The Grey Tribe

"Doomstadt, Latveria

"The supreme leader of Latveria, Victor Von Doom, has unilaterally dissolved the Latverian parliament, in a move that has sharply divided the country.

Von Doom has stated that the emergency powers granted to him by the supreme leader act passed by the Latverian parliament in 2014 grant him the authority to dissolve the parliament, while the leader of the opposition party has called the action "A blatant disregard for legal precedent and the Latverian constitution" and vows to fight it in court."

And you come out of that story knowing who the characters are, and what they want, and what they say about the situation, but absolutely no information on which to draw any conclusions.

Is Von Doom's decision legal under the constitution and the supreme leader act? What do either of those documents actually say about this situation?

You have no idea, and no information with which to even guess.

And a long time ago I sort of expanded this idea in my head to include pretty much all news stories that give you a prepackaged set of characters and ideas but no context with which to evaluate them.

And while this obviously has relevance to the Trump era and his symbiotic role with right-wing news sources, I was actually thinking of this lately with the story of Anthropic putting some kind of "watermark" into its AI outputs.

A lot of people on this website who are much more competent than I am in this realm read that story and went, "I don't really know what this means".

This is how I feel about almost all the news about AI coming out these days. I always know who the characters are and what conclusions each character wants me to draw, but I feel completely unequipped to actually evaluate anything.

please please please tell me this is AI company marketing please

And look, okay, listen. I have a film degree. Im not in any an expert on cinema nor am I a film scholar but I do have some higher formal education on the topic, and I am a trans person who has, unfortunately, been 21. Here's my 2 cents:

Firstly, trans-coded villains in horror movies (namely the "man in a dress" archetype) is pretty cinema 101. It IS so extensively talked about that you were probably drawing an eye in the back of the lecture hall if you dont remember anything being said about it. If you ever take a horror movie class specifically then you are absolutely guaranteed to have this conversation and have the plethora of scholarship about it thrown at you for required reading.

Secondly, I do not like this idea that simply being a bit rude or short with someone of a particular demographic is always and exclusively rooted in a prejudice towards the identity group(s) they are a part of. There is a VERY big difference between active transphobia and just being a bit of a dick, and conflating the two is going to make things very messy and potentially dangerous. For starters, you are going to create an extremely paranoid and jumpy bunch of young trans people who are absolutely convinced that the entire world is out to kill them when they inevitably encounter some random asshole in the real world. And you are going to give a whole bunch of conservatives a whole bunch of ammunition to say that we think every minor inconvenience or moment of discomfort is a targeted attack against us, frankly because you are acting like it is.

Additionally, every 21 year old has a very weird superiority complex. I did, you did/do/will. It just comes with the territory. Youre having your first taste of true independence and are probably in undergrad, which is an environment that drip-feeds you a lot of rewards for doing essentially what you just did in high school again but at a slightly higher difficulty with less social ostracism. If you live on your own or in the dorms with other 21 year olds, you will all just feed into each other's superiority complexes. You end up convinced that you and your friends are the smartest people alive and the first ones to ever come up with certain ideas, that I promise have been thought of by millions of 21 year olds before you. This includes "has anyone else noticed that trans-coded villains are common in horror movies?" And I think its justified to have a bit of a reality check in someone saying "yes, everyone has, this has been discussed extensively for generations, youre just 21."

Finally, I do not appreciate in the slightest the response to this tweet being "silence of the lambs has no artistic merit and should be scrubbed from the media landscape entirely because of Buffalo Bill." If you personally are not comfortable with/do not have the ability to look past the trans-coded villain archetype you dont have to watch it, but to act like the presence of a poorly-aged trope completely negates all the very real positive impact a foundational film did for modern horror is infuriatingly anti-intellectual and betrays your one-dimensional morality around media, as well as your complete inability to look at something objectively.

"This was addressed directly, you just didn't actually watch the movie."

i interpret it as a cautionary tale about gatekeeping.

I need you to understand why this is important. The reason that Buffalo Bill hit me in a particularly hard way is that he deeply, deeply hates himself, doesn't know himself very well, and has latched on to an incorrect idea about how to fix himself into someone he doesn't hate. I also deeply, deeply hate myself. I obviously wasn't, like, a hair away from becoming Buffalo Bill, but the fundamental premise of the character is an experience of the world I also have, I just know myself better. Buffalo Bill famously says "would you fuck me? I'd fuck me. I'd fuck me so hard" to himself while putting on his lipstick, and he very clearly wouldn't. He's trying to convince himself that he'd fuck him and it isn't working. He does a sexy dance for a camera as a woman, except the moment he starts to enjoy it he's filled with revulsion at himself. Not shame! The man doesn't feel shame. He's instinctively repulsed by his own existence.

It is my observation that there are a lot of people who hate themselves or have something else wrong with them, who mistakenly believed they were transgender. Transition did not fix their problem and in order to convince themselves they didn't make a mistake they start trying to convince everyone around them they must be transgender. I have been bothered by several such people, who interpret any negative emotion as gender dysphoria and who think anyone who says "I don't have gender dysphoria" is proof they have gender dysphoria. I see many people who repeat "hrt would have saved her" about literally everyone because they're trying to convince themselves that hrt saved them.

Norman Bates is TME, because he has multiple personalities, he does not suffer from gender dysphoria, and he is not, in any meaningful sense, a trans woman. He's just, y'know, his mother. Norman Bates has a split personality. He has MPD, not DID, because that is the nomenclature of the time. Maybe audiences of that time were familiar with Jekyll and Hyde, or "split personality", because the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder didn't really take hold in the popular consciousness before Sybil, published in 1973.

Buffalo Bill is TME because he isn't trans. Hannibal said so. Even if he did suffer from gender dysphoria.

Yeah. This is a world where psychoanalysis is real. Something something repulsive crust trauma plot.

but then i just go one level up to "well the author is an idiot"

The Doylist explanation for this is just that they wrote the "he thinks he is transsexual, but he is not" into the movie, because LGBT activists found the book problematic. It didn't really satisfy the people who found it problematic, but it made it look to bystanders that the studio had done its thing. What more can you ask for?

The reason he cannot be trans is part of what you termed the sci-fi premise of the movie where psychology works, where people have observable traits that correspond to things that are true about them.

This is more than just the premise of the book. I mean, sure, in the universe of Hannibal, Dr. Chilton is a hack, Hannibal is really, really good at forensic psychiatry (he just uses it for evil), and Buffalo Bill has some sort of fantasy mental disorder that is nonetheless completely transparent to an expert like Hannibal.

But as far as gender is concerned, you should apply the same amount of charity. When a movie has a man in a dress, you shouldn't read it as "commentary on trans women" or "commentary on gender feels", you should read it as "commentary on gender roles" or just "man in a dress funny". You should take the movie on its own terms, and just go with it.

the lighting

the set design

his haircut

those glasses

the face acting

the unnatural dialogue

the faces they make

Everything here looks like the acting quality and set design don’t matter. It doesn’t look like a cheap movie where they were trying their best, but the sound is rubbish because it bounces off the empty walls of the location because they had to time to decorate. It looks like the kind of movie where it doesn’t matter that these two people can’t act, because what matters is what they look like naked, and once they are naked they don’t act, because they actually have real sex on camera. All that’s important is to establish that she’s out of his league, and she thinks he’s beneath her, because of the elf thing, but then later he’s on top of her, because that’s the fantasy.

tl;dr people don't use "gender" consistently as a concept, and I'm not sure how to deal with this

Gender (as in being a man, a woman or nonbinary) is clearly an important concept that affects lots of people's lives, mine included. But can we define it in a coherent way that matches real-world experiences? Here are some of the definitions I've seen, and why I don't think they make sense. I'm not trying to argue that these definitions couldn't be used to define gender or categorize people as men, women, or nonbinary, but just that these definitions don't reflect how we actually use those categories, and therefore aren't very useful for thinking about gender in today's world (for instance, figuring out how to combat misogyny, question one's own gender, relate to people of a different gender, etc.).

I'm very open to pushback or argument in favor of any of these definitions, or proposals of new definitions that are more workable.

I. The Dictionary

Merriam-Webster defines "gender" as either:

(1) grammatical gender (not what I'm talking about) (2a) "sex": either of the two major forms of individuals that occur in many species and that are distinguished respectively as female or male especially on the basis of their reproductive organs and structures, (2b) "the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex", or (2c) "gender identity", in turn defined as "a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female."

This actually does a pretty good job of capturing different ways I've heard people talk about gender, as defined principally by biological state, adherence to gender roles/norms, or internal state of being. I've also seen a few more ways of looking at this, also flawed (eg societal treatment, desire to be X, circular argument).

II. Why not define gender based on behavioral or cultural traits?

In my opinion, this is the strongest of the Merriam-Webster definitions, but I believe that these traits are not in fact sufficiently correlated with the things we mean by 'gender' in everyday speech. The straw-man version of this argument is that the "cultural traits" associated with gender roles, while a less regressive version of this argument holds that gender is some type of 'performance' or 'presentation' which may not adhere to traditional stereotypes.

II.a. Why not define gender based on adherence to gender roles?

Traditional gender roles are not universally endorsed by each gender, and typically one recognizes that a cis male person who enjoys stereotypically feminine interests like painting his nails or fashion is not a woman, and a cis female person who enjoys stereotypically masculine interests like hunting or engineering is not a man. In fact, we usually take such claims as misogynistic when applied against women, and celebrate women in stereotypically masculine activities, such as women in weightlifting. Most women and men have some traits that do not align with their gender's role, and nearly everyone has some deviation. Gender roles come from gender, not the other way around.

II.b. Why not define gender as a performance or presentation?

This is at least less obviously unworkable than gender roles, since the notion of what behaviors constitute the 'performance' or 'presentation' gender is underspecified; but it seems like in general it comes down to some combination of personality, aesthetic, and fashion. Maybe that's really how people use the labels man and woman, and we should just accept that...but I really don't want to. I feel like a cis female person with an assertive, argumentative personality; traditionally masculine fashion, like cargo shorts or suits; no interest in makeup; and a relatively androgynous appearance (short hair, breasts and/or hips not accentuated by clothing, etc) is definitely still a woman. Also, lots of people like this exist in the real world, and don't generally get lumped in with men.

Maybe there's something else to performing gender or presenting as a gender besides these aspects, but I haven't thought or heard of it. Please let me know if so.

III. Why not define gender as an internal sense of maleness or femaleness?

Because not everyone has such a sense innately without knowing what to look for, and proposals of what to look for are flawed. (Also, it's difficult to verify claims of internal sense that don't lead to any other actions or traits, so adopting this definition of gender might mean we have to avoid any situations where people might lie about their gender.)

It's unfortunately very hard to find any kind of academic surveys of whether people have this internal sense of gender, and if I see a survey that >90% of people have this sense then I'll accept the internal sense definition as legitimate. But until then, we'll have to make do with shoddy sources of data and anecdotes. I and several people I know — at least a quarter of the people I've spoken to about this — don't have such a sense; this Reddit poll and this Tumblr poll both find that people are split on the matter. Again, I'd love some real data on this! But so far I'm not convinced that this is true. You can just bite the bullet here and admit that a large chunk of the population is agender or nonbinary; that may in fact be true. But probably lots of the people you're applying that label to haven't heard the word "agender," so I'm not sure this really reflects how people use the concept of gender in practice.

Another option is that the "internal sense" doesn't refer to innately feeling that one is a man or a woman or neither, but some other gender-related feeling, like preference for particular sex characteristics, preference for being a certain gender, or anti-preference for either of those things (gender dysphoria).

III.a. Why not define gender as preference for being a certain gender?

Because (like the definition analyzed in section V.b.) this is sort of circular. If you don't know what a man or a woman is (aside from someone who wants to be a man/woman), how can you know you have a preference for being that gender? (If you think this is a strawman, here's a website that endorses this, saying "it’s your desire to be a girl that makes you a girl, nothing more and nothing less." Maybe this is a weakman, though - I'd welcome stronger versions of this argument.)

III.b. Why not define gender as a preference for particular sex characteristics?

Just as with the internal sense of gender, some non-obviously-agender people seem to lack such a preference: the cis-by-default, who are contented with their body but wouldn't object to having the opposite sex's body. Also, some people might rather have other sex characteristics for reasons that don't necessarily seem related to *gender identity*, like preferring to be seen as a man to avoid sexism, or wanting female sex characteristics to attract men (or lesbians).

I think that gender dysphoria is mostly the inverse of III.a. and III.b., so I won't really be addressing it here. I think it's a pretty serious thing and I hope that people with dysphoria are able to transition and potentially change their gender, but at the same time I'm not convinced that "would have dysphoria about not being X gender" is a good definition of X gender.

IV. Why not define gender as biological sex?

In short, because of transgender people. You have basically three ways of construing biological sex, depending on how you want to classify various trans and intersex edge cases: chromosomes and/or sex assigned at birth, genitalia, or hormones.

IV.a. Why not define gender as having XX or XY chromosomes, or being assigned female/male at birth, or what gametes their body produces?

I think probably 95% of the readers of my blog already understand why this is a bad idea, but for those who don't: transgender people change their genders to not match the ones they had at birth nor their chromosomes. It's generally considered transphobic to categorize trans people as their birth gender, and even if you don't care about that, putting fully-transitioned trans people whom everyone assumes to be a man/woman into the opposite gender is just confusing. If you doubt me, Google images of Buck Angel (an XX AFAB) or Hunter Schafer (an XY AMAB)*. This would be very confusing as well as transphobic.

