Male and Female Robots

Carleas, there’s a difference between what treatment I offer you and what treatment I owe you.
I’m morally obligated to treat you with a certain degree of civility… and you have the same moral obligations toward me.
I’m not obligated to agree with you… nor are you obligated to agree with me… we’re merely obligated to be civil in our disagreement.

Gender is a description of you… even the people that deeply care about your subjectivity have to describe you as you are OR ELSE be lying about you.

So you might well feel like you’re a non-gendered, 1437 years old, alien from another planet or any number of other things.
But I am not obligated to address you as such, agree with that description of you, nor even respect your opinions in that regard.

Asking me to do any of that against my own judgement IS an imposition… demanding it IS tyrannical.

Yet, it might make for a good store policy to choose the path of least resistance when dealing with someone like that to get their money and get them out the store asap.
“Hello ancient zer, martian, how may I help you t’day?”

The social situations you bring up are better informed by other factors that you keep using to confuse the topic.
Teenagers bunking together according to gender might be best informed by their parents fear of their sexuality.
So what if you feel more like one of the boys? If you have the body of a girl and the parents don’t want the their boys exposed to a female body… then you’re shit out of luck.

You and I might well reach an agreement on how best to tackle such social circumstances, completely separate from whether or not a person qualifies as male or female.

Many of our social conventions regarding gender maybe are founded on previous or even current misapprehensions of what all we can determine from person’s gender alone.
We used to have or perhaps still do have a common perception of women, that indicates they make bad drivers. We might well socially act out this perception resulting in a “social treatment”
And assuming we can agree there’s something wrong with that, the solution isn’t to “pretend women are men when driving” but to drop that misapprehension that gender is deterministic with regard to driving.

Where gender isn’t largely or entirely deterministic, we might well agree that participation should be elected rather than enforced or restricted by gender.
We could find a great deal more agreement between us, i imagine, if you stopped confusing our classification of gender with the social conventions we have around gender.

I do agree… but again I would caution against confusing the issue.
I suspect our moral concern grows and scales with any creatures capacity for cognition as it becomes relatable to us, killing a dog is far more worrying than killing an ant.
killing an ant capable of human cognition is about equivalent to killing a human… irrespective of whether or not it used to be human.
Same is true of AI, aliens etc.

What’s more interesting is that I would probably say it’s a “human” mind inside that ant… If I had to boil that impulse down to the root of it, I think I would do that to indicate the history of that mind.
If it were merely an ant with a human-like mind, I don’t think I would do that…
I suppose in comparing to gender-dysphoria that would translate equally… It’s much harder to say “it’s a male brain/mind” when it neither naturally nor historically has belonged in a male body.

But now finally, we get to the heart of the issue

No… there’s a very clear dimension on which we disagree.
It’s not a spectrum where we’re quibbling over where to draw the line… it’s that you think there’s a dimension to gender that I reject.

My entire post was about how in the body-swap scenario you would become fully female… irrespective of your subjectivity.
THAT is the core of our disagreement… the relevance of subjectivity.

I don’t think subjectivity is at all relevant to gender, though your gender might well be relevant to your subjectivity.
I hold that gender is an entirely biological phenomenon and that confusing it with subjectivity is a costly mistake, precisely due to the social ramifications.
If we could alter people so as to give them a fully biologically male or female body, I would argue that would make them fully male or female, by definition (as that’s all gender addresses).
A more interesting question to ask is: would that be a cure for gender-dysphoria, or might it turn out that “gender dysphoria” is merely the manifestation of some neurological issue, not addressed by body modifications?

Besides, if or when we can alter ourselves to that degree we’ve arguably, at that point, transcended the dimorphism of our species which could eradicate the social and linguistic need for binary gender distinctions, and probably many more things we take for granted like the implications of age and possibly even species.
There are a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi works of fiction that explore the possible social consequences of such a breakthrough.

What you’re talking about seems more like playing pretend we already did all that and socially act it out… which comes across as fucking delusional.
It’s like trying to organize some grand scale societal LARP where we pretend people’s wishes about who or what they are, were actually realized.
But then for the fear of anyone breaking character in this play we redefine words and concepts so as to maintain it indefinitely… i.e. it’s not about what you are, but what you feel.

