+_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).
+
+But I _don't_ think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively _jacking off_ to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various _different_ female bodies ... unless she was _already_ into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a _lot_ of porn in this genre! But it seems to mostly be created for and consumed by ... men?
+
+I just don't see any _reason_ to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in _male_ sexuality.
+
+(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I _like_ being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" to "variation", but people who don't [understand the naturalistic fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature) aren't going to understand anything _else_ I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male heterosexuality weren't "supposed" to collide like this.)
+
+But it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The detailed exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read and learned—and in particular, the reductionist methodology I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this is a _hard problem_.
+
+We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who [read different books in a different order](TODO: link "The Feeling Is Mutual"), might come to very different conclusions about himself.
+
+If you don't have the conceptual vocabulary to say, "I have a lot of these beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings about being female, but it seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must be some sort of causal relationship between that and this erotic fantasy, which is realistically going to be a variation in _male_ sexuality," you might end up saying something simpler like, "I want to be a woman." Or possibly even, "I _am_ a woman, on the inside, where it counts."
+
+(As Yudkowsky [occasionally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not _become true of him_ because he believed it.)
+
+What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because different theories that purport to explain the same facts can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.
+
+If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and _staying_ on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is "supposed to" "run on" estrogen.
+
+But if my gender feelings are rooted in a malfunctioning in _male_ sexuality
+
+[TODO implication that departs from the standard narrative: if I could get body-mods _without_ psych effects of HRT &c., that would actually be desirable]
+
+[TODO concern: if the desire is just a confusion in male sexuality, wouldn't that imply that body mods aren't desireable? Like, maybe staight non-trans AGP men _think_ they want to mod female, but if they actually did it, they would get super-dysphoric because (and which proves that) they're perverts and not Actual Trans Women, which are a different thing. You might think so! But, _empirically_, I'm pretty happy with my 5.month-HRT breasts for about the reasons I expected. From what I hear from people braver than me, that experience continues down the slope of interventions]
+
+[TODO: but if you haven't _made_ all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, you might interpret the qualia as simply (wanting to) "be a woman", or at least be attached to the idea even if you don't quite believe it]
+
+(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)