-I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women _and_ non-transitioned AGP men _very_ frequently. I can't recall any instances of cis lesbians saying this. The poster herself seems to implicitly acknowledge this, by calling it a "trans lesbian question" rather than merely a "lesbian" question!
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-I think the boring hypothesis here is "Yeah, because trans women are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians." Again, this isn't Science, because I'm just using my brain's pattern-matching capabilities (I could be selectively remembering, distorting my categories, _&c._). With time and funding, I'm sure it would be possible to make it more formal—gather Reddit comments from cis and trans women, have raters categorize themes while blinded to the cis/trans identity of the authors ...
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-But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd manages come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal explanations that can't _possibly_ match up with the machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out, then I'm not sure how to proceed. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
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-Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
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-And yet—if it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)),
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-I would totally respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality; I can't expect everyone to share my parsimony intuitions.
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-But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!
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-[TODO: behavioral genetics and trans]
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-I think "Men who sexually fantasize about being women, do not particularly resemble actual women" _is_ the "boring" hypothesis—boring in the sense that Steve Sailer's views on race are boring, in that _everyone knows this shit instinctively_, but no one at your respectibility level can say it out loud because you're insane religious fanatics who are
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-In ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), you express skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
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-> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
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-> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
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-> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
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-The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
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-In the case of the etiology and taxonomy of MtF, it seems to me that informed observers typically _agree_ that there's a pretty stark bimodality in the data (very large effect sizes, even if not of course not literally everyone fits the stereotype, because _nothing_ in psychology is that clean): that androphilic MtF transsexuals tend to have been overtly feminine their entire lives in a way that's noticeable to others (such that they "stick out" in Society as effeminate men if they _didn't_ transition), but gynephilic/bi/asexual MtF transsexuals don't fit this profile (living as ordinary men before "coming out"), and very frequently report a history of erotic female transformation fantasies (autogynephilia)—which shows up not only in easily-quantifiable surveys, but also qualitatively if you [just _read_ the things non-androphilic MtFs write in their own forums when the general public isn't looking](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on).
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-Anyway, if we agree on the basic observations, what's at issue? [What's at issue is the _causality_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/): does AGP cause gender identity (such that these are, basically, straight males with a fetish), or does gender identity (presumably caused by some underlying brain intersex condition) get eroticized and manifest as AGP?
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-I readily admit that I can't definitely _prove_ that it's not an intersex condition. Nevertheless—if I'm just being honest about the inference procedure my brain is _actually_ using, without pretending that it's more rigorous than it is—I think this question is _actually_ pretty obvious if you have functional parsimony intuitions about how the world works.
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-To me, the qualitative observations are very important, because they have a lot of details about what the psychological phenomenon actually is. (The qualitative observations are what _motivated_ the survey question, to try to get a more quantifiable measurement of something we already had reason to believe exists.) An ordinary cis woman who reads the survey question, "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?" with no context, is not necessarily in the same headspace as an MtF transsexual, even if they end up giving the same number—just like someone who's never had a real manic–depressive cycle might give the same answer to "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?" because they're remembering when their team lost the Super Bowl. (If you were worried about a bipolar screening test not generalizing to a group so different as "hospital inpatients", how much more worried should you be about asking people of _different sexes_ questions _about sexuality_?)