-In a world where we don't _have_ magical perfect sex-change technology, but we _do_ have hormone replacement therapy and various surgical methods, you actually end up with _four_ clusters: females (F), males (M), masculinized females a.k.a. trans men (FtM), and feminized males a.k.a. trans women (MtF). I _don't_ have a "clean" philosophical answer as to in what contexts one should prefer to use a {F, MtF}/{M, FtM} category system (treating trans people as their social gender) rather than a {F, FtM}/{M, MtF} system (considering trans people as their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)), because that's a complicated semi-empirical, semi-value question about which aspects of reality are most relevant to what you're trying think about in that context. But I do need _the language with which to write this paragraph_, which is about _modeling reality_, and not about marginalization or respect.
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-Something I have trouble reliably communicating about what I'm trying to do with this blog is that "I don't do policy." Almost everything I write is _at least_ one meta level up from any actual decisions. I'm _not_ trying to tell other people in detail how they should live their lives, because obviously I'm not smart enough to do that and get the right answer. I'm _not_ telling anyone to detransition. I'm _not_ trying to set government policy about locker rooms or medical treatments.
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-I'm trying to _get the theory right_. My main victory condition is getting the two-type taxonomy (or whatever more precise theory supplants it) into the _standard_ sex ed textbooks. If you understand the nature of the underlying psychological condition _first_, then people can make a sensible decision about what to _do_ about it. Accurate beliefs should inform policy, rather than policy determining what beliefs are politically acceptable.
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-My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
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-Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
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-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
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-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
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-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
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-In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
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-But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
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-If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
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-I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
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-I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
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-Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
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-But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
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-What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
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-[I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
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-It worked once, right?
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-(Picture me playing Hermione Granger in a post-Singularity [holonovel](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Holo-novel_program) adaptation of _Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality_ (Emma Watson having charged me [the standard licensing fee](/2019/Dec/comp/) to use a copy of her body for the occasion): "[We can do anything if we](https://www.hpmor.com/chapter/30) exert arbitrarily large amounts of [interpretive labor](https://acesounderglass.com/2015/06/09/interpretive-labor/)!")