Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems Date: 2021-01-01 Category: commentary Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences Status: draft > _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 fields](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tSgcorrgBnrCH8nL3/don-t-revere-the-bearer-of-good-info) 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 [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 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: [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/).) So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and _of course_ knew that I must never 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, where I was also having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being a girl. Just—little day-to-day thoughts. Like when I would write in my pocket notebook in the persona of my female analogue. 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." [TODO: notebook photos] [TODO: more examples!] [TODO: Whipping Girl when it came out in 2007] And so on. 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 2020 from how it was to live in 2005? 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. 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 a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_. [TODO: need to introduce the pefect and obvious word "autogynephilia" and link to "Beacon Through the Darkness", probably around here, and the two-types] This brings me to the other thing I need to explain about my teenage years, which is that I became 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_. So, you know, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_. 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_. (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—uh, bear with me for a moment—I was a _very_ religious teenager. I remember 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 has a frequency of 0.9, then the probability of getting them all right would only be 0.910 ≈ 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 cortex, _&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 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 reproductive 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). [TODO: bridge paragraphs/section ... this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" and the metaethics sequence, men should think of themselves as men; mention my initials] 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). [TODO: rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"] [TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed] The short story ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2) portrays an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because [evolution didn't design women and men to be optimal partners for each other](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), and the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution ends up splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners. At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back eleven years later, the _argument makes sense_ (though you need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI 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). 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 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, and 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. [TODO: re-count and fix old-LW links to "Changing Emotions"] It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on this blog eight times. In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that was its predecessor. (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.) 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— [TODO: include more blockquote here] > 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. 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 change, 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).) This high-level description of a hypothetical fantasy technology leaves some 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. 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, 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. 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 which set the 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. [TODO (somewhere around-ish this section): chromosomes at the root of the causal graph: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models ] 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, 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 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 Guidice _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 very Heads-biased and very 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 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 apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Good news for antisexism!—relatively speaking.) 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. 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 want 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? 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_ in my open-source programming scene are male.](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization 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. I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps will 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 _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 that point to 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, plausibly she's smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty _g_-loaded](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) and her 1580 (out of 1600) solidly beats 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 representative outputs of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my _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 liking challenges and points as much as 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 have 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_ 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. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—) 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 live 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.) 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." One interesting prediction of this story [TODO: explain the ETLE theory] [TODO: I vaguely, vaguely remember having some other transformation fantasies before losing interest in them (perhaps suggesting something ETLE-like as an underlying trait)] 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 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-typical 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? 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. (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 specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this 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](TODO: link "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'm making _better decisions_ for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's actually going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I can talk about my 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_? [TODO: smoother transition to the discussion of personal identity; my old view is that gender identity is sexist (because psych. sex differences are fake/minimal); my new view is that brain sex is real and that I'm male] 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 "merge" two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) 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.) [TODO: change scenario to interpolate between people, _at what point_ does it become] 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. 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_, because "making probability distributions less accurate in order to achieve some other goal" is exactly what _deception_ means. 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."_ [TODO: Do ppl ever really recover from being religious? being at peace with what's real ...] https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality) ------- ### Coda > And Durham—the software puppet, the lifeless shell animated by a being from another plane—looked him in the eye and said, "You have to let me show you what you are." > > —_Permutation City_ by Greg Egan 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). Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights). All this time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like the initials) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy—I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender". _Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I am not immune to this.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my pure beautiful sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_. Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/); the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender is more real or more relevant in some sense and should take precedence. So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness several times in the main body of this post, but I've tried to mostly limit the intent of it to references to an explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits, or the brief summary of the two-type Blanchard taxonomy for which the word _autogynephilia_ (the obvious and perfect word for my thing) was coined. Everything I've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Blanchard was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after encountering the obvious and perfect word. But after moving to Berkeley and doing a little bit more reading ... I _don't_ think Blanchard was dumb and wrong. I think the two-type taxonomy is _basically_ correct, as a first approximation. (Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what that means, and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are better than pretending not to have a theory.) I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_. So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, actually I think you're just a perverted male like me"? Actually, lots. For example, in 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit (which currently has 90,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp". Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of real-world MtFs. But if you just _look_ at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. Informal Reddit poll isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing: [TODO: cite as many 80% surveys as I can from Kay Brown's bibliography]. Worried about leading survey questions pointing to the wrong conclusion, and want more detailed (if not standardizable and quantifiable) accounts? Me too! [TODO: McCloskey, or how did I missed this from Serano 2007] > There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context. [TODO: Nevada] [...] http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm > As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety. Got that? To release anxiety—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_