(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-In Berkeley, I met some really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
+In Berkeley, I met some really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching faculties in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became increasingly persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this story has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience.
-I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
+I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
+(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)
+
Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender-feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces that let them ever doubt.
The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accomodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
-Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/), and how can I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
+Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
-This shift in belief (from thinking the narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie) happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up, partially from my reading, but also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
+My shift in belief, from thinking the narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up, partially from my reading, but also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
[Someone I talked to](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her. (This person was unusual along a lot of other dimensions, and again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.)
But many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me—at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; talking about this stuff _at all_ was hard enough, that 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 (from my view) oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
-One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_)
+One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_ There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to _point to_. If it's not sex and it's not sex-atypical behavior, then _what is it?_)
+
+Another wrote a comment in one discussion 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 unlikely. Elsewhere on the internet, the _same goddamned person_ reported being sexually into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
-Another wrote a comment in one discussion 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 unlikely. Elsewhere on the internet, the _same goddamned person_ reported being sexually into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when she was first seriously questioning her gender identity. [TODO: my reaction; it's rude for me to probe and doubt, but this is gaslighting]
+[TODO: my reaction; it's rude for me to probe and doubt, but this is gaslighting]
-The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one told me (quotes edited for clarity and grammar). "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
+The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all TERFy and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
Another trans woman I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
-[TODO: September 2016: I start my "secret" blog under a pen name]
+[TODO: ↑ rework and revise above section in light of "The Two-Type Taxonomy Is a Useful Approximation for ..." after that's written and published]
+
+------
+
+As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [in](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
+
+At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/).
+
+[some misgivings about naming choices, but I don't actively regret it like my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts]
+
+[aside (footnote?) on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will"]
+
+[aside (footnote?) on the blog name: I had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) / it's a little bit awkward having the blog title and URL be different, and people think "space" is a separate word]
+
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious response to my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I wanted to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
+
+A friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of hormone replacement therapy](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
+
+I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. In the process of drafting this post, I was happy to discover that the [notes from the appointments](TODO: compile ancillary page and linky) were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks)](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read (for example) one of the LCSW's note about discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
+
+I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was pretty preoccupied with the thing about how [_everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) and the professionals were _in on it_, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her that it actually cost $40.)
+
+Actually, [it's worse](/2016/new-clothes/) than if they were in on it. In some ways, it would be _better_ if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they don't even know how to interpret observations someone not buying it even when you state your objections very clearly. Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying (and noting that I should probably chill out before tinkering with my biochemistry), and she wrote back:
+
+> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
+
+I replied:
+
+> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonony is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
+
+Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning. That is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
+
+However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with hearts. I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty.
+
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking.
+
+[TODO: break with progressive morality: http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/]
[TODO: October 2016: I wrote Eliezer to ask about the conflict with "Changing Emotions" and made a Cheerful Price offer to talk about it https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price (shut up, we're not a cult) ]
[it was around this time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)]
+[internet pharmacy]
+
[TODO: early 2017, eventually I start being louder on Facebook and eventually have a nervous breakdown]
[TODO: one thing that kept coming up during the private and Facebook discussions was this category boundary argument—including, e.g., with MIRI comms director Rob Bensinger. That part, I knew I could win]
[TODO: proton concession]
-[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure]
+[TODO: "Blegg Mode", "Where to Draw the Boundaries?", and failure /2019/May/hiatus/ ]
[TODO: more blogging (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5aqumaym7Jd2qhDcy/containment-thread-on-the-motivation-and-political-context), 2019 Christmas party, disclaimer on "Categories Were Made"]
[TODO: categories clarification from EY—victory?!]
+["Univariate fallacy" also a concession]
+
[TODO: "simplest and best" pronoun proposal, sometimes personally prudent]
[TODO: why you should care; no one should like Scott and Eliezer's proposals; knowledge should go forward, not back]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff