>
> —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
-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 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."
+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,
+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.
-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, frankly, I also expect my parsiony intuitions to actually get the right answer in the real world, and modesty/[Outside View](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FsfnDfADftGDYeG4c/outside-view-as-conversation-halter)/[Caution on Bias Arguments](https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/17/caution-on-bias-arguments/) to get the wrong answer.
+Let me explain.
-If we have a big causal graph with C at the root (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ ...) with real-valued variables, and someone proposes a theory about what happens to the E_i 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 structure in their social behavior—but sexuality looks more "biological" than "social".)
-
-In my ontology of how-the-world-works, this is _not_ a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians _and_ gay men _and_ heterosexual males with a female gender identity _and_ heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
+In my ontology of how the world works, "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" is _not_ a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians _and_ gay men _and_ heterosexual males with a female gender identity _and_ heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
What do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?
-Well, they're all human; that buys you a _lot_ of similarities!
+Well, they're all human; that buys you a lot of similarities!
But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".
So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
-Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared _social_ experience could induce similarities.
+Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared social experience could induce similarities.
But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
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 we 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_ (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 common lives. (Indeed, as you know, 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 possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?!
+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?
-Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your 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?
+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?
-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 "imagine being him/her" questions.
+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.
-The _reason_ I believe 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) survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
+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?
-If you look at what trans women say _to each other_ when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories (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.
+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.
-Without making any pretentions whatsoever to rigor or Science, but _just_ looking at the world and trying to describe it in words, I think there is clearly a _thing_ here. When I look at what women write, and when I look at what gay men write, I don't see the _same thing_.
+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.)
-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 you 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.
+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.
-When you pose a vaguely similar question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is very nonobvious.
-And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for you, _you agree with me_: you wrote about this methodological issue in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
-> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
-> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
+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
+
+
+(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.
+
+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.
+
+And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for him, Scott Alexander agrees with me: he wrote about this methodological issue in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
+
+> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
+>
+> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
+>
> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
-The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you think you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
+The reason it makes sense for Alexander to be skeptical of the screening test is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder" don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People already had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" [as a taxon](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/). As an experienced clinician, when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a certainty—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to immediately jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
+
+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.
+
+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.
-This 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 actually going on.
+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.
-If you're wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think you 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 (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.
+[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)
-This is why I expect the standard "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" cope to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither yours 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.
+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".
+
+I can believe that some women are AGP, but it's going to need a more detailed investigation than the survey prompt
+
+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
+
+Alexander's post gives one account of a woman
+
+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.
-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.
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.)
-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 _very_ different psychological phenomena that you shouldn't lump together as "autogenderphilia". 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"). 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.
+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").
+
+]
+
+
+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.
+
-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—and when I empirically-but-unScientifically eyeball the world (which is a much _higher-bandwidth_ information channel than eyeballing the shape of the 1–5 survey response histogram), that's not what I see. I could be biased, but—well, do _you_ see it? Where? Any other exhibits besides Elena?
Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
> The answer: Yes
-I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women _and_ non-transitioned AGP men _very_ frequently. I can't recall any instances of cis lesbians saying this. _The poster herself seems to implicitly acknowledge this_, by calling it a "trans lesbian question" rather than merely a "lesbian" question!!
+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!!
-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." 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 ...
+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."
-But I begin to despair this is a domain where [Science can't help](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wzxneh7wxkdNYNbtB/when-science-can-t-help). It seems like people mostly _agree_ about empirical observations! People _agree_ that AGP is common in lesbian trans women (after this is pointed out with sufficient force, if it looks like the general public isn't looking). You _agree_ that it looks like there are two types of MtF differentiated by sexual orientation; you just think that the second type is also an intersex condition because ... ???
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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 ...
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.
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.
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/)
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff