Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
+(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)
+
Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender-feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces that let them ever doubt.
As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [in](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
-At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/2016/Sep/apophenia/).
+At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/).
+
+[some misgivings about naming choices, but I don't actively regret it like my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts]
+
+[aside (footnote?) on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will"]
+
+[aside (footnote?) on the blog name: I had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) / it's a little bit awkward having the blog title and URL be different, and people think "space" is a separate word]
+
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious response to my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I wanted to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I miss out just for being more self-aware about the reasons?
+
+A friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of hormone replacement therapy](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
+
+I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was pretty preoccupied with the thing about how _everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_, and the professional shrinks were _in on it_. Not in the sense that I thought they secretly agreed with me about the typology and were consciously lying, but in the sense that the whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) is garbage-tier epistemology. Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about this, and she wrote back:
+
+> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
+
+I replied:
+
+> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonony is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
+
+[for however weird I am, I don't understand what anyone _else_ says in these sessions]
+[conscious that I could cherry-pick to create a trans narrative: Polly Pocket, a girl's scooter, ]
+
-[aside (footnote?) on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will" ]
-[aside (footnote?) on the blog name: I had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/)]
+I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her that it actually cost $40.)
-[Hormones front— I commissioned https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html sent 5K to Sarah on 9/14 ]
http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/
Urgent/needed for healing—
_ Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
_ The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ...
+_ I Am Not Great With Secrets (aAL)
_ A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
Big posts—
_ Conflict Theory of Bounded Distrust: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bounded-distrust
_ Generic Consequentialists Are Liars
_ Comment on "The Logic of Indirect Speech" (multi-receivers vs. uncertainty about a single recieiver)
-_ Feature Selection
_ There's No Such Thing as Unmotivated Reasoning
_ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
_ Longtermism + Hinge of History = Shorttermism (not my original idea, but don't remember whose blog I read this on, so I'll write my own version)
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff