-But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that hurts to not be respected. (What _is_ an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously verbally asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy."
+But the harm I'm theorizing is _not_ that the child has an intrinsic male identity that hurts to not be respected. (What is an "identity", apart from the ordinary factual belief that one is of a particular sex?) Rather, the concern is that social transition prompts everyone, _including the child themself_, to use their mental models of girls (juvenile female humans) to make (mostly subconscious rather than deliberative) predictions and decisions about the child, which will be a systematically worse statistical fit than their models of boys (juvenile male humans), because the child is, in fact, a boy (juvenile male human), and those miscalibrated predictions and decisions will make the child's life worse in a complicated, illegible way that doesn't necessarily result in the child spontaneously verbally asserting, "I prefer that you call me a boy."
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+Scott Alexander has written about how [concept-shaped holes can be impossible to notice](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-can-be-impossible-to-notice/). A culture whose [civic religion](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/08/gay-rites-are-civil-rites/) celebrates being trans, and denies that gender has truth conditions other than the individual's say-so, has concept-shaped holes that would make it hard for a kid to notice the hypothesis "I'm having a systematically worse childhood than I otherwise would have because all the grown-ups in my life have agreed I was a girl since I was three years old, even though all of my actual traits are sampled from the joint distribution of juvenile male humans, not juvenile female humans", even if it's true.
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+The epistemic difficulties extend to grown-ups as well. I think people who are familiar with the relevant scientific literature or come from an older generation should find the story I've laid out above pretty compelling, but the parents themselves are likely to be more skeptical. They _know_ they didn't coach the child to say "I'm a girl." On what grounds could a stranger who wasn't there (or a skeptical family friend who sees the kid maybe once a month) assert that subconscious influence must be at work?
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+Apparently, people can have very different priors about these things. In the early 20th century, a German schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten claimed to have taught his horse, Clever Hans, to do arithmetic and other intellectual feats. One could ask, "How much is 2/5 plus 1/2?" and the stallion would first stomp his hoof nine times, and then ten times—representing 9/10ths, the correct answer. An investigation concluded that no deliberate trickery was involved—Hans could often give the correct answer when questioned by a stranger, demonstrating that von Osten couldn't be secretly signaling the horse when to stop stomping. But further careful experiments by Oskar Pfungst revealed that Hans was picking up on unconscious cues "leaked" by the questioner's body language as the number of stomps approached the correct answer: for instance, Hans couldn't answer questions that the questioner themself didn't know.[^pfungst]