+At this point, 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_?
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+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.
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+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](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf): furries and amputee-wannabes who want to emulate the objects of their attraction, "look like" "the same thing" as autogynephiles, but pointed at a less conventional erotic than women. The autogynephilia–transition concordance has been documented by many authors, and I claim the direction of causality is obvious. (If you want to argue that it goes the other way—that some underlying "gender identity" causes both autogynephilia and, separately, the desire to transition, then why does it usually not work that way for androphiles?) The cultural-factors→transition arrow is obvious if you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade.
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+This has been a qualitative summary of my current thinking. I'm very bullish on thinking in graphical models rather than discrete taxons being the way to go, but it would be a lot more work to try to pin down all these claims rigorously—or, to the extent that my graph is wrong, to figure out the correct (or, _a_ more correct, less wrong) graph instead. But as a gesture of _aspiration towards_ more rigor, we can do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to show how a "two types" could emerge quantitatively.