Title: You Are Right and I Was Wrong: Reply to Tailcalled on Causality
Date: 2021-02-01
Category: commentary
-Tags: causality, Tailcalled
+Tags: causality, Tailcalled, autogynephilia, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
-Friend of the blog [Tailcalled responds to](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/) my [2016 response to Ozy](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) on autogynephilia.
\ No newline at end of file
+Friend of the blog [Tailcalled responds to](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/) my [2016 response](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) to [Ozy on autogynephilia](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/).
+
+Summarizing—Ozy had claimed that the concept of _autogynephilia_ is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women _also_ have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant gender issues.
+
+I was, and am, intensely skeptical that these are really separate things, but at the time, I didn't have the language to properly articulate the theoretical basis of my skepticism. Frustrated by the tendency I perceived of many trans advocates to [resist making scientific generalizations about psychology](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/) while acknowledging the empirical correlations that motivate the generalizations, I wrote, "Summarizing correlations is the _entire point_ of making a taxonomy."
+
+But as Tailcalled's response points out, this is just wrong! Different causal theories can generate the same correlations in a particular set of observations, while still making meaningfully and drastically different claims about the world.
+
+As an illustrative example, suppose you observe that among professional athletes in Chicago, [basketball players wear red jerseys](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/185700267974/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2018-2019), but [gridiron football players wear navy-blue jerseys](http://www.gridiron-uniforms.com/GUD/images/2020_Chicago.png). Reifying these observations into a two-type "basketball/red" and "football/blue" taxonomy of professional athletes is perhaps not the _worst_ theory—it does [compress the length of the message needed to describe your observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)—but it's not a particularly _good_ one, largely because it's so _fragile_: it _completely_ breaks down the moment you leave Chicago, or [the Bulls unveil a new jersey](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/635656121361809408/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2020-2021), or you just look at what the visiting team is wearing. And it's fragile _because_ it doesn't reflect what's "really going on" in the world: in fact, what color shirt you're wearing doesn't causally affect what games you can play, and _vice versa_.
+
+In the case of sex dysphoria in [developmental males](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), I think the documented correlations between age-of-onset and sexual orientation and history of autogynephilic arousal _do_ reflect what's really going on in the world.
+
+[TODO: wrap up, talk more about the specifics in Tailcalled's post, maybe cite Veale's identity-defense model or Serano 2020]