Transcript: "Autogynephilia and Epistemic Despair"

I went on Phil Illy's show to talk about the blog! There's probably not much new here for long-time readers.

Here's the transcript, which has been, you know, like, sort of edited for, like, clarity. (I'm not a practiced speaker, and verbatim transcripts are famously awful.)

PI: Hi everyone, I'm here with Zack M. Davis, who had a big impact on me when I was learning about autogynephilia. He writes this blog called The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought. It's about social science and epistemology with a focus on gender issues, in particular autogynephilia. Reading his work during my initial foray into learning about autogynephilia helped me feel a lot less crazy. I was feeling gaslit, because the science was saying one thing, and then I was facing unanimous opposition from trans women online all saying that it was wrong. So it kind of made me have a sort of dissociation feeling from being lied to. Anyway, his blog helped me a lot with that. He's put a lot of thought into this, and so I'm really glad to have him on the channel. Thank you for coming on my channel, Zack.

ZMD: Thanks for having me. I've been meaning to do a podcast for a while, and I kept not like getting around to like writing up a pitch letter. But you wrote me a pitch letter, so it worked out—a little bit late.

PI: This is a great start, hopefully, and I hope I hope to see you on more podcasts, because I think you've put a great deal of thought into autogynephilia and the politics surrounding it. Your blog goes into great depth, and it's a great resource for, I'd say, particularly sort of rational thinking AGPs that might really like it. It just had a big impact on me. I've heard from plenty of other self-aware AGPs that they really appreciate your blog. As far as I could tell, you're held in high esteem by those who read you.

ZMD: The narcissism is probably not interesting to your listeners. We should get on to the content part.

PI: Right. [facetiously:] Zack, you're great. I guess a good place to start might be your history with autogynephilia, like how you first started noticing it in your life, and what that looked like.

ZMD: So about age 13, eighth grade, I started—you know, it was a heteronormative time. I already knew that boys were supposed to like girls. But there was that moment in puberty where you start to actually like girls. And around that time I started actually noticing girls, there was also just this assorted associated thought of—I don't know how to describe it, but just, wouldn't it be nice if I looked like that? And just admiring women, but in a sort of identifictory way.

And within a few years, this blossomed out into lots and lots of little things. I started swirling the descenders in my handwriting, because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine. When it was time to go to college and order bedsheets for the [beds] at college, I deliberately got the pink with flowers design on principle. I was reading about feminism ... there was just this feeling of wanting to identify with women.

Someone listening to someone listening to this account in 2024 would say, "Well, the obvious explanation is you're trans. That's what's going on. You're obviously so trans, so eggy."

That's not what it looked like in 2004. Because there was also this very obvious erotic aspect, which I don't think we need to go into that much detail on on the podcast. There was this beautiful, pure, sacred self-identity thing, but there was also very obviously this erotic thing. And the erotic thing was very obviously erotic; there was no reason to deny this. I didn't have a name for this thing.

PI: Did you connect the the beautiful, pure, sacred self-identity thing, which—I love how you call it that, because I saw I resonate with that description—were you able to connect that to the erotic thing? Or did it seem like they felt separate?

ZMD: It seemed like if I had bothered asking the question in that many words, I would have obviously said there's a connection.

At the time, I didn't really talk about the erotic thing. This was not something I expected to be podcasting about 20 years later. I don't know where it came from. In middle school, my friends lent me this graphic novel series called Ranma ½, featuring a male protagonist who transforms into a woman on being exposed to cold water. I don't know if that had an influence, but—

PI: Did you try taking a cold shower after reading that?

ZMD: No—I mean, no.

PI: Okay.

ZMD: But in the series, he's like, "Oh, no, this is a terrible curse. I want to rid myself of the curse." And I'm reading this thinking, "That actually sounds great."

PI: Yeah, it's obviously good, right?

ZMD: Right. And so, obviously, I did not tell anyone about this, except, very haltingly, a couple of close personal friends, because this is clearly a weird sex thing.

Around 2006, I was browsing Wikipedia, and I found the word autogynephilia. And I'm like, "Oh, there's a word for the thing. That's what I am. There's a word for the thing." I was very excited. I wrote about it in my notebook. I have a blog post like that excerpts the page from my notebook about this.

PI: Yeah, that's a good post. I like that one.

ZMD: And so at the time, I even wrote about this in my notebook at the time, I was surprised. Of course, this is like 2006. I had heard about transsexualism as a thing. Everyone knows that that exists. But it wasn't something that was—I had definitely not met any trans people in real life that I knew about.

So I get exposed to this word, I'm like, "Oh, that's obviously the word for the thing," and I'm surprised: wait, this is part of an explanation for transsexualism? I was actually surprised because as part of the whole beautiful, pure, sacred self-identity thing, I was also—at the time I called it anti-sexism—I was very into psychological sex differences denialism. The whole idea of being trans, because you're actually a woman inside—that seemed wrong to me. What would that mean?

PI: Right, because if there's very little differences between the sexes, then what would that even mean?

ZMD: Yeah, it's just a sexist idea. I knew I was a male because of my anatomy. That's just what the word means.

Later, as I was growing up in my later teens and 20s, I read a lot more science, and I gradually backed off from what I'm now calling psychological sex differences denialism, because I gradually realized that, yeah, this doesn't actually look true. I was very committed to it in principle, but I look at the world around me, and it just ...

PI: It's obviously not true.

ZMD: Yeah. And so I wrote in my diary in 2004, "I would never do drag, because that represents a mockery," because the idea of trans, within the social justicey mindset of the time, where sexism was a bigger problem than transphobia, trans itself didn't seem like a politically correct idea to me, back when I still believed in the political correctness of the time.

PI: Yeah, and I've noticed quite a few trans people do something similar, where they try to downplay sexual dimorphism, I think because they want, but maybe for different reasons, to think it's easier to cross over into the other gender if there are less differences.

ZMD: Maybe. And so I spent 10 years from, 2006 to 2016, reading everything I could about gender and transgender and evo psych and sex differences, and I didn't realize. Of course, I had heard of Blanchard at all. It was in the Wikipedia article.

And so in 2007, I bought this book when it was new, Julia Serano's Whipping Girl, and, it's just so darkly comic in hindsight, how many clues there were that I missed that about—

PI: The connection between autogynephilia and transgenderism?

ZMD: Because I had assumed that AGP was a different thing, I had assumed, oh, well, trans people, trans people say they have this inner gender identity thing, so I believe them, that must be right. And I'm like, but me, my thing is AGP, it clearly has to be a different thing, because the idea that these are actually the same thing, or that they actually share it, or that one is the root cause of the other, wasn't the mainstream view, and because it wasn't the mainstream view, I had no particular reason to believe it. And it's just hilarious how many clues there were, like—

Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes, the deceptive transsexual, or the pathetic transsexual. While characters based on both models are presented as having a vested interest in achieving an ultra-feminine appearance, they differ in their abilities to pull it off. Because the deceiver successfully passes women, they generally act as unexpected plot twists, or play the role of sexual predators who fool innocent straight guys into falling for other men.

When I looked at this back in 2016, after I had my Blanchardian enlightenment, I'm like, oh, this is the two types.

PI: Exactly. Yeah.

ZMD: And, so, I had been exposed to this idea of the two-type typology, you know, I read, The Man Who Would Be Queen, but I somehow just never put my weight down on it, I guess because I didn't know any trans people in real life. And so what changed was, in 2016, I moved to Berkeley, California. I was already in the Bay Area, but I moved to what, at the time, I thought was the correct side of the Caldecott Tunnel. I've since changed my mind about that.

But Berkeley, it was closer to my day job in San Francisco, and I had more friends in the area, and so I moved to Berkeley, moving out of my mom's house. And then, in Berkeley, you can't help but meet a higher density of trans people, and in particular, in my social circle, like, quite a lot of trans women, and, you start to notice the obvious similarities between me and a lot of these trans women. And this came as a huge shock, because I had been assuming for 10 years that my thing was a different thing.

PI: Even though that Blanchard's theory was a theory of transsexualism, you still thought that AGP was a different thing?

ZMD: Well, Blanchard is just some guy, right? I still believe this, by the way. How was I supposed to know that he was actually right? Lots of people say things.

PI: Fair enough.

ZMD: And so there was this period of several months of being, wait a minute, I had assumed my thing was just a weird sex thing that I would just quietly live in—not shame, exactly, but to a first approximation, quietly live in shame forever, because I had assumed that trans women are a different thing. I was a guy because, I didn't have a choice in the matter. I may have had these beautiful, pure, sacred identity feelings, such that I grew my beautiful, beautiful ponytail, and there was a disastrous period in the late 'aughts where I was trying to use my initials as a nickname, because I thought, I didn't like having an identifiably masculine name.

PI: Right, an androgynous name would be better.

ZMD: This turned out to be a terrible idea, because, "Z.M." doesn't even feel like a name. I wanted to use my first two initials like a name. Some people can pull that off. It just didn't work. And also, Zachary is ten times more common than Zoë and Zelda put together.

Anyway, little things like that: there's this obsession over years about—not femininity, because as a proud anti-sexist, I believed that femininity didn't really exist. But femaleness and wanting to identify with femaleness. But it was always a dream. I never actually believed it. And especially as I grew out of my anti-sexist phase, I especially didn't believe it.

And so, suddenly moving to Berkeley, meeting all these people who, seemed a lot like me, but also, seemed to believe that they were women and seemed to believe that everyone else should believe that they were women. It just didn't make sense to me, and it still doesn't make sense.

It's funny because, I want to—okay, I'm not a progressive, but, the underlying psychological generator that makes progressive political sentiment sound like a good idea, I want to stay loyal to that generator. So when I say it doesn't make sense to me, I don't mean that in the crudest, like, meanest, stigmatizing, "these people are bad and wrong and evil and unclean" sense. I just mean it's literally not true. That's all.

PI: Right. Yeah. What was it like, how did you start coming to realize that they were, that you actually did share an etiology with them?

ZMD: So like as a result of this, I started reading more. I read Kay Brown's blog and corresponded with her a bit. And I started having a lot of private conversations, whenever I could: "hey, you know, could we talk in private about gender stuff"?

And people are pretty willing to talk in private, but there's still this disconnect, this fundamental stumbling block where, I can see there's this person who, my social circle agrees, this is a trans woman. And I'm looking at this and saying, "That's a guy. That's a guy with long hair like me."

It was different after taking Blanchard seriously, because before that, I had met a trans woman at a meetup, and I had assumed she was a different thing. I was respectfully believing, when it was still plausible that most trans women were a completely different thing than me. I believed the gender identity story and didn't presume to question it.

But after the idea had been made salient to me that, wait, my erotic thing and my beautiful, pure self-identity thing, that is the thing people are calling being trans? The illusion snapped, and I'm just, like, I don't believe this.

And again, I'm a transhumanist. I am in favor of morphological freedom. If people want to modify their bodies to have a body that's more suited to them, that seems great to me. I think Society should accommodate that in some way. But in order to figure out what the correct way to accommodate it is, you want to be very, very clear about what the actual phenomenon is and what the available interventions actually do.

So after I had this period of freaking out, having a lot of private conversations, doing a lot of reading, at this point, I realized—I had fantasized, years before, in 2009, I had fantasized about taking hormones, but obviously never did anything about it, because it just wasn't done.

So in late 2016, I finally was finally like, "Wait a minute, I actually am eligible." So I went to the gender clinic at Kaiser and ended up trying out HRT for five months, and then chickened out, because I was like, what are the long-term health risks? What about fertility risks? I was just—it was an experiment worth trying.

PI: Do you think you're going to try it again? Or was that enough?

ZMD: I think that was enough. I was curious.

PI: I recall in your post about this, I think it's called putting the 'cis' in 'decision' or something like that. It seemed like you were hoping that it would significantly change sort of how your mind works to be in a more feminine manner.

ZMD: I wouldn't say hoping, cause again, remember that I still retain the generator of my teenage anti-sexism, even though I don't actually believe that anymore. But I was scientifically curious about, is this going to have a huge effect? Subjectively, I don't think I noticed much. I definitely noticed libido going down, but other than that, I can't definitively say it had no psychological effect other than the libido, because maybe it did, and I just didn't notice, but I don't think I felt very different. Other people will give you different self-reports on this.

PI: I personally suspect that your experience is probably pretty accurate in terms of the actual psychological changes it makes. I expect it to make morphological changes, but I feel like a lot of the psychological changes people report are just them more inhabiting their feminine persona more deeply.

ZMD: I kind of suspect that, but I haven't like studied it in detail—I don't know. I don't want to like confidently assert things that I don't actually know. There was some breast growth, which was—it was a worthwhile gender-themed drug experiment. And at the time I was like very adamant: I'm not transitioning; this is a gender-themed drug experiment.

But it's just bizarre to me that—so on the one hand, like, you might think, if you disagree with everyone around you, maybe you're the one that's wrong. But it just seems like my theory does a better job of explaining everyone else's experience than their theory does about explaining me. You could try to come up with a story like, you actually are trans and you have a gender identity, but you're just repressing it. And the erotic aspect is a effect of gender identity, not a cause. And this worldview just seems horribly gerrymandered to me.

I say horribly gerrymandered, but in order to explain what that means, there's this whole associated like philosophy of language that like explains what I mean by that. And maybe for people who didn't follow my trajectory of going deep into the sex differences literature and deep into like the sort of philosophy I was reading, maybe they don't have the same concepts that make this seem so intuitive to me. Again, this goes both ways. I don't want to like arrogantly say, ah, "I know more; therefore I'm epistemically superior to all of you." But on the other hand, I try to like write clearly about what I think is going on. And if someone else thinks they have a better account, they're welcome to blog about it too.

PI: Yeah. I've found that, after I learned about autogynephilia and the associated theory that it seemed to describe what I was seeing so good compared to the gender identity.

ZMD: Especially when you look at what trans women write online when the general public isn't watching. You go to /r/MtF, the subreddit search for fetish in the sidebar, and there are like dozens upon dozens of posts where people say, "Oh, you know, I get an erection when I have gender euphoria" or "My gender dysphoria goes away after masturbating." If you just look at the literal text of what people are literally claiming about the world, this is obviously autogynephilia. This is obviously just like the straightforward explanation of what's going on, if you just look at the world. And then the commenters are like, "Oh no," there's somehow this ideology that's like, "you're actually a woman, specifically a woman who happens to be trans, and this is just a symptom of that."

PI: Yeah. They switch up the cause and effect, basically, where the gender identity is the ultimate cause in their perspective, whereas the way we see it is more that the autogynephilia is the ultimate cause.

ZMD: Yeah. Or I don't want to be too like dogmatic about—there could be multiple causes. In the sense that, introspectively, it seems like a pretty good guess that like my AGP was a necessary cause of what I've been calling the beautiful, pure, sacred self-identity thing. But you can imagine it not being a sufficient cause, like the fact that I'm not a macho guy's guy. I'm a sensitive introspective nerd. And there could be multiple causes leading someone to have like gender identity feelings, but it's still seems pretty obvious that autogynephilia is a major cause.

PI: Yeah, for sure. I'm open to the possibility that there's other causes. But I just haven't seen any convincing cases made for any additional causes, besides the homosexual type, of course.

ZMD: Yeah. But you can imagine that there don't necessarily have to be discrete types. I mean, yes, it clearly looks like the late-onset type and the early onset type—you just look at the world, these seem like very different things. But part of what makes this such a puzzle is that within the late onset type itself, there's lots of variety. And you could say, you could insist that autogynephilia is the root cause and it manifests in various ways, or you could posit that autogynephilia is a major cause and there are like other inputs that could go into it. I don't actually know.

Anyway, let's go back, switching back to my story in 2016. So I had a lot of these conversations. I did a lot of reading. And at the time I was feeling very betrayed, very upset that my society, my subculture, very much believes in gender identity in a way that I just don't think makes sense. I don't think it's true. AGP very clearly seems like a very prominent causal factor that no one seems to be treating as a prominent causal factor. If you corner someone in the right context, you can get them to get them to admit that the phenomenon exists, but the idea that this is a major cause, and that the causes actually matter, does not seem to be on people's radar.

Most of this freaking out was in private to start, and then like gradually getting louder and louder, and deciding to start a blog. I took my very smart and very cowardly friends' advice to start using a pseudonym at first, so I was M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake, the first part of that pen surname being from Ranma ½. I started a blog and I started writing about this stuff.

As I was writing, at first I thought I was arguing for the two-type typology, that there's HSTS, the early-onset type, and there's AGP, the late-onset type, and these are different things: Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence are right about everything. The reason I was so insistent that they were right about everything was because no one else had any credible alternative. And as I started arguing, as I was having these arguments with people in my intellectual community, the really disturbing thing is that it started seeming to be the case that the causes and the etiology didn't actually seem to be a crux for people.

I started out arguing that AGP, late-onset gender dysphoria is not an intersex condition. You can choose to be very libertarian and transhumanist about it, but let's be clear about the facts. And I kept seeing this argument that was not even engaging with the empirical question of, is AGP the root cause in all these trans women that we know, but just saying that words, categories are a human invention that we impose upon the world; how about we define the word woman such that it includes people who want to be identified as women? And since this way of drawing the category boundary will make people happier, that's the utilitarian, the correct decision.

I think this argument is bonkers. This is really, really crazy.

PI: Right. It undermines the rationalist subculture being about using good reasoning and epistemology to arrive at true things.

ZMD: I didn't even want to talk about the rationalists in this podcast that much. Anyway, basically, I'm part of a cult.

Okay, it's not really a cult. There's this internet-based subculture that ostensibly cares a lot about reasoning and science and that kind of stuff. That's all your listeners need to know. That's the context in which I was having debates with everyone.

Okay, I guess it is a little bit relevant that one the subculture's founding texts specifically had this sequence about like how language works and how you want to like draw your categories that carve reality at the joints such that like you're grouping—

What does it mean when we call someone a woman, or call this a book, or call something a pencil? What does it mean for something to belong to a category? The proposed answer here is that you group similar things into the same category in order to make similar predictions about them. Because reality is complicated, you can't know everything about the world, but you can use features that you observe to assign category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about the features that you haven't observed yet. So if I see a cat, and I haven't seen it move yet, I haven't heard it like make any noises yet, I can probably predict that it's going to move in a cat-like way and make the meowing sound that cats make, because like this is a very stable predictable feature of the world that I can use to make predictions, even if I haven't seen this particular animal before. And so that's how categories work.

In 2009, it was not controversial that this is how categories work, among the sort of weird nerds who like actually talk about this area of philosophy occasionally. And then suddenly in 2016, the weird nerds who talk about this area of philosophy occasionally have this brand new philosophy of language that says, ah, well, when we do that thing of assuming the cat is going to meow, we do that for our convenience. Therefore, it's not like an inherent feature of the world. And therefore we can also define gender categories the way we want.

And this is really crazy, but explaining why it's crazy is actually kind of subtle. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about this in a lot of detail, writing many thousands of words, carefully explaining the problems, doing a little bit of math.

It was funny because at first I thought I was arguing for the two-type typology. And then it turns out the situation on the ground of what our culture is interested in, is actually so much worse than I thought at first, because I thought people would be interested in the empirics of, what is going on? And it turns out that that's not even the main issue. I didn't even need to get there. Because I was still stuck on this much more basic issue of, can you redefine concepts in order to make, in order to make your map of the territory look good to you?

PI: Right. Can you redefine words to make people feel better?

ZMD: Yeah. And the fact that I had to put so much effort into this very, very obvious thing and people still pretended—I mean, I think the smart people got it, but it didn't percolate out to cultural-level common knowledge.

PI: And they might not say it openly, even the people that did get it.

ZMD: Yeah. So at this point, because I'm less dogmatic about the two-type typology these days, I don't even necessarily care that much about, we need to popularize the two-type taxonomy specifically. I do want to popularize that AGP is a real thing that is clearly a causal factor in a lot of these gender problems. And also just that Biological Sex Actually Exists and Is Sometimes Relevant, Even When It Makes People Sad. That is my minimum ask.

PI: That's a low bar.

ZMD: It's a very low bar, but people who want to remain in good standing with progressive Society are not willing to say that sentence on Twitter. Everyone believes this, but no one is going to say it that clearly.

PI: It's definitely frustrating. I've had similar frustration when talking with people about gender stuff years ago, when I was first learning about autogynephilia. So the people that were disagreeing with me, couldn't tell me what a woman was with a non-circular definition. I just fundamentally can't respect interlocutors when they can't even define such a supposedly central term. And especially if they have a gender studies degree and can't tell me what a woman is: what did you even learn?

ZMD: Well, the gender studies we wish we had is not the gender studies we actually have. I remember back in 2007, I was really excited—this was like still back in my anti-sexism phase—I was really excited to take the "Introduction to Feminisms" class at UC Santa Cruz, because I was still very early in my disillusionment with the cultural left. I was excited that I was going to take "Introduction to Feminisms"; I'm going to do well as a male in this class and be honorable.

It just felt like the whole class was like taught in a language that I couldn't speak. You have all these assertions that this-and-such as oppression and, yes, obviously I agree; I'm a good person. But how does the oppression work? It just seems like there are large swaths of social science that like are not into figuring out how the world works in a disinterested way. That sounds mean and uncharitable.

PI: No, it's fair. That's accurate.

ZMD: But when you talk to the people themselves, they don't really seem to disagree either. I was in a "Contemporary Sexuality" class at SF State—I have a very tragic educ—schooling backstory that we don't need to get into because that's not what this podcast is about—I'm complaining in class that activism and scholarship are different things, and the professor's like, "No, I don't think they are." So ...

PI: Yeah, I've been bothered to see the corruption of the academy with how political it's gotten. There's whole fields like sociology and anthropology, for instance, that have gotten so heavily waiting towards activist researchers that there's not research being done anymore into true stuff.

ZMD: Again, I am wary of the possible failure mode—the woke social-justice people have their own ideological buble. I don't want to fall into the failure mode of forming an anti-woke bubble where we form our own parallel ideological bubble that we're not aware of. I don't want to say that there's like nothing—I recommend reading widely. I don't want to say that there's nothing there, but there's still something missing.

You can imagine a better world where the state of scientific literacy was greater, and we did have more real science on this topic, because there's just so much that we just don't know, and there's not a whole lot of people interested in figuring stuff out. Even me, I'm mostly not working on this topic these days, because, I have other things to do with my life.

PI: Right, you've already thought through a lot of it, and might just feel like, I've already done that, been there, done that.

ZMD: I've done the stuff that I needed to do to figure out my own life. In 2016, this was all, very confusing. What's going on? Now I think I have enough of a basic picture of how the world works, and how it differs from the socially acceptable narrative world that I'm not in this fundamental epistemic crisis anymore, and now that the crisis is solved, I can go do math and programming and stuff, but while the crisis was going on, resolving it seemed pretty urgent.

It's sad because the ideas you have—one of the complications, one of the things that makes studying psychology so hard is that the ideas you have influence what your mind is like. Your mind is partially made of ideas. You kind of expect that, on a biological level, my experience of AGP and trans women's experience of AGP is probably pretty similar—I mean, modulo hormone replacement therapy is going to change some stuff.

PI: You interpret it differently.

ZMD: Yeah, the way I interpret my experience—for me, like, because I learned about, I learned about AGP first and lost my belief in psychological sex differences denialism, when I'm thinking about, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have a female body, it's very clear to me—even within, even while writing erotica for myself or getting GPT-4 to write erotica for me, I'm very clear that this is a story about a male-brained person wanting to have a female body. I'm mostly on the anatomic autogynephilia rather than the interpersonal dimension. Rather than magically just being a woman, because—there's a question of the implementation details.

Given that there are sex differences in psychology and the brain, do I actually want to have a female brain? If you could actually do that, would that be desirable?

And when I introspect on my own desires, I think my answer is largely no, because—I mean, other than scientific curiosity, being a transhumanist and wanting to experience everything—but if I take it seriously, I have to imagine that if I could magically have a more female-like brain, it seems like that would, by necessity, take out the necessarily male part of my sexuality that finds this very scenario exciting, right?

If you were actually a woman, you would not be so erotically obsessed with this idea of being a woman. Or at least, that's always seemed obvious to me. A lot of people seem to dispute this. I don't think we have time to get into the AGP in women—AGP and cis women—debate on this podcast, but I've never found that very plausible.

PI: I don't find it too plausible either. Maybe it happens in a subset of lesbians, but I wouldn't expect it to be that common.

ZMD: Yeah, I read a couple, a couple self-reports from lesbians that—okay, maybe that. But that's usually not what people are talking about when they say cis women are AGP, too, which I think is mostly cope.

PI: Right, absolutely. When you started writing your blog and people started reading it, what sort of reactions did you get from it?

ZMD: My social circle is pretty good at free speech norms, so I think it was mostly just a lot of polite disagreement. Free speech norms such that I'm not getting hounded out of the city or actively shunned. They're not good at using the power of free speech to get the right answer, but they're not going to ostracize you either.

PI: That's not so bad. Still not the best, but it could have been a lot worse, at least emotionally.

ZMD: I mean, I did actually have that nervous breakdown and get hospitalized. But it could have been worse.

There was a dramatic episode that I mentioned in part one of my memoir, where I was arguing about this stuff on Facebook and staying up too late, and eventually the stress and the sleep deprivation, I went a little bit crazy for a while there.

On the one hand, it was actually pretty bad for me, but I want to accept my share of the blame for that, and say that my friends are pretty good at free speech norms, even though they're not very good at actually being sane.

I'm sorry if that sounds arrogant, but I've also, in non-podcast form, written in thousands of words in lots and lots of detail why I think that. And if someone disagrees, please let me know in the comments.

PI: Right. Because if someone disagrees with you, you'll definitely be willing to listen to them and update your beliefs if you see that they have a good point.