Most of the time these things develop naturally and take hold organically because of need, comfort or utility…
It’s quite rare outsides cults, religions and extreme political ideologies, to impose such idiosyncratic nonsense on others, though.
Using language to establishing in-group, out-group from within such ideological frameworks, otoh is quite common… gotta make the right propitiations… or else.

Agreed, and you’ll note that I haven’t argued that you owe anyone anything. I don’t think people have a property right in being recognized as the sex of their choice, and I’ve explicitly rejected any legal obligation to do so.

But I think doing so is part of the ‘civility’ that you describe, and I also think that in many cases the world is best described by doing so. On to that:

First, ‘bad driving’ seems a bit of a loaded example of social sexual roles, and not one I’m defending. I don’t think transwomen are identifying as women because they drive poorly. More central examples would point to more central social role dichotomies, e.g. hunter vs. gatherer, defender vs nurturer, competition vs. cooperation, hard vs. soft, strength vs. caring, violence vs. persuasion, brawn vs. beauty, etc. Even in a far future where sex becomes meaningless in the way you suggest later in your post, these dichotomies might well persist, because they reflect different game-theoretic social strategies that it may continue to make sense for people to specialize in, and which may continue to be correlated. (This is a new claim, and one I would also be interested to hear Karpel Tunnel’s thoughts on).

But to your larger point about getting it wrong and solving that mistake, if I might draw a parallel (and I apologize if you know the story): Until the mid 1800s, jade was believed to be a single mineral. In 1863, it was discovered that it was two distinct minerals, jadeite and nephrite, with different composition and different properties that were capable of distinguishing them, once people knew to look. Following the discovery that what we believed was one thing was actually two things, we had three options: 1) say that only jadeite is real jade, 2) say that only nephrite is real jade, or 3) say that both continue to be real jade.

We can look at what’s going on here in a similar way: there was something we called ‘man’ thought of as one thing. Then we revised our ontology to distinguish between man the biological sex category and man the social role category. We are then presented with three options, and I think you can see where I’m going here: 1) say that only the biological thing is a real man, 2) say that only one who occupies the social role is a real man, or 3) say that both continue to be real men.

We can debate which is the best option, but it is wrong to say that there is only one solution.

I’m not sure that that’s it, but this feels like progress. I don’t think I’ve said that subjective perception is sufficient, and if I have I was wrong. Rather, where subjective perception is clearly communicated by adherence to norms for the perceived sex and communicates an accurate picture how how a person wants to be treated and can be expected to behave, that is sufficient, because one sense of sex is the norms and the expectations about behavior and treatment they are intended to inform.

The role of subjectivity here is in 1) people being the local experts on themselves, so that they are the best qualified to testify as to what we should expect from them and how they wish to be treated, and 2) making their communication sincere.

I think this is a fair point, and you’re right that we shouldn’t pretend the technology exists in deciding how to treat people now. I bring it up now only to tease out the ontology of sex.

But I do worry that there was likely a time when people would have said that it was genital shape and hormones that made the man, and then plastic surgery and hormone therapy advanced to the point they are now and the goalposts were moved. I don’t mean to accuse you of doing this, you’ve been consistent throughout this conversation and I have every reason to believe you will remain consistent as technology advances. But I think we can probably agree that the conversation will move with what’s possible, so that the magic plank in Theseus’ ship can never be replaced.

I had a bit of trouble following this part, but I think, thought I may be wrong, it raised an interesting issue, again for physicalists especially. I doubt anyone argued that it was just genital shape and hormones. I think they would have thought that the body in general and the brain (bathed in development with a more male mix of hormones), bones and muscles, shapes of hands, hair and joints, and the gametes, were all involved and also over time, that one had the one’s one had as one grew up, and so far hormones and plastic surgery have trouble fixing all that. But let’s say we come up with technology to replaces the boards in the ship of Thebes. Is it the same ship`? I mean, that’s the whole thing about that Ship. Though perhaps I am assuming you meant Ship of Thebes not Theseus’ ship. It is calling into question identity.

If Sara thinks she is a man, but needs to replace herself with a man, was she a man, or did she decide to replace herself with something else?

Shouldn’t any physicalist be saying: your body is you. If it feels like X, then it feels like X and it is this body with feeling X. You feel like a what you are calling a woman with this obdy. If you start replacing yourself with ever increasing plastic surgery and endocrinology changes - which in turn have effects on many other systems in the body, they you are making something new - you will create someone who will feel like you feel now. That new body or partly new body or whatever will create internal states you do not have now and in different ranges and amplitudes. It will not be you. You are in fact asking to create something you have not experienced, since experience comes through the body and that body’s experience of itself cannot be what you are asking to be changed into. You cannot have the identity you are asked to have created, because your body is not that body. (and yes, this is similar perhaps to what happens when one goes through puberty, but it would be odd to say, for a physicalist, I feel like I have already gone through puberty so I want those hormone changes now even though I am 8[size=100])[/size]. If you feel like you have gone puberty, it is because your current body feels that way, and there’s no need for a change. You cannot radically transform a body to make it so you feel like you do before those changes. (Unless you are a dualist or some other factor is involved that is not involved in physicalism)

But, as said, I may have misunderstood. Still, the above is important to raise, and though I have raised it before, I took it in a slightly different direction and further.

But you are using this Ship of Thebes set of changes with a near opposite aim. To get Mad Man to accept that the final product is really a woman. Even if that is true, in the end, it undermines the entire point of the process, since if now she is a woman, she wasn’t before and was confused about what she was. And a tremendous amount of money went into a misunderstanding.

I agree that there is something similar going on but the distinction you’re trying to make is not it.

Being a “man” used to be most fundamentally about having a penis and being able to impregnating women, it also, to a lesser extent had something to do with a hairy face and bigger body… that was the depth of our understanding, so much so that we would cease to think of you as a man if you lost your “manhood” or became otherwise impotent… it was very much defined along the biological lines, to the extent that we understood biology, which was to say it had something to do with procreation first then morphology second.

We have since gained a much better understanding of the phenomenon… penises and hairy faces are less central in the telling of what makes a man within our new biological paradigm. It certainly is a much richer and far more nuanced picture of what it means to be a man or woman… and there’s far more than merely two components involved… it has to do with chromosomes, endocrines, bone density, hand-eye coordination, muscle mass, fetal development, brain pruning… tons of things a medieval peasant would not even be able to comprehend or envision how we could possibly measure or observe, much less be willing to grant belongs in the narrative.

So yes, we’ve discovered more about what it means to be a man, and that there’s far more to it than just a penis and testicles… but we’ve not suddenly discovered that “hey turns out women can be men, socially.”

That being said… this ultimately boils down to our definitions, or call it ontology, if you’d like.

It seems to me we’ve hit bedrock with this one… it’s cool that we’ve narrowed down the exact point of contention, but I’m at a loss for how to find common ground from here.

I’ve asked you a few times but you’ve never answered me… how do you envision we might persuade each other?
I could be persuaded if you showed me the superior utility of your language… though arguably, you’ve tried that and failed.
But you’ve not given me any means by which YOU could be persuaded…

What might move you from this position?

This is spot on… physicalist is a strange description though, I’d prefer materialist or naturalist.

But, yes… from everything I’ve learned about how the human nervous-system and neurology works, it does seem more accurate to say you are a body, than to say you have a body.
Even diet and routine play a major role in giving your moment to moment experience it’s character… to imagine more invasive changes having a lesser effect on the sum total of your experience seem unscientific, at best.

In a very profound way it’s true to say If you change your body, you change yourself… hell people who have ONLY gained or dropped a lot of weight can attest to the dramatic changes in attitude and mood.
What changes in your subjective landscape that might come with hormone treatment and the consequences of that on your body’s chemistry… It’s probably quite difficult to even imagine.

To be fully transformed from a male to female or vice versa, would likely include a system shock to your neurology, there are nerves and sensations that would be entirely novel to you, your brain would have to adapt to those signals as if a newborn discovering new body parts, without the benefit of being a newborn… it seems we can only speculate what that might be like… but I think it’s fair to say it would change you.

I’ve used materialist and people thought I was Marxist. Naturalist…hm. I think it is a confused term because I think supernatural is a confused term. The dichotomy, since on the one hand it sounds like an ontological claim - there are only natural things not supernatural ones - but is also an epistemological one - and this would mean that if, say, science discovered ghosts in fifty years, they would be natural, or at least real, begs questions, I think. IOW it treats the unknown, especially if it seems to contradict current models and both unreal and not possible. But we know that this is not always true and in fact has been with regularity false. Things that if real woudl contradict models have turned out to be real. I think most scientists would call themselves physicalists so I go there. There really isn’t a good term. I’ve spent a lot of time tearing up ‘physicalism’ since I think it has metaphysical baggage and seems in denial that regardless, utterly regardless of the qualities of something or lack of qualities of something, if scientists think it is real, they think it is real. And then they call it physical. I think they should call themselves verificationists or something. It’s not what is real, the substance of it, it is that it is real and the process through which they decide this. In a sense I think it leads to some of the same messes as natural/supernatural does, where suddenly one can deduce something is not real since it is supernatural, which, well ain’t science. So out of the sloppy mess of this paragraph my conclusions is I don’t like any of the terms. But Carleas seems to accept physicalism and this one most directly and clearly points out the problems precisely because of its ‘substance baggage’.

And I wouldn’t necessarily stop people and an even more radical version of this is coming through the transhumanists, who might happily transform themselves into a sapien ocelot with an AI instead of their left brain lobe. They actually worry me more than the confusion trans issues are throwing down the pike at growing children. But that’s a whole nother can of worms.

I agree with you that there is a soft implication of duality in suggesting you might mentally or subjectively be the thing, that your body is not… but I think Carleas is forging this distinction along a different dimension, namely the social sphere… you might mimic and adopt traditional male behavior from an existing preference for it and thus qualify, within the social paradigm, as male… if you also make an effort to look the part, he argues, you could effectively be described as male with sufficient accuracy so as to render that description true enough for most contexts, within that social paradigm…

At least, that’s how I’ve understood his argument to me, thus far.

Yes. But once he named the Ship of Thebes (though he did call it Theseus) it seemed like his point was that at a certain point you would have to accept that what was in front of you was a man, despite the original ‘ship’s’ sex. But I think that has an internal backlash, because then it was not one before.

As far as his social approach…I’m much happier, as I’ve told him, with women and men being allowed to pursue their desires and not be boxed in because they are outliers on bell curves. If you are woman who likes to sit with her legs spread, elbows on knees and you are a plumber who likes to have short hair. Go for it.

I dislike the idea that now we will, implicitly tell this person with ovaries and attraction to me, should she have it, that really she’s a gay man.

Now I know that Carleas is not going to say that to anyone and even most transsupporters are not. But down through the ether that idea is entering the minds of children. That if you feel inside certain ways that are male and you were born a woman, you are really a man.

And I think it ends up being, pardon my french, a brain fuck. Because at the same time a more traditional feminist message is also being aimed at children. That they need not be limited or cornered by their sex. I am much more aligned with this one.

Put the two together and you are damaging people. It’s toxic double bind communication.

KT & Carleas

As much as I hate to say it, despite his many attempts here to prove me wrong, I think Carleas is trying and failing to rationalize addressing people according to their chosen gender.
It’s easier to identify the goal he has set himself, than it is to identify any definition or “ontology” that he’s presenting.

However, I think we’re nearing what’s at the heart of this whole thing. KT’s worry about sending mixed signals to kids made it clear that we’re missing something.
Because I don’t think we’re sending kids a mixed message at all… we’re giving them postmodern relativism, which amounts to “reality is whatever we agree it is”
It’s liberating you to be a woman and act hyper masculine or even hyper feminine and yet still call yourself a man and if we all agree to go along with it, then it’s functionally (if only socially) true.
This is not too dissimilar from where I think Carleas wants to end up…

But the terrible downside is that since this fairytale is only true (or false) by virtue of our intersubjective agreement about it, dissent becomes dangerous, destructive, tyrannical even.
That person would have been a man, had you but agreed to “grant” them their identity… because of your dissent their gender is denied, no different to actively stripping it from them, you monster!
From this vantage we can see how we’re only one step removed from wanting to purge or reform the non-believers who would so casually destroy our idyllic fantasy-scape.

Carleas has staked out playing along as merely “good manners” that permits him the social recourse of treating dissent as rude behavior and to punish it accordingly…
Someone less magnanimous (or less moderate), might rather seek recourse in the law… maybe prevent such dissent by mandatory re-education/sensitivity courses… make sure to bring your kids.
Or better yet, never mind, we’ll get to your kids through the schools.

That’s just one of the messages. The other message is essentialist. Transpersonism is essentialist, that inside men and women are different and this is not dependent on bodies. It is, essentially, an essentialist spiritualism, founded on a dualism. In some sense there must be souls and these are male or female. This cuts against physicalism, but also feminism, at least the bulk of it. And, more important in relation to Carleas, it cuts against gender and sex being intersubjective. It is not intersubjective, these are essential qualities.

Yes, I think we need to stay out of all heads. If someone things you seem to be a man, take it like a woman and believe in yourself.

Well, on other issues, that is already the case. Start actually rsponding emotionally to things around you and you will get put on meds, will lose your job, will lose custody of your children…and so on.

Imagine actually honestly responding to corporate bs while working there. Everything from team building, PR, marketing, corporate culture, ‘doing great’, vision statements, day to day office politics, boss behavior…you’ll get shit out of there faster than you can say ‘nice tie’.

Which is happening.

Addendum

I fear that what we’re observing is the reenactment of a story well known but rarely read nor absorbed, a very close adaptation at that…

That’s how the emperor acquired his new “social” clothes…

I think we’re referring to the same ship.

This is a bigger topic than what we’re dealing with here, but I’ll give you my take to see if it’s compatible, or if this is another deeper diconnect that underpins our disagreements in this thread.

It’s true that a person is her body, and in some sense a person, like a river, only exists in a single moment, and changes in the next as calories are burned, cells are born and die, and neuronal connections form, strengthen, weaken, or die. Every moment, the set of contingencies around an individual changes. That’s true whether that individual is receiving hormone therapy or just typing on a philosophy forum. There is a very pedantic sense in which the continuity of personhood is illusory.

In practice, people ignore that, and it’s a pragmatic choice. We treat people as though they are the same person from day to day, from year to year; we punish sober people for crimes they commit while drunk; we keep people in prison for decades. We think of ourselves as continuations of the people we were before puberty, even though our thoughts, motivations, and physical and mental abilities are mostly different. We do that because it’s useful, it’s predictive, it’s pragmatic.

So too should we treat a person who undergoes a hypothetical complete sex change as still the same person they were. Not because they are identical in every detail, but because the change is comparable to other changes in which we recognize continuous personhood: normal human aging; significant bodily injury; drug use; etc.

There’s a different question, as I allude to in invoking the Ship of Thesesus, of at what point e.g. a man becomes a woman in the process of the complete sex change. I agree with your point that the hypothetical relies on the premise that at the beginning we have a man, and at the end we have a woman, and I think that’s correct. I don’t know if most trans advocates would agree with me, but I don’t know that we can have a consistent ontology of gender without that; if an earlier version of themselves self-identified as their birth sex and sought to conform with societal expectations of that sex, it is difficult to say on what grounds we would say they were not (other than an assumption of e.g. a female soul in a male body that is inherently female no matter what it believes about itself).

But that doesn’t touch personhood. I don’t disagree that it would entail behavior and thought changes, and that’s my understanding of what trans people report about the effects of hormone therapy. But personhood is generally accepted to survive such changes.

I think this is significantly more of a constraint than you seem to think. People aren’t going to be convinced of things that are obviously empirically false, so getting everyone to agree about something entails getting a bunch of people to independently verify the world and align their descriptions of it. When we run tests in a laboratory setting, having many sensors that agree on the outcome is a good thing, and that agreement is taken as a strong indication about what the reality is.

And to preempt your rebuttal that the present case is a case of people being “convinced of [something that is] obviously empirically false”, again I will point out that that would be question begging. When a transwoman says “I am a woman”, she isn’t making a claim about chromosomes, and she would happily acknowledge that such a claim would be obviously empirically false.

Let me provide a few defeaters for two distinct claims:

Claim: there is a widely accept sense of “woman”/“man” that does not depend on biology.
If you could demonstrate that people don’t think of Princess Toadstool as a woman (and, perhaps more importantly, didn’t before she got voice-overs from human women). If people didn’t see her and other fictional characters, who lack biology and are only sex-defined by their superficial social sexual signaling, as actually being the social sex which is being signaled, that would be strong evidence that my claim is false.

Claim: calling a trans person by their chosen (i.e. sincerely and accurately signaled) sex accurately describes the world.
If you could show me that people’s expectations are significantly misaligned by calling a trans woman a “woman” or a trans man a “man”, e.g. in a contrived setting in which someone describes a non-present trans person using their chosen sex and is then asked about how they expect that person to look, act, think, etc., and see how well those expectations align as compared with control cases of their birth sex or third options like “transsexual”. Similarly, measuring their surprise using something like pupil dilation when that person walks in following various descriptions (this test may need to be normed against other similarly uncommon traits and their various descriptions).

This is useful for clarifying what we’re even disagreeing about. I note than one aspect of our disagreement is that I am more focused on descriptive claims about how we use language, and how language is understood, and you are more interested in normative claims about how we should use or understand language. For example, I learned recently of the idea of corpus linguistics, the study of language through statistical analysis of a given corpus, and I think that would be very probative to my claims, but not say very much about your claims (except to the extent that the actual use of language in a speaker population goes to the utility because being understood is a big part of the utility of language).

My concern most recently in the thread was not the situation where the person identifies as a man then becomes a woman, but rather that person X feels they are a woman. They feel this in that male body. Then they change that body as radically as they can. The feel of their new body, for a physicalist, cannot match whatever they felt in their old body. The have radically changed the body that felt like a woman. Whatever they feel right now cannot be what they felt then.

OK, I agree, though I’m not sure I see the relevance. In line with what I’ve been arguing here, I think when someone says “I feel like a woman”, they are not mostly referring to the physical feeling, but to the social feeling, e.g. “I feel that I should be treated and be expected to act like a woman”.

Is that responsive to what you were getting at?

The above statement is question begging… in that you are assuming your conclusion when you assume “I am a woman” could, much less should, have a subject other than a person’s biology.

My rebuttal of that is not question begging, Carleas, I’m not making any assumptions… I’m doing what you are doing with gender to show you the absurdity that is generated.
That act of sophistry where you split something equally into the social component we associate with it.

When the people kept saying how wonderful the clothes were they knew full well they couldn’t physically see any clothes.
What they were communicating was that their social behavior was going to conform to that of people that could see clothes… and in that sense they were telling the truth.
People behave differently when they see clothes and when they don’t… and so we can say the “social” behavior of seeing clothes is just as critical a component of clothes.

All you have to do to erase the lie from anything, is to split the subject equally into a social component and the social part will be true, if it’s acted out.

And as for how you could be convinced… I have to give up.

The emperor did in fact have new SOCIAL clothes, until he didn’t, that much can’t be disputed… I’d lose the argument if that’s where you plant the flag.
Given the prevalence of woke PC nonsense these days, it’s trivially easy for you to find some gender studies saps to point to as an example of this nonsense being “commonly accepted”

But no one saw the clothes! You’re premising your comparison on the idea that no one who calls a transwoman a woman has a sincere belief behind it, that the only motivation is adherence to dogma or keeping up appearances, and that everyone really agrees with you completely and if they say otherwise the only explanation is that they’re lying. And you cast the transwomen themselves as “the swindlers”, who are insincere and are scamming their way into riches (which are what in this parallel?) through what can only possibly be a LIE (always in all caps, because that helps to convey something important, maybe how big the lie is?).

In comparing this case to the Emperor’s Clothes, you’re dismissing out of hand the possibility that people just don’t mean by their statements what you would mean by those statements, and that they sincerely parse the world differently.

Are you saying that transwomen think they have XX chromosomes?

I’ll have to feel into that more, but that’s not the main thing I’ve heard. That their dysphoria is very physical and in reaction to the body. I think they are necessarily dualists.

sophiagubb.com/what-does-it- … ansgender/
and

and

I think we should consider gender dysphoria evidence, if weak, of dualism, especially if we take them seriously.

I think it would be oddly condescending to support trans rights but consider them deluded. One can try to make gender mean nothing really, which I think at root is your approach Carleas, but they sure don’t think so. I mean, why go through the pain of the operations and the social pain if gender is nothing.

On the surface your support their rights and you want people to be kind in relation to their wishes, but on another, philosophical level, you are fundamentally denying their experiences or really their interpretations of their experiences.

The swindle doesn’t exclusively or even predominantly come from trans people, but it is this: If you don’t “grant” (i.e. see) their “chosen gender” it’s because that gender is invisible to fools and bigots… so which are you?
Cue the sophistry and mental gymnastics to make it so… everyone is now scrambling to see this gender in one light or another.

Without that swindle, without that garbage, it would be what it is… these are people who are suffering from some neurological condition that is making them very unhappy in their own bodies.
Maybe us LARPING with them truly is the best medicine we have… and if that is the case, I don’t see what’s so wrong with lying for a good cause.
Well apparently a lot… because that means we don’t see it, which means we’re either fools or bigots…

So no, I don’t see gender-dysphoric people as liers or swindlers or any such thing… your suspicions in that regard only underlines the success of the swindlers.
I see them as victims of a pretty horrific condition from which they are seeking relief… and I’d be happy to give them an escape, if I could… even if it is within a fantasy.

Isn’t that what it is to be a philosopher?

But seriously, I don’t think supporting their rights and giving primacy to their self-identity entails accepting their ontology or metaphysics of mind. Some trans people may be dualists, and I think they’re wrong to the extent that they are. But I don’t think it’s condescending to disagree with someone about that. Trans people have no special insight into the experience of being a mind, so unlike e.g. their statements about their most appropriate sexual social role, they aren’t the local expert on the nature of mind. Nor are they inherently more expert on the ontology of sex (though I imagine many become significantly better versed in the philosophy and biology of sex in seeking to understand and explain their experiences and defend their choices).

But in any case: what are we to take away from the physical aspect of some people’s dysphoria? Is that to say that it isn’t social? I’m not sure that that follows. People have a relationship with themselves as a social being: we choose (within our ability) a haircut, wardrobe, posture, style of speech, etc. When someone doesn’t like their body, it’s largely about its social appearance: it doesn’t look like they want it to look. I don’t think having an Adams apple is something you feel internally, rather you feel it externally (i.e. with your hands) or see in the mirror. That is to say, a lot of the way we interact with our own bodies is social, to the extent we evaluate them as representing who we want to be socially.

I don’t think that’s the only way in which we relate to our bodies; people can evaluate themselves in terms of strength and flexibility and coordination in non-social ways too. But note that the people you quote aren’t talking about the many internal or mostly-functional ways in which men’s bodies differ from women’s. They aren’t saying “my bone density is all wrong!”, they’re pointing to prominent external features, things that they can see in the mirror, and that other people would notice immediately, that mark them as not the sex they want to be seen as.

But you don’t have to pretend to see, you do see, immediately. When you meet a coworker with long hair and a dress and a blouse and earrings and makeup, you see immediately what they are trying to tell you about their social sex. I don’t even have to tell you what social sex it is, because you know from a superficial description what sex it is. If we put those superficial indicia on a toaster, you would know immediately that we’re trying to convey that the toaster has that social sex, and if you say things like, “Oh, Ms. Cuisinart Metal Classic CPT-180, aren’t you looking lovely today!”, everyone will know why you’re saying that, but if you say to the dressed-up toaster, “Hey bro, you check out that football tackle last night?”, it will be seen as incongruous.

What is invisible about that?

If the dude in the dress has a square jaw, a giant adam’s apple and sporting a five o’clock shadow… What am I not seeing?
I’m not seeing a woman… how is any of this unclear to you?

Since I first started posting in this thread I have rejected your conception of “social sex” as meaningless sophistry… Yet you appeal to this concept over and over again as though deaf to my objections.
Not even two posts ago, I underlined how devoid of value this concept is… and yet you appeal to it again without addressing the criticism.

At this point I’ve written literally pages worth of arguments, all laid out for you to examine and respond to…

There’s a critical error somewhere in our communication, if you still think appealing to “social sex” is worthwhile, or worse laboring under the illusion that I would agree.

You could see the “social clothes” the Emperor had… and yet he was still naked.