+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?
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+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?
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+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.
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+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?
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+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.
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+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.)
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+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.
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+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
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+(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.
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+After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some numbers and data to help learn more about what's going on with the pattern. There's clearly a thing here, but is the thing being generated by a visible minority, or is it actually a majority? When [82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/), that makes me think it's a majority.
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+When you pose a superficially similar-sounding question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is nonobvious.