1 Title: Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
4 Tags: autogynephilia, epistemology, two-type taxonomy
7 [This started out as a draft email to Scott, but I'm really unhappy with the way it's developing; I should try to sculpt it into a defensible public post instead—or make it a good email first, then a post]
9 on parsimony intuitions (re autogenderphilia and developmental psychology)
11 > Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
13 > —[Steven Kaas](https://twitter.com/stevenkaas/status/148884531917766656)
15 Explaining my view in a way that I think you'll understand 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 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. So, self-consciousness aside, here goes—
17 You suggest what you allege is 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."
19 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 actually 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.
21 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?
23 Well, they're all human; that buys you a _lot_ of similarities!
25 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".
27 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?
29 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.
31 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?
33 I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
35 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).
37 _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 don't know.)
39 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.)
41 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?!
43 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" gibberish, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
45 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.
47 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 anyone'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. 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.
49 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_.
51 I freely admit that this art of looking at how people behave in the world and trying to describe what you see, is not a Science, because it relies on your brain's magical (as the term of art for "capabilities we don't know how to program") pattern-matching abilities that other people might doubt, whereas if you have a pre-registered survey of fixed questions, and the target demographic comes back and says 3.4, other people can't seriously doubt that they did, in fact, say 3.4.
53 Nevertheless, looking at how people behave in the world and trying to describe what you see is a form of _empiricism_, even if it's less third-party-legible than Science. In trying to upgrade our naïve empiricism to a Science, we should hope to design careful surveys to give us quantitative measurements of the qualitative patterns we see "in the wild", but getting this right is a surprisingly tricky endeavor. We're not obligated to throw away all our qualitative observations, in favor of single (!) survey question, just because the latter is quantifiable.
55 You wrote about this in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
57 > 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.
59 > 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.
61 > 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.
63 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."
65 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.
67 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.
69 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.
71 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.
73 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.)
75 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".
77 Fundamentally, 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.
79 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?
81 Here's [an example from Twitter](https://web.archive.org/web/20210903211904/https://twitter.com/lae_laeta/status/1433880523160567808)—
83 > The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
87 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!
89 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." Again, 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 ...
91 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 ... ???
93 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.
95 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.
97 Ozy has an old post about [how "the community" doesn't have a _gender_ gap; we merely have an _assigned sex at birth_ gap](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/01/lw-has-an-assigned-sex-at-birth-gap-not-a-gender-gap/). In my worldview, this should be _embarrassing_. (If you keep running into domains where "assigned" sex is a more useful predictor than "gender", that should be a clue that sex is real and gender identity is fake.) But if Ozy's mind hasn't been [created already in motion](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CuSTqHgeK4CMpWYTe/created-already-in-motion) to find it embarrassing even after it's been pointed out, then I'm not sure what else I can say?
99 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/) (And if I had a prior belief that invisible dragons were plausible, I would remain agnostic about the no-dragon _vs._ invisible-dragon hypotheses upon seeing an apparently empty garage.) But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"!! If you're _not_ playing a "does the evidence permit me to believe" game, I just don't see how you think the _SSC_ survey data is powerful enough to answer that question one way or the other!
111 I think "Men who sexually fantasize about being women, do not particularly resemble actual women" _is_ the "boring" hypothesis—boring in the sense that Steve Sailer's views on race are boring, in that _everyone knows this shit instinctively_, but no one at your respectibility level can say it out loud because you're insane religious fanatics who are
113 In ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), you express skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
115 > 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.
117 > 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.
119 > 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.
121 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 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."
125 In the case of the etiology and taxonomy of MtF, it seems to me that informed observers typically _agree_ that there's a pretty stark bimodality in the data (very large effect sizes, even if not of course not literally everyone fits the stereotype, because _nothing_ in psychology is that clean): that androphilic MtF transsexuals tend to have been overtly feminine their entire lives in a way that's noticeable to others (such that they "stick out" in Society as effeminate men if they _didn't_ transition), but gynephilic/bi/asexual MtF transsexuals don't fit this profile (living as ordinary men before "coming out"), and very frequently report a history of erotic female transformation fantasies (autogynephilia)—which shows up not only in easily-quantifiable surveys, but also qualitatively if you [just _read_ the things non-androphilic MtFs write in their own forums when the general public isn't looking](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on).
127 Anyway, if we agree on the basic observations, what's at issue? [What's at issue is the _causality_](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/): does AGP cause gender identity (such that these are, basically, straight males with a fetish), or does gender identity (presumably caused by some underlying brain intersex condition) get eroticized and manifest as AGP?
129 I readily admit that I can't definitely _prove_ that it's not an intersex condition. Nevertheless—if I'm just being honest about the inference procedure my brain is _actually_ using, without pretending that it's more rigorous than it is—I think this question is _actually_ pretty obvious if you have functional parsimony intuitions about how the world works.
131 To me, the qualitative observations are very important, because they have a lot of details about what the psychological phenomenon actually is. (The qualitative observations are what _motivated_ the survey question, to try to get a more quantifiable measurement of something we already had reason to believe exists.) An ordinary cis woman who reads the survey question, "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?" with no context, is not necessarily in the same headspace as an MtF transsexual, even if they end up giving the same number—just like someone who's never had a real manic–depressive cycle might give the same answer to "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?" because they're remembering when their team lost the Super Bowl. (If you were worried about a bipolar screening test not generalizing to a group so different as "hospital inpatients", how much more worried should you be about asking people of _different sexes_ questions _about sexuality_?)
133 Anecdotally, when I talked about my experiences to Sarah Constantin, her _first_ reaction was to say that she
137 Just—_other than_ this mysterious sexualized _desire_ to be female, the biological _and_ psychological traits of the group in question seem to be in the _male_ normal range. Notice how your survey had almost eight times as many lesbian trans women than straight trans women? That's _not_ what the distribution of sexual orientation looks like among cis women. But if we consider that trans women are _male_, and males tend to be attracted to females, the data looks _less confusing_. Or did you know that [the ratio of trans to cis women among Haskell programmers is close to 1:1](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/)? That's _way_ off from the ratio in the general population. The data looks _less confusing_ if you think of it as "at least 1.5% of male Haskell programmers wish they were female" rather than "Haskell programmers with female gender identities are equally likely to be trans or cis".
139 Your "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]" hypothesis seriously is treating "gender identity" as a causally potent variable that means the same thing in trans people and cis people. And just—the world doesn't look that way
141 Even if it were _true_ that the late-onset type were caused by some
143 You point to your survey data saying that cis gay men are autoandrophilic as something Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence can't explain, but I don't see my theory as being particularly committed to making predictions about how gay men will answer the "Picture a very attractive man [...]" question. It's a different population!
145 I would totally respect it if you were merely _uncertain_ about the AGP→gender-ID _vs._ gender-ID→AGP causality; I can't expect everyone to share my parsimony intuitions. But on Discord, you said "it just seemed totally wrong"! I just don't think that's something you can possibly conclude based on how _other populations_ are answering similar survey questions!
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