[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md

Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
Date: 2021-03-21 11:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek
Status: draft

_(Part 1 of 3)_

> _I'll write my way out  
> Write everything down, far as I can see  
> I'll write my way out  
> Overwhelm them with honesty  
> This is the eye of the hurricane  
> This is the only way I can protect my legacy_
>
> —"Hurricane", _Hamilton_

So, as I sometimes allude to, I've spent basically my entire adult life in this insular intellectual subculture that was founded in the late 'aughts to promulgate an ideal of _systematically correct reasoning_—general methods of thought that result in true beliefs and successful plans—and, [incidentally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4PPE6D635iBcGPGRy/rationality-common-interest-of-many-causes), to use these methods of systematically correct reasoning to prevent superintelligent machines from [destroying all value in the universe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). Lately I've been calling it my "robot cult" (a phrase [due to Dale Carrico](https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2011/08/ten-reasons-to-take-seriously.html))—the pejorative is partially [ironically affectionate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gBma88LH3CLQsqyfS/cultish-countercultishness), and partially an expression of betrayal-trauma acquired from that time almost everyone I [used to trust](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science) insisted on, on ...

Well. That's a _long story_—for another time, perhaps. For _now_, I want to explain how my robot cult's foundational texts had an enormous influence on my self-concept in relation to sex and gender.

It all started in summer 2007 (I was nineteen years old), when I came across _Overcoming Bias_, a blog on the theme of how to achieve more accurate beliefs. (I don't remember exactly how I was referred, but I think it was likely to have been [a link from Megan McArdle](https://web.archive.org/web/20071129181942/http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009783.html), then writing as "Jane Galt" at _Asymmetrical Information_.)

[Although](http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/hal-finney) [technically](http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/james-miller) [a](http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/david-j-balan) [group](http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/andrew) [blog](http://www.overcomingbias.com/author/anders-sandberg), the vast majority of posts on _Overcoming Bias_ were by Robin Hanson or Eliezer Yudkowsky. I was previously acquainted in passing with Yudkowsky's [writing about future superintelligence](https://web.archive.org/web/20200217171258/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/tmol-faq.html). (I had [mentioned him in my Diary once in 2005](/ancillary/diary/42/), albeit without spelling his name correctly.) Yudkowsky was now using _Overcoming Bias_ and the medium of blogging [to generate material for a future book about rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vHPrTLnhrgAHA96ko/why-i-m-blooking). Hanson's posts I could take or leave, but Yudkowsky's sequences of posts about rationality (coming out almost-daily through early 2009, eventually totaling hundreds of thousands of words) were _amazingly great_, [drawing on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info) the [established knowledge of fields](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASpGaS3HGEQCbJbjS/eliezer-s-sequences-and-mainstream-academia) from [cognitive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ftJ38y9SRBCBsCzy/scope-insensitivity) [psychology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R8cpqD3NA4rZxRdQ4/availability) to [evolutionary biology](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MH2b8NfWv22dBtrs8) to explain the [mathematical](https://www.readthesequences.com/An-Intuitive-Explanation-Of-Bayess-Theorem) [principles](https://www.readthesequences.com/A-Technical-Explanation-Of-Technical-Explanation) [governing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eY45uCCX7DdwJ4Jha/no-one-can-exempt-you-from-rationality-s-laws) _how intelligence works_—[the reduction of "thought"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/p7ftQ6acRkgo6hqHb/dreams-of-ai-design) to [_cognitive algorithms_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HcCpvYLoSFP4iAqSz/rationality-appreciating-cognitive-algorithms). Intelligent systems [that use](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/executable_philosophy) [evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6s3xABaXKPdFwA3FS/what-is-evidence) to construct [predictive](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) models of the world around them—that have "true" "beliefs"—can _use_ those models to compute which actions will best achieve their goals. You simply [won't believe how much this blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DXcezGmnBcAYL2Y2u/yes-a-blog) will change your life; I would later frequently [joke](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha_ha_only_serious) that Yudkowsky rewrote my personality over the internet.

(The blog posts later got edited and collected into a book, [_Rationality: From AI to Zombies_](https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2), but I continue to say "the Sequences" because I _hate_ the gimmicky "AI to Zombies" subtitle—it makes it sound like a commercial book optimized to sell copies, rather than something to corrupt the youth, competing for the same niche as the Bible or the Koran—_the book_ that explains what your life should be about.)

There are a few things about me that I need to explain before I get into the topic-specific impact the blog had on me.

The first thing—the chronologically first thing. Ever since I was thirteen or fourteen years old—

(and I _really_ didn't expect to be blogging about this eighteen years later)

(I _still_ don't want to be blogging about this, but unfortunately, it actually turns out to be central to the intellectual–political project I've been singlemindedly focused on for the past four years because [somebody has to and no one else will](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/))

—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... need to write more about the phenomenology of this. In the meantime, just so you know what I'm talking about, the relevant TVTrope is ["Man, I Feel Like a Woman."](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) Or search "body swap" on PornHub. Or check out my few, circumspect contributions to [the popular genre of](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) captioned-photo female transformation erotica (everyone is wearing clothes, so these might be "safe for work" in a narrow technical sense, if not a moral one): [1](/ancillary/captions/dr-equality-and-the-great-shift/) [2](/ancillary/captions/the-other-side-of-me/) [3](/ancillary/captions/the-impossible-box/) [4](/ancillary/captions/de-gustibus-non-est/).

(The first segment of my pen surname is a legacy of middle-school friends letting me borrow some of the [Ranma ½](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD) graphic novels, about a young man named Ranma Saotome cursed ("cursed"??) to transform into a woman on exposure to cold water. This was just _before_ puberty kicked in for me, but I have no way of computing the counterfactual to know whether that had a causal influence.)

So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and _of course_ knew that I must never, ever tell a single soul about. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to [tell my Diary about it](/ancillary/diary/53/#first-agp-confession).)

But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing that would persist indefinitely, where I started having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being female. Just—little day-to-day thoughts, little symbolic gestures.

Like when I would [write in my pocket notebook in the persona of my female analogue](/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png).

Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _y_, _z_)](/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg) because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine.

Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."

Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.

Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_ when it was new in 2007, and [who would rather read from Evelyn Fox Keller's _Reflections on Gender and Science_ than](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/) watch [Super Bowl XLII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XLII).

Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.

(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)

Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)

Or how one of the [little song-fragments I used to write in my head](/tag/music/) went—

> _Sometimes I sigh because I'll never get rich  
> And there's no magic so I can't be a witch  
> And that I must enjoy the scorn of the world  
> Just 'cause I'm butch and I'm a tranny girl_

Or the time I felt proud when my Normal American Girl coworker at the supermarket in 'aught-nine said that she had assumed I was gay. (I'm not, but the fact that Normal American Girl thought so meant that I was successfully unmasculine.)

And so on _et cetera ad infinitum_. This has been a very persistent _thing_ for me.

The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing doesn't _feel_ explicitly erotic. The thing I did in the day in class about writing in my notebook about being a girl, was _very different_ from the thing I did in my room at night about _visualizing_ girls with this abstract sense of "But what if that were _me_?" while furiously masturbating. The former activity was my beautiful pure happy romantic daydream, whereas the latter activity was not beautiful or pure at all!

Now I am not a cognitive scientist, and can't claim to _know_ exactly what my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is, or where it comes from—that's [not the kind of thing I would expect people to _know_ from introspection alone](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). But it has always seemed like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between the erotic thing, and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, even if the two things don't _feel_ the same: the overlap in subject matter is too much to be a coincidence. And the erotic thing definitely came _first_.

Maybe this story reads differently in 2021 from how it was to live in the 'aughts? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—

(and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is _much_ easier to talk about than the erotic thing)

(I mean, the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is much harder to talk about _clearly_, but talking about it _un_-clearly is less shameful and requires much less bravery)

—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation.

But it was a different time, then. Of course I had _heard of_ transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life. (I understood my "tranny girl" song to reflect an idle fantasy, not a legitimate life plan.)

At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—[roughly analogous to how](/2017/Jul/interlude-vi/) a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.

[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.

You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body).

So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.

So, you know, as part of my antisexism, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out [_The Feminine Mystique_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique) and [Susan Faludi's _Backlash_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women) from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—[_Pandagon_](https://web.archive.org/web/20070630211101/http://pandagon.net/), [_Feministe_](https://web.archive.org/web/20080901002058/http://www.feministe.us/blog), [_Feministing_](https://web.archive.org/web/20080605182529/http://www.feministing.com/). The one time I special-ordered a book at the physical Barnes & Noble before I turned 18 and got my own credit card and could order books online, it was [_Feminist Intepretations of Ayn Rand_](https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html).

(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)

It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity things. True, the [blank slate doctrine](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#blank-slate) has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been [likened to a nontheistic state religion](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/09/how-dawkins-got-pwned-part-1/)—uh, bear with me for a moment—I was a _very_ religious teenager.

I have a vague memory of being in the Crown College library at the University in Santa Cruz in 2007, reading Robert Wright's _The Moral Animal_ (because it had been on [Yudkowsky's old book-recommendations list](https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html)), and being _aghast_ at how openly, brazenly _sexist_ it was.

(That is, with respect to what I considered _sexist_ at the time. I wish there was some way to know what my teenage self would think of my current self's writing, which is at least as "bad" as Wright and plausibly worse. Maybe if the whole benevolent-superintelligence thing my robot cult always talks about ever works out, I'll be able to kick off a limited-scope [ancestor-simulation](https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html) to find out. In the meantime, if you're offended, I'd love it if you could let me know in the comments exactly how much and why! [Personal identity doesn't actually exist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RLScTpwc5W2gGGrL9/identity-isn-t-in-specific-atoms); humans growing up in the same cultural tradition can be seen as being drawn from a similar _distribution_ as my teenage self.)

That overwhelming feeling of cold horror and hatred at _the enemy revealed_—that, I conjecture, is what religious people feel when encountering a heretical text for the first time. (In _principle_, a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm that it is the same emotion, as a matter of biological fact.) The social–psychological need to [avoid the belief's real weak points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points) is why the "religion" characterization makes sense, even if the claim that psychological sex differences are fake isn't a [_supernatural_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural) one. But quasi-religious ideological fervor aside, there was presumably a _reason_ I cared so much about being a good pro-feminist _specifically_, and hardly spent any time at all thinking about other dimensions of social justice, like race or class. And I think the reason is because, because ...

Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in order to finish that sentence in the current year and be understood, I'd have to say, "because I was trans." And with respect to what the words mean in the current year, it's true. But that's not how I think of it, then or now.

It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable [Other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex#Volume_One). But that's not unusual, is it?—or it _shouldn't_ be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.

------

Anyway, that's some background about where I was at, personally and ideologically, _before_ I fell in with this robot cult.

My ideological committment to psychological-sex-differences denialism made me uncomfortable when the topic of sex differences happened to come up on the blog—which wasn't particularly often at all, but in such a _vast_ body of work as the Sequences, it did happen to come up a few times (and those few times are the subject of this blog post).

For example, as part of [an early explanation of why the values we would want to program into an artificial superintelligence don't reduce to any one simple principle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NnohDYHNnKDtbiMyp/fake-utility-functions), Yudkowsky remarks that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other or from any other value."

From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?

I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ part, all humans are extremely similar: [as Yudkowsky would soon write about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) [(following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/pfc92.pdf), complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis. As a toy example, if some organelle gets assembled from ten genes, those ten alleles _all_ have to be nearly universal in the population—if each only had a frequency of 0.9, then the probability of getting them all right would only be 0.9<sup>10</sup> ≈ 0.349. If allele H [epistatically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis) only confers a fitness advantage when allele G at some other locus is already present, then G has to already be well on its way to fixation in order for there to be appreciable selective pressure for H. Evolution, feeding on variation, uses it up. Complicated functionality that requires multiple genes working in concert can only accrete gradually as each individual piece reaches fixation in the entire population, resulting in an intricate species-universal _design_: just about everyone has 206 bones, a liver, a [parietal lobe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parietal_lobe), _&c_.

In this way (contrary to the uninformed suspicions of those still faithful to the blank slate), evolutionary psychology actually turns out to be impressively antiracist discipline: maybe individual humans can differ in small ways like personality, or [ancestry-groups in small ways](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#ancestries) like skin color, but these are, and _have_ to be, "shallow" low-complexity variations on the same basic human design; new _complex_ functionality would require speciation.

This luck does not extend to antisexism. If the genome were a computer program, it would have `if female { /* ... */ } else if male { /* ... */ }` conditional blocks, and inside those blocks, you can have complex sex-specific functionality. By default, selection pressures on one sex tend to drag the other along for the ride—men have nipples because there's no particular reason for them not to—but in those cases where it was advantageous in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for females and males to do things _differently_, sexual dimorphism can evolve (slowly—[more than one and half orders of magnitude slower than monomorphic adaptations](/papers/rogers-mukherjee-quantitative_genetics_of_sexual_dimorphism.pdf), in fact).

The evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers wrote, "One can, in effect, treat the sexes as if they were different species, the opposite sex being a resource relevant to producing maximum surviving offspring" (!). There actually isn't one species-universal design—it's _two_ designs.

If you're willing to admit to the possibility of psychological sex differences _at all_, you have to admit that sex differences in the parts of the mind that are _specifically about mating_ are going to be a prime candidate. (But by no means the only one—different means of reproduction have different implications for [life-history strategies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory) far beyond the act of mating itself.) Even if there's a lot of "shared code" in how love-and-attachment works in general, there are also going to be specific differences that were [optimized for](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8vpf46nLMDYPC6wA4/optimization-and-the-intelligence-explosion) facilitating males impregnating females. In that sense, the claim that "the love of a man for a woman, and the love of a woman for a man, have not been cognitively derived from each other" just seems commonsensically _true_.

I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).

My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to [minimize the expected squared error of my probabilistic predictions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).

Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), concerned an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. My song went—

> _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight  
> So she can't give her bad advice  
> No love or value save for evolutionary psych_  
>
> _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight  
> Because the world's not girls and guys  
> Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night_

Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is abhorrent. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their views on psychology! Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed to Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. I hadn't yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but heed that we too may have ideas that are false".

[TODO: Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html ; contrast that incident (it's not an accident that he guessed right) to Yudkowsky: "I try to avoid criticizing people when they are right. If they genuinely deserve criticism, I will not need to wait long for an occasion where they are wrong." (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MwQRucYo6BZZwjKE7/einstein-s-arrogance)]

[TODO Vassar slapping me down in June 2008 (on the same day that I crossdressed in front of Seanan and Katie!): https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/why-do-psychopa.html#comment-518267438]

Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).

According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this appeal-to-black-box](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well in our lives (though it won't work on AI). And from this empathy, evolution also coughed up the [moral miracle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow) of [_sympathy_, intrinsically caring about what others feel](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds).

In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), Yudkowsky appeals to the complex moral value of sympathy as an argument against the desireability of nonsentient sex partners (_catgirls_ being the technical term). Being emotionally intertwined with another actual person is one of the things that makes life valuable, that would be lost if people just had their needs met by soulless catgirl holodeck characters.

But there's a problem, Yudkowsky argues: women and men aren't designed to make each other optimally happy. The abstract game between the two human life-history strategies in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness had a conflicting-interests as well as a shared-interests component, and human psychology still bears the design signature of that game denominated in inclusive fitness, even though [no one cares about inclusive fitness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers). (Peter Watts: ["And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete."](https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)) The secnario of Total Victory for the ♂ player in the conflicting-interests subgame is not [Nash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium). The design of the entity who _optimally_ satisfied what men want out of women would not be, and _could_ not be, within the design parameters of actual women.

(And _vice versa_ and respectively, but in case you didn't notice, this blog post is all about male needs.)

Yudkowsky dramatized the implications in a short story, ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2), portraying an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because of the mismatch in the sexes' desires, and because the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution (according to the story) turns out to be splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias (on [Venus and Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol#Origins), ha ha), complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.

Of course no one _wants_ that—our male protagonist doesn't _want_ to abandon his wife and daughter for some catgirl-adjacent (if conscious) hussy. But humans _do_ adapt to loss; if the separation were already accomplished by force, people would eventually move on, and post-separation life with companions superintelligently optimized _for you_ would ([_arguendo_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguendo)) be happier than life with your real friends and family, whose goals will sometimes come into conflict with yours because they weren't superintelligently designed _for you_.

The alignment-theory morals are those of [unforseen maxima](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum) and [edge instantiation](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/edge_instantiation). An AI designed to maximize happiness would kill all humans and tile the galaxy with maximally-efficient happiness-brainware. If this sounds "crazy" to you, that's the problem with anthropomorphism I was telling you about: [don't imagine "AI" as an emotionally-repressed human](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zrGzan92SxP27LWP9/points-of-departure), just think about [a machine that calculates what actions would result in what outcomes](https://web.archive.org/web/20071013171416/http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting-device/), and does the action that would result in the outcome that maximizes some function. It turns out that picking a function that doesn't kill everyone looks hard. Just tacking on the constaints that you can think of (make the _existing_ humans happy without tampering with their minds) [will tend to produce similar "crazy" outcomes that you didn't think to exclude](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked). 

At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at "Failed Utopia #4-2" in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back a dozen years later—[or even four years later](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/D34jhYBcaoE7DEb8d)—my performative horror was missing the point.

_The argument makes sense_. Of course, it's important to notice that you'd need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI in the story doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other. A faithful antisexist (as I was) might insist that that should be the _only_ moral, as it implies the other [_a fortiori_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_a_fortiori). But if you're trying to _learn about reality_ rather than protect your fixed quasi-religious beliefs, it should be _okay_ for one of the lessons to get a punchy sci-fi short story; it should be _okay_ to think about the hyperplane between two coarse clusters, even while it's simultaneously true that a set of hyperplanes would suffice to [shatter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_set) every individual point, without deigning to acknowledge the existence of clusters.

On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_ (presumably after [the Norse deity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver%C3%B0andi)), rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but since the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ the impact of what has taken place in the story.

Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.

It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"

The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—

> Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will ... give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn't make you a woman. You'd still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
>
> [...]
>
> So to actually _become female_ ...
>
> We're talking about a _massive_ transformation here, billions of neurons and trillions of synapses rearranged. Not just form, but content—just like a male judo expert would need skills repatterned to become a female judo expert, so too, you know how to operate a male brain but not a female brain. You are the equivalent of a judo expert at one, but not the other. You have _cognitive_ reflexes, and consciously learned cognitive skills as well.
>
> [...]
>
> What happens when, as a woman, you think back to your memory of looking at Angelina Jolie photos as a man? How do you _empathize_ with your _past self_ of the opposite sex? Do you flee in horror from the person you were? Are all your life's memories distant and alien things? How can you _remember_, when your memory is a recorded activation pattern for neural circuits that no longer exist in their old forms? Do we rewrite all your memories, too?

But, well ... I mean, um ...

(I still really don't want to be blogging about this, but _somebody has to and no one else will_)

From the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, "normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing" is actually a _great_ outcome—the _ideal_ outcome. Let me explain.

The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accomodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where ["magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)).

So imagine having something like [the transporter in _Star Trek_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter), but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) [Nana Visitor (circa 1998)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg). (In the folklore of [female-transformation erotica](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), this machine is often called the ["morphic adaptation unit"](https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html).)

As "Changing Emotions" points out, this high-level description of a hypothetical fantasy technology leaves many details unspecified—not just the _how_, but the _what_. What would the indistinguishable-from-magical transformation booth do to my brain? [As a preference-revealing thought experiment](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DdEKcS6JcW7ordZqQ/not-taking-over-the-world), what would I _want_ it to do, if I can't change [the basic nature of reality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism), but if engineering practicalities weren't a constraint? (That is, I'm allowed to posit any atom-configuration without having to worry about how you would get all the atoms in the right place, but I'm not allowed to posit tethering my immortal soul to a new body, because [souls](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/u6JzcFtPGiznFgDxP/excluding-the-supernatural) [aren't](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Au7kvRAPREm3ADcK/psychic-powers) [real](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fdEWWr8St59bXLbQr/zombies-zombies).)

The anti-plug-and-play argument makes me confident that it would have to change _something_ about my mind in order to integrate it with a new female body—if nothing else, my unmodified brain doesn't physically _fit_ inside Nana Visitor's skull. ([One meta-analysis puts the sex difference in intracranial volume and brain volume at](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3969295/) a gaping [Cohen's _d_](/2019/Sep/does-general-intelligence-deflate-standardized-effect-sizes-of-cognitive-sex-differences/) ≈ 3.0 and 2.1, respectively, and Visitor doesn't look like she has an unusually large head.)

Fine—we're assuming that difficulty away and stipulating that the magical transformation booth can make the _minimal_ changes necessary to put my brain in a female body, and have it fit, and have all the motor-connection/body-mapping stuff line up so that I can move and talk normally in a body that feels like mine, without being paralyzed or needing months of physical therapy to re-learn how to walk.

I want this more than I can say. But is that _all_ I want? What about all the _other_ sex differences in the brain? Male brains are more lateralized—doing [relatively more communication within hemispheres rather than between](https://www.pnas.org/content/111/2/823); there are language tasks that women and men perform equally well on, but [men's brains use only the _left_ inferior frontal gyrus, whereas women's use both](/papers/shaywitz-et_al-sex_differences_in_the_functional_organization_of_the_brain_for_language.pdf). Women have a relatively thicker corpus callosum; men have a relatively larger amygdala. Fetal testosterone levels [increase the amount of gray matter in posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, but decrease the gray matter in Wernicke's area](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3306238/) ...

Do I want the magical transformation technology to fix all that, too?

Do I have _any idea_ what it would even _mean_ to fix all that, without spending multiple lifetimes studying neuroscience?

I think I have just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would mean. Since sex isn't an atomic attribute, but rather a high-level statistical regularity such that almost everyone can be cleanly classified as "female" or "male" _in terms of_ lower-level traits (genitals, hormone levels, _&c._), then, abstractly, we're trying to take points from male distribution and map them onto the female distribution in a way that preserves as much structure (personal identity) as possible. My female analogue doesn't have a penis (because then she wouldn't be female), but she is going to speak American English like me and be [85% Ashkenazi like me](/images/ancestry_report.png), because language and autosomal genes don't have anything to do with sex.

The hard part has to do with traits that are meaningfully sexually dimorphic, but not as a discrete dichotomy—where the sex-specific universal designs differ in ways that are _subtler_ than the presence or absence of entire reproductive organs. (Yes, I know about [homology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology))—and _you_ know what I meant.) We are _not_ satisfied if the magical transformation technology swaps out my penis and testicles for a functioning female reproductive system without changing the rest of my body, because we want the end result to be indistinguishable from having been drawn from the female distribution (at least, indistinguishable _modulo_ having my memories of life as a male before the magical transformation), and a man-who-somehow-magically-has-a-vagina doesn't qualify.

The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait (given some suitably exhaustive parsing and factorization of the human design into individual "traits"), but take it with respect to the target sex's distribution. I'm 5′11″ tall, which [puts me at](https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/) the 73rd percentile for American men, about 6/10ths of a standard deviation above the mean. So _presumably_ we want to say that my female analogue is at the 73rd percentile for American women, about 5′5½″.

You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow _less female_ on that account, so why can't I keep my height? The problem is that if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that _some_ women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.

The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The [sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property). Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)

Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which set that coin came from, but [if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) as to which collection we're looking at.

A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.

And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people [dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex](https://archive.is/y5V9i), when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. Certainly, I agree that almost no one interacts with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _are_ such a common cause—the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all _other_ sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that provides a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.

Take faces. People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real [(a computer statistical model gets up to 99.47% accuracy)](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1351#d3e949), but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional _pattern_ in many measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. [Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).

Notably, for _images_ of faces, we actually _do_ have transformation technology! (Not "magical", because we know how it works.) AI techniques like [generative adversarial networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948) and [autoencoders](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368) can learn the structure of the distribution of facial photographs, and use that knowledge to synthesize faces from scratch (as demonstrated by [_thispersondoesnotexist.com_](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/))—or [do things like](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786) sex transformation (as demonstrated by [FaceApp](https://www.faceapp.com/), the _uniquely best piece of software in the world_).

If you let each pixel vary independently, the space of possible 1024x1024 images is 1,048,576-dimensional, but the vast hypermajority of those images aren't photorealistic human faces. Letting each pixel vary independently is the wrong way to think about it: changing the lighting or pose changes a lot of pixels in what humans would regard as images of "the same" face. So instead, our machine-learning algorithms learn a [compressed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex63DPisEjomutkCw/msg-len) representation of what makes the tiny subspace (relative to images-in-general) of faces-in-particular similar to each other. That [latent space](https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d) is a lot smaller (say, 512 dimensions), but still rich enough to embed the high-level distinctions that humans notice: [you can find a hyperplane that separates](https://youtu.be/dCKbRCUyop8?t=1433) smiling from non-smiling faces, or glasses from no-glasses, or young from old, or different races—or female and male. Sliding along the [normal vector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(geometry)) to that [hyperplane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane) gives the desired transformation: producing images that are "more female" (as the model has learned that concept) while keeping "everything else" the same.

Two-dimensional _images_ of people are _vastly_ simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But _in theory_, a lot of the same _mathematical principles_ would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could, like the AI in "Failed Utopia #4-2", synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-_didn't_-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.

Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct _female_ and _male_ classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along _every_ dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't _discretely_ sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as [Marco del Giudice _et al._ point out](http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf), the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel _et al._'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, _four_ or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a Heads-biased and Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, [MRI brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).

Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)

Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which my mosaic is more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples). If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed that preference was coherent), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).

Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I would _prefer_ to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? (Well, maybe two or three.) When I look around me—most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_?

Is _everyone else_ not supposed to notice? Suppose I transitioned. Suppose I passed. Suppose I caught the worshipful attention of a young man just like me ("a" young man, as if there wouldn't be _dozens_), who privately told me, "I've never met a woman quite like you." What would I be supposed to tell him? ["There's a _reason_ for that"](https://www.dumbingofage.com/2014/comic/book-5/01-when-somebody-loved-me/purpleandskates/)?

I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I still want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _relatively unlikely_.

I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."

I said, "I like characters and stories! I think."

He said, "I know, but at the margin, you seem suboptimally far in the challenges and points direction. But that's fine; that's what women are for."

And what evidence could I point to, to show him that he's _bad and wrong_ for saying that, if he's not already religiously required to believe it?

_Alright_. So _in principle_, you could imagine having a PersonApp that maps me to a point in the female region of configuration space in some appropriately structure-preserving way, to compute my female analogue who is as authentically _me_ as possible while also being authentically female, down to her pelvis shape, and the proportion of gray matter in her posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and—the love of a woman for a man. What is she like, concretely? Do I know how to imagine that?

Or if I can imagine it, can I _describe_ it in this blog post? I am presently sorrowful that [(following John Holt)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/S8ysxzgraSeuBXnpk/rationality-quotes-july-2009/comment/DtyDzN5etD4woXtFM) we all know more than we can say. I have mental models of people, and the models get queried for predictions in the course of planning my social behavior, but I don't have introspective access to the differences between models. It's easier to imagine people in hypothetical situations and say things like, "That doesn't sound like something she'd _do_, but _he_ would" (and be correct), than to say exactly it is about her character and his that generated these predictions, such that [my words would paint a picture in your head](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) that would let you make your own predictions about her and him without having met them—just like how you're better at recognizing someone's face, than at describing their face in words in enough detail for an artist to draw a portrait.

As a _first-order approximation_, I do have a sister. I think the family resemblance between us is stronger than with either parent. We're about equally intelligent—OK, she's probably smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) [_g_-loaded](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) and her 1580 (out of 1600) trounces my 2180 (on [the out-of-2400 scale used between 2005 and 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes,_including_a_new_2400-point_score), such that 2180 proportionally scales down to 1453 out of 1600). Our dark hair curls into helices with similar radius. We even have similar mannerisms, I think? She's 5′6½″.

But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare resumés and representative work-samples of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my dropout–autodidact's passion culminating in this _batshit insane_ secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of science and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.

Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to [sight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_(device)) against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).

(All this is in accordance with ["Everything is a vector space" philosophy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBw8dDkAWohFjWQSk/the-cluster-structure-of-thingspace) implied by this blog's [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain)—if it turns out that something _isn't_ a vector space, I'm not sure I want to know about it. I can hope that my description of the _methodology_ is valuable, even if your brain's pattern-matching faculties can't follow along with the same example, because you haven't met my sister and only know the aspects of me that shine through to the blog.)

Okay. Having supplied just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would even mean to actually become female—is that what I _want_? I mean, if it's reversible, I would definitely be extremely eager to _try_ it ...

I had said we're assuming away engineering difficulties in order to make the thought experiment more informative about pure preferences, but let's add one constraint to _force_ the thought experiment to be informative about preferences, and not allow the wishy-washy evasion of "I'm eager to _try_ it."

What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Or (my preference) if some deep "brain sex" transformation only works once, even if a more superficial motor remapping is easy to do or re-do? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.

In that case, if I have to choose ... I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female? I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't _want_ to stop loving challenges and points—or women!—in the way that I do. And if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.

At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like _the most appealing thing in the world_. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp to play with for a subjective year and tiles the _rest_ of our future lightcone with paperclips, that's _fine_; I will die _happy_.

So, I guess ...

If I'm being _really_ honest with myself here ...

And I successfully make-believe that I can tell the truth with no consequences on my secret ("secret") blog even though at this point my paper-thin pseudonymity is more like a genre convention rather than providing any real privacy ...

I guess I _want_ to be "a normal [...] man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing."

Is that weird? Is that wrong?

Okay, yes, it's _obviously_ weird and wrong, but should I care more about not being weird and wrong, than I do about my deepest most heartfelt desire that I've thought about every day for the last eighteen years?

This is probably counterintuitive if you haven't been living with it your entire adult life? People have _heard of_ the "born in the wrong body" narrative, which makes intuitive sense: if female souls are designed to work female bodies, and you're a female soul tethered to a male body, you can imagine the soul finding the mismatch distressing and wanting to fix it. But if, as I'm positing for my case, there _is no mismatch_ in any objective sense, then where does the desire come from? How do you make sense of wanting to change physiological sex, for reasons that _don't_ have anything to do with already neurologically resembling that sex? What's really going on there, psychologically?

Part of what makes this so hard to talk about _besides_ it being weird and wrong, is that we don't really understand how our own minds work in a legible way; we just experience things. Even if you're [not sure that other people really see "the same" colors as you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYjyQ839MDsZ6E3L/seeing-red-dissolving-mary-s-room-and-qualia) (and you don't know how to [reformulate the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rQEwySCcLtdKHkrHp/righting-a-wrong-question) [to not](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question) [be confused](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions)), you can at least [agree on color _words_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution) by pointing to [Pantone swatches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone#Pantone_Color_Matching_System), but I'm not sure I have the language to convey the facts about the qualia I associate with the word _autogynephilia_ to someone who doesn't already feel something similar.

But I have to try. A clue: when I'm ... uh. When I'm—well, you know ...

(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this.)

A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.

If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror. My face ruins it and makeup doesn't help.)

What's going on here? _Speaking_ of mirrors, the sexologist [James Cantor speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons. Way, way back in the 1980s, Italian neuroscientists wired up the brains of macaque monkeys with electrodes, and noticed that some of the _same_ brain regions would light up when the monkey grabbed a rasin, and when the monkey watched the _researcher_ eat a rasin. These "mirror neurons" are speculated to form the basis of empathy.

So, the _phrase_ "mirror neurons" is not and _cannot_ be an answer. Real understanding is about detailed predictive models, not [what words to repeat back in school](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password). I can't expect to understand the real answer without spending multiple years studying neuroscience, and if I did, I couldn't expect to transmit the model to you in one blog post. (That would be _several_ blog posts.)

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.)

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_.

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.

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?

Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?

_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).

But I _don't_ think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively jacking off to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various _different_ female bodies ... unless she was _already_ into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a _lot_ of porn in this genre! But it seems to mostly be created for and consumed by ... men? [Adult human males?](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)

I just don't see any _reason_ to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in _male_ sexuality. I didn't have the fancy vocabulary for it then, but the basic idea seemed pretty obvious in 2005, and seems equally obvious now.

(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I _like_ being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" down to "variation", but people who don't [understand the naturalistic fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature) aren't going to understand anything _else_ I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male heterosexuality weren't functionally optimized to collide like this.)

But it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The detailed exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read and learned—and in particular, the reductionist methodology I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the very specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its predecessor in the Extropians mailing-list archives) that changing sex is a _hard problem_.

We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who [read different books in a different order](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/), might come to very different conclusions about himself.

If you don't have the conceptual vocabulary to say, "I have a lot of these beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings about being female, but it seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must be some sort of causal relationship between that and this erotic fantasy, which is realistically going to be a variation in _male_ sexuality," you might end up saying something simpler like, "I want to be a woman." Or possibly even, "I _am_ a woman, on the inside, where it counts."

(As Yudkowsky [occasionally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not _become true of him_ because he believed it.)

What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because different theories that purport to explain the same facts can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.

If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and _staying_ on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is designed to "run on" estrogen. But if my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are fundamentally a misinterpretation of misdirected _male_ sexuality, then it's not clear that I _want_ the psychological effects of HRT: if there were some unnatural way to give me a female body (or just more female-_like_) _without_ messing with my internal neurochemistry, that would actually be _desireable_.

Or, you might think that if the desire is just a confusion in male sexuality, maybe real life body-modding _wouldn't_ be desirable? Maybe autogynephilic men _think_ they want female bodies, but if they actually transitioned in real life (as opposed to just having incompetently non-realistic daydreams about it all day and especially while masturbating), they would feel super-dysphoric about it, because (and which proves that) they're just perverted men, and not actual trans women, which are a different thing. You might think so!

But, empirically, I did grow (small) breasts as a result of [my five-month HRT experiment](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/), and I think it's actually been a (small) quality-of-life improvement for approximately the reasons I expected going in. I just—like the æsthetic?—and wanted it to be part of _my_ æsthetic, and now it is, and I don't quite remember what my chest was like before, kind of like how I don't quite remember what it was like to have boy-short hair before I grew out my signature beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (Though I'm _still_ [kicking myself for not](/2017/Nov/laser-1/) taking a bare-chested "before" photo.) I don't see any particular reason to believe this experience wouldn't replicate all the way down the [slope of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/).

Fundamentally, I think I can make _better decisions_ for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's really going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I have the language to talk about my obsessive paraphilic desire to be shaped like a woman without wanting to actually be a woman, similarly to how the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" aren't actually women.

If the _actual_ desire implemented in one's actual brain in the real physical universe takes the form of (roughly translating from desire into English) "You know, I kind of want my own breasts (_&c._)", it may be weird and perverted to _admit_ this and act on it (!!)—but would it be any _less_ weird and perverted to act on it under the false (in my case) pretense of an invisible female gender identity? If you know what the thing is, can it be any worse to just _own it_?

If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology or something close to it—if you could grow a female body in a vat, and transfer my brain into it, and had a proven solution to the motor-mapping and skull-size issues—if it cost $250,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.

Since we _don't_ have that ... the existing approximations don't really seem like a good idea for me, all things considered?

As a professional computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit and no one knows why.

But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of evolved biological systems, and I think I have [reason to be wary](https://www.nickbostrom.com/evolution.pdf) of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.

_All_ drugs have side-effects; _all_ surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).

In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol (or collecting it from [pregnant horses' urine](https://www.fundforanimals.org/duchess-sanctuary/about-the-duchess-sanctuary/pregnant-mare-urine.html)) and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: [breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html).

For all that my body is disappointingly male and therefore ugly, it _works_. It makes the hormones that it needs to function without me needing to [dissolve a pill under my tongue](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/) every day—without saddling me with extra dependencies on the supply chains that make the pills, or the professional apparatus to draw my blood and tell me what pills to take—without me needing to know what "hormones" _are_.

For all that my penis is boring at best and annoying at worst, it _works_. The organ does the things that it's designed to do; it lets me pee while standing up, and reward myself while pretending that it isn't there.

Did you know that trans women [have to dilate their neovagina after bottom surgery](https://www.mtfsurgery.net/dilation.htm)? Yeah. There are these hard tubes of various widths, and you're supposed to stick them up there multiple times a day after surgery (and weekly indefinitely) to prevent the cavity from losing depth. I'm told that there are important technical reasons why it would be objectively wrong to use the phrase _open wound_ in this situation, but the body doesn't know the important technical reasons and you still need to dilate.

I am glad that these interventions _exist_ for the people who are brave and desperate enough to need them. But given that I'm not that desperate and not that brave, would it not be wiser to trust the paraphrased proverb and not look a gift man in the mouth?

My beautiful–beautiful ponytail was a _smart move_ (and hair length isn't sexually dimorphic anyway; it's only our culture's sexism that makes it seem relevant in this context).

My [five-month HRT experiment](/tag/hrt-diary/) was a _smart move_, both for the beautiful–beautiful breast tissue, and [For Science](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForScience).

My [laser hair removal sessions](/tag/lasers/) were ... arguably a waste of money, since I still have to shave even after 13 treatments?—but it at least got the density of my ugly–gross facial hair down a bit. Trying it was definitely a _smart move_ given what I knew at the time, and I _just might_ be rich enough and disgusted-by-facial-hair enough to go back for more density-reduction. (Electrolysis gets better results than laser, but it's more expensive and a lot more painful.)

People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a _smarter move_ to check out [movie-grade latex masks](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/) first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror _without_ taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)

And I should probably look into [figuring out if there's anything to be done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_hair_loss#Treatment) for my hairline before it gets any worse?

But _staying_ on transition-grade HRT indefinitely—doesn't seem like a smart move? Even though I would be happy with the fat-redistribution effects, I don't expect the health effects to be net-positive, and I don't expect the psychological effects to be net-desirable (even if I [wasn't](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) [self-aware](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/) enough to notice much besides libido change during my five-month experiment).

And _social_ transition—really doesn't seem like a smart move? If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology, that would happen automatically (people are pretty good at noticing each other's sex), and I would expect to be very happy. (After some socio-psychological adjustment period; remember, in the real world, I didn't even manage to change _nicknames_.) But given that we _don't_ have magical perfect transformation technology, the main objection here is that I _don't expect to pull off_ that kind of ... perma-[LARP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game). I mean _really_ pull it off—everyone in Berkeley and Portland will be very careful to respect your pronouns the minute you come out, but [_they will be lying_](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/). I know, because I lie. Of course I _say_ "she" when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) requires it—I'm not a _monster_—but it's only on a case-by-case basis whether I _believe_ it.

It's definitely [_possible_ to pass alright](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/) with a lot of work ([voice training for trans women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)#Voice_feminization) is a thing!), but it's not clear why I would want to put in all that work, when overall, my life is fundamentally _okay_ as ... a man? An adult human male? As a matter of objective fact, which doesn't care about my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings.

How dumb would I have to think you are, to expect you not to notice?

And how dumb would you have think I am, to expect me to expect you to _pretend_ not to notice?

-------

Even if I never took the beautiful pure sacred self identity thing too literally, owning it for what it really is—an illusion, the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—takes a different tone in the harsh light of my deconversion from psychological-sex-differences denialism. In "Changing Emotions", Yudkowsky wrote—

> If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.

In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—

> Is it cheating if you deliberately define your personal identity such that the answer is _No_?

To which I now realize the correct answer is—_yes!_ Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" [represent hidden probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences); inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means [using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes). But this AI trick can only _work_ if the entities you've assigned to category Y are _actually_ similar—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you _close_ to the right answer, on average.

The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know.

In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could _interpolate_ between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.)

People _do_ change a lot over time; there _is_ a sense in which, in some contexts, we _don't_ want to say that a sixty-year-old is the "same person" they were when they were twenty—and forty years is "only" 4,870 three-day increments. But if a twenty-year-old were to be magically replaced with their sixty-year-old future self (not just superficially wearing an older body like a suit of clothing, but their brain actually encoding forty more years of experience and decay) ... well, there's a reason I reached for the word "replace" (suggesting putting a _different_ thing in something's place) when describing the scenario. That's what Yudkowsky means by "the change is too sharp"—the _ordinary_ sense in which we model people as the "same person" from day to day (despite people having [more than one proton](/2019/Dec/on-the-argumentative-form-super-proton-things-tend-to-come-in-varieties/) in a different place from day to day) has an implicit [Lipschitz condition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipschitz_continuity) buried in it, an assumption that people don't change _too fast_.

The thing about Sorites problems is that they're _incredibly boring_. The map is not the territory. The distribution of sand-configurations we face in everyday life is such that we usually have an answer as to whether the sand "is a heap" or "is not a heap", but in the edge-cases where we're not sure, arguing about whether to use the word "heap" _doesn't change the configuration of sand_. You might think that if [the category is blurry](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray), you therefore have some freedom to [draw its boundaries](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) the way you prefer—but [the cognitive function of the category is for making probabilistic inferences on the basis of category-membership](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries), and those probabilistic inferences can be quantitatively better or worse. [Preferences over concept definitions that aren't about maximizing predictive accuracy are therefore preferences _for deception_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception), because ["making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is what _deception_ means](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist).

That's why defining your personal identity to get the answer you want is cheating. If the answer you wanted was actually _true_, you could just say so without needing to _want_ it.

When [Phineas Gage's](/2017/Dec/interlude-xi/) friends [said he was "no longer Gage"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) after the railroad accident, what they were trying to say was that interacting with post-accident Gage was _more relevantly similar_ to interacting with a stranger than it was to interacting with pre-accident Gage, even if Gage-the-physical-organism was contiguous along the whole strech of space time.

Same principle when Yudkowsky wrote, "If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman [...] I don't think I'd call her 'me'". The claim is that psychological sex differences are large enough to violate the Lipschitz condition imposed by our _ordinary_ concept of personal identity. Maybe he was wrong, but if so, that cashes out as being wrong _about_ how similar women and men actually are (which in principle could be operationalized and precisely computed, even if _we_ don't know how to make it precise), _not_ whether we prefer the "call her me" or "don't call her me" conclusion and want to _retroactively redefine the meaning of the words in order to make the claim come out "true."_

Do people ever really recover from being religious? I still endorse the underlying psychological motivation that makes me prefer the "call her me" conclusion, the _intention_ that made me think I could get away with defining it to be true. Now that I don't believe that anymore—now that I can't take for granted that actual women aren't a somewhat unfathomable Other onto me—my world hasn't collapsed in the way religious people [tend to fear](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat) when their most precious belief is threatened. It just means I have to do [a little more intellectual work](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility) to figure out what's actually right. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)

-----

Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy 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).

It would take some unfathomably bizarre twist of circumstances to induce me to write publicly about such deeply private matters—like my weird sexual obsession ending up at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights), and everyone I used to trust telling _blatant pants-on-fire lies_ about their _own_ philosophy of language that were clearly optimized to _trick me into cutting my dick off_ (independently of the empirical cost–benefit trade-off which determines whether or not I should cut my dick off).

But such an absurd scenario couldn't actually happen, right? Um, to be continued.

_([Please subscribe](/feeds/all.atom.xml) for Part 2, "Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer" (coming someday), and Part 3, "A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning" (coming—someday later))_