ZMD: The philosophy of language thing was actually—on the one hand, I'm resentful that I had to go into that much detail and rigor about this very, very obvious, drop-dead obvious thing. But it actually was a pretty good exercise in being better at philosophy, of nailing down all these—because it gets pretty subtle.

I ended up writing an 11,000 word post, "Unnatural Categories Are Optimized for Deception", in which I'm arguing that the only reason that you would want to draw category boundaries for non-predictive reasons is because you want to fool someone or you want to fool some part of yourself into making a prediction that will make the map look good at the expense of reflecting the territory.

I don't know if that made sense to your listeners, but you can read the post. We'll link it in the description.

PI: I think I first started reading your blog around the time you had that detour into the philosophy of language stuff. And I got what you were doing, because I'd already read the stuff on autogynephilia. Did the people in your subculture recognize what you were doing?

ZMD: The people I was having gender discussions with did. I can imagine it looking weird to some people, like, why are you so bent up about the philosophy of language? But I think people knew. I was trying to do this thing where I was trying to keep the philosophy stuff separate. I hadn't even dropped the M. Taylor Satome-Westlake pseudonym yet.

So for a couple years, my writing was in this awkward state where, I have my gender and politics blog, and I'm also doing real-name blogging about the philosophy of language. And, these things are obviously—one is obviously the result of the other. And people knew. I eventually ended up dropping the pseudonym, because it was just eventually too awkward. I took my cowardly friends' advice to start with a pseudonym. But I just temperamentally am not well suited to keeping secrets, which is probably causally related to why I'm doing autogynephilia blogging in the first place. That I want a world that makes sense, and I want a world that makes sense in public, and I don't want to hide. I never took the anonymity very seriously. The level of privacy I was going for was, the first page of my "Zack M. Davis" Google search results should hopefully not be my politically sensitive blogging, just for the sake of future job searches. But I'm not even worried about that anymore. I'm going on your podcast with my real name and face.

PI: Yeah, I remember you decided to drop the pseudonym around the time that I was finishing the manuscript for my book. And I was glad to see that you finally felt comfortable coming out. And that point you made about a desire for prioritizing honesty being causally related to talking about autogynephilia. I definitely feel that that applies to myself, as well: that I didn't feel that it was right that I would have to lie because other people with my same sexuality didn't like what the science said about them.

ZMD: Yeah. And I've said this a couple times, but if someone has doubts about the science, that's fine. It is possible to have skeptical good faith doubts about the details,because the whole autogynephilia theory, it's not just one atomic claim that stands or falls on its own. There's this whole bundle of claims about like, what about bisexual trans women? And there's a proposed explanation: "Well, that's meta-attraction." You could reasonably have doubts, where some people might say, "Well, maybe some AGPs really are bisexual." I'm not wedded to every specific detail of all supposedly bisexual trans women are really just only AGP. You're actually in a better position to have an informed opinion than me, because, for your book, you went deep into the sexology literature.

PI: Yeah, before I even started writing the book, I was obsessively reading about the stuff for about a year, and then it got to a point where I knew too much to not share it. And I started writing the book.

ZMD: I've read a lot of the stuff, too, obviously. I'm just heartbroken about that we couldn't even get to the Biological Sex Actually Matters thing. These days, I'm just not even that curious about the details, because, I figured, I know enough to solve my own issues. I was thinking a good title for this podcast episode would be "AGP and Epistemic Despair." Because at this point, I'm just in despair of having a world that makes sense and figuring out what—I don't know.

PI: It seems like that people's desire to have beliefs that feel good is trumping the desire for truth. Yeah. Seems like the fundamental thing that is happening, as far as I can tell.

ZMD: Right. But so, by the way, you and I have both had interactions with our friend Tailcalled, who—I mean, maybe he's not your friend—he started out, you know, he started the Blanchardianism subreddit. And then later, he got disillusioned. And by the way, I think you should have him on the show. Maybe he's cutting at cross-purposes to your political campaign, but I still think it would be a great episode. Anyway, he did a lot of surveys and trying to figure out what's actually going on with trans, and he ended up getting disillusioned with the Blanchardianism side because he thought the science wasn't rigorous enough. He had doubts about the details of ELTE and meta-attraction and so on and so forth.

I think Tail does great work, and it's a tragic, tragic commentary on the state of the world that there was a dynamic that he was frustrated that our intellectual circle, the "Blanchardians", are not being rigorous enough and not being scientifically curious enough.

I almost want to plead guilty to that in some sense, because the reason I did so much writing was not because I was desperately, desperately curious to figure out all the sexological details about how does meta-attraction work or whatever. It was because I had this personal need that, when I look at the world around me, it sure seems like trans women are men and trans men are women. Or male and female, respectively, if you prefer that. And it seems like this matters. It seems like this has implications.

PI: Right, it does matter.

ZMD: I'm curious about at least some of the details, you know?

PI: Yeah, where are you on autoandrophilia? Do you think it's a thing?

ZMD: I mean, it looks like it's a thing. You had Laura on the show, right?

PI: Right, yeah. I find there to be compelling self-reports, like case studies, but I guess I was curious.

ZMD: I don't want to confidently have an opinion about things I haven't studied in detail.

PI: Okay, yeah, fair enough.

ZMD: There was just a sense of, I learned enough to break with the progressive zeitgeist, and I'm mostly focused on other things now.

PI: I also have learned enough about gender stuff and other related things to where what I've learned is too dissimilar from the progressive zeitgeist for me to really believe in it anymore.

ZMD: And yet it moves. We're still in the situation where—you know, when trying to figure out my own self, I wrote about my experiences, and I read about other people's experiences, I read the scientific literature. I feel like I have myself basically figured out, and I don't want to be super confident and dogmatic about having all of sexology and all of psychology figured out.

But when I look at the younger generation, I see people like me who are in their early 20s, and it's not 2006 anymore. These people are transitioning. And I talk to them, and be like, hey, have you considered this autogynephilia thing. And a lot of them can acknowledge similar experiences, but the culture isn't—it's still interpreted through this lens of, "Yeah, but I'm trans."

People have this gender-identity first ontology that so baked in to respectable progressive culture that it's almost like the facts don't matter, arguing doesn't even work; there's this entrenched cultural institution of being a trans woman. The map has influenced the territory in forming this new gender role. Again, you can talk to people in private, and people can be pretty reasonable. People acknowledge in private: yeah, I agree that gynephilic trans women don't seem to be sampled from the cis female distribution. I agree that it makes sense to think of trans women as a de facto third gender role.

But it's weird to have this culture where a lot of people know this, a lot of people have this view, but it is not the common knowledge consensus view. A lot of people have this view privately, and they coexist and share the same social circle with a lot of other people who will say things like, "Yeah, well, back when I thought I was a straight guy." And then I'm silently, because I've sort of learned—

PI: You learned to be silent.

ZMD: Well, no, no, no. I've sort of assigned myself a diplomacy budget where, people in my social circles know of my opinion. And so I don't have to bring it up all the time. You don't have to start, keep fighting the same fight every time. As an atheist in a Christian society, you're not going to start a fight every one time someone praises God. It's just not workable.

But I'll sit there thinking, okay, but you are a straight male. Just literally, you are literally, in fact, biologically male. And you are literally, in fact, gynephilic. That's what those words used to mean: straight guy.

And that's not what those words mean now. But this is a weird and unstable situation where you have this de facto third gender that everyone is bought into respecting. And me too. I use people's correct pronouns even when they don't pass.

But without even committing in detail to what a better world would look like, the current state of affairs does not seem that great to me. And I'm despairing of, despairing—you know, I wrote my blog. I'm doing this, I speak up where I can. But I'm just a very small, small part of the world-spirit. And it seems like the world spirit has other ideas. I don't think the thing that we have is very sustainable.

There's that old saying, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. It seems likely that gender identity culture can endure for a surprisingly long time. Rather than strictly collapsing under the cold light of reason, you can imagine it collapsing because something else game-changing happens instead, like superhuman artificial intelligence or fertility collapse or something.

PI: I think it will eventually collapse just because it's not an accurate description of reality. It's being held in force by sort of authoritarian measures. People are taught a very specific way of thinking and there are consequences for saying otherwise. But I think as trans people, their population continues to grow, more and more people are going to have everyday experience with transsexuals. I think more people will encounter a dissonance between what they're perceiving and what they're being told to think.

ZMD: But there might be a path-dependence where the equilibrium that we end up with could be pretty different from what would happen if the kinds of discussions that you and I are trying to have had happened earlier in political time and been louder and more dominant in the public sphere. In a lot of places you are ending up with this de facto third gender role thing where people still notice who's a.f.a.b. and who is a.m.a.b. People are still noticing these things, but you also still have this entrenched institution of being a trans woman or being a trans man. Whereas you can imagine a different world where biological sex was always primary and some AGPs become femboys or something like that. And in some ways, I think that could—with all due respect to my trans women friends, I think that would be a healthier world in some ways.

PI: Yeah, I think it would be more ontologically sound. But I think what we have now, the gender identity ideology associated with it, I think it was inevitable given just the individual—it seems to me like an egregore that arises out of the autogynephilic wish to be a woman to the greatest extent possible. And then once enough people have that wish, it created this cultural entity.

ZMD: Yeah. And which is just so heartbreaking because, people who know me in Berkeley—you know, if someone was trying to protect gender identity culture, there's one particular tack you could imagine taking where you say, "Oh, fine, you, Zack; you're just a weird fetishist. That's totally a different thing from actually being a trans woman." Which is, again, basically what I thought for 10 years. And it's kind of funny that, among people who know trans people, like in Berkeley, no one actually seems to believe that. When I say I think I'm in the same taxon as trans women, no one particularly seems to doubt this.

PI: Right, because they'll notice the similarities.

ZMD: It's also funny because, again, it breaks my anti-sexist heart, but, you know, sex differences in interests and personality: there's a particular kind of geek that's interested in things instead of people, so there are particular subcultures where it's surprisingly easy to get into a situation where, in a particular context, where there are more trans women than cis women. And that breaks a lot of illusions.

PI: Right, like I recall you writing about that happening at a Rust convention.

ZMD: Just basically, yeah, basically, in sort of the programming spheres that are tilted towards males so much, basically, trans women are a significant proportion of the women. There's this very common thing when I see, you know, I see online, an interesting programming blog post by someone with a female name. I'm, like, oh, are they trans? And, you know, not always, but a significant—

PI: But usually.

ZMD: A significant fraction of the time, very significant fraction of the time. I think I examined the Haskell community survey data, and the trans women to cis women ratio was about one to one.

PI: Which backs up that point you were saying about trans women being sampled from a different distribution than cis women.

ZMD: And if you have this philosophical insight about what it means for something to belong to a category, being more accurately modeled as being sampled from a different distribution is what it means to belong to a category. When I say that I'm male, it's not because identifying with masculinity or maleness or some vision of fulfilling male gender roles. It's just that I, unfortunately or not, I am, in fact, biologically male, and you probably can make some inferences about my behavior and psychology from this. I've accepted this now. I didn't want to believe this in 2004, but it is what it is.

PI: Was it hard to accept that? And once you did, was there a difference in how you felt?

ZMD: These things are pretty gradual.

In terms of despair at turning the culture around, I'm grateful to you for writing the popular-level book, so I don't have to. And really, I couldn't have, because I'm a sensemaker and not a popularizer. When my curiosity is aroused I want to be as rigorous and detailed as possible, which is not the same thing as writing a popular-level text that you can hawk at conferences and stuff. But I heard you had an interesting experience at Genspect last October.

PI: Yeah. I wore what is, for me, typical garb. Obviously, not typical garb for women, you know, sampled from a different distribution, as we've talked about. At the conference itself, it was perfectly fine. I exhibited no conflict, got along with people, not an issue at all. But then, a few days later on Twitter, Kellie-Jay Keen struggled Genspec. And it started this conflict between the two different schools of feminists, between the liberal feminists and the radfems. And with me as the ostensible target, right? I'm the focal point of the discussion, but it's not actually a conflict with me. When you were seeing that, what are some of your thoughts on it?

ZMD: I don't know. I think I have more sympathy for the radfems than you. Because Kellie-Jay Keen, Karen Davis types, they're very clear that they're not trying to do sensemaking. They want a society in which women have their traditional protected spaces, and they are fighting for that. And insofar as people like you and me are more amenable to a compromise solution, where trans women can get their body mods, but we also don't destroy the public concept of sex, they're not happy with that compromise. And I can see why they're not.

I just wish—I can see that there are reasons why it isn't, but I wish the whole conversation could take place at a higher meta level, where first we establish a shared map of the territory of what's actually going on, and then also, and then separately, in addition to that, we have the policy debate about what to do about it.

But given that that's so hard for humans to pull off, I have a little bit of sympathy for the people who are worried that that ostensible attempt—they want to go back to the world where sex is a top-level category that has these top-level protections. I also want—

PI: I think we're both kind of sympathetic to that to some extent, right?

ZMD: And, unfortunately, because—anyway, I don't know.

PI: I actually used to, around 2016 or so, I got exposed to radical feminism, and it seemed really plausible to me for a bit. It seems like a lot of AGP find it plausible, because we're kind of primed to put women up on a pedestal, and radical feminism is kind of female supremacist in sort of its vibe. But after I learned more about psychological sex differences, for example, I came to realizing that it was not a simple matter of, while the male oppression of females is an ancient thing, it even occurs in other primates, it's not just in humans, it's not as simple as that sort of Marxist-derived version of it.

ZMD: But there's also a naturalistic fallacy angle you can take on it and say, yeah, this happens in other primates, but it's still terrible.

PI: Yeah, no, I don't like it. I do have some egalitarian sentiments. I live on the West Coast, in Portland. However, I think we do have to recognize that, that males and females are, on average, different psychologically, and this is apparent to us in everyday life. I'm not sure what the quite, quite what the right policy is, I agree with you that, at least with regards to transsexualism, that adults, the morphological freedom thing, that adults should be able to have access to alter their body. And it may just never be reconcilable between the radical feminists and people that want that freedom.

ZMD: So, I don't know, I think we've covered most of the stuff I wanted to cover.

PI: I noticed you also wanted to talk about, the sort of thing I'm doing, the cause of raising autogynephilic identity as sort of a social category, that you're pessimistic about it, to some extent, and I'd be curious to hear about.

ZMD: Just empirically, I know people in their early 20s who have transitioned and even people who are socially adjacent to me and like my writing in some cases. If they're not buying it, then the chances for the rest of society just seem incredibly bleak. If I can't win definitively, in my own native subculture where I have so much home-field advantage, then the prospects of winning a broader cultural battle just seem hopeless.

PI: Yeah, I do feel that I'm in somewhat of an underdog situation.

ZMD: Sorry, I also want to highlight that it may seem uncouth to talk about winning, because ideally you want to figure out what's actually true and not just fight a zero-sum war between different ideas where the ideas you ended up with, you're just blindly loyal to them without any particular reason. But it looks like science and politics do actually interact, unfortunately, and so, separately from the fact that I think I'm right, the project of sharing those ideas with other people does have some similarities with war and competition, even though that feels like it shouldn't be the case. Anyway, go on.

PI: There is a political element to it, for sure, which is why I might describe it as trying to win something. But even though there does seem to be a lot of headwinds to people accepting autogynephilia theory, I still am optimistic about the ability to spread the ideas and grow the proportion of the autogynephilic and autoandrophilic population who understand these ideas.

ZMD: On the margins.

PI: On the margins, and particularly among the autists. As far as I can tell, these sort of ideas, the autistic autosexuals seem the most able to separate sort of what is true from what might feel good, and they are the most promising subgroup. And I think when you get a large enough group of autists together working on something, great things can happen. Even though in everyday life, the incentives might not be there for people to be out as autogynephilic or autoangrophilic, at least to the degree that homosexuals are able to be out, I do think that so much of life happens these days in the disembodied domain of the internet, and even people who haven't transitioned, they might want to be able to participate in gender discourse and talk about their own experiences and sexual identity just as people with more well-established identities do. My hope is that over time, through building it within community discourse, we'll collectively improve each other's knowledge and when we have false ideas, disprove them. My hope is that over time we'll iteratively arrive at more of our kind understanding the sort of type of sexual orientation they have and also more of them accepting it in a chill way where it's not this huge damage to their self-image, where it's really just like not a big deal because they know other people like that that they respect and it's fine.

ZMD: To the future ... whatever future we can get.

PI: I understand feeling a little bit hopeless, but I think I'm trying to take a really long view on this that if autogynephilia is true, then eventually that sort of meme will win out to some extent, and it might take a very long time. People are still struggling with evolution by natural selection. It used to be Christians that were bothered by it, and now it's the egalitarian left that has issues with its implications. But I think eventually ideas that are true, they have a certain staying power to them.

ZMD: Hopefully. We can hope.

PI: I can hear your voice; I can understand feeling dispirited after what you went through with trying to talk about autogynephilia and then having that reality—

ZMD: Well, again, I could understand nuanced specific doubts of every little—Blanchard and Bailey, there's lots of detailed claims here. So I could also understand, like if someone has read the erotic target identity inversion paper and has like specific doubts about—like I don't want to be defending a fixed dogma. But I do want a world where facts matter. And it seemed like the crux I ran into with people was not about science. It just seemed like people don't think that non-social facts matter.

PI: Yeah, I understand it's frustrating. I do want to say that it did really help me when I was struggling with sort of this, when upon learning that I was autogynephilic and then having people doubt me and I was struggling with it, it did help me a lot to see that I wasn't the only one that had gone through this sort of struggle before, of having the reality doubted even after reading the papers and everything.

ZMD: I mean, I have reservations about that phrasing. I don't want to copy their phrasing of, "Oh no, you're doubting my reality, therefore you're oppressing me."

PI: You know what I mean though?

ZMD: I know what you mean.

PI: Just in an emotional sense. And in the realistic experience of, you've put in due diligence to know what is true, or at least to read a bunch of papers and do your best to like try to find out what's true, and then just have everyone still doubt it. It's kind of crazy-making, and seeing that that had happened to someone else made me feel less crazy. And it also made me realize how serious the problem was that it was happening in a subculture that is supposedly super, super rational.

ZMD: Yeah, they're totally lying about that.

PI: Well, cause they're human ultimately, right? So it was part of the impetus for me to write my book. I didn't want that to continue happening to people. And I didn't think it was fair what happened to me or you. And also there wasn't yet a popular-level book. The closest thing was Anne Lawrence's book [Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism], but the title seems designed to hurt AGPs in the feels.

ZMD: I loved the title.

PI: No, I loved it. I loved it at first, the transgressiveness of it. I loved the edginess of it.

ZMD: I don't even think it was about edginess. I think it's just descriptively accurate.

PI: Yeah. But because it's accurate, it hurts emotionally, right? A little bit.

ZMD: I guess so. Again, that was like this shocking thing, talking to people in private in 2016. I bought extra copies of Men Trapped in Men's Bodies to give to people.

PI: Same.

ZMD: I snuck it into more than one queer center library—you go to the community's queer center and they have a bookshelf. I just stick the book in there.

PI: I made my local library system buy it. And then they had it for a couple of years, but someone wants to complain and they removed it now.

ZMD: I gave someone this book and I got complaints along the lines of like, someone complained that Lawrence used the word transgendered. I don't even remember, but grammatical complaints, like saying men instead of a.m.a.b or whatever. I'm just like, okay, but has it occurred to you for just a moment that someone who is not part of your ideological subculture and use like exactly the same terminology as you might, you know, have things to say about reality?

PI: I think people that are trapped in that ideological subculture have a poor time modeling other subcultures because it's the progressive zeitgeist. It's so all-encompassing. That's interesting that you also had gotten extra copies, because I bought an extra one to be able to share with people, and then I realized like at a certain point that most people weren't going to make it past seeing the cover and I was like, damn, there needs to be another book that explains this in a simpler way that isn't such a bummer, so to speak, to some of the AGPs.

ZMD: Better propaganda.

PI: Right, exactly. I needed to—

ZMD: In a descriptively neutral sense! The word propaganda—

PI: It needed a more memetically viable delivery than was being done. And so I tried to do that where it made it more emotionally palatable, but also shorter sentences, clearer sentences. You lose some of the detail you do that.

ZMD: I cannot write like that.

PI: I know, I know. Some of my favorite posts of yours are actually like the ones that are just like a few hundred words, like like your "Psychology Is About Invalidating People's Identities" post is excellent.

ZMD: Thank you.

PI: I know you can't write like that, and I don't naturally write like that. I just kept editing until it looked like that; I read books about how to write short in the American style and I did it. Time will tell how influential the book is. I just think that the sort of argument I make in the book, that it's it's an epistemic injustice that people with this orientation don't get a fair shot at learning about it, say, like in sex ed, as you've proposed on your blog. I think those of us who go through these feelings, we deserve to be treated as humans that can handle hearing the truth, especially because if you do transition, that is a very serious kind of adult decision. We deserve to be treated seriously and told what is real so that we can make sense of reality and decide how we want to live in it.

ZMD: And the other tragedy of this culture, I think it makes people into worse people. In the words of J.K. Rowling, call yourself what you want, wear what you like—I would add, modify your body how you like. But like being committed to this particular ontology of gender in a way that shuts out the various situations in which people have like legitimate reasons for wanting to use the sex-based ontology without worrying about whether it might trigger someone's dysphoria: that's just no way to live. Maybe there's a way to live in the world as it exists with the technology that we actually have.

PI: Yeah, I hope for that sort of an outcome to where—I obviously want transsexuals to be able to live in society as the gender they aspire to and to be able to have access to the medical care.

ZMD: There's also this funny aspect of, I keep like wanting to put emphasis on, look, I'm not—I don't do policy. If you want to transition and you know what you're getting into, I don't want to say that—I don't want to make definitive policy decisions on how other people should live their lives, because that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to get the facts. But there is clearly this element of—if you have to round me into the trans activist camp or the gender critical camp, it's pretty clear that—I don't know.

PI: Like ontologically which camp you're in.

ZMD: Yeah. There does seem to be this phenomenon where among people who transition first and then learn about the two type typology and then say, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." I suspect there's a real effect that if you teach those people about the typology first, they don't end up transitioning, because given current technology where you can't just magically grow a new body in a vat and swap your brain into it, transitioning makes a lot more sense if you actually believe in gender identity. Whereas if you don't have that belief in the first place, I think a lot of people are more likely to do the thing that you and I are doing, which is like, OK, just live with it.

PI: I would agree that if more people had heard the typology before transitioning, it might lead to overall fewer transitions, but I think there would still be some people who hear about the typology and then realize that their transsexual feelings aren't going to be able to go away and they might transition earlier. I do think there's probably a thing where people who learn the typology first, they're probably more likely to decide not to transition than people who only hear about the gender identity theory. But to be clear, the reason I don't transition, it's just because of my physical situation. If I thought I'd be able to be somewhat passable, I'd probably be doing it. It's just like a realistic, pragmatic appraisal of my situation.

ZMD: How tall are you?

PI: Six four. I'm taller than the average man to the degree that the average man is taller than the average woman. I'm the true third gender. It's about being realistic for me personally.

PI: If you don't mind me asking, why have you—did we already cover that, why you chose not to?

ZMD: I chickened out over medical uncertainty. So I'm a transhumanist in theory, but in practice, I'm wary about unnecessary medical interventions. There's so much we just don't know about biology. We know enough like—vaccines. It's not like someone knows how to engineer nanobots that specifically kill the disease. Vaccines are like injecting a weakened form of the disease into your body and letting nature, letting your immune system figure it out. There's a general unease that, okay, we can make artificial hormones. You inject artificial female hormones into a male body. Is that going to break stuff, if you keep doing it over a long period of time? Maybe.

PI: That's a fair concern.

ZMD: I know that this has been studied somewhat. There are definitely people doing it—like we know it doesn't immediately kill you because there are lots of people who do it, who have done it and are living happy lives for decades and decades. But could it be breaking things subtly in a way that makes the benefit not worth the cost? I'm pretty worried about that. And also just not passing. I'm "only" five eleven. Okay, medical conservatism, and not passing, and I just don't believe any of this shit.

PI: Even if you didn't believe it, you could still think, oh, I'm going to take this because I want to look more feminine.

ZMD: I did get laser on my face—the laser wasn't that effective, but I did try to get facial hair reduction. I like my beautiful, beautiful ponytail, even though hair length is not actually sexually dimorphic and that's just a cultural convention. The effects that hormones did have on my body that was permanent; I feel OK about it. I have accepted what is available to me in the world as it is.

PI: Which is, I think, a great place to come to.

ZMD: If superhuman artificial intelligence invents a way to like actually grow a new female body in a vat, then I think I would go for that. But at that point, like humanity has much, much bigger problems, which is not the subject of this podcast.

PI: At that point, they probably will have already figured out how to alter the the sort of internalization mechanism that seems to happen with with autosexuality.

ZMD: I don't want to be cured, though. If you could cure autogynephilia—okay, I would rather have the magical body transformation than be cured and just be an ordinary man. But if there were a cure, I wouldn't take it. I like being the way I am, even though being the way I am in this world necessarily entails like knowing that there are some possible nice things that you can't have.

PI: Well, it sounds like you've come to a pretty good place of acceptance of your situation, which I would love for more autogynephilic individuals to arrive at, regardless of their state of transition, but just to understand their situation and reality.

ZMD: I think that's a good place to wrap it up.

PI: I was just thinking the same thing. Thanks for coming on my channel.

ZMD: Thanks for having me on the show.

PI: And I would like to mention again to the viewers, and I'll put it in the description, that he blogs about this stuff at unremediatedgender.space and it's a great blog.

ZMD: In retrospect, it may not have been the best idea for the blog title and the URL to be so different, because no one remembers the title.

PI: No, only your diehard fans.

ZMD: Thanks. Bye.

PI: Bye.