Title: Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
-Date: 2021-12-15 05:00
+Date: 2021-12-18 22:15
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
-Status: draft
> Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
>
In ["Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/10/autogenderphilia-is-common-and-not-especially-related-to-transgender/), Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 _Slate Star Codex_ reader survey, proposes what he calls a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."
-Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer [sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/) to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsiony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.
+Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a [Science _vs._ Bayescraft](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/viPPjojmChxLGPE2v/the-dilemma-science-or-bayes) thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer [sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds](https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/01/11/reality-is-very-weird-and-you-need-to-be-prepared-for-that/) to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsimony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.
Let me explain.
Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
-_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)
+Sometimes I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly don't know.)
-But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a different [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense [as a political coalition](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
+But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a different [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense [as a political coalition](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live the same kind of lives. (Indeed, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
And so, given that I already don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that correspond to?
Imagine a Bayesian network with real-valued variables with a cause C at the root, whose influence propagates to many effects (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ → E₄ ...). If someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E<sub>i</sub> when C is between 2 and 3 _or_ between 5 and 6 _or_ above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?
-In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant [conditional indpendence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence) structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.
+In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant [conditional independence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_independence) structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.
Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this might seem dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm explaining why I can't take Scott Alexander's theory seriously without even addressing the survey data that he thinks his theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
The thing is, I don't see my theory as making particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine _being_ him/her?" questions asked on the survey.
-The reason I'm sold that autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people [locate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance) which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
+The reason I'm sold that autogynephila (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people [locate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance) which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
-If you're not acqauinted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica written by and for men who identify as men.
+If you're not acquainted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey results. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prerequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica produced by and for men who identify as men.
+The surprising thing is that if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over and over again (examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_).
+The AGP experiences described in such posts by males who identify as trans women seem strikingly similar to AGP experiences in males who identify as men. I think the very boring hypothesis here is that these are mostly the same people—that identifying as a trans woman is an effect (of [AGP and other factors](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/)) rather than a cause.
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-The surprising thing is, if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over
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-(examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_) over and over and over again.
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-After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some numbers and data to help learn more about what's going on with the pattern. There's clearly a thing here, but is the thing being generated by a visible minority, or is it actually a majority? When [82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/), that makes me think it's a majority.
+After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some data to learn more about what's going on with the pattern. Are these accounts of AGP coming from a visible minority of trans women, or is it actually a majority? When [82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to a "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realized you were trans?" survey](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/89nw0w/did_you_have_a_genderbody_swaptransformation/), that makes me think it's a majority.
When you pose a superficially similar-sounding question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is nonobvious.
The failure of surveys to generalize between populations shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–5 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question _wasn't_ "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you _do_ get a lot of "Am I happy then sad sometimes? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's really going on. In slogan form, [you are not measuring what you think you are measuring](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kNxhKWvixtKW5anS/you-are-not-measuring-what-you-think-you-are-measuring).
-If Alexander is wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think he should be still more wary that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_. Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (for there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the one domain where I think we have very strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empahtic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail.
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-This is why I expect the [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/) of "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither Alexander's nor [Moser 2009](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
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-The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable, is because my skepticism is specifically about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the 1–5 question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a higher-bandwidth channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response.
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-[TODO— briefly say something about woman quoted in post, and my contact (/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-agp)
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-My common-sense intuition is that the experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body (which is pretty common and normal), and autogynephilic/autoandrophilic cross-sex fantasies (which are less common, but by no means rare), are superficially similar enough that they can generate overlapping reports if you _just_ ask "Would it be sexy to be her, 1–5", but that when you poke at the details, they're going to turn out to be different psychological phenomena that you shouldn't lump together as "autogenderphilia".
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-I can believe that some women are AGP, but it's going to need a more detailed investigation than the survey prompt
+If Alexander is wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think he should be still more wary that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_. Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (for there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the one domain where I think we have strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empathic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail.
-if you'd _never heard_ of this stupid ideologically-charged debate—would you need to _spontaneously invent_ the term AGP (or a synonym like _eonism_ as coined by Ellis in 1920 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Ellis#Eonism>) _in order to make sense of your experience_? If your _serious_ answer is Yes, that's _really interesting_ and I want to hear more. (Omega seems to be claiming this about herself, which is _really_ fascinating and my model _definitely_ loses some points for predicting that she shouldn't exist.) But I think _most_ females saying "yeah, sure, cis women are AGP too; it's, like, getting turned on by imagining other people being attracted to you, right? Seems normal" _after having been presented with the term in an ideologically-charged context_ are not really understanding the phenomenon in males that the term was originally coined to point to
+This is why I expect the [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/) of "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither Alexander's nor [Moser 2009](/papers/moser-agp_in_women.pdf)'s); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like to suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl. The common and normal experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body just isn't the same thing as cross-sex embodiment fantasies, even if people who aren't familiar with the [lurid details of the latter](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) don't realize this.
-Alexander's post gives one account of a woman
+The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable is because my skepticism is specifically about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a higher-bandwidth channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response, like free-form testimony. The account quoted in Alexander's post from a woman claiming to experience AGP does more to convince me that AGP in women might be a real thing than _Slate Star Codex_ survey data showing straight cis women giving a mean response of 2.4 to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine _being_ her?" question. (And even then, I would want to ask followup questions to hopefully distinguish true female AGP from situations like when [a female acquaintance of mine initially seemed to empathize with the concept, but found it bizarre when I elaborated a little more](/2023/Jul/blanchards-dangerous-idea-and-the-plight-of-the-lucid-crossdreamer/#explaining-agp).)
-I can conceive of being wrong about this, but I don't think the _SSC_ survey data is a powerful enough instrument to make that call—I'd want in-depth interviews and preferably the kind of physical arousal measurements that Michael Bailey's lab does.
+While the promise of psychological research is that it might [teach us things about ourselves that we don't already know](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), I still mostly expect it to [all add up to normality](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/adding-up-to-normality)—to retrodict the things we've already observed without the research.
+My disquiet with Alexander's "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender" (and similarly Aella's ["Everyone Has Autogynephilia"](https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia)) is that it visibly fails to add up to normality. In a world where it was _actually true_ that "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]", I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking to look like the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts, and that's just not what I see.
-You _start_ to get into these issues with the "My literal body is arousing" account in the post, but I expect more digging to reveal a different picture. Of course, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in [TODO: unredact name1]'s head specifically. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to [TODO: name2] in 2016, her _first_ reaction was, "I can relate to this; I'm turned on by the idea of being a hot girl", but then when I went into a little _more detail_ (linking to the ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman"](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) TVTropes page), she revised to, "Wait, no, I can't relate this at all; like, you _want_ to have breasts?" (I regret that this is paraphrased from memory; I haven't been able to find the transcript because I think Sarah deleted her Facebook account a couple times.)
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-Just on my prior beliefs about sexually-dimorphic animals, I just have _so much_ trouble _actually_ believing that [name1]'s experience of her body is more relevantly similar to mine than [name2]'s, _even if_ [name1] ends up sometimes using similar English words as me (_e.g._, "it's hot that I have breasts").
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-In a world where it was _actually true_ where "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" reflected what was actually going on in the world, I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking, to look like the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts.
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-Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
+Consider [this quip from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
> The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
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> The answer: Yes
-I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women _and_ non-transitioned AGP men very frequently.
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-_The poster herself seems to implicitly acknowledge this_, by calling it a "trans lesbian question" rather than merely a "lesbian" question!!
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-I think the boring hypothesis here is "Yes, of course, because trans women are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians."
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-This isn't Science, because I'm just using my brain's pattern-matching capabilities (I could be selectively remembering, distorting my categories, _&c._). With time and funding, I'm sure it would be possible to make it more formal—gather Reddit comments from cis and trans women, have raters categorize themes while blinded to the cis/trans identity of the authors ...
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-From my perspective, it looks like the _Slate Star_/Alicorner crowd basically _agree_ with me on all the empirical observables, but then _somehow_ you people manage come up with these absurdly gerrymandered verbal "explanations" that can't _possibly_ match up with the underlying cognitive machinery your brain must be using to know what to anticipate, but if you don't see this after it's already been pointed out then I'm not sure how to proceed.
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-I can't _prove_ that all these ***physiological males with male-typical interests whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic (i.e. male-typical) sexuality*** (we _agree_ on all that!!) are men with a fetish rather than women in male bodies—for the same reason I can't prove there's not an [invisible inaudiable dragon that's permeable to flour](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief) in your garage. From my perspective, it looks like you just have a fundamentally broken epistemology; from your perspective, I probably look like I'm dogmatically making unexplained inferential leaps.
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-If it were _just_ a matter of different priors (where my stronger [inductive bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_bias) lets me learn faster from less data, at the cost of [being wrong in universes that I think mostly don't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_optimization)), I would expect you to express more uncertainty. I would _totally_ respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality. [I _agree_ that causality is _much harder_ to pin down than mere correlation.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/)
+I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women and non-transitioned AGP men very frequently. (I speak from experience.) Do cis lesbians often feel this way about each other? I'm inclined to doubt it—_and the author seems to agree with me_ by calling the phenomenon a "trans lesbian" question rather than just a "lesbian" question! I think the very boring hypothesis here is that this is because trans lesbians are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians. And I think that authors who can't bring themselves to say as much in those words are [going to end up confusing themselves about the statistical structure of real life](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), even if they can agree that trans lesbians and straight men have some things in common.
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