As a response to your recent thread:
Blanchardianism makes claims about trans women which trans women disagree with. For instance that trans women are primarily motivated by autogynephilia.
Given this disagreement, it's possible to analyze it in a cooperative manner, for instance maybe Blanchardians and trans women have observed different pieces of the puzzle, and by sharing information with each other, they can get a more accurate picture of things. However the fact that the disagreement has been stuck for a while now suggests that this is not a very likely explanation.
So another possibility is that one of the sides is trolling the other side. If one of the sides is trolling, then we should expect that side to make bizarre and misleading arguments. And I would claim that the Blanchardian side regularly does so, e.g. with emphasizing menstruation fetishism, or by doing deceptive sampling.
These are the sorts of things that would make me go "You'll Never Persuade People Like That".
You counterargue:
This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for this-and-such proposition, and my interlocutor isn't, themselves, convinced by my arguments, it makes sense for them to reply about why they, personally, aren't convinced. Why is it relevant whether I would convince some third party that isn't here?
What's going on in this kind of situation? Why would someone think "You'll never persuade people like that" was a relevant reply?
In this sort of case, I personally have a bunch of evidence about the validity of autogynephilia theories that makes me unlikely to change my mind a lot on the topic. However, I might be able to provide feedback of what sorts of arguments normatively should change people's minds, among those on the fence.
And in these cases, the arguments are really trollish. So normatively, when people see those arguments, they should go "huh, I guess the Blanchardians are a trollish side in this debate", and un-update away from whatever they've "learned" from the Blanchardians.
Originally I was annoyed by the trollish arguments, since I was trying to argue for autogynephilia theory. However I have mostly given up with pushing for autogynephilia theory, for various reasons including the fact that the people involved are terrible trolls. But it's kind of frustrating because I didn't originally have much way of proving the trollishness, since I had learned that they were trollish through trollish arguments in private emails/private conversations and through their lack of updates on my critiques. So at this point I feel a sense of reassurance and validation when Blanchardians push obviously trollish points and I get to point them out in a low-context way.
So, if you've been reading my Less Wrong posts over the last twenty-one months, you'll notice that I've been doing a lot of philosophy-of-language blogging lately! Those posts are:
(forthcoming)But, if you didn't know, the reason I've been doing so much philosophy-of-language blogging lately is because I was frustrated because I thought a lot of people were motivatedly getting the philosophy of language wrong for political convenience, specifically around transgender issues. (I think assertions like "trans women are women" and similar need to be argued for on the empirical merits; you can't just define them to be true.)
In particular, "Where to Draw the Boundaries?" was intended as a "stealth reply" (quoting/paraphrasing without attribution in order to reply to the philosophical substance while eliding the political context) to:
I also write a blog about gender issues under a differential-visibility-but-not-actually-Secret pen name. The posts from that blog that are most relevant to my philosophical writing on Less Wrong are:
To allay concerns about premature abstraction of political issues, I'm putting up this non-Frontpageable post in case anyone wants to comment on or ask questions about my object-level motivations without cluttering up our philosophy discussions.