IV.b. Why not define gender based on what genitalia someone has?

This is probably the most defensible of the biological/physical definitions; unlike chromosomes/ASAB/gametes, trans people often do change their genitalia. However, you still have a similar issue when it comes to trans people who are functionally members of the gender they transitioned to, but haven't had surgery yet or don't plan to; in particular, lots of trans men get called men or treated as men even though they haven't had phalloplasties.

IV.c. Why not define gender based on what hormones someone has?

Children don't have very high levels of sex hormones: typically, male 9-year-olds have 0.45 ng/dL or less of testosterone, and 9-year-old girls have... 0.46 ng/dL or less. You can't use estrogen for this, because after menopause, female estrogen levels drop down to or below (!) typical male levels.**

Yet gender is very salient in childhood, and in fact one often hears about how gendered socialization into what a boy or a girl 'should' be can affect us well into adulthood. So, it doesn't make sense to adopt a definition of gender which labels 9-year-olds as indeterminate gender.

V. Why not define gender as something else?

V.a. Why not define gender as how society perceives someone?

This was my preferred definition of gender for quite a while, since it bypasses both biology and internal mental states. I still think it's probably my favorite of these options, even though almost no one else seems to use this definition when asked! (Even if people's behavior and attitudes seem to match it.) However, after arguing with one of my friends about it, I've come to see two problems with it.

Firstly, genderedness of social treatment varies. If we are saying that being treated as women (or cis females) are treated makes one a woman, then it follows that there are some ways that society treats women. Suppose person X experiences such treatment occasionally, perhaps because they rarely experience sexism and are mostly not treated according to their gender, while person Y experiences such treatment very often (maybe they, idk, get catcalled a lot because of a female appearance, or their family or friends heavily pressure them to adhere to gender roles). This model says that person X and person Y are both women, because they are both perceived by society as women. But why shouldn't we say that person Y is more of a woman than person X, because they experience more such treatment?

You can say "because that doesn't make sense, either you are a woman or you aren't," which is fine but feels arbitrary (other gendered experiences lack this problem because they can't vary in intensity - but it is true that people who define gender as chromosomes don't usually say that someone with XYY is "more of a man" than someone with XY); or you can bite the bullet and allow some people to be more of their gender than others. However, I worry that in practice this will end up falling into many of the same issues as defining gender as adherence to stereotypes or as presentation (see section II).

The second objection is that social perception is inconsistent; perhaps person Z is treated as a woman in some situations and as a man or as an indeterminate gender/nonbinary person in other situations. The theory would then have to conclude this person was in some kind of in-between category, which may be inappropriate when it comes to some categories of people who are sometimes treated as one gender and sometimes as another, like extremely butch women, crossdressing men, and transgender people early in transition. I think in some sense these people are in between genders more than most people, but I'm not sure if that justifies categorizing them as in between genders, rather than outlier examples of a specific gender.

A third objection is that this is still sort of circular, like I argue against in section V.b., because how does society (which is just a collection of people making decisions) know what gender to treat someone as, without being circular? One, admittedly slightly self-obsessed, response is that lots of people don't use this definition, and if everyone adopted it then it would be circular. But if everyone adopted this definition we could just stop caring about gender altogether, and it wouldn't exist as a concept and therefore wouldn't have to be defined. If you are against gender abolition in even hypothetical glorious futures, as many people seem to be, then this definition doesn't work.

V.b. Why not define a person's gender as being the gender they identify as?

Because this is a circular argument. Elaborating on my argument against this sort of thing from section III.a., this claim is essentially that a person X is a gender G if X identifies as a G. But claims of identification must come from somewhere! How should one know which gender to identify as? If it's just some sort of voice in your head, then we're back at internal senses of gender, as in section III. If it's not, X must make a decision of which gender to identify as***, and they've chosen gender G. But being gender G is just defined as being someone who identifies as gender G, so it's not possible to know if one is gender G before figuring out what one identifies as.

Another way to think about this is that if you swapped the meanings of the words "men" and "women," so that everybody who identified as a man now identified as a woman and vice versa, under this definition of gender...absolutely nothing would be incoherent.

Perhaps a steelman of this argument is that "woman" refers to a set of people who are all more similar to the "woman" cluster than the "man" cluster, and vice-versa, so one's gender is defined relative to other people and where they stand relative to these clusters. This has many of the same issues as gender roles in my opinion (see section II), but is also probably in contention with section V.a.'s gender-as-social-perception for my preferred way to think about gender.

VI. Why did you just write 2500 words about definitions? And where do we go from here?

Because words should mean things, and gender is important to many people's lives. Also because I want an answer to the question of what gender I am - not that I seriously plan to change my gender, but I have no good explanation of why I'm [gender I am]**** other than "I guess that's how it is, people say I'm that, I'd maybe be unhappy if I were something else? Does it matter?"

As far as where to go, although I really hope I find some universal coherent and useful definition of gender, for now I think we have to muddle along with some strange mix of these poor definitions of gender. But I think it's important to be aware that gender isn't a well-defined concept, and to be mindful of what we mean when we talk about "gender," "men," and "woman"; I think some conflicts are caused by differing definitions of these words rather than other disagreements.

I would really appreciate anybody reblogging this post, or replying as a comment, if they have anything to say on the matter, especially disagreements with the post, defenses of definitions I don't like, and suggestions for better definitions.

Footnotes

Sometimes, people think you can be in denial in one way, but not the other (in denial about being transgender), and you can be lying in the opposite direction (lying about being cisgender) only.

As in

This character:

Ciri.

In this trailer:

there have been at least three separate people I’ve known whose bedrooms had this vibe: the incredible clashing between different shades of pink, the dark carpet, the messiness, the poor lighting filtering through that dark curtain—I know how it feels being in this room.

I painted my room this exact color in 2008/2009. martha’s organized, but she’s a student and it’s a cramped space—she arranges her shelves the best she can, but her stuff is just stuff and doesn’t perfectly match. when I’m at school I have to dry my laundry in the middle of my room exactly the same way!

yup, that’s what every break room I’ve ever had at work looks like, with the mismatched tupperware and posters and questionably-clean microwave.

sylvia’s house is obviously intended to be coordinated, but with a nonprofessional’s taste. you can see the little pumpkins in the background from halloween, there’s a printed tablecloth at the table, the counters are that realistic mix of cluttered and clean. 

even in a fancy office, we’ve got the ugly fluorescent lighting that’s not really doing anyone favors, the crooked potted plants, the sporadic beige and white walls, the random workplace posters above the printer and trash cans.

people sitting in weird places because there aren’t enough seats around the tv! the cat tower with kitty litter shoved in the corner! the overstuffed table! the slightly-crooked picture frames! this IS the vibe of being stuffed into a too-small room with company over.

When you said "innocent", you could have meant/referred to

journalistic ethics

whether or not he has done it, the case against Luigi is quite weak, and he will probably walk

whether or not he will be found innocent, Luigi didn't do it

#1 is just a no-brainer, but the ethical rules are different for private individuals than for journalism. You don't write in a newspaper that he "is the killer", you say alleged and accused of, unless you are damn sure.

You don't really know about #2. You can say things like "based on the evidence available", but before there has been a trial, it's all speculation. You don't know what will be entered into evidence.

Now #3 is by itself only a conspiracy theory once the trial is over. If you say #3 before the trial, then only #3 AND NOT #2 is a conspiracy theory.

There were so many people who thought others meant #3 (actual innocence) when they meant #1 or #2. There was never all that much disagreement about this. I mean, most of us weren't there, so how would I know about #3? Some people just assumed #3 in bad faith, when somebody else clearly meant #1. And even though I am not a newspaper, I think I can criticise a newspaper for not doing #1 properly, and I can err on the side of caution and say "accused" or "alleged" until there is a verdict.

If somebody published made-up experimental results, even if the results are misleading, dangerous, and were made up out of whole cloth, the threshold for a university to intervene is high.

If you're writing your thesis, your advisor may be as strict or as lenient about methods as he or she wants, but if you have a PhD, it takes a lot for the research integrity people at your university to step in, and even then, they often drag their feet, while the administration fights tooth and claw to keep the thing under wraps or end the investigation as fast as possible. If you are publishing a paper, the peer reviewers might be really tough and unreasonable on you, but once the paper is past peer review, it takes a lot to retract it.

You also see that in the reporting. About half of the reporting, at least here in REDACTED, says "He was just unfairly targeted for his plagiarism because he's black", while the other half says "Former professor Arday, 41, plagiarist, compulsive liar, and impostor found dead by authorities so you know he didn't fake that one, too."

About half the reporting acts af if everybody plagiarises, everybody fakes research, everybody lies on his CV, but these racists made a big deal out of it. That half also leaves out all the made-up stories about playing for Crystal Palace, his snooker career, or his marathons.