Not the best day. But, not the worst.
Separately, there are, and [perhaps](http://www.transtorah.org/PDFs/On-Becoming-A-Woman.pdf) [always](/2017/Mar/nothing-new-under-the-sun/) have been, paraphilic men who wished they were women—autogynephiles—and the extreme right tail of them also sought out interventions from the twentieth-century doctors. Tragically, this [didn't usually work as well](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/a-passing-privilege/), but it was rare enough for autogynephiles to actually attempt it (as opposed to privately fantasizing or playing dress-up) that it didn't have much impact on the social order.
-The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by [the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/), whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been victimized by the hegemonic social order.
+The legal changes required for the twentieth-century doctors' innovation was sponsored by [the political coalition of individually non-hegemonic identity groups](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/hierarchy-wings/), whose organizing principle had always been to fight on behalf of the marginalized—those who, without the coalition's sponsorship, would have been (even more) victimized by the hegemonic social order.
But when the source of a coalition's power rests on the loyalty of the victims it protects, and of their allies, then those seeking to win more power for the coalition have an incentive to both create more victims, and distinguish loyal from fair-weather allies.
[...]
My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
+
+
+> knows much less than what he thinks when he's talking about with the object level of trans people
+Trans people aren't a reliable source about what's going on with trans people, because they're playing a respectability politics game
Still, the macaque–rasin anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction." Or _something like that_.
-One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf) (ETLE)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
+One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion", this—["erotic target location error"](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf)?—is agnostic to the object of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
And this is actually what we see. Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of _being_ women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
-Once I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general ETLE hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
+Recently I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
-And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for me the thing going on with me being an underlying ETLE-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
+And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for me the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
I don't _know_ the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to _be_, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's [one of those sensitive bookish males](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
-----
-Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird [sexual fetish that can't possibly be realized using existing technology](https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049) and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
+Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird sexual obsession about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science.
It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
> She did laugh ruefully at that.
>
> —https://donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com/nytimes-peru-n-word-part-four-what-happened-in-peru-2a641a9b5e83
+
+(Friendship Divorce)
+> _I wish you well
+> Couldn't you tell after all these years?
+> I wish you love
+> And life in a world that you're dreaming of_
----
-Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say?
+Pre-emptive dismissal as "unrepresenative" is incoherent: if it's not representative, how are you guessing what about I'm say? (Counter: maybe the guess is because this non-representative thing gets selectively signal-boosted—but that doesn't work if the person is talking about their own experience and hasn't been selected)
https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/644563577202704384/your-experiences-are-not-universal-theory-of
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes
https://transliberalism.substack.com/
Everyone wants to think they're an agent that's made an informed choice. And when the one comes to them and points out that they're the victim of a hostile memetic environment that's been conceptually gerrymandered to game them into making CRAZY choices for someone else's benefit, they take it personally. [...] From the inside, you have free choice in the sense that you don't know what you're going to do until you've finished computing it. From the outside, you're a system that can be gamed. You're always going to be dominated by _someone's_ memeplex. The question is, if you knew more and thought faster, which parts of your current ideology would extrapolated-you construe as parasites, and which as symbiotes? You should, of course, be very suspicious of anyone who thinks they already know the answer. But perhaps it should not be seen as such a incursion to suggest that the answer may surprise you!
+
+https://medium.com/@transphilosophr/t4t-and-the-micropolitics-of-trans-liberation-357df39df017
_ Gaydar Jamming (L.B. and R.H.)
_ Overlapping Distributions and Cancellable Stereotypes (the standard GC argument about trans = stereotypes but with more math)
_ Friendship Practices of the Secret-Sharing Plain Speech Valley Squirrels
+_ What Are Pronouns For?
2021 significant posts—
LW—
+_ Daniel C. Dennett on Near-Term Alignment Problems
_ Angelic Irony
_ "You'll Never Persuade Anyone"
-_ Cromwell's Rule Is About Symmetry, Not Fairness
+_ Cromwell's Rule Is About Physical Symmetry, Not Fairness
_ The Motte-and-Bailey Doctrine as Compression Artifact
_ "Rationalists" Don't Exist (But Rationality Does)
- And the Wisdom to Know the Difference
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me
+-----
+
+A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian.
+
+But how would that work? The experience described by this trope would be something you'd predict if sexuality was implemented in a separate brain module that could stay with the rest of the body even while the "soul" (the implementation of someone's personality, memory, _&c._) gets swapped out. But if the brain isn't actually modularized that way, the magical transformation process would have to do a lot more custom engineering work (to "fit" the brainware-construed-as-"soul" with sexuality-brainware that matches the body) to get the particular outcome portrayed in the stories.
+
+_In principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the stories, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way is it _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
+
+The problem is that, in the real world, the guys who are jacking off to the _fantasy_ of knowing what it's like to be female, are being motivated by a variation in _male_ sexuality. If you were to _actually_ become neurologically female, it _wouldn't_ seem like the scintillating apotheosis of sexual desire and the most important thing in the world. It would just feel normal, in the way that actual women feel their own existence is normal.
-A common theme in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now. But how would that work? That experience would be something you'd predict if sexuality was implemented in a separate brain module that could stay with the rest of the body even while the "soul" (the implementation of someone's personality, memory, _&c._) gets swapped out.
+In this way, autogynephilia is _intrinsically self-undermining_ in a way that fantasies of space flight are not. This doesn't in any way lessen the desire or make it go away—any more than [the guy who gets turned on by entropy decreasing a closed system](https://qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1049) would have his libido permanently vanish upon learning about the second law of thermodynamics. But it does, I suspect, change the way you think of it: it makes a difference whether you interpret the desire as a confused anomaly in male sexuality—the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—or _take it literally_.
+
+-----
+
+Another clue comes in the form of the following conjunction of observations. One, I'm not particularly repulsed by my own body in real life. ("Vague disappointment, sometimes" isn't the same thing as "repulsion".) Two, my fantasies about having a female body aren't _that_ discriminating—on the contrary, if I had magical BodyApp tech, I would want to experiment with being different ages/races/builds. Three, the thought being transformed in a _different_ male body, other than my own, _is_ kind of repulsive—
+
+-----
-But if the brain isn't actually modularized in that particular way, the magical transformation would have to do a lot more engineering work
+Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body".
-_ transformation details matter: accents and homonyms, sexual orientation changing emotions/accent fantasies: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/pheakgvLbFndXccXC
+Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because
--------
_ morality and culturally-defined values
---------
+-------
-_ Vassar clapback anecdote
+"The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/),
+
+> until men start thinking of themselves as _men_ they will tend to regard women as defective humans.
+
+When I read the ["systematizing–empathizing"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear, is [only a statistical difference at Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf)—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
+
+"Everything is a system" to "I _think_ everything is a system."
+
+I think everything is a system ... because I'm male??
+
+"I often wish some men/women would appreciate": https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj ]
--------
_ playing dumb initials anecdote
-
--------
-"The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/), Yud on "men should think of themselves as men" / "I often wish some men/women would appreciate"]
+_ Vassar clapback anecdote
-------------
+--------------
_ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2" (but phrased in a way that's agnostic about
But, it's actually looking like it's going to take closer to five years? I've done a lot of secret ("secret") blogging in the intervening four years (highlights on the About page: http://unremediatedgender.space/about/), but there's still a lot of content that has to be part of "the full version" that I somehow haven't managed to write down yet. I wanted to just write one big megapost, in the hopes of getting it all out of my system so I can finally move on with my life, but it was too difficult, so I'm going to have to split it into multiple parts.
-Here's Part 1 ([TODO] words), about my experiences (as seen through the interpretive lens of Yudkowskian philosophy): [TODO linky]
+Here's Part 1 ([TODO] words), about my experiences (as seen through the interpretive lens of Yudkowskian philosophy): [TODO linky] (content warning: weird private sexuality things)
Then Part 2 can cover the evidence and theory for why I think I'm justified in believing that a substantial majority of trans women in Western countries are relevantly "like me", even though I don't have introspective access to other people's experiences. (Including going into the hidden Bayesan structure of what "relevantly 'like me'" is even supposed to mean—the sense in which a psychological theory can be "true".)
roll my own pingbacks? (I didn't like the Pelican plugin) http://blog.mlindgren.ca/entry/2015/01/17/how-to-manually-send-a-pingback/
worddiff for gitweb?! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1518178/how-do-i-change-the-gitweb-default-diff-format-to-color-words
+whole blog RSS? https://posativ.org/isso/docs/configuration/server/#rss
rework footnotes plugin!? (Markdown footnote format is better than [ref][/ref] tags)
self-host a copy of Source Sans Pro (I'm annoyed that my devserver preview fonts are ugly when I've killed my network connection so I can focus for once)
bigger click-target pagination links
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff