> If it makes sense to speak of stripping away my autogynephila and my explicitly egalitarian-individualist ideology, would my very soul be revealed as male?
-(Editor's note: _yes_.)
+(Editor's note: _yes_. Because I have a male brain, and sufficiently-advanced soul science would be able to notice. It doesn't manifest as a _consciously-felt_ explicit "gender identity"—but [why should it?](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/))
> And if so, what can I do about it? What violence could I inflict upon me to make me my _self_?
>
-Title: Thing of Things Transgender Intellectual Turing Test Predictions and Commentary
+Title: <em>Thing of Things</em> Transgender Intellectual Turing Test Predictions and Commentary
Date: 2017-03-29 19:26
Category: commentary
Tags: Ozy, two-type taxonomy
Why am I doing this again?
-I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it would seem a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given our differences. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
+I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it would seem a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given our differences in outlook. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
-_But you only live once_. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing in the transfeminine direction is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_ (the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units) being around 0.2 or 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
+_But you only live once_. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing in the transfeminine direction is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_ (the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units) being around 0.2 or 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is allegedly _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
But this—_obsession_ with sex differences and genderbending has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose, because I've been ideologically corrupted by lurking [/r/GenderCritical](https://www.reddit.com/r/GenderCritical/)—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?
After some thought, you conjecture that it probably has something to do with having cheap-to-detect features that correlate with more-expensive-to-detect features that are decision-relevant with respect to the agent's goals—
-A few (non-adapted) bleggs are purple rather than blue, but are very nearly like ordinary bleggs in all other aspects, so it feels more intuitive to think of them as oddly-colored bleggs rather than their own category of object: their easily-observed deviant color doesn't let you make significant inferences about anything you care about. (While "only" 95% of purple bleggs contain vanadium ore, as compared to 98% of standard-color bleggs, the three-percentage points difference doesn't seem like a big deal.)
+A few (non-adapted) bleggs are purple rather than blue, but are very nearly like ordinary bleggs in all other aspects, so it feels more intuitive to think of them as oddly-colored bleggs rather than their own category of object: their easily-observed deviant color doesn't let you make significant inferences about anything you care about. (While "only" 95% of purple bleggs contain vanadium ore, as compared to 98% of standard-color bleggs, the three percentage-points difference doesn't seem like a big deal.)
Likewise, 2% of otherwise-entirely-ordinary bleggs contain palladium, but you have no way of knowing this without taking them to the sorting scanner (which is finicky to start up and takes a minute to run): their metal content is of great practical interest, but seems like a rare, unpredictable fluke, unrelated to any other feature that you might hope to use to distinguish a new category of sortable object.