+What are the reasons a male-to-female transition might seem like a good idea to someone? _Why_ would a male be interested in undergoing medical interventions to resemble a female and live socially as a woman? I see three prominent reasons, depicted as the parents of the "transition" node in a graph.
+
+First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with unusually female-typical psychological traits, you might fit into the social world better as a woman rather than as an anomalously effeminate man.
+
+Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, autogynephilia is very obviously a real thing; [I wrote about my experiences with it in a previous post](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). Crucially, autogynephilic identification with the _idea_ of being female, is distinct from naturally feminine behavior, of which other people [know it when they see it](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/).
+
+Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. Many people who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.)
+
+If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a liability–threshold model: males transition if the _sum_ of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits).
+
+You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm claiming that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types".
+
+Why? It has to do with the parents of femininity and autogynephilia in the graph. Suppose that gay men are more feminine than straight men, and autogynephilia is the result of being straight plus having an "erotic target location error", in which men who are attracted to something (in this case, women), are also attracted to the idea of _being_ that thing.
+
+Then the value of the sexual-orientation node is pushing the values of its children in _opposite_ directions: gay males are more feminine and less autogynephilic, and straight males are less feminine and more autogynephilic, leading to two broadly different etiological trajectories by which transition might seem like a good idea to someone, even while it's not that the two types have nothing in common. For example, this model predicts that among autogynephilic males, those who transition are going to be selected for higher levels of femininity compared to those who don't transition—and in that aspect, their stories are going to have _something_ in common with their androphilic sisters, even if the latter are broadly _more_ feminine.
+
+(Of course, it's also the case that the component factors in a liability-threshold model would negatively correlate among the population past a threshold, due to the effect of conditioning on a collider, as in the famous Berkson's paradox. But I'm claiming that the degree of bimodality induced by the effects of sexual orientation is substantially greater than that accounted for by the conditioning-on-a-collider effect.)
+
+An advantage of this kind of _probabilistic_ model is that it gives us a _causal_ account of the broad trends we see, while also not being too "brittle" in the face of a complex world. The threshold graphical model explains why the two-type taxonomy looks so compelling as a first approximation, without immediately collapsing the moment we meet a relatively unusual individual who doesn't seem to quite fit the strictest interpretation of the classical two-type taxonomy.
+
+[TODO—
+example: hi femininity + AGP
+example: cultural factors
+care must be taken to avoid rationalization]
+
+You might ask: okay, but why do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_?
+
+Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world.
+
+The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by [Lippa](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) and by [Bailey and Zucker](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
+
+The v-structure between sexual orientation, erotic target location erroneousness, and autogynephilia has been documented by Anne Lawrence:
+
+
+The autogynehilia→transition arrow has
+
+The cultural-factors→transition arrow is obvious if you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade.
+