+-------
+
+I made friends with a trans woman whom I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing. (We bought a couch for the occasion.)
+
+There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are very obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't necessarily self-identify as "autogynephilic"). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together under the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but _I know the secret_."
+
+And from the trans woman's end—I'm not sure. Maybe pity. Maybe the blackmail victim's fear.
+
+One day, "Helen" mentioned having executive-dysfunction troubles about making a necessary telephone call to the doctor's office. The next morning, I messaged her:
+
+> I asked my counterfactual friend Zelda how/whether I should remind you to call the doctor in light of our conversation yesterday. "If she was brave enough to self-actualize in the first place rather than cowardly resign herself to a lifetime of dreary servitude to the cistem," she said counterfactually, "—unlike _some_ people I could name—", she added, counterfactually glaring at me, "then she's definitely brave enough to call the doctor at some specific, predetermined time today, perhaps 1:03 p.m."
+>
+> "The 'vow to call at a specific time' thing never works for me when I'm nervous about making a telephone call," I said. The expression of contempt on her counterfactual face was withering. "Obviously the technique doesn't work for _boys_!"
+
+I followed up at 1:39 _p.m._ (while I was at my dayjob):
+
+> "And then at one-thirty or so, you message her saying, 'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' And if the call had already been made, it's an affirming comment, but if the call hadn't been made, it functions as a social incentive to actually call in order to be able to truthfully reply 'yeah' rather than admit to still being paralyzed by telephone anxiety."
+>
+> "You always know what to do," I said. "Nothing like me. It's too bad you're only—" I began to say, just as she counterfactually said, "It's a good thing you're only a figment of my imagination."
+
+"Helen" replied:
+
+> i'm in the middle of things. i'll handle it before they close at 5 though, definitely.
+
+I wrote back:
+
+> "I don't know," I murmurred, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ["Helen"].
+
+Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
+
+(I'm not saying I was _right_ to say it; I'm admitting that I _did_ say it)
+
+—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.
+
+I don't think I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different, I thought. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+
+-------
+
+I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
+
+I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"
+
+No, I said, it's weirder than that; the idea of having female anatomy oneself and being able to appreciate it from the first person is intrinsically more exciting than the mere third-person appreciation that you can do in ordinary real life as a man.
+
+"[S]o, like, literal autogynephilia is a thing?" she said (as if she had heard the term before, but only as a slur or fringe theory, not as [the obvious word for an obviously existing thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)).
+
+She mentioned that as a data point, _her_ only effective sex fantasy was her as a hot girl. I said that I expected that to be a qualitatively different phenomenon, based on priors, and—um, _details_ that it would [probably be creepy to talk about](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories).
+
+So, she asked, I believed that AGP was a real thing, and in my case, I didn't have lots of desires to be seen as a girl, have a girl name, _&c._?
+
+No, I said, I did; it just seemed like it couldn't have been a coincidence that my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) (the class of things including the hope that my beautiful–beautiful ponytail successfully sets me apart from all the guys who are proud of being guys, or feeling happy about getting _ma'am_'ed over the phone) didn't develop until _after_ puberty.
+
+She said, "hm. so male puberty was a thing you did not like."
+
+No, I said, puberty was fine—it seemed like she was rounding off my self-report to something closer to the standard narrative, but what I was trying to say was that the standard was-always-a-girl-in-some-metaphysical-sense narrative was _not true_ (at least for me, and I suspected for many others).