+> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
+>
+> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
+
+In ["Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, proposes what he calls a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."
+
+Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer [sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/) to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsiony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.
+
+Let me explain.
+
+In my ontology of how the world works, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" is _not_ a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians _and_ gay men _and_ heterosexual males with a female gender identity _and_ heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
+
+What do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?
+
+Well, they're all human; that buys you a lot of similarities!
+
+But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".
+
+So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
+
+Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared social experience could induce similarities.
+
+But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
+
+I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
+
+Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
+
+_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)
+
+But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a different [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense [as a political coalition](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
+
+And so, given that I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?
+
+Imagine a Bayesian network with real-valued variables with a cause C at the root, whose influence propagates to many effects (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ → E₄ ...). If someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E<sub>i</sub> when C is between 2 and 3 _or_ between 5 and 6 _or_ above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?
+
+In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant [conditional indpendence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence) structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.
+
+Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this might seem dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm explaining why I can't take Scott Alexander's theory seriously without even addressing the survey data that he thinks his theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
+
+The thing is, I don't see my theory as making particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine _being_ him/her?" questions asked on the survey.
+
+The reason I'm sold that autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people [locate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance) which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
+
+If you're not acqauinted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica written by and for men who identify as men.
+
+
+
+
+
+The surprising thing is, if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over
+
+
+(examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_) over and over and over again.
+