>
> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
+In a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the story about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being transformed into a woman and used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these Sequences of _super great_ blog posts about how reasoning works by some guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky—where one _particularly_ influential-to-me post was [the one that explained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) why the idea of "changing sex" is much easier said than done, [because the tantalizingly short English phrase doesn't capture the complex implementation details of the real physical universe](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).
+
+At the time, this was my weird personal thing, which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about. In particular, I didn't think of myself as being "transgender." The whole 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 [trying to use my initials as a name](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-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 in some sense more real or more relevant and should take precedence. So where does that leave me? In ["Sexual Dimorphism ..."](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I wrote about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times, but I tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I said is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined "autogynephilia" as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) 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.
+
+My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
+
+> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
+
+> Still, for people roughly similar to the Bay Area / European mix, I think I'm over 50% probability at this point that at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women.
+
+(***!?!?!?!?***)
+
+> A lot of them don't know it or wouldn't care, because they're female-minds-in-male-bodies but also cis-by-default (lots of women wouldn't be particularly disturbed if they had a male body; the ones we know as 'trans' are just the ones with unusually strong female gender identities). Or they don't know it because they haven't heard in detail what it feels like to be gender dysphoric, and haven't realized 'oh hey that's me'. See, e.g., <https://sinesalvatorem.tumblr.com/post/141690601086/15-regarding-the-4chan-thing-4chans> and <https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/>
+
+(Reading _that_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me [how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).)
+
+> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
+
+> 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 six years later, and _I am panicking_. (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) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
+
+But at the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left [a careful comment in the Facebook thread](/images/facebook_etle_comment.png) (with the obligatory "speaking only for myself; I obviously know that I can't say anything about anyone else's experience" [disclaimer](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/06/against-disclai.html)), quietly puzzled at what Yudkowsky could _possibly_ be thinking ...
+
+A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California): 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.)
+
+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.
+
+(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's more to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean, but I need a few paragraphs to talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, before I can elaborate on more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
+
+The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatment of HRT, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+
+In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives, in a way that causes huge social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
+
+That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed of the fact that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resememble females and aspire to be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such behavior, just on priors.
+
+Suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female (as far as the technology can manage) do _not_ fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type—it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your _second_ hypothesis for how this behavior might arise?
+
+What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
+
+So, yeah. Basically, 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, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
+
+Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 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](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 over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
+
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) 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 a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of 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 non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes.) [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/) 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).)
+
+Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) (the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association) [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf) ([ICD-10-CM codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM) F64.1 and F64.2):
+
+> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
+
+(Bolding mine.)
+
+Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard-and-friends and arrives at essentially the _same_ two-type taxonomy of MtF, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
+
+> 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? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
+
+Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
+
+Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
+
+> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. **Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.**
+
+Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) [this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#whipping-girl) book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
+
+> 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.
+
+"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 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?
+
+Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
+
+Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
+
+The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
+
+How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
+
+Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
+
+Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
+
+There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but a good theory to the precision that our theories about engineering bridges are good) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".
+
+(In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much; [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.)
+
+So, if some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
+
+But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 230 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
+
+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 obviously very 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?
+
+Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. 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 Univerity in Santa Cruz when 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 (in his infamous [Comment 171](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."
+
+Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
+
+(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
+
+If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
+
+> _Look in the mirror
+> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
+> I'm just a spirit
+> I'm just a spirit
+> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
+
+This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
+
+To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has recently _become_ more common in the cultural environment of the current year), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (in some ways, it would be _less_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
+
+Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
+
+Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and [I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the intellectually serious people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
+
+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.
+
+I ... [went the other direction](https://www.gwern.net/Modus). In slogan form: "Holy shit, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
+
+Okay, that slogan isn't right. Again, I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accomodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
+
+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](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
+
+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?_ 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 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 goddamned person_ reported being into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when 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's 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 of reality_; I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but this was _really personally disturbing_.
+
+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 can't blame anyone for prioritizing their mental health, even if I personally find it pathetic that grown adults in the so-called "rationalist" community need to be protect themselves from "invalidation".
+
+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."
+
+Someone else 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: ↑ rework and revise whole 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.
+
+[TODO: emails with Kay Brown started 13 August; sent 40 messages during 2016 calendar year]
+
+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/) (with [loving attention to technology choices, rather than just using WordPress](/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/)).
+
+... the pseudonymity is kind of a joke at this point. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side. Given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), it's _probably_ a smarter play if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results isn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog?—so I _guess_ I'll keep the Saotome-Westlake byline on this site, even though it's definitely a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling, and not an Actually Secret pen name. Plus, after having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there are _already_ a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I don't want to throw away or rewrite that history—this is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.
+
+(Separately, I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it, the way I regret [my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials). For the pen name: a 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/). For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever did stoop to the depravity of starting one of my own one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL more than the title, and as far as the URL goes, to be led by the dot before the TLD to interpret "space" as a separate word, rather than my intent of "genderspace" being analogous to "configuration space"—but it doesn't bother me that much.)
+
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided 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 going forward)](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) the note about one of the LCSWs 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 than if they were in on it; [in some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) 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, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) 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. (Whatever than means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) 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 talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; 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. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. [I don't think it's the same thing](TODO: linky autogenderphilia reply?), and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
+
+Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my [break with progressive morality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded cultural assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
+
+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 Waton 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 a right-wing friend (a self-aware autogynephile who I had gone crossdressing in public once with back in the early 'tens, who had gone trad and started lifting weights in the intervening few years and felt good about his AGP starting to abate), I was starting to question it now.
+
+Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was Mencius Moldbug's anti-democratic (!) political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), which 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; the Republicans, representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite, can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long. The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_; if you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality" in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](TODO linky). Moldbug contends that all of this is Bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance; it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO (possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader but not meddle in day-to-day operations) with the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_). [TODO: linky UR refs]
+
+(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more obvious after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
+
+In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
+
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
+
+Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
+
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
+
+This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
+
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
+
+Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
+
+The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of blacks and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembers the world of 2006, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that they were, in fact, straight boys, and didn't think the world owed them deference for their perversion. And this experience _did_ raise further questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I couldn't help but notice that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
+
+While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. What _was_ going on with that?
+
+I wasn't, like, _friends_ with Yudkowsky, obviously; I didn't have a natural social affordance to _just_ ask him the way you would ask a work buddy or a college friend something. But ... he _had_ posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about he trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2 hour conversation, and I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in '12, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong."
+
+At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish?—some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it? To the normal person I would explain thusly—
+
+First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money in exchange for them using their time differently from how they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle–class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a somewhat higher rate than most therapists.
+
+Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
+
+Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
+
+By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. If the God-shaped whole in my head can't not be filled by _something_, it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are not therefore true, and Yudkowsky's writings on the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe were a potent way to do that. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the holy text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
+
+That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past, there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
+
+I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest encyclical seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
+
+Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my happy price inquiry (whether he accepted the offer and a conversation occured, or what was said if it did occur), because I think the rule I should follow for telling this Whole Dumb Story is that while I have complete freedom to talk about _my_ actions and things that happened in public, I'm not allowed to divulge information about what Yudkowsky may or may not have said in private conversations that may or may not have occured, because even without an explicit secrecy promise, people might be less forthcoming in private conversations if they knew that you might blog about them later. Personally, I think most people are _way_ too paranoid about this, and often wish I could just say what relevant things I know without worrying about whether it might infringe on someone's "privacy", but I'm eager to cooperate with widely-held norms even if I personally think they're dumb.
+
+(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+
+[TODO: Scott linked to Kay Brown as part of his links post and got pushback
+https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/
+https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i]
+
+[TODO: I posted to /r/gendercritical (post the full text in an ancillary page; it's currently in my "Collective Debt, Collective Shame" draft)
+
+The first comment was "You are a predator." ... I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.]
+
+Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for.
+
+... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it.
+
+"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
+
+As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
+
+[TODO: confronted Olivia on 20 January:
+> just, that line about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria
+> maybe it wouldn't take so much metacognition if someone would just mention the OTHER diagnostic criterion!!!!
+walking it back a bit—
+> I shouldn't do this to you, obviously, but hopefully you can understand why the situation is distressing from my perspective]
+she told me to go away
+
+[TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized
+
+I didn't stop there
+exchange with Rob Bensinger (significant because of his position at MIRI) 7 February
+
+[my first contact with Ben at all was 8 Feb
+> I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl
+> well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes]
+
+tantrum started evening of Saturday 11 Feb
+my terrible date with Anna T. was actually on 12 February—that explains why I remember being so distracted!
+discussion with hundreds of comments, especially with Anna T.
+31 posts total between—"some of you may have noticed" Sat 11 Feb, and promising to quite Facebook for a week 0844 15 Feburary
+
+I was actually planning to visit Sophia in Portland!
+4 February
+> Okay, I've got my flight, hotel, con tickets, and makeup; I'll be flying in the morning of Friday the 17th, and leaving the evening of Sunday the 19th. My objectives are (1) take original photographs at key landmarks (Q Center, TriMet trains, that bridgey thing, &c.) to lend verisimilitude to the "fiction" posts on my secret blog, which are set in Portland/Beaverton, (2) cosplay Pearl at WizardWorld on Saturday, and (3) meet you in some capacity (at the con or elsewhere).
+
+Katie Tue Feb 14 2017 10:52:04: So my theory is Anna would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out / And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you" / "See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
+
+14 Feb exchange with Katie about reconnecting with her natural compassion
+
+[email Yudkowsky "the spirit of intervention" at 0418 a.m. (I don't even want to read it now) 14 February]
+
+[email to Michael "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)" 0632]
+
+Michael's reply—
+> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. How were Anna and Divia? I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret Tchetchetkine and Larch, in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
+
+[according to emails, I hung out with Ben in the day of 14 Feb, but I have no memory of this]
+
+[I messaged Ben "I just woke up" at Tue Feb 14 16:09:41 PST 2017, so apparently I did sleep a little that day?!]
+
+email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" 15 Feb 0017
+
+"questions" to Anna and Michael 16 Feburary
+> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
+in this thread, I claimed that, "I did in fact get sleep, but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to."
+
+[a couple of delusional emails to Yudkowsky at 11XX on 16 Feb]
+
+[16 February, I ask to meet Orion to talk about taking a sabbatical "Can I come to the city and meet with you?" at 1317 p.m.]
+
+Cooperate messages—
+Jonah 4x, Jack, Ziz 6x, "Wilhelm" 2x, Katie 6x, Anna T. 6x, Jenna 8x, Linda 5x, Ben 5x, Brent 4x, Boyd
+
+That I was on a trip and don't want it to be a bad trip
+
+Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
+Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
+Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
+
+I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
+
+"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
+
+Thu Feb 16 16:39:06 PST 2017: Ziz says, "Am still here. Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors. Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face."
+Thu Feb 16 18:18:43 PST 2017: Ziz says "Watson returned. Am currently in ur house, using ur wifi. Are you coming here? Am unclear on your intent, but am happy to sit here and work on stupid resume padding stuff for a while if you're coming."
+
+Fri Feb 17 14:19, "I'm so confused I just woke up / I'm so sorry"
+
+previous psych episode, repeating two words, Science and Female; but this time, it was Cooperate and Defect
+
+to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
+
+/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
+
+[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
+
+[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
+
+[another happy price offer to Yudkowsky on 2 March
+> That makes sense. Sorry for being boring; I'm kind of going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development. Hopefully this is not too socially-disruptive! Michael said he thinks I'm doing good work??
+]
+
+[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
+
+7 March—
+> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (e.g., from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
+reply—
+> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
+
+12 March—
+> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
+
+I met Jessica in March
+
+/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
+
+[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
+
+[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to trans widow friend, 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, Olivia, and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff