I concede that it's plausible that my psychology falls into a reference class that could receive a bipolar I or paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis if I were to seek out a diagnosis, but right now, I'm modeling the field of psychiatry as an evolved social-control mechanism rather than a genuine attempt to help people, and I correspondingly decline to use its language and categories. (You sometimes hear people talk about psychiatric conditions being "underdiagnosed" at higher IQs, but that's backwards: the underlying psychological variations were [here first](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/burdens/); people only bother bucketing them into a "diagnosis" when people with the relevant traits cause problems in Society. But the evolutionarily-novel way that Society happens to be structured isn't necessarily optimized to be _good_ for humans except insofar as humans following their individual incentive gradients usually don't screw things up too badly for themselves. Existing Society is just the thing the forces of memetic evolution happened to cough up in the disruptive wake of the industrial revolution; it doesn't necessarily _make sense_. And _I_ don't cause problems.)
-Glancing over my email Sent folder, it looks like the time to pinpoint as when things started to, um, become eventful again, was 2 April. That evening, I got an email tip from our local shaman/raconteur "Travis" ([previous appearance](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/)) that someone we knew had just been thrown in psychiatric prison _too_ (Subject: Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward) and asking if I wanted to get involved. The person in question turned out to be my trans woman friend "Roberta", who had apparently been trying to board a plane in "Cleveland" to visit her family somewhere in Europe (which is large enough that I'm not going to obfuscate its identity with a scare-quoted substitute). Soon enough, I and a number of Roberta's other friends managed to coordinate to start calling psychiatric "hospitals" in the Cleveland area, hoping to find out where she was and talk to her (Subject: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation).
+Glancing over my email Sent folder, it looks like the time to pinpoint as when things started to, um, become eventful again, was 2 April. That evening, I got an email tip from our local shaman/raconteur "Travis" that someone we knew had just been thrown in psychiatric prison _too_ (Subject: Another autogynophilic [_sic_] rationalist is in a psych ward) and asking if I wanted to get involved. The person in question turned out to be my trans woman friend "Roberta", who had apparently been trying to board a plane in "Cleveland" to visit her family somewhere in Europe (which is large enough that I'm not going to obfuscate its identity with a scare-quoted substitute). Soon enough, I and a number of Roberta's other friends managed to coordinate to start calling psychiatric "hospitals" in the Cleveland area, hoping to find out where she was and talk to her (Subject: information centralizing thread for [roberta] situation).
So, a horrifying thing that I didn't realize while I was _in_ psychiatric prison in February, that I learned during this April attempt trying to help bust someone else _out_, is that these places have a _policy_ of [refusing to confirm or deny](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_response) whether they're holding someone (because ["privacy"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Insurance_Portability_and_Accountability_Act)). They'll take down your phone number and say, _If_ we have a patient with such a name, then we'll give her your message and she can choose to call you back, but we can neither confirm nor deny whether we have a patient by that name.
Economists distinguish a spectrum between _rival_ and _nonrival_ goods. If you want to know more math than your school expects of you, all you need is a book, dedication, and time. If you want an Honorable Mention on the Putnam exam (and don't care about merely getting a better score if you don't make the list), you need to be _better than_ all but no more than 99 entrants. The payoffs in the competitive scenario have a significantly different structure from the scenario where you just want to learn stuff.
-Or do they? Let's consider grad school admissions rather than the Putnam exam. You want to get into the best school possible, to get access to better mentors and better peers. Getting in to any _particular_ school is a contested rivalrous good (we assume that each can only accept a fixed number of applicants _n_, no matter how good the _n_+1th applicant is on some cosmic absolute scale), but when we consider multiple schools with different admissions standards, there's no dire [dual](slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) discontinuity: a small change in application quality results in a small change of best-school-accepted-to (if you don't get into Caltech, go to MIT; if you don't get into MIT; go to Carnegie Mellon; if you ... UC Santa Cruz ... San Diego State ... SF State), much like how a small change in study quality results in a small change in knowledge gained.
+Or do they? Let's consider grad school admissions rather than the Putnam exam. You want to get into the best school possible, to get access to better mentors and better peers. Getting in to any _particular_ school is a contested rivalrous good (we assume that each can only accept a fixed number of applicants _n_, no matter how good the _n_+1th applicant is on some cosmic absolute scale), but when we consider multiple schools with different admissions standards, there's no dire [dual](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/28/non-dual-awareness/) discontinuity: a small change in application quality results in a small change of best-school-accepted-to (if you don't get into Caltech, go to MIT; if you don't get into MIT; go to Carnegie Mellon; if you ... UC Santa Cruz ... San Diego State ... SF State), much like how a small change in study quality results in a small change in knowledge gained.
So the real problem can't be the fact of competition as such. Rather, the problem is the _mismatch_ between the criteria by which you're snobby about schools and the criteria by which schools are snobby about you. Doing a PhD is a serious commitment; you should only do it if you're genuinely in love with the program, not because you're afraid of not being in academia. Even if there's always _someone_ who would take you as a student, _it's not going to work very well_ if you're going to spend seven years in a fog of barely-concealed contempt, trying not to say out loud, "This place is kind of a dump; I'm only here because MIT didn't take me, and Carnegie Mellon only accepted me without funding."
----
-So, there's a thing about me, possibly even _the_ thing about me, where there is this beautiful feeling at the center of my life that has shaped me more than almost anything else, where obviously I know that I am in fact male, but I don't want to _identify_ with that fact; I want to believe that I could be female and still be the same person in all the ways that matter, and this sentiment is clearly tied to my sexuality, as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be _with_ and people I want to be _like_.
+So, there's a thing about me, possibly even _the_ thing about me, where there is this beautiful feeling at the center of my life that has shaped me more than almost anything else, where obviously I know that I am in fact male, but I don't want to _identify_ with that fact; I [want to believe](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) that I could be female and still be the same person in all the ways that matter, and this sentiment is clearly tied to my sexuality, as if my brain just doesn't draw that much of a distinction between people I want to be _with_ and people I want to be _like_.
... the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.
There's a word in the psychology literature for the beautiful feeling at the center of my life: _autogynephilia_ ("love of oneself as a woman"), coined in the context of a theory that it represented one of two distinct etiologies for male-to-female transsexualism. This theory didn't seem to be the standard mainstream view, and, I learned, people get really mad at you when you mention it in a comment section, so for a long time [I self-identified with the _word_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/) "autogynephilia", but assumed that the associated _theory_ was false. _I_ wasn't one of those people who were _actually trans_; I was just, you know, one of those guys who are [pointedly insistent on](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/) not being _proud_ of the fact that they're guys. (And who dimly, privately suspect that this may somehow be causally related to their obsessive masturbation fantasies about being magically transformed into a woman.)
-Moving to "Portland" in 2016 and meeting some _very interesting_ people there led me to do some more reading—Kay Brown's blog [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), Anne Lawrence's monograph [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](http://www.annelawrence.com/mtimb.html), Imogen Binnie's novel [_Nevada_](https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/) (this item is reverse-scored)—and I eventually concluded that, no, wait, actually the theory looks _correct_, and I _do_ have the same underlying psychological condition that leads people to transition. That, in fact, my story up to now may even be _typical_ of trans women who transition in their thirties, right up to the ["Oh, I just want to _experiment_ with hormones, I'm not actually going to _transition_" phase](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) (although I'm [not currently proceeding further](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/)).
+Moving to "Portland" in 2016 and meeting some _very interesting_ people there led me to do some more reading—Kay Brown's blog [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), Anne Lawrence's monograph [_Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](http://www.annelawrence.com/mtimb.html), Imogen Binnie's novel [_Nevada_](https://www.dailydot.com/irl/nevada-imogen-binnie-transgender/)—and I eventually concluded that, no, wait, actually the theory looks _correct_, and I _do_ have the same underlying psychological condition that leads people to transition. That, in fact, my story up to now may even be _typical_ of trans women who transition in their thirties, right up to the ["Oh, I just want to _experiment_ with hormones, I'm not actually going to _transition_" phase](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/) (although I'm [not currently proceeding further](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/)).
-This is _really important information_! This is _not_ the thing someone should have to piece together themselves at age 28. This is the sort of thing that should just be in the standard sex-ed books, that boys having these kinds of feelings can read at age 15 and immediately say, "Ah, I'm in the same taxon as lesbian trans women, and heterosexual crossdressers, and guys who have these fantasies but don't do anything about them in particular, and bigender people who are on low-dose hormones and choose how to 'present' in different social venues; I wonder which of these strategies is best for me given my exact circumstances?"
+This is _really important information_! This is _not_ the sort of thing someone should have to piece together themselves at age 28! This is the sort of thing that should just be in the standard sex-ed books, that boys having these kinds of feelings can read at age 15 and _immediately_ say, "Ah, looks like I'm in the same taxon as lesbian trans women, and heterosexual crossdressers, and guys who have these fantasies but don't do anything about them in particular, and bigender people who are on low-dose hormones and choose how to 'present' in different social venues; I wonder which of these strategies is best for me given my exact circumstances?"
So, while I realize that a lot of people have strong feelings about this topic, and I wanted to be sensitive to that, I also want to promote this theory, because I want people to have accurate information about the underlying psychological condition, so they can make the best [choices](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) about what to do about it, whereas people might make poorer choices in a regime where everyone had to figure things out for themselves in an environment full of misinformation about "gender identity."
Let me tell you about the moment I stopped wanting to be sensitive—the moment of liberating clarity when I resolved the tension between being a good person and the attendant requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore.
-I was arguing about all this with a (cis, male) acquaintance over instant messaging, who I'll call "Kevin."
+I was arguing over instant messaging about all this with a (cis, male) acquaintance I'll call "Kevin," who had no obvious personal stake in the matter.
+
+
Understand the underlying psychological phenomenon _first_, I said, _then_ decide on quality-of-life interventions based on the facts.
It _felt like_ I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people.
-Obviously I'm totally in favor of trans _people_ having access to the hormones and surgeries that they want, and having their preferred pronouns respected.
+The Orwellian horror here is not, of course, that someone in my extended social circle has opinions I disagree with.
-But if Kevin is a representative example of what the _subculture of trans activism_ does to people's heads, then maybe your _shitty delusional subculture deserves to die_.
+The Orwellian horror is that [...]
+
+That the threat of being labeled a mean ol' reactionary transphobe is
-I understand that for people who have _already_ built up a self-image around the idea that they are literally women and always have been, the idea that their female gender identity arose out of a misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality could be extremely disturbing.
+_Words should mean things_, or _Knowledge is better than ignorance_.
-But people dealing with gender dysphoria who haven't already transitioned deserve accurate information! [...] this, _this_ is _personal_.
+[...]
+
+Obviously I'm totally in favor of trans _people_ having access to the hormones and surgeries that they want, and having their preferred pronouns respected.
+
+But if Kevin is a representative example of what the _subculture of trans activism_ does to people's heads, then maybe your _shitty delusional subculture deserves to die_.
-If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to _shut up and stop thinking_ about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for _twenty-five years_ (!?), then I have _no interest_ in being a good person.
+If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to _shut up and stop thinking_ about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for _twenty-five years_, then I have _no interest_ in being a good person.
I'm certainly not _trying_ to say things that will hurt people—_least_ of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of _my wildest fantasy_.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff