+Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
+
+I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender-feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces that let them ever doubt.
+
+I ... went the other direction. In slogan form: "Holy shit, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
+
+Okay, that slogan isn't right. Again, I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accomodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
+
+The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accomodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
+
+Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/), and how can I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
+
+My shift in belief, from thinking the narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up, partially from my reading, but also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
+
+[Someone I talked to](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her. (This person was unusual along a lot of other dimensions, and again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.)
+
+But many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me—at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; talking about this stuff _at all_ was hard enough, that I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies—but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but (from my view) oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
+
+One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_ There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to _point to_. If it's not sex, _what is it?_)
+
+Another wrote a comment in one discussion expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be _possible_, she admitted, but it must be extremely unlikely. Elsewhere on the internet, the _same goddamned person_ reported being sexually into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
+
+[TODO: my reaction; it's rude for me to probe and doubt, but this is gaslighting]
+
+The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
+
+Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all TERFy and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
+
+Another trans woman I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
+
+[TODO: ↑ rework and revise above section in light of "The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ..." after that's written and published]
+
+------
+
+As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [in](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
+
+At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/apophenia/).
+
+[aside (footnote?) on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will" ]
+
+[aside (footnote?) on the blog name: I had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/)]
+
+[Hormones front— I commissioned https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html sent 5K to Sarah on 9/14 ]
+
+http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/
+
+[TODO: October 2016: I wrote Eliezer to ask about the conflict with "Changing Emotions" and made a Cheerful Price offer to talk about it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price (shut up, we're not a cult) ]
+
+[it was around this time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)]
+
+[TODO: early 2017, eventually I start being louder on Facebook and eventually have a nervous breakdown]
+
+[TODO: one thing that kept coming up during the private and Facebook discussions was this category boundary argument—including, e.g., with MIRI comms director Rob Bensinger. That part, I knew I could win]
+
+[TODO: so when I quit my job in order to write (mention HRT experiment too), the capstone of my sabbatical was to be "The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions", which I later followed up with the "Reply on Adult Human Females" ... and mostly, things were fine—I was disappointed with my impact, but it wasn't grounds to declare the whole community a fraud]
+
+[TODO: I was at the company offsite browsing Twitter (which I had recently joined with fantasies of self-cancelling) when I saw the "Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning", and I _flipped the fuck out_]
+
+[TODO: getting support from Michael + Ben + Sarah, harrassing Scott and Eliezer]
+
+[TODO: proton concession]
+
+[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
+
+[TODO: more blogging (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aqumaym7Jd2qhDcy/containment-thread-on-the-motivation-and-political-context), 2019 Christmas party, disclaimer on "Categories Were Made"]
+
+[TODO: categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
+
+["Univariate fallacy" also a concession]
+
+[TODO: "simplest and best" pronoun proposal, sometimes personally prudent]
+
+[TODO: why you should care; no one should like Scott and Eliezer's proposals; knowledge should go forward, not back]