>
> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5–10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-Indeed—here we are over seven years later, and I am panicking.[^panic] (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) in cases like this, where the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.
+Indeed—here we are over seven years later, and I am panicking.[^panic] As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic really interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) in cases like this, where the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.
[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the following posts are a memoir telling the Whole Dumb Story, written in the ashes of my defeat.
[^signaling-reasons]: This was brazen cowardice. Today, I would notice that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make insightful and accurate predictions about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be less prepared for a world in which those trends have progressed further.
-A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+<a id="correct-side-of-the-tunnel"></a>A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley, closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), which then had over 28,000 subscribers, [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation 'fetish' (or similar) before you realized you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results](https://archive.is/lm4ro): [82% of over 2000 respondents said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with over 230 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 opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as an axiom and [actually look](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at what people say and do, these kinds of observations are not hard to find. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
+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 opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as an axiom and [actually look](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at what people say and do, these kinds of observations are not hard to find. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
Reddit isn't scientific enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of not exclusively androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (A lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes; Jack Molay coined the term [_crossdreaming_](https://www.crossdreamers.com/), which seems more apt.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/), Phil Illy's book [_Autoheterosexual: Attracted to Being the Opposite Sex_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C62L2GJW), or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
I _do_ have a lot of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+<a id="internalized-misandry"></a>In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry. I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions—in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's [account](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
Someone I met at the Berkeley _Less Wrong_ meetup who went by Ziz[^ziz-privacy] denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her—but it seems worth noting that Ziz was unusual along a lot of dimensions. Again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case to be broadly useful for understanding the world.
-[^ziz-privacy]: Ziz [wrote about her interactions with me in _her_ memoir](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) and explicitly confirmed with me on 5 November 2019 that we weren't under any confidentiality agreements with each other, so it seems fine for me to name her here.
+[^ziz-privacy]: Ziz [wrote about her interactions with me in _her_ memoir](https://web.archive.org/web/20230601044116/https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) and explicitly confirmed with me on 5 November 2019 that we weren't under any confidentiality agreements with each other, so it seems fine for me to name her here.
In contrast, many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me (at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies) but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
Another wrote a comment in one discussion condemning "autogynephilia discourse" and expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be _possible_, she admitted, but it must be extremely rare. Elsewhere on the internet, the same person reported being into and aroused by gender-bender manga at the time she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
-Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude. All else being equal, I would prefer not to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects _me_, and my attempts to figure out my life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people really unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it was a conscious political ploy, [I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"](/2016/new-clothes/) rather than trying to _undermine my connection to reality_.
+Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude. All else being equal, I would prefer not to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects _me_, and my attempts to figure out my life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people really unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it was a conscious political ploy, [I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"](/2016/Nov/new-clothes/) rather than trying to _undermine my connection to reality_.
She said that she had to deal with enough invalidation already, that she had her own doubts and concerns but would only discuss them with people who shared her views. Fair enough—I'm not entitled to talk to anyone who doesn't want to talk to me.
I wrote back:
-> "I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ["Helen"].
+> "I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ['Helen']."
Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
-Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+<a id="unqualified-reservations"></a>Among many works I had skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet, was the neoreactionary blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.
"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
-In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues: someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-type taxonomy, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy, who had been [broadly](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [critical](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) of the theory.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (whom I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Brennan (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of [_Thing of Things_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues: someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-type taxonomy, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy, who had been [broadly](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [critical](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) of the theory.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (whom I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had commented on the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.
[^koller-and-friedman-ii]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score".
-It was as if the part of people that talked didn't have a problem representing their knowledged using a graph generated from a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. I didn't think that was what the True Causal Graph looked like.
+It was as if the part of people that talked didn't have a problem representing their knowledge using a graph generated from a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. I didn't think that was what the True Causal Graph looked like.
-----
An a.f.a.b. person came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology for fear of hurting trans people (including dear friends) and becoming an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get really angry and visibly have an outburst. Then, people would ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.
-The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, you are an evil transphobe who should _die_", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes and we should burn them all".
+The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you ever want to know what genitals someone has for any reason, then you are an evil transphobe", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes".
-I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a really dismissive manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
+I added that the worst part was that the "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view was basically correct. It was phrased in a hostile and demeaning manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
+
+(That is, TERFs who [demonize AGP trans women](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) are pointing to an underappreciated empirical reality, even if the demonization isn't warranted, and the validation of a biologically male person's female gender identity undermines the function of a female-only space, even if the male's intent isn't predatory or voyeuristic.)
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