> Why would it cause one to not pass as well? Surely fetishizing being an attractive woman would cause one to have a lot of motivation to be an attractive woman.
-Part of it is going to be age of transition, as you note. Another part is that there's lot of subtly gendered behavioral stuff that we _don't know how to fix_ independently of _motivation_, things you might not _notice_ as part of the female-typical phenotype until you meet an autogynephilic trans woman who doesn't have them. [Motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/). [Vocal mannerisms](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/the-sound-of-your-voice/). Unfortunately (heartbreakingly), this is a [hard problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)—harder than people realize!
+Part of it is going to be age of transition, as you note. Another part is that there's lot of subtly gendered behavioral stuff that we _don't know how to fix_ independently of _motivation_, things you might not _notice_ as part of the female-typical phenotype until you meet an autogynephilic trans woman who doesn't have them. [Motor behaviors](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/all-the-wrong-moves/). [Vocal mannerisms](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2012/12/01/the-sound-of-your-voice/). <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>Unfortunately (heartbreakingly), this is a [hard problem](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)—harder than people realize!
> the idea that very feminine gay men transition because gay men are attracted to masculine men and straight men are attracted to feminine women, so by becoming a woman they can get a more desirable sexual partner
(Where one day, that sensitive, nerdy guy with a ponytail says, "Hey everyone, turns out I've secretly been a girl this entire time in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and no one noticed!", and everyone else is supposed to politely be like, "Oh, right, that makes sense.")
-But transitioning isn't a binary switch; it's a whole series of interventions designed to make a man resemble a woman as much as possible: hormones _and_ hair removal _and_ new clothes _and_ voice training _and_ coming out to friends and family and coworkers _and_ meeting new people as a woman _&c_. Maybe ... maybe you could take _some_ interventions _without_ giving up your primary social identity, as a _reasonable compromise_ between the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought, and the practical realities of a world in which biological sex is a real thing that [we don't know how to change](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (even if people in Portland will politely _pretend not to notice_). An autogynandromorphophilic consolation prize, when the real thing will always be out of reach, and the thing that people like to pretend is as good as the real thing looks like it would actually cause way more problems than it solves.
+But transitioning isn't a binary switch; it's a whole series of interventions designed to make a man resemble a woman as much as possible: hormones _and_ hair removal _and_ new clothes _and_ voice training _and_ coming out to friends and family and coworkers _and_ meeting new people as a woman _&c_. Maybe ... maybe you could take _some_ interventions _without_ giving up your primary social identity, as a _reasonable compromise_ between the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought, and the practical realities of a world in which biological sex is a real thing that <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>[we don't know how to change](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (even if people in Portland will politely _pretend not to notice_). An autogynandromorphophilic consolation prize, when the real thing will always be out of reach, and the thing that people like to pretend is as good as the real thing looks like it would actually cause way more problems than it solves.
I am not the first person to have this idea.
But it's also not clear how much relevance this science-fictional scenario has to people in the unglorious preposthuman present. Yes, we do have HRT and SRS, and these are magnificent achievements for the grand cause of morphological freedom, and should be available on an informed-consent basis. It's definitely something.
-But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend reading [Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take.
+But it's also definitely not-everything. To get a sense of how far we have to go, I strongly recommend reading <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>[Eliezer Yudkowsky's heartbreaking 2009 take](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) on what an actually effective male-to-female sex change would take.
In my youth, I used to be more optimistic about the future of human enhancement. "Oh, sure, that may be true of _present-day humans_, but _in general_ ..." felt like a relevant and useful form of argument.
... and just, I don't know. I've been _pretty upset_ lately in the way that I've been on-and-off [upset](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) for the last two and a half years, where in addition to this _creepy_ and _absurd_ pseudonymous blog that I don't even have the willpower to write at a decent pace (see the above list of things-yet-left-unwritten), I keep getting into arguments with people in real life (or in [Discord](https://discordapp.com/) servers that feel real-life-adjacent) who seem to think that guys like me can _literally_ be women _by means of saying so_.
-And it's just _not true_. It's just _so obviously not true_. [(Given current technology.)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)
+And it's just _not true_. It's just _so obviously not true_. <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>[(Given current technology.)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)
So, I'm an intellectual. I _realize_ very well that "It's obviously not true" isn't an argument that someone could engage with. So I do make arguments. I try very hard to be careful to explain the empirical claims I'm making and point to evidence, and try to anticipate and disclaim in advance the most probable misinterpretations of what I'm saying, and demonstrate that I understand that words can be used in many ways depending on context, but that I'm trying to use language to point to a particular empirical statistical structure in the world, and that becomes a lot more cumbersome to express if I'm not allowed to use this word with this widely-used definition/[extension](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) ...
<a id="blue-egregore"></a>That incentive lasted about forty years. After its crowning victory in _Obergefell v. Hodges_, the [Blue](http://web.archive.org/web/20200623015648/https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/) [Egregore's](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/) LGBT activist machinery wasn't about to sit idle or quietly disband, so instead adapted itself to the obvious next growth channel of absorbing new neurotype-demographics into the "T": specifically, capturing a larger fraction of the ~5% (?) of men with intense AGP (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been [furtive, closeted crossdressers](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15859369)), and the ~5% (?) of [girls](https://www.parentsofrogdkids.com/) on the losing end of [female intrasexual competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_intrasexual_competition) (whose analogues in a previous generation would have been anorexic).
-<a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute a successful [sex change](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex).
+<a id="re-collapse-the-sex-gender-distinction"></a>Sculpting "trans" into an interest group large enough to serve as a pawn (well, [bishop](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/06/ol9-how-to-uninstall-cathedral/)) under the Blue Egregore's control required the LGBT sub-egregore to re-collapse the sex/gender distinction (pried apart at such painstaking cost by its feminist cousins two generations earlier)—in the _other_ direction: sex, having already been split into "sex" and "gender" (f.k.a. gender _roles_ f.k.a. _sex_ roles), must now give way entirely to the latter. In [Hoffman and Taylor's account of the precession of simulacra (following Baudrillard)](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/excerpts-from-a-larger-discussion-about-simulacra/), medical transsexualism of the 20th-century West was a mixture of simulacrum levels 1 (to the extent that hormones and surgery constitute <a id="changing-emotions-link"></a>a successful [sex change](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions)) and 2 (to the extent that they don't, and transitioning consists of [lying](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/blatant-lies-best-kind/) about one's sex).
In contrast, post-_Obergefell_ gender theory belongs to simulacrum level 3: rather than having a non-circular truth condition, "gender" is just a free-floating Schelling point, a [role](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) or [costume](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurelyAestheticGender) to be [symbolically identified](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/the-thing-and-the-symbolic-representation-of-the-thing/) with, meaning no more (and no less) what one can predict that others will predict that others will predict ... _&c._ that it means. Biological sex would continue to be a decision-relevant variable if it were cognitively available (summarizing a variety of physical differences, who can get pregnant, various game-theoretic social consequences of who can get pregnant, [personality differences to the tune of](https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265) [Mahanalobis _D_](https://marcodgdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/delgiudice_2013_is-d_valid_ep.pdf) ≈ 2.7, _&c._)—but _no_ culture can provide all the concepts that _would be_ decision-relevant _if available_. Definitionally, you don't know what you're missing. ["The limits of my language are the limits of my world."](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein) Some claim to have [_seen through_](https://www.gwern.net/docs/philo/2012-sistery-tryingtoseethrough.html) to a world beneath the world, but without a way to _share_ what they've allegedly seen, to bring it within mutually-reinforcing consensus of the intersubjective, who's not to say that they only dreamed it?
Women are better at verbal ability and social cognition, whereas [men are better at visuospatial skills](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/12/alpha-gamma-phi/). The sexes achieve similar levels of overall performance via somewhat different mental "toolkits." Murray devotes a section to a 2007 result of Johnson and Bouchard, who report that general intelligence ["masks the dimensions on which [sex differences in mental abilities] lie"](/papers/johnson-bouchard-sex_differences_in_mental_abilities_g_masks_the_dimensions.pdf): people's overall skill in using tools from the metaphorical mental toolbox leads to underestimates of differences in toolkits (that is, nonmetaphorically, the effect sizes of sex differences in specific mental abilities), which you want to statistically correct for. This result in particular is _super gratifying_ to me personally, because [I independently had a very similar idea a few months back](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/)—it's _super validating_ as an amateur to find that the pros have been thinking along the same track!
-The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
+<a id="ancestries"></a>The second part of the book is about some ways in which people with different ancestries are different from each other! Obviously, there are no "distinct" "races" (that would be dumb), but it turns out (as found by endeavors such as [Li _et al._ 2008](/papers/li_et_al-worldwide_human_relationships_inferred.pdf)) that when you throw clustering and [dimensionality-reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) algorithms at SNP data (<em>s</em>ingle <em>n</em>ucleotide <em>p</em>olymorphisms, places in the genome where more than one allele has non-negligible frequency), you get groupings that are a pretty good match to classical or self-identified "races".
Ask the computer to assume that an individual's ancestry came from _K_ fictive ancestral populations where _K_ := 2, and it'll infer that sub-Saharan Africans are descended entirely from one, East Asians and some native Americans are descended entirely from the other, and everyone else is an admixture. But if you set _K_ := 3, populations from Europe and the near East (which were construed as admixtures in the _K_ := 2 model) split off as a new inferred population cluster. And so on.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff