1 My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
4 > knows much less than what he thinks when he's talking about with the object level of trans people
5 Trans people aren't a reliable source about what's going on with trans people, because they're playing a respectability politics game
8 This, then, is Blanchard's dangerous idea: "all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women."
10 Even if you weaken _all_ to _almost all_ , or even _most_
14 > I am firmly convinced that the overwhelming majority—probably 98% or more—of cases of severe gender dysphoria in men arise in connection with either effeminate homosexuality or autogynephilia; most of the rare exceptions probably arise in connection with conditions such as schizophrenia and certain personality disorders
16 "Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
18 How to account for people disagreeing?
20 * ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
21 * exact type of AGP and whether you remember it in childhood make a difference in how obvious the right answer is
22 * ppl have heard a strawman of the theory, not read "Becoming What We Love"; innoculated against smart version of theory (Anne Vitale)
26 the selection effect and the incentives are dual: ppl who notice AGP don't transition, people who transition convince selves AGP doesn't matter—and the "If you're not trans, you're not allowed to talk" disarms anyone else from being allowed to talk
28 type of dysphoria also matters
30 trans women don't want to talk about it
31 stright guys who regard it as a humiliating private kink don't want to talk about it
34 To visualize how this ends up looking in practice, I want you to consider the fictitious but (I claim) entirely realistic tale of Katherine and Mark.
37 two fictional case studies: one with childhood AGP and interpersonal fantasy, another like me (Ranma 1/2, transformation fantasies, sex differences denial, encountering AGP first)
39 when they meet in Portland, they note their obvious similarities and know that they have to be the same type of thing (I'm actually trans, you're just AGP is not an option)
42 Katherine looks at Mark with a sense of pity. "That poor girl, cowed by Bailey's vicious pseudoscientific lies!"
44 Mark looks at Katherine with a mixture of jealousy and contempt. "Wait. Wait a minute. So this _entire fucking time_, _actual trans women_ were really just _guys like me_ who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy romantic fantasies about being a girl, and then _took them literally_?! I didn't know you were allowed to take them literally. You bastards! You delusional bastards! You beautiful, lucky bastards who get all nice things I can't have, at the terrible cost of never being able to say _why_! I'm so upset about this that I feel motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling the shitty epistemology that led to this absurd situation!"
47 but the real takeaway is that everyone should be more skeptical of why they think they do what they do
50 idea innoculation: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aYX6s8SYuTNaM2jh3/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance
52 blue-eyed islanders and common knowledge
54 [TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015)
55 our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.]
57 _ AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"
61 * claims to victimhood are leveraged into claims to power
63 * [the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
65 Aren't those trans women going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious
67 [the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me]
69 [TODO: Freaky Friday, differentiating between "my type" and transition goals anecdotes—maybe cis people can be fooled into not knowing what that means, but _I know what that means_]
71 "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals
73 Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_.
75 Normal straight men also have positive-valence thoughts about women when they're not immediately horny.
77 * The lie will rot, maybe ppl will be honest after the convention has set in??
81 xkcd assumes furries are sexual https://xkcd.com/471/
82 xkcd implies AGP is common https://xkcd.com/535/
86 My enemy is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_. I don't know what the _right_ culture is, but I'm pretty sure that _this ain't it, chief_.
88 Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
94 People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
97 If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
99 I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/)—the urge to scapegoat and submit to the dominant player is definitely a thing—but I really think this is reading me wrong?
101 I'm not at war with trans _people_—open, creative people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. I'm at war with [an _ideology_ that is adapted to appeal to people just like me](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) and commit us to remaking our lives around a set of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_.
103 Maybe that's not particularly reassuring, if people tend to identify with their ideology? (As I used to—as I _still_ do, even if my [revised ideology is much more meta](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/).) When the prototypical Christian says "Hate the sin, love the sinner", does anyone actually buy it?
105 But what else can I do? We're living in midst of a pivotal ideological transition. (Is it still the midst, or am I too late?) Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months.
107 What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to an aggressive recruitment campaign that the scintillating thought is _literally true_, simply because he thought it? (Not just that it could _become_ true _in a sense_, depending on the success of medical and social interventions, and depending on what sex/gender concept definition makes sense to use in a given context.) What kind of Society is that to live in?
109 [I have seen the destiny of my neurotype, and am putting forth a convulsive effort to wrench it off its path. My weapon is clear writing.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8q4vXestDkGTFwsc/human-evil-and-muddled-thinking) Maybe the rest of my robot cult (including the founders and leaders) have given up on trying to tell the truth, but _I_ haven't. If I just keep blogging careful explanations of my thinking, eventually it might make some sort of impact—a small corrective tug on the madness of the _Zeitgeist_.
111 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XYCEB9roxEBfgjfxs/the-scales-of-justice-the-notebook-of-rationality
112 writes down all the facts that aren't on anyone's side.
114 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/10/24/is-autogynephilia-real-the-phenomenon-the-construct-the-theory/
116 [I know _exactly_ what's wrong with me]
120 [the direction of causality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/)
121 http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/
123 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/
125 complicit with cissexism:
126 /2017/Mar/interlude-ii/
127 /2019/Feb/interlude-xviii/
129 In "Interpersonal Entanglement", Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships, since they don't have to deal with the mismatch.
131 Stereotypically, AGP-taxon trans women have a tendency to pair up with each other.
133 > The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa. I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples. (Googles ... yep, looks like it.) <https://news.softpedia.com/news/Gay-and-Lesbian-Families-Are-Happier-than-Heterosexual-Ones-77094.shtml>
135 Cross-gender identity is a virtually sustained or intermittently occurring wishful fantasy about being a person of the opposite sex.” Freund, K., Steiner, B.W. & Chan, S. Two types of cross-gender identity. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 11, 49–63 (1982). DOI: 10.1007/BF01541365
137 https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216
138 > damn one extremely bad way to start my day is having the receptionist at slack say I look like a male celebrity
139 > I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say???
141 Or consider Dr. Will Powers, [whose presentation on trans healthcare](https://powersfamilymedicine.com/s/Healthcare-of-the-Transgender-Patient-V60.pptx) was [praised by people from my robot cult on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/strohl89/posts/10157396578969598). I was disappointed by the the brief mention of autogynephilia [(on slide 29 of the v.6.0 presentation)](/images/powers_slide_on_agp.png): Powers says Blanchard has been disproven, but that autogynephilia does exist _very_ rarely: "[i]n my now almost 7 years of treating transgender patients, I have seen this paraphilia only once in a person requesting MtF therapy", Powers says, going on to describe the particularly delusional patient (who wanted "the largest breasts possible", and claimed he needed to become a woman to please a Russian Instagram model whom he implausibly claimed to be his girlfriend) whom he denied informed-consent treatment.
143 You might ask, why am I citing Will Powers in support of my thesis, when Powers's testimony seems to contradict it? Only one case in seven years, he says.
145 I cite it because—surprise! _Powers was lying._ [In a November 2020 post to his own subreddit, he opens up](https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jx9io9/my_official_post_on_my_personal_opinion_on/):
147 > Every time I try and speak on this, I get attacked. People discredit what I have to say, call it harmful, and hateful. [...] I've previously stated I had one of these in my practice. I stated that, because I didn't want to push the narrative that it was common because I get literally eviscerated every time I try and talk about it. In reality, I see it fairly often. Almost once a month. Probably at least 10 times a year. [...] Continuing to lie about it and act like it isn't happening is a disservice to transgender people as a whole.
151 This comment in particular is really something—
152 https://www.reddit.com/r/DrWillPowers/comments/jxh3mz/in_this_thread_help_me_and_this_community_come_up/gd0mytr/
154 A common trope in female transformation erotica (search for _tg caption blog_ if you want examples) is that sexuality "goes with the body": in these stories, men who have been magically swapped bodies with women, often express excitement or horror (depending on the story and the author) about the discovery that they're attracted to guys now—or alternatively, express gratitude that the woman he swapped with was a lesbian.
156 Intuitively, when I imagine how I want transformation technology to work, I imagine speaking accents "going with the body". Native speakers of a language are more likely to confuse homophones, because https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/wAW4ENCSEHwYbrwtn/other-people-s-procedural-knowledge-gaps/comment/yTdJm7JjPJPynwS3a
159 We _know_ that there are straight guys with this weird fetish for which _AGP_ seems like an apt term, who don't _think_ of themselves as anything other than straight guys with a weird fetish. (Guys don't like to talk about their weird fetishes in public under their own name, but we can infer their existence because there's a _lot_ of porn and [subpornographic cultural artifacts](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman) catering to them.)
161 And if you _read_ the things non-exclusively-androphilic trans women say in appropriately secluded forums—not the sob pieces for the general public about their horrible, unbearable lifelong dysphoria, but the subreddits with a steady stream of n00bs dropping by to ["wonder[ ] if anybody else discarded this as a weird fetish" to which the top-voted comment says "Yes we have all been there"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/m0t41r/i_alway_thought_i_had_some_weird_fetish/)—you see very similar experience-reports.
163 I'm taking the audacious step of pointing to these two groups, noting the similarities, and yelling, "Hey! It looks like these are actually the _same people_!"—and then having to go to desperate lengths to formalize what "the same" is supposed to mean in this context when virtually everyone in the second group says "Nu-uh!"
165 But people in the first group who don't take that audacious step—which I didn't until after I moved to Berkeley in 2016 despite reading a _lot_ about related topics (it's _amazing_ how much you can read without "putting the pieces together", if no one puts them together for you)—don't _realize_ they have an interest that would require a crusade to protect.
167 is _the most important thing in my life_. When I have questions about the thing, I want _answers_. I want the _real_ answers, the answers that are _actually, literally true_.
169 And it looks like there's this mass movement of people spreading blatant lies about what the thing is, who, _when questioned by someone sympathetic in a sufficiently secluded context_, will fess up: "Oh, that's the lie-to-children version; it's not, like, _literally_ true, but there's politics involved; [it gives the average cis person the necessary information to treat trans people respectfully](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/01/27/lies-to-cis-people/)."
171 Why does _anyone_ think this is remotely ethically acceptable behavior?! For people who love to pontificate on how no one can say whether or not Pluto "is a planet", it sure seems to presuppose some pre-given carving of the world into a coalition of hostile "cis people" (who are OK to lie to), and a coalition of friendly "trans people" (who share the coalition's notion of "respect" and won't blow the whistle on lies).
173 But—_who_ is "cis", and therefore OK to lie to? Am _I_ cis? If we don't have clear public diagnostic criteria of what it means to be transgender, how am I supposed to _tell_? [I'm sick of this.](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/)
175 having to argue that "HRT is not cosmetic"
177 from a 2007 notebook—
178 > & I'm sorry if this is simply normal maleness directed down an unusual channel—as they say, _autogynephillia_—it's a terrible theory, the BBL nonsense theory—intended to sweep up all transwomen—but it swept up _me_. (But _I'm not trans_.)
180 Aella's thing about men turning into werewolfs—I'm a well-behaved werewolf. I retain my vocabulary, and transform back into a man when my wolf-form tries to escalate and the lady says "No."
182 * practice of deferring to designated-victim trans women _makes the trans
183 women worse people_: if you know that you can win a dispute by playing the
184 transphobia card, that incentive shapes your life (Moldbug: discussion of
185 "ignoble privilege" in "Gentle Introduction" pt. 3)
186 * kind of like how _the right to be sued_ is an important part of legal
187 personhood: the possibility of recourse is necessary for trust
189 the cultural presumption that anything bad that happens to trans people (like losing a job) is probably due to discrimination and transphobia is actually bad for trans people in the long run, because it incentivizes other members of society to treat trans people like inherently fragile designated victims (to be avoided if possible and coddled if not possible), rather than just ordinary people who happen to be trans\u00e2\u0080\u0094if you were a business owner, you wouldn't want to hire someone who you couldn't fire without fearing a lawsuit, and if you can't not-hire them without also fearing a lawsuit, conveniently happening to lose their resume starts looking like a good life strategy! You can't outlaw Bayesian reasoning and feedback mechanisms! I understand why it's tempting to think that you can, but don't hate the player; hate the game-theoretic nature of all life!",
191 https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2020/07/07/a-dataset-of-common-agp-aap-fantasies/
193 this is what ETLE looks like for people for whom it's actually about clothes: http://onceiwasaman.blogspot.com/
195 How to get over feeling like I'm fetishizing womanhood?
196 https://archive.ph/6l1W8
198 someone posted an inflation fetish joke in Kelsey's channel and got a lot of laugh reactions including from Big Yud, and it's salient to me that people don't gaslight people with other transformation fetishes
199 https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/458329253595840522/987991378590052402/SPOILER_unknown.png
201 Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
203 an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that _wasn't_ why my ordeal's and Devi's were so traumatic _at all_: the psych ward is _very much_ governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
205 [initial fan mail to Bailey on 7 January, followup to include blog link on 11 February; initial fan mail to Blanchard 10 August]
207 I had some self-awareness that I was going off the rails—
208 > She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state. https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199
210 to Ben: "I thought I got a message from Michael Vassar saying that the main coalitions were you, and Sarah Constantine, and Zack Davis vs. the world" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:30:55 GMT-0800
212 scared that Orion was going to kill me
214 to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
218 You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
219 Mon Apr 10 08:51:03 PDT 2017
221 Michael's "Congratulations on not going back to work at the carpet store!" was a reference to Rick & Morty "Mortynight Run" which aired in August 2015, but I hadn't seen it yet
223 winning Hamilton tickets at $2200
227 Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
228 Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"",
230 He was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff"
231 But in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy
232 Not in the way of someone feminine
233 The only thing I knew about it at the point we got married was that he thought it was fun to go in drag sometimes
236 And he thought feminization kink was fun
237 Like me making him dress up? But he said it was about humiliation
238 We didn't even do it more than a handful of times, it wasn't really my thing
239 Nothing in my experience ever caused me to think he was trans
241 "He talked about being a child always feeling out of place
242 "But out of place seemed like because he was shy and anxious
243 He said he was convinced his anxiety and social problems was *because* he was trans
245 Spencer seemed much less happy to me after admitting to want transition, often crying about how ugly his body was
247 because it basically amounts to, \"You rebuilt your entire life around your perverted narcissistic fantasy and didn't even notice\
248 like, there's no nice way to say that
250 My taxon, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.\
252 all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
253 and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
255 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZEgQGAjQm5rTAnGuM/beware-boasting-about-non-existent-forecasting-track-records
257 Idle anecdote on zero-sum intutions: I tend to invent fake conservation laws when I'm having a psychotic episode. In 2013, it was "the happiness and suffering in the universe sum to zero". In 2017, it was something more complicated about a pattern where "frenemies" (think Hamilton and Burr in the musical) inevitably get into a conflict where one murders the other, but, in order to make the equation balance, aspects of the dead man's personality and values rub off on the victor. (I'm not claiming there's a moral here other than "Psychosis is good for inventing fake conservation laws.")
259 If my so-called "friends" are going to selectively pretend not to know basic Sequences shit in a way that has clearly been optimized for tricking me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical evidence determining whether or not we live in one of the possible worlds where cutting my dick off is a good idea), and still won't correct the mistake after I (and Michael, and Ben, and Sarah, and Zvi—and Jessica, who can be presumed to not share my object-level-politically-derived biases, because she seems pretty happy about having had her dick cut off) spend thousands of words patiently explaining the problem ... how do I know these "friends" aren't already secretly in the pay of the mine dwarves? They're certainly acting like it.
261 A distributed intelligence that's using your former friends for processing power and actuators is trying to confuse you into cutting your dick off. Another former friend says, "Oh, that's just an exception; the distributed intelligence isn't usually that crazy. You shouldn't stop believing its story about how you need to give it your lunch money so that it can save the world." You think for a moment. "I guess that makes sense," you say, and hand over your lunch money.
263 * the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
264 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
266 Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
268 I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing, either by design or due to technological limitations.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blob