countries having lower rates of sex crimes. Maybe there really is such a pattern; but the data isn’t clear.

Yet if biology contributes anything to the causation of violence—and at this point I think the evidence for that is utterly overwhelming—then mainstream feminism has done the world a grave disservice by insisting upon only social and cultural causes. Maybe it’s the case that our best options for intervention are social or cultural, but that doesn’t mean we can simply ignore biology. And then again, maybe it’s not the case at all:A neurological treatment to cure psychopathy could cut almost all forms of violence in half.

I want to be completely clear that a biological cause is not a justification or an excuse: literally billions of men manage to have high testosterone levels, and experience plenty of anger and sexual desire, without ever raping or murdering anyone. The fact that men appear to be innately predisposed toward violence does not excuse actual violence, and the fact that rape is typically motivated at least in part by sexual desire is no excuse for committing rape.

In fact, I’m quite worried about the opposite: that the notion that sexual violence is always motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women will be used to excuse rape, because men who know that their motivation was not oppression will therefore be convinced that what they did wasn’t rape. If rape is always motivated by a desire to oppress women, and his desire was only to get laid, then clearly, what he did can’t be rape, right? The logic here actually makes sense. If we are to reject this argument—as we must—then we must reject the first premise, that all rape is motivated by a desire to oppress and subjugate women. I’m not saying that’s never a motivation—I’m simply saying we can’t assume it is always.

The truth is, I don’t know how to end violence, and sexual violence may be the most difficult form of violence to eliminate. I’m not even sure what most of us can do to make any difference at all. For now, the best thing to do is probably to donate money to organizations like RAINN, NAESV and NSVRC. Even $10 to one of these organizations will do more to help survivors of sexual violence than hours of ruminating on your own complicity—and cost you a lot less.

Reasons to like Joe Biden

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Sep 6 JDN 2459099

Maybe it’s because I follow too many radical leftists on social media (this is at least a biased sample, no doubt), but I’ve seen an awful lot of posts basically making this argument: “Joe Biden is terrible, but we have to elect him, because Donald Trump is worse.”

And make no mistake: Whatever else you think about this election, the fact that Donald Trump is a fascist and Joe Biden is not is indeed a fully sufficient reason to vote for Biden. You shouldn’t need any more than that.

But in fact Joe Biden is not terrible. Yes, there are some things worth criticizing about his record and his platform—particularly with regard to civil liberties and war (both of those links are to my own posts making such criticisms of the Obama administration). I don’t want to sweep these significant flaws under the rug.

Yet, there are also a great many things that are good about Biden and his platform, and it’s worthwhile to talk about them. You shouldn’t feel like you are holding your nose and voting for the lesser of two evils; Biden is going to make a very good President.

First and foremost, there is his plan to invest in clean energy and combat climate change. For the first time in decades, we have a Presidential candidate who is explicitly pro-nuclear and has a detailed, realistic plan for achieving net-zero carbon emissions within a generation. We should have done this 30 years ago; but far better to start now than to wait even longer.

Then there is Biden’s plan for affordable housing. He wants to copy California’s Homeowner Bill of Rights at the federal level, fight redlining, expand Section 8, and nationalize the credit rating system. Above all, he wants to create a new First Down Payment Tax Credit that will provide first-time home buyers with $15,000 toward a down payment on a home. That is how you increase homeownership. The primary reason why people rent instead of owning is that they can’t afford the down payment.

Biden is also serious about LGBT rights, and wants to pass the Equality Act, which would finally make all discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity illegal at the federal level. He has plans to extend and aggressively enforce federal rules protecting people with disabilities. His plans for advancing racial equality seem to be thoroughly baked into all of his proposals, from small business funding to housing reform—likely part of why he’s so popular among Black voters.

His plan for education reform includes measures to equalize funding between rich and poor districts and between White and non-White districts.

Biden’s healthcare plan isn’t quite Medicare For All, but it’s actually remarkably close to that. He wants to provide a public healthcare option available to everyone, and also lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 instead of 65. This means that anyone who wants Medicare will be able to buy into it, and also sets a precedent of lowering the eligibility age—remember, all we really need to do to get Medicare For All is lower that age to 18. Moreover, it avoids forcing people off private insurance that they like, which is the main reason why Medicare For All still does not have majority support.

While many on the left have complained that Biden believes in “tough on crime”, his plan for criminal justice reform actually strikes a very good balance between maintaining low crime rates and reducing incarceration and police brutality. The focus is on crime prevention instead of punishment, and it includes the elimination of all federal use of privatized prisons.

Most people would give lip service to being against domestic violence, but Biden has a detailed plan for actually protecting survivors and punishing abusers—including ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment and ending the rape kit backlog. The latter is an utter no-brainer. If we need to, we can pull the money from just about any other form of law enforcement (okay, I guess not homicide); those rape kits need to be tested and those rapists need to be charged.

Biden also has a sensible plan for gun control, which is consistent with the Second Amendment and Supreme Court precedent but still could provide substantial protections by reinstating the ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring universal background checks, and adding other sensible restrictions on who can be licensed to own firearms. It won’t do much about handguns or crimes of passion, but it should at least reduce mass shootings.

Biden doesn’t want to implement free four-year college—then again, neither do I—but he does have a plan for free community college and vocational schooling.

He also has a very ambitious plan for campaign finance reform, including a Constitutional Amendment that would ban all private campaign donations. Honestly if anything the plan sounds too ambitious; I doubt we can really implement all of these things any time soon. But if even half of them get through, our democracy will be in much better shape.

His immigration policy, while far from truly open borders, would reverse Trump’s appalling child-separation policy, expand access to asylum, eliminate long-term detention in favor of a probation system, and streamline the path to citizenship.

Biden’s platform is the first one I’ve seen that gives detailed plans for foreign aid and international development projects; he is particularly focused on Latin America.

I’ve seen many on the left complain that Biden was partly responsible for the current bankruptcy system that makes it nearly impossible to discharge student loans; well, his current platform includes a series of reforms developed by Elizabeth Warren designed to reverse that.

I do think Biden is too hawkish on war and not serious enough about protecting civil liberties—and I said the same thing about Obama years ago. But Biden isn’t just better than Trump (almost anyone would be better than Trump); he’s actually a genuinely good candidate with a strong, progressive platform.

You should already have been voting for Biden anyway. But hopefully now you can actually do it with some enthusiasm.

How to hurt allies and alienate people

pnrj core principles, current events, ethics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 9 JDN 2459071

I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile now, but I have been worried about the reaction I might get. Ultimately I realized that this is precisely why it needs to be written. Especially since Slate Star Codex is offline for the foreseeable future, there don’t see to be a lot of other people willing to write it.

The timing could be questioned, I suppose; when we are in the throes of a historic pandemic and brazen creeping authoritarianism, perhaps now should be the time for unconditional solidarity. But I fear that unconditional solidarity is one of the most dangerous forces in human existence: Politics is the mind-killer, arguments are soldiers, and the absolute unwillingness to question one’s own side is how we get everything from the Spanish Inquisition to Vladimir Lenin.

And since this is about not simply being mistaken but alienating allies, perhaps these desperate times are when we need the correction most: For we simply cannot afford to lose any allies right now.

“All men benefit from male violence.”

“It’s impossible to be racist against White people.”

“I hate White people.”

“Men are pigs.”

“All I want for Christmas is White genocide.”

Statements like these have two things in common: One, they are considered appropriate and acceptable to say by most of the social justice left; and two, they are harmful, alienating, and wrong.

All men benefit from male violence? You mean that male rape victims benefit from male violence? The thousands of men who are assaulted and murdered by other men—at far higher rates than women—benefit from that, do they? Did Matthew Shepard benefit from male violence?

It’s impossible to be racist against White people? Then tell me, what was it when a Black woman told me that melanin is the gateway to the soul and all White people are soulless snakes? Swap the colors, and it sounds like something only a diehard KKK member or neo-Nazi could say. If that’s not racism, what is?

The insistence that racism is “prejudice plus power” is a disingenuous redefinition of the concept precisely in an attempt to retroactively make it true that it’s impossible to be racist against White people. This is not what the word “racist” means to most people. But even if I were to allow that definition, do you think Black people never have power over White people? There are no Black managers who discriminate against their White employees, no Black teachers who abuse their White students? I’m not aware of Barack Obama discriminating against any White people, but can anyone deny that he had power? White people may have more power on average, but that doesn’t mean they have more power in every case.

What’s more, I don’t really understand what leftists think they are accomplishing by making this kind of assertion. Is it just an expression of rage, or a signal of your group identity? You’re clearly not going to convince any White person who has been discriminated against that White people never get discriminated against. You’re clearly not going to convince any man who has been brutally attacked by another man that all men benefit from male violence. It would be one thing to say that White people face less discrimination (clearly true) or that most White people don’t face discrimination (maybe true); but to say that no White people ever face discrimination is just obviously false, and will be disproved by many people’s direct experience.

Indeed, it seems quite obvious to me that this kind of talk is likely to frustrate and alienate many people who could otherwise have been allies.

The left has a counter-argument prepared for this: If you are alienated by what we say, then you were never a true ally in the first place.

The accusation seems to be that alienated allies are just fair-weather friends; but I don’t think someone is being a fair-weather friend if they stop wanting to be your friend because you abuse them. And make no mistake: Continually telling people that they are inferior and defective because of their race or gender or some other innate aspect of themselves absolutely constitutes abuse. Indeed, it’s nothing less than a mirror image of the very abuse that social justice is supposed to exist to prevent.

To be sure, there are cases where people claim to be alienated allies but were never really allies to begin with. Anyone who says “Wokeness made me a Nazi” obviously was far-right to begin with, and is just using that as an excuse. No amount of people saying “I hate White people” would justify becoming a Nazi or a KKK member. This isn’t them genuinely being alienated by the left being unfair; this is them saying “Look what you made me do” as they punch you in the face.

But I think the far more common scenario is more like this: “I want to support social justice, but every time I try to participate in leftist spaces, people attack me. They say that I’m defective because of who I am, and it hurts. They don’t seem interested in my input anyway, so I think I’ll just stay away from leftist spaces to preserve my own mental health.” These are people who broadly agree with social justice in principle, but just feel so frustrated and alienated by the movement in practice that they decide they are better off remaining on the sidelines.

Is it really so hard to understand how someone might feel that way? Why would anyone want to interact in a social space where most of the time is spent disparaging people like them? To stay in such a space, one either needs to have very strong moral convictions to sustain them against that onslaught, or needs to be masochistic or self-loathing.


Maybe it is self-loathing, actually: Liberal White people are the only group that systematically exhibits a negative in-group bias. The further left you are on the political spectrum, the more likely you are to suffer from mental illness, especially if you are male. I’ve seen some right-wing sources use this to claim that “liberalism is a mental illness”, but the far more sensible explanation is that the kind of collective guilt and self-hatred that the left inculcates in liberal White people is harmful to mental health. It may also be because concern about the injustice in the world makes your life generally harder, even though you are right to be concerned.

There really does seem to be a lot of pressure to confess and self-flagellate among White leftists. I think my favorite is the injunction to “Divest from Whiteness“; it’s beautiful because it’s utterly meaningless. If you really just meant “fight racial discrimination”, you could have said that. Better yet, you could have recommended some specific policy or belief to adopt. (“Defund the Police”, for all its flaws, is an infinitely superior slogan to “Divest from Whiteness”.) By saying it this way, you’re trying to bring in some notion that we are morally obliged to somehow stop being White—which is of course completely impossible. Frankly I think even if I got gene therapy to convert my body to a West African phenotype people would still say I was “really White”. Thus, Whiteness becomes Original Sin: A stain acquired at birth that can never be removed and must always be a source of guilt.

So let me say this in no uncertain terms:

It’s okay to be White.

It’s okay to be straight.

It’s okay to be male.

It’s wrong to be racist.

It’s wrong to be homophobic.

It’s wrong to be sexist.

No, it isn’t “covertly racist” to say that it’s okay to be White—and if you think it is, you are part of the problem here. People do not have control over what race they are born into. There is no moral failing in being a particular color, or in being descended from people who did terrible things. (And it’s not like only White people have ancestors who did terrible things!)

Yes, I know that there are White supremacist groups using the slogan “It’s okay to be White”, but you know what? Stopped Clock Principle. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Nazis believe many things that are wrong, but the mere fact that Nazis believe something doesn’t make it wrong. Nazis also generally believe in Darwinian evolution, and Adolf Hitler was a strict vegetarian.

I am not denying that privilege and oppression exist. But there is a clear and absolutely vital moral distinction between being a member of a group and oppressing people who are not in that group. Being White is not the same thing as being racist. Being straight is not the same thing as being homophobic. Being male is not the same thing as being sexist. Indeed, I would argue that being a member of the privileged category is not even necessary to participate in oppression—you can oppress people of your own group, or be in one underprivileged group and oppress someone in another group. Being privileged certainly makes it easier for you to support oppression and more likely that you’ll do so—but it is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Another common response is that this is just “tone policing“, that complaining about alienating rhetoric is just a way of shutting down dissent in general. No doubt this is sometimes true: One of the more effective ways of silencing someone’s argument is to convince people that it has been delivered in an overly aggressive or shrill way, thus discrediting the messenger. (This was basically the only major criticism ever leveled against New Atheism, for instance.)

But it clearly takes the notion too far to say that any kind of rhetoric is acceptable as long as it’s for the right cause. Insulting and denigrating people is never appropriate. Making people feel guilty for being born in the wrong group is never fair. Indeed, it’s not clear that one can even argue against tone policing without… tone policing. Sometimes your tone is actually inappropriate and harmful and you need to be criticized for it.

In fact, some of the people that harsh rhetoric is alienating may harbor real prejudices that need to be challenged. But they aren’t very likely to make the intense effort to challenge their own prejudices if every interaction they have with the social justice community is hostile. If we want to change someone’s mind, it helps a great deal to start by showing them compassion and respect.

I’m not saying that fighting for social justice is never going to upset people. Social change is always painful, and there are many cherished beliefs and institutions that will have to be removed in order to achieve lasting justice. So the mere fact that someone is frustrated or upset with you doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve done anything wrong. But you should at least consider that people might sometimes be upset with you for genuinely good reasons, that when they say your aggressive rhetoric is hurtful and alienating that might be because it’s actually true.

Authoritarianism and Masculinity

pnrj core principles, current events, personal, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 19 JDN 2458957

There has always been a significant difference between men and women voters, at least as long as we have been gathering data—and probably as long as women have been voting, which is just about to hit its centennial in the United States.

But the 2016 and 2018 elections saw the largest gender gaps we’ve ever recorded. Dividing by Presidential administrations, Bush would be from 2000 to 2006, when the gender gap never exceeded 18 percentage points, and averaged less than 10 points. Obama would be from 2008 to 2014, when the gender gap never exceeded 20 points and averaged about 15 points. In 2018, the gap stood at 23 percentage points.

Indeed, it is quite clear at this point that Trump’s support base comes mainly from White men.

This is far from the only explanatory factor here: Younger voters are much more liberal than older voters, more educated voters are more liberal than less educated voters, and urban voters are much more liberal than rural voters.

But the gender and race gaps are large enough that even if only White men with a college degree had voted, Trump would have still won, and even if only women without a college degree had voted, Trump would have lost. Trumpism is a white male identity movement.

And indeed it seems significant that Trump’s opponent was the first woman to be a US Presidential nominee from a major party.

Why would men be so much more likely to support Trump than women? Well, there’s the fact that Trump has been accused of sexual harassment dozens of times and sexual assault several times. Women are more likely to be victims of such behavior, and men are more likely to be perpetrators of it.

But I think that’s really a symptom of a broader cause, which is that authoritarianism is masculine.

Think about it: Can you even name a woman who was an authoritarian dictator? There have been a few queen tyrants historically, but not many; tyrants are almost always kings. And for all her faults, Margaret Thatcher was assuredly no Joseph Stalin.

Masculinity is tied to power, authority, strength, dominance: All things that authoritarians promise. It doesn’t even seem to matter that it’s always the dictator asserting power and dominance upon us, taking away the power and authority we previously had; the mere fact that some man is exerting power and dominance on someone seems to satisfy this impulse. And of course those who support authoritarians always seem to imagine that the dictator will oppress someone else—never me. (“I never thought leopards would eat my face!”)

Conversely, the virtues of democracy, such as equality, fairness, cooperation, and compromise, are coded feminine. This is how toxic masculinity sustains itself: Even being willing to talk about disagreements rather than fighting over them constitutes surrender to the feminine. So the mere fact that I am trying to talk them out of their insanely (both self- and other-) destructive norms proves that I serve the enemy.

I don’t often interact with Trump supporters, because doing so is a highly unpleasant experience. But when I have, certain themes kept reoccurring: “Trump is a real man”; “Democrats are pussies”; “they [people of color] are taking over our [White people’s] country”; “you’re a snowflake libtard beta cuck”.

Almost all of the content was about identity, particularly masculine and White identity. Virtually none of their defenses of Trump involved any substantive claims about policy, though some did at least reference the relatively good performance of the economy (up until recently—and that they all seem to blame on the “unforeseeable” pandemic, a “Black Swan”; nevermind that people actually did foresee it and were ignored). Ironically they are always the ones complaining about “identity politics”.

And while they would be the last to admit it, I noticed something else as well: Most of these men were deeply insecure about their own masculinity. They kept constantly trying to project masculine dominance, and getting increasingly aggravated when I simply ignored it rather than either submitting or responding with my own displays of dominance. Indeed, they probably perceived me as displaying a kind of masculine dominance: I was just countersignaling instead of signaling, and that’s what made them so angry. They clearly felt deeply envious of the fact that I could simply be secure in my own identity without feeling a need to constantly defend it.

But of course I wasn’t born that way. Indeed, the security I now feel in my own identity was very hard-won through years of agony and despair—necessitated by being a bisexual man in a world that even today isn’t very accepting of us. Even now I’m far from immune to the pressures of masculinity; I’ve simply learned to channel them better and resist their worst effects.

They call us “snowflakes” because they feel fragile, and fear their own fragility. And in truth, they are fragile. Indeed, fragile masculinity is one of the strongest predictors of support for Trump. But it is in the nature of fragile masculinity that pointing it out only aggravates it and provokes an even angrier response. Toxic masculinity is a very well-adapted meme; its capacity to defend itself is morbidly impressive, like the way that deadly viruses spread themselves is morbidly impressive.

This is why I think it is extremely dangerous to mock the size of Trump’s penis (or his hands, metonymously—though empirically, digit ratio slightly correlates with penis size, but overall hand size does not), or accuse his supporters of likewise having smaller penises. In doing so, you are reinforcing the very same toxic masculinity norms that underlie so much of Trump’s support. And this is even worse if the claim is true: In that case you’re also reinforcing that man’s own crisis of masculine identity.

Indeed, perhaps the easiest way to anger a man who is insecure about his masculinity is to accuse him of being insecure about his masculinity. It’s a bit of a paradox. I have even hesitated to write this post, for fear of triggering the same effect; but I realized that it’s more likely that you, my readers, would trigger it inadvertently, and by warning you I might reduce the overall rate at which it is triggered.

I do not use the word “triggered” lightly; I am talking about a traumatic trigger response. These men have been beaten down their whole lives for not being “manly enough”, however defined, and they lash out by attacking the masculinity of every other man they encounter—thereby perpetuating the cycle of trauma. And stricter norms of masculinity also make coping with trauma more difficult, which is why men who exhibit stricter masculinity also are more likely to suffer PTSD in war. There are years of unprocessed traumatic memories in these men’s brains, and the only way they know to cope with them is to try to inflict them on someone else.

The ubiquity of “cuck” as an insult in the alt-right is also quite notable in this context. It’s honestly a pretty weird insult to throw around casually; it implies knowing all sorts of things about a person’s sexual relationships that you can’t possibly know. (For someone in an openly polyamorous relationship, it’s probably quite amusing.) But it’s a way of attacking masculine identity: If you were a “real man”, your wife wouldn’t be sleeping around. We accuse her of infidelity in order to accuse you of inferiority. (And if your spouse is male? Well then obviously you’re even worse than a “cuck”—you’re a “fag”.) There also seems to be some sort of association that the alt-right made between cuckoldry and politics, as though the election of Obama constitutes America “cheating” on them. I’m not sure whether it bothers them more that Obama is liberal, or that he is Black. Both definitely bother them a great deal.

How do we deal with these men? If we shouldn’t attack their masculinity for fear of retrenchment, and we can’t directly engage them on questions of policy because it means nothing to them, what then should we do? I’m honestly not sure. What these men actually need is years of psychotherapy to cope with their deep-seated traumas; but they would never seek it out, because that, too, is considered unmasculine. Of course you can’t be expected to provide the effect of years of psychotherapy in a single conversation with a stranger. Even a trained therapist wouldn’t be able to do that, nor would they be likely to give actual therapy sessions to angry strangers for free.

What I think we can do, however, is to at least try to refrain from making their condition worse. We can rigorously resist the temptation to throw the same insults back at them, accusing them of having small penises, or being cuckolds, or whatever. We should think of this the way we think of using “gay” as an insult (something I all too well remember from middle school): You’re not merely insulting the person you’re aiming it at, you’re also insulting an entire community of innocent people.

We should even be very careful about directly addressing their masculine insecurity; it may sometimes be necessary, but it, too, is sure to provoke a defensive response. And as I mentioned earlier, if you are a man and you are not constantly defending your own masculinity, they can read that as countersignaling your own superiority. This is not an easy game to win.

But the stakes are far too high for us to simply give up. The fate of America and perhaps even the world hinges upon finding a solution.

A Socratic open letter to transphobes everywhere

pnrj core principles, ethics, personal, public policy, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 23 JDN 2458903

This post is a bit different than usual. This is an open letter to those who doubt that trans people actually exist, or insist on using the wrong pronouns; above all it is an open letter to those who want to discriminate against trans people, denying trans people civil rights or the dignity to use public bathrooms in peace. Most of my readers are probably not such people, but I think you’ll still benefit from reading it—perhaps you can use some of its arguments when you inevitably encounter someone who is.

Content warning: Because of how sex and gender are tied up together in transphobes’ minds, I’m going to need to talk a little bit about sexual anatomy and genital surgery. If such topics make you uncomfortable, feel free to skip this post.

Dear Transphobe:

First of all, I’m going to assume you are a man. Statistically you probably are, in which case that works. If by chance you’re not, well, now you know what it feels like for people to assume your gender and never correct themselves. You’re almost certainly politically right-wing, so that’s an even safer assumption on my part.

You probably think that gender and sex are interchangeable things, that the idea of a woman born with a penis or a man born without one is utter nonsense. I’m here to hopefully make you question this notion.

Let’s start by thinking about your own identity. You are a man. I presume that you have a penis. I am not going to make the standard insult many on the left would and say that it’s probably a small penis. In fact I have no particular reason to believe that, and in any case the real problem is that we as a society have so thoroughly equated penis size with masculinity with value as a human being. Right-wing attitudes of the sort that lead to discriminating against LGBT people are strongly correlated with aggressive behaviors to assert one’s masculinity. Even if I had good reason—which I assuredly do not—to do so, attacking your masculinity would be inherently counterproductive, causing you to double down on the same aggressive, masculinity-signaling behaviors. If it so happens that you are insecure in your masculinity, I certainly don’t want to make that worse, as masculine insecurity was one of the strongest predictors of voting for Donald Trump. You are a man, and I make no challenges to your masculinity whatsoever. I’m even prepared to concede that you are more manly than I am, whatever you may take that to mean.

Let us consider a thought experiment. Suppose that you were to lose your penis in some tragic accident. Don’t try to imagine the details; I’m sure the mere fact of it is terrifying enough. Suppose a terrible day were to arrive where you wake up in a hospital and find you no longer have a penis.

I have a question for you now: Should such a terrible day arrive, would you cease to be a man?

I contend that you would remain a man. I think that you, upon reflection, would also contend the same. There are a few thousand men in the world who have undergone penectomy, typically as a treatment for genital cancer. You wouldn’t even know unless you saw them naked or they told you. As far as anyone else can tell, they look and act as men, just as they did before their surgery. They are still men, just as they were before.

In fact, it’s quite likely that you would experience a phantom limb effect—where here the limb that is in your self-image but no longer attached to your body is your penis. You would sometimes feel “as if” your penis was still there, because your brain continues to have the neural connections that generate such sensations.

An even larger number of men have undergone castration for various reasons, and while they do often find that their thoughts and behavior change due to the changes in hormone balances, they still consider themselves men, and are generally considered men by others as well. We do not even consider them transgender men; we simply consider them men.

But does this not mean, then, that there is something more to being a man than simply having male anatomy?

Perhaps it has to do with other body parts, or some totality of the male body? Let’s consider another thought experiment then. Suppose that by some bizarre event you were transported into a female body. The mechanism isn’t important: Perhaps it was a mad scientist, or aliens, or magic. But just suppose that somehow or other, while you slept, your brain in its current state was transported into an entirely female body, complete with breasts, vulva, wide hips, narrow shoulders—the whole package. When you awaken, your body is female.

Such a transition would no doubt be distressing and disorienting. People would probably begin to see you as a woman when they looked at you. You would be denied access to men’s spaces you had previously used, and suddenly granted access to women’s spaces you had never before been allowed into. And who knows what sort of effect the hormonal changes would have on your mind?

Particularly if you are sexually attracted to women, you might imagine that you would enjoy this transformation: Now you get to play with female body parts whenever you want! But think about this matter carefully, now: While there might be some upsides, would you really want this change to happen? You have to now wear women’s clothing, use women’s restrooms, cope with a menstrual cycle. Everyone will see you as a woman and treat you as a woman. (How do you treat women, by the way? Is this something you’ve thought carefully about?)

And if you still think that being a woman isn’t so bad, maybe it isn’t—if your mind and body are in agreement. But remember that you’ve still got the mind of a man; you still feel that mental attachment to body parts that are no longer present, and these new body parts you have don’t feel like they are properly your own.

But throughout this harrowing experience, would you still be a man?

Once again I contend that you would. You would now feel a deep conflict between your mind and your body—dare I call it gender dysphoria?—and you would probably long to change your body back to what it was, or at least back to a body that is male.

You would once again experience phantom limb effects—but now all over, everywhere your new body deviated from your original form. In your brain there is a kind of map of where your body parts are supposed to be: Your shoulders are supposed to end here, your legs are supposed to end there, and down here there is supposed to be a penis, not vulva. This map is deeply ingrained into your mind, its billions of strands almost literally woven into the fabric of your brain.

We are presumably born with such a map: By some mindbogglingly complex mix of genetic and environmental factors our brains organize themselves into specific patterns, telling us what kind of body we’re supposed to have. Some of this structuring may go on before birth, some while we are growing up. But surely by the time we are adults the process is complete.

This mental map does allow for some flexibility: When we were young and growing, it allowed us to adjust to our ever-increasing height. Now that we are older, it allows us to adjust to gaining or losing weight. But this flexibility is quite limited: it might take years, or perhaps we could never adjust at all, to finding that we had suddenly grown a tail—or suddenly changed from male to female.

Now imagine that this transformation didn’t happen by some sudden event when you were an adult, but by some quirk of ontogeny while you were still in the womb. Suppose that you were born this way: in a body that is female, but with a mind that is male.

In such a state, surely something is wrong, in the same way that being born with sickle-cell anemia or spina bifida is wrong. There are more ambiguous cases: Is polydactyly a disorder? Sometimes? But surely there are some ways to be born that are worth correcting, and “female body, male mind” seems like one of them.

And yet, this is often precisely how trans people describe their experience. Not always—humans are nothing if not diverse, and trans people are no exception—but quite frequently, they will say that they feel like “a man in a woman’s body” or the reverse. By all accounts, they seem to have precisely this hypothetical condition: The gender of their mind does not match the sex of their body. And since this mismatch causes great suffering, we ought to correct it.

But then the question becomes: Correct it how?

Broadly speaking, it seems we’ve only two options: Change the body, or change the mind. If you were in this predicament, which would you want?

In the case of being transferred into a new body as an adult, I’m quite sure you’d prefer to change your body, and keep your mind as it is. You don’t belong in this new body, and you want your old one back.

Yet perhaps you think that if you were born with this mismatch, things might be different: Perhaps in such a case you think it would make more sense to change the mind to match the body. But I ask you this: Which is more fundamental to who you are? If you are still an infant, we can’t ask your opinion; but what do you suppose you’d say if we could?

Or suppose that you notice the mismatch later, as a child, or even as a teenager. Before that, something felt off somehow, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. But now you realize where the problem lies: You were born in a body of the wrong sex. Now that you’ve had years to build up your identity, would you still say that the mind is the right thing to change? Once you can speak, now we can ask you—and we do ask such children, and their answers are nigh-unanimous: They want to change their bodies, not their minds. David Reimer was raised as a girl for years, and yet he always still knew he was a boy and tried to act like one.

In fact, we don’t even know how to change the gender of a mind. Despite literally millennia of civilization trying at great expense to enforce particular gender norms on everyone’s minds, we still get a large proportion of the population deviating substantially from them—if you include mild enough deviations, probably a strict majority. If I seem a soft “soy boy” to you (and, I admit, I am both bisexual and vegetarian—though I already knew I was the former before I became the latter), ask yourself this: Why would I continue to deviate from your so ferociously-enforced gender norms, if it were easy to conform?

Whereas, we do have some idea how to change a body. We have hormonal and surgical treatments that allow people to change their bodies substantially—trans women can grow breasts, trans men can grow beards. Often this is enough to make people feel much more comfortable in their own bodies, and also present themselves in a way that leads others to recognize them as their desired gender.

Sex reassignment surgery is not as reliable, especially for trans men: While building artificial vulva works relatively well, building a good artificial penis still largely eludes us. Yet technological process in this area continues, and we’ve improved our ability to change the sex of bodies substantially in just the last few decades—while, let me repeat, we have not meaningfully improved our ability to change the gender of minds in the last millennium.

If we could reliably change the gender of minds, perhaps that would be an option worth considering. But ought implies can: We cannot be ethically expected to do that which we are simply incapable.

At present, this means that our only real options are two: We can accept the gender of the mind, change the sex of the body, and treat this person as the gender they identify themselves as; or we can demand that they repress and conceal their mental gender in favor of conforming to the standards we have imposed upon them based on their body. The option you may most prefer—accept the body, change the mind—simply is not feasible with any current or foreseeable technology.

We have tried repressing transgender identity for centuries: It has brought endless suffering, depression, suicide.

But now that we are trying to affirm transgender identity the outlook seems much better: Simply having one adult in their life who accepts their gender identity reduces the risk of a transgender child attempting suicide by 40%. Meta-analysis of research on the subject shows that gender transition, while surely no panacea, does overall improve outcomes for transgender people—including reducing risk of depression and suicide. (That site is actually refreshingly nuanced; it does not simply accept either the left-wing or right-wing ideology on the subject, instead delving deeply into the often quite ambiguous evidence.)

Above all, ask yourself: If you ever found yourself in the wrong sort of body, what would you want us to do?