> 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](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/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/). 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
The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it _should_ have gone. (Narrative optimization should be a _deliberate_ process: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather rather than letting them get blurred together in the murky, unauditable process of reconstructing the scene from an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after.)
-A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which [I had protested that](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/changing_emotions/q6j) gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
+A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which [I had protested that](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd) gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
At some point (to my eternal regret, I cannot recall the exact context), she casually said something about my desire for social dominance. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on something as innocuous and indisputable as my height or hair color.
(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](http://lesswrong.com/lw/xe/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 [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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff