Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Author: Zack M. Davis
-Date: 2023-01-01 05:00
+Date: 2023-07-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
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 magically 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 someone 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."
+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 to try to seem not-masculine—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)—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'm not immune to this, either.) 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 beautiful pure 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 way 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](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
+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 way 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 was being dumb and wrong when he coined "autogynephilia" as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals—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 ten years after [encountering the obvious and perfect word](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
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).)
+(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 over seven years later, and _I am panicking_.[^panic] (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic _really_ interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
-[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the next four posts are the retrospective accounting of that panic, a memoir written in the ashes of my defeat.
+[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the following posts are the retrospective accounting of that panic, a memoir written in the ashes of my defeat.
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 casual friend who I'll call "Wilhelm" messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
+A casual friend whom I'll call "Thomas"[^quoted-pseudonyms] messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
-For background, "Wilhelm" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_-er who I had met in the South Bay back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
+[^quoted-pseudonyms]: In this and the following posts, personal names that appear in quotation marks are pseudonyms.
-Relevantly, "Wilhelm" [was also autogynephilic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=93u4sgeARSHfPkqPN) (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
+For background, "Thomas" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_ reader who I had met back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
-<a id="confided-to-wilhelm"></a>As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.[^unethical]
+Relevantly, "Thomas" was also autogynephilic (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
-[^internship]: "Internship" is in scare quotes, because the Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
+<a id="confided-to-thomas"></a>As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "[Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/BlanchardPhD/) is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.
-[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
+(I didn't _have sex_ with her, obviously. _That_ would be unethical.[^unethical])
-[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see from the dates (26 March 2016) that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Wilhelm"). They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
+[^internship]: The Singularity Institute at the time was not the kind of organization that offered formal _internships_; what I mean is that there was a house in Santa Clara where a handful of people were trying to do Singularity-relevant work, and I was allowed to sleep in the garage and also try to do work, without being paid.
-[^unethical]: Another ethically mitigating factor is that the escort had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all escorts have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
+[^siai]: The "for Artificial Intelligence" part was a holdover from the organization's founding, from before Yudkowsky [decided that AI would kill everyone by default (and that this was a bad thing)](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SXurf2mWFw8LX2mkG). People soon started using "SingInst" as an abbreviation more than "SIAI", until the organization was eventually rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in 2013.
- (I didn't _have sex_ with her, obviously. _That_ would be unethical.)
+[^twenty-sixth]: Writing this up years later, I was surprised to see that my date with the escort was the same day as the "20% of the ones with penises" post (and my comment thereon and following conversation with "Thomas"), 26 March 2016. They hadn't been stored in my long-term episodic memory as "the same day", likely because the Facebook post only seems overwhelmingly significant in retrospect; at the time, I did not realize what I would be spending the next seven years of my life on.
-He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arugably _more_ ethical than casual sex. He had said that he had gotten interested in politics and developed in a socially and sexually conservative direction. "Free love is a lie," he said, noting that in a more traditional Society, our analogues would probably be married with kids by now.
+[^unethical]: Another ethically mitigating factor is that she had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all women in that profession have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
-He also said that his gender dysphoria had receded. "At a certain point, I just cut my hair, give away a lot of clothes, and left it behind. I kept waiting to regret it ... but the regret never came," he said. "It's like my brain got pushed off the fence and subtly re-wired."
+He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arugably _more_ ethical than casual sex. In the last few years, he had gotten interested in politics and developed in a socially and sexually conservative direction. "Free love is a lie," he said, noting that in a more traditional Society, our analogues would probably be married with kids by now.
+
+Also, his gender dysphoria had receded. "At a certain point, I just cut my hair, give away a lot of clothes, and left it behind. I kept waiting to regret it ... but the regret never came," he said. "It's like my brain got pushed off the fence and subtly re-wired."
I had said that I was happy for him and respected him, even while my own life remained very pro-dysphoria, pro-ponytails, and anti-politics.
-After complimenting me on my comment on Yudkowsky's post on the twenty-sixth, "Wilhelm" elaborated that he thought Yudkowsky's post was really irresponsible, because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria probably had erotic target location errors. "Wilhelm" went on:
+After complimenting me on my comment on Yudkowsky's post on the twenty-sixth, "Thomas" elaborated that he thought Yudkowsky's post was really irresponsible, because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria were probably autogynephilic. "Thomas" went on:
> To get a little paranoid, I think the power to define other people's identities is extremely useful in politics. If a political coalition can convince you that you have a persecuted identity or sexuality and it will support you, then it owns you for life, and can conscript you for culture wars and elections. Moloch would never pass up this level of power, so that means a constant stream of bad philosophy about identity and sexuality (like trans theory).
>
> So when I see Eliezer trying to convince nerdy men that they are actually women, I see the hand of Moloch.[^moloch]
-[^moloch]: The references to "Moloch" are presumably an allusion to Scott Alexander's ["Meditations on Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), in which Alexander personifies coordination failures as the god Moloch.
-
- (Incidentally, the quotation in "Meditations on Moloch" of [a poem I wrote in the _Less Wrong_ comments in 2011](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkRpALFAwJQuntHiF/the-gift-we-give-tomorrow-spoken-word-finished?commentId=ZkoKnj4nLbScHHHJC) is probably the most exposure my writing has ever gotten, and will ever get.)
+[^moloch]: The references to "Moloch" are presumably an allusion to Scott Alexander's ["Meditations on Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), in which Alexander personifies coordination failures as Moloch, the god of Carthagean myth.
We chatted for a few more minutes. I noted [Samo Burja's comment](/images/burja-shape_of_the_moral_panic.png) on Yudkowsky's post as a "terrible thought" that had also occurred to me: Burja had written that the predicted moral panic may not be along the expected lines, if an explosion of MtFs were to result in trans women dominating previously sex-reserved spheres of social competition. "[F]or signaling reasons, I will not give [the comment] a Like", I added parenthetically.[^signaling-reasons]
[^signaling-reasons]: This brazen cowardice makes for a stark contrast to my current habits of thought. Today, I would notice that that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make _insightful and accurate predictions_ about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be _less prepared_ for a world in which those trends have progressed further.
-A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](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.
+A few weeks 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](https://www.bart.gov/) ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
While I was waiting for internet service to be connected in my new apartment, I read a paper copy of _Nevada_ by Imogen Binnie. (I don't recall how I came across the recommendation.) It's about a trans woman in New York City named Maria Griffiths who steals her girlfriend's car to go on a road trip, and ends up meeting an autogynephilic young man named James H. in a Wal-Mart in Star City, Nevada, whereupon she tries to convince James that _autogynephilia_ is a bogus concept and that he's actually trans.
-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.)
+In Berkeley, I met some really interesting people who seemed 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—much like how Maria and James immediately recognize each other as similar but different in _Nevada_. (I saw 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_ (as discussed above), 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.)
+This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_ (as mentioned above), 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.
There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but as good as our theories about how to engineer bridges) 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".[^lucky-simplification]
-[^lucky-simplification]: In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, [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.
+[^lucky-simplification]: In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/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.
[I claim that femininity and autogynephilia are two such anti-correlated nodes in the True Causal Graph](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). They're anti-correlated because they're both children of the sexual orientation node, whose value pushes them in _opposite directions_: gay men are more feminine than straight men,[^gay-femininity], and autogynephiles want to be women because we're straight.
Or there's a piece that has made the rounds on social media more than once: ["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".)
+(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".)[^not-coming-out-revisions]
+
+[^not-coming-out-revisions]: The original version also says, "I begin to show an interest in programming, which might be the most obvious sign so far." But software development _isn't_ a female-typical profession! [(5.17% of respondents to the 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey were women.)](https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#developer-profile-demographics)
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—
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_.
+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 to 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'm not entitled to talk to anyone who doesn't want to talk to me, even if I personally find it pathetic that grown adults need to protect themselves from "invalidation".
+I gave someone else a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. She didn't like it—which I would have respected, if her complaint was just that Lawrence was overconfident and overgeneralizing, as a factual matter of science and probability. But my acquaintence seemed more preoccupied with how the book was (in her words) "seemingly deliberately hurtful and disrespectful", using "inherently invalidating language that is very often used in people's dismissal, abuse, and violence towards trans folk", such as calling MtF people "men", referring to straight trans women as "homosexual"—or using "transgendered" (with an _ed_) instead of "transgender". (I would have hoped that the fact that Lawrence is trans and (thinks she) is describing herself would have been enough to make it credible that she didn't mean any harm by saying "men" instead of "a.m.a.b."—and that it should have been obvious that if you reject authors for not speaking in your own ideology's shibboleths, you lose an important chance to discover if your ideology is getting something wrong.)
+
The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman 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."
-------
-I made friends with a trans woman who I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing. (We bought a couch for the occasion.)
+I made friends with a trans woman whom I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing. (We bought a couch for the occasion.)
There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are very obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't necessarily self-identify as "autogynephilic"). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together under the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but _I know the secret_."
(I'm not saying I was _right_ to say it; I'm admitting that I _did_ say it)
-—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No."
+—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.
+
+I don't think I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different, I thought. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+
+-------
+
+I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
+
+I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"
+
+No, I said, it's weirder than that; the idea of having female anatomy oneself and being able to appreciate it from the first person is intrinsically more exciting than the mere third-person appreciation that you can do in ordinary real life as a man.
-Nothing happened. What's significant is that I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different. I had reason to believe that _she was like me_, and I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+"[S]o, like, literal autogynephilia is a thing?" she said (as if she had heard the term before, but only as a slur or fringe theory, not as [the obvious word for an obviously existing thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)).
+
+She mentioned that as a data point, _her_ only effective sex fantasy was her as a hot girl. I said that I expected that to be a qualitatively different phenomenon, based on priors, and—um, _details_ that it would [probably be creepy to talk about](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories).
+
+So, she asked, I believed that AGP was a real thing, and in my case, I didn't have lots of desires to be seen as a girl, have a girl name, _&c._?
+
+No, I said, I did; it just seemed like it couldn't have been a coincidence that 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) (the class of things including the hope that my beautiful–beautiful ponytail successfully sets me apart from all the guys who are proud of being guys, or feeling happy about getting _ma'am_'ed over the phone) didn't develop until _after_ puberty.
+
+She said, "hm. so male puberty was a thing you did not like."
+
+No, I said, puberty was fine—it seemed like she was rounding off my self-report to something closer to the standard narrative, but what I was trying to say was that the standard was-always-a-girl-in-some-metaphysical-sense narrative was _not true_ (at least for me, and I suspected for many others).
+
+"The thing is, I don't think it's actually that uncommon!" I said, linking to ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). "It's just that there's no script for it and no one wants to talk about it!"
+
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:23 PM
+> ok, _very_ weird
+> yeah, I just don't have a built-in empathic handle for "wants to be a woman."
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 09/02/2016 1:24 PM
+> it even has a TVTrope! [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman)
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:27 PM
+> ok, yeah. wow. it's really just easier for my brain to go "ok, that's a girl" than to understand why anyone would want boobs
+
+I took this as confirmation of my expectation that alleged "autogynephilia" in women is mostly not a thing—that normal women appreciating their own bodies is a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from my thing, even if you can make it look similar if you squint and are motivated to believe that trans women are women (so that "But cis women are autogynephilic, too" sounds to you like a reasonable objection to Blanchard _et al._). My friend mentioned that she also fantasized about being a hot girl _when she didn't know what I was talking about_. After I went into more detail (and linked the TVTropes page), she said she _didn't understand why anyone would want boobs_. Well, why would she? But I think a lot of a.m.a.b. people understand.
-------
-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/) [into](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.
+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/) [into](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [existing](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-thing/), 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](http://zackmdavis.net/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 "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" as 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/)). 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).[^naming-choices]
(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
+------
+
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?
Sarah Constantin, 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 feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](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 (LCSW) before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
-I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was happy to discover that the notes from the appointments 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 got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments 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 about (for example) 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 very 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.)
--------
-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 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/).
+Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my break with progressive morality. 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 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 Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Wilhelm", I was starting to question it now.
+Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
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!
-<a id="cheerful-price-privacy-constraint"></a>Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my cheerful 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.
+<a id="cheerful-price-privacy-constraint"></a>Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my cheerful 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; I often wish I could just say what relevant things I know without worrying about whether it might infringe on someone's "privacy". (This secrecy-hating trait probably correlates with the autogynephilia blogging; someone otherwise like me who believed in privacy wouldn't be telling you this Whole Dumb Story.) But I feel morally obligated 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.)
------
-I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/), and he [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
+If I had to pick a _date_ for my break with progressive morality, it would be 7 October 2017. Over the past couple days, I had been having a frustrating Messenger conversation with some guy, which I would [later describe as feeling like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/).
-------
+Over the previous week and months, I had been frustrated with the _Zeitgeist_, but I was trying to not to be loud or obnoxious about it, because I wanted to be a good person and not hurt anyone's feelings and not lose any more friends. ("Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she had said, "just find talking vaguely aversive.")
-A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/), thanking me for the recommendation of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."
+The conversation made it very clear to me that I could have no peace with the _Zeitgeist_. It wasn't the mere fact that some guy in my social circle was being dumb and gaslighty about it. It was that fact that his gaslighting was an unusually pure distillation of _socially normative_ behavior in Berkeley 2016. There were more copies of him than there were of me.
-We struck up an email correspondence (Subject: "Re: [An Algorithmic Lucidity] Please moderate: 'Wicked Transcendence II'"). She had found my blog from the _Slate Star Codex_ blogroll. She had transitioned in July of the previous year at age 35, to universal support. (In Portland, which was perhaps uniquely good in this way.)
+It was a Huckleberry Finn moment for me: opposing this was worth losing friends, worth hurting feelings, and, actually, worth the other thing. I posted on Facebook in the morning and [on my real-name blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/) in the evening:
-I said I was happy for her—probably more so than the average person who says that—but that (despite living in Berkeley, which was perhaps uniquely in contention with Portland for being perhaps uniquely good in this way) there were showstopping contraindications to social transition in my case. It _really mattered_ what order you learn things in. Because the 2016 _Zeitgeist_ had the back of people who model themselves as women who were assigned male at birth (but not people who model themselves as men who love women and want to become what they love), if you _first_ realize, "Oh, I'm trans," and then sucessfully transition, and _then_ read Anne Lawrence, you can say, "Huh, seems plausible that my gender identity was caused by my autogynephilic sexuality rather than the other way around; weird," shrug, and continue living happily ever after. In contrast, I had [already been thinking of myself as autogynephilic (but not "trans") for ten years](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). Even in Portland or Berkeley, you still have to send that coming-out email, and I couldn't claim to have a "gender identity" with a straight face.
-
-She said she would recommend _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ on her Facebook wall. I said she was very brave—well, we already knew she was very brave because she _actually transitioned_—but, I suggested, maybe it would be better to wait until [October 11th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day) ([October 11th](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/october-eleventh/))?
-
-As an afterthought to an explanation of why she thought successfully transitioning is more feasible than I seemed to believe, she suggested a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.
-
-I replied that "obviously a man" is unsophisticated. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men", but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.
-
-She replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing (which I would [later adapt into a guest post with her gracious permission](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/)). If the base rate of AGP transsexualism in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. Thus, the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There _is_ evidence—but who cares, as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits?
+> the moment of liberating clarity when you resolve the tension between being a good person and the requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore 💖
-I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. _I_ cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, [linking to a program I had written](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs) to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from [a paper about sex differences in the "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). Sophia was impressed, but had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given the residuals of each facet against the other, so I assumed you could sample one, and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't actually use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd.
+Former MIRI president Michael Vassar emailed me about it, and we ended up meeting once. (I had also emailed him back in August, when I had heard from Anna that he was also skeptical of the transgender movement (Subject: "I've heard of fake geek girls, but this is ridiculous").)
------
-I messaged an _alumna_ of my [App Academy](https://www.appacademy.io/) class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the harrassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later in the cohort, she started a quarrel with another student (an 18-year-old boy, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over the offensive political implications of something he had said; someone else pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough, or autistic enough, not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)
-
-In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining the problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
-
-She asked if I had read _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. (I had.) She said she personally didn't care about bathrooms.
-
-She had also read a lot about related topics (in part because of her own history as a gender-nonconforming child), but that this area of it (autogynephilia, _&c._) was difficult to talk about except from one's lived experience because "the public narrative is very ... singular". She thought that whether and how dysphoria was related to eroticism could be different for different people, but thought that the singular narrative had been culturally important, in the same way as the "gay is not a choice" narrative had been, letting people with less privilege live in a way that makes them happy with less of a penalty. (She did empathize with concern about kids being encouraged to transition early; given the opportunity to go to school as a boy at age 7, she would have taken it, and it would have been the wrong path.)
-
-She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)
-
-And just—these are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe the same thing. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them are interested in pointing out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they mostly approve of the purposes to which the singular narrative is being used—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—put a damper on how trustworthy the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals is? How do you _know_ what's good in the real world, if you [mostly live in the fake world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
+I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/), and he [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
------
-Of course, not all feminists were of the same mind on this issue. In late December 2016, I posted [an introductory message to the "Peak Trans" thread on /r/GenderCritical](/ancillary/what-i-said-to-r-gendercritical/), explaining my problem.
-
-The first comment was "You are a predator."
-
-... I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.
-
-------
+A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/), thanking me for the recommendation of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. "It strongly spoke to many of my experiences as a trans woman that I've been treating as unmentionable. (Especially among my many trans friends!)" she wrote. "I think I'm going to start treating them as mentionable."
-At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally started HRT. 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 secret blog was for.
+We struck up an email correspondence (Subject: "Re: [An Algorithmic Lucidity] Please moderate: 'Wicked Transcendence II'"). She had found my blog from the _Slate Star Codex_ blogroll. She had transitioned in July of the previous year at age 35, to universal support. (In Portland, which was perhaps uniquely good in this way.)
-... 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, at least a little, at least subtly.
+I said I was happy for her—probably more so than the average person who says that—but that (despite living in Berkeley, which was perhaps uniquely in contention with Portland for being perhaps uniquely good in this way) there were showstopping contraindications to social transition in my case. It _really mattered_ what order you learn things in. Because the 2016 _Zeitgeist_ had the back of people who model themselves as women who were assigned male at birth (but not people who model themselves as men who love women and want to become what they love), if you _first_ realize, "Oh, I'm trans," and then sucessfully transition, and _then_ read Anne Lawrence, you can say, "Huh, seems plausible that my gender identity was caused by my autogynephilic sexuality rather than the other way around; weird," shrug, and continue living happily ever after. In contrast, I had [already been thinking of myself as autogynephilic (but not "trans") for ten years](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). Even in Portland or Berkeley, you still have to send that coming-out email, and I couldn't claim to have a "gender identity" with a straight face.
-"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."
+She said she would recommend _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ on her Facebook wall. I said she was very brave—well, we already knew she was very brave because she _actually transitioned_—but, I suggested, maybe it would be better to wait until [October 11th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day) ([October 11th](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/october-eleventh/))?
-As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman who I'll call "Chaya", 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.
+As an afterthought to an explanation of why she thought successfully transitioning is more feasible than I seemed to believe, she suggested a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.
------
+I replied that "obviously a man" is unsophisticated. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have third-gender categories such that AGP trans women aren't "men", but they're still not drawn from anything close to the same distribution as cis women.
-"Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she said, "just find talking vaguely aversive." In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, she said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
+Sophia replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing (which I would [later adapt into a guest post with her gracious permission](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/)). If the base rate of AGP transsexualism in Portland was 0.1%, someone would need log<sub>2</sub>(99.9%/0.1%) ≈ 9.96 ≈ 10 bits of evidence to clock her as trans. If the structure of one's face was 4 times more likely to be from a male than a female, that would only contribute 2 bits. Sophia was 5′7″, which is about where the female and male height distributions cross over, so she wasn't leaking any bits there. And so on—the prospect of passing in naturalistic settings is a different question from whether there exists evidence that a trans person is trans. There _is_ evidence—but as long as it's comfortably under 10 bits, it won't be a problem.
-I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
+I agreed that for most people in most everyday situations it probably didn't matter. _I_ cared because I was a computational philosophy of gender nerd, I said, [linking to a program I had written](https://github.com/zackmdavis/Persongen/blob/8fc03d3173/src/main.rs) to simulate sex classification based on personality, using data from [a paper by Weisberg _et al._ about sex differences in the correlated "facets" underlying the Big Five personality traits](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3149680/). (For example, studies had shown that women and men didn't differ in Big Five Extraversion, but if you split "Extraversion" into "Enthusiasm" and "Assertiveness", there were small sex differences pointing in opposite directions, with men being more assertive.) My program generated random examples of women's and men's personality stats according to Weisberg _et al._'s data, and then tried to classify the "actual" sex of each example given only the personality stats—only reaching 63% accuracy, which was good news for androgyny fans like me.
-She sent me a photo of the key snapped in half (proving that it was unusable, to satisfy my security anxiety) and told me to go away.
+Sophia was impressed, but had some cutting methodological critiques. The paper had given [residual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals) statistics of each facet against the other—like the mean and standard deviation of Enthusiasm _minus_ Assertiveness—so I assumed you could randomly generate one facet, and then use the residual stats to get a "diff" from one to the other. Sophia pointed out that you can't actually use residuals for sampling like that, because the actual distribution of the residual was highly dependent on the first facet. Given an unusually high value for one facet, taking the overall residual stats as independent would imply that the other facet was equally likely to be higher or lower, which was absurd. Sophia built her own model in Excel using the correlation matrix from the paper, and found a classifier with 68% accuracy.
------
-I made plans to visit Portland for the weekend of 18 February 2017, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be nice to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River[^river-fka]) to lend versimilitude to the charade.
+On the evening of 10 October 2016, I put up my Facebook post for Coming Out Day:
-[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) is a suburb of Portland; the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), but the vignette was inspired by my attendance of a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.
-
- I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.
+> Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!
+>
+> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
+>
+> Because we are already enduring it.
-[^river-fka]: Formerly known as William River??
+It got 40 Likes—and one comment (from my half-brother, who was supportive, but didn't seem to understand what I was trying to do). Afterwards, I wondered if I had been too subtle—or perhaps that because Coming Out Day was supposed to be personal, no one wanted to look like a jerk by taking the bait and starting a political fight on my brave personal self-disclosure post.
-At the close of a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I wrote:
+But Coming Out Day isn't, strictly, personal. _I_ had self-identified as autogynephilic for ten years, without being "out" about it (except during the [_very unusual_ occasions when it was genuinely on-topic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)). The only reason I was making a Coming Out Day post in 2016 and not any of the previous ten years, was because the political environment had made it an issue.
-> (Thanks very much for your promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I am interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet you; unfortunately, I kind of feel motivated to generally avoid trans women now, because the conjunction of validate-everyone's-identity social norms and my continuing obsession with last year's shocking mega-update make me feel like I'm made out of social antimatter: better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing, mutually annihilating me and my interlocutor and killing everyone in the room in a shower of gamma rays.)
+In some ways, it was nice to have the affordance to talk about an important part of my life that I otherwise mostly didn't get the opportunity to talk about. But on net, I _preferred_ the closet, if the affordance had to come in the form of a deluge of lies for me to combat.
------
-... the "quietly stay out of everyone's way" policy lasted about 3 days.
-
-In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["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) piece).
-
-[^amelia-rip]: Clicking on Amelia's profile years later, it's a memorial page, which is ominous.
-
-I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."
-
-(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas Amelia seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)
-
-Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):
-
-> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
-
-Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: XX-cluster for when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes, _&c._
-
-So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words can be used in many ways, and are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—given the context of my comments to Amelia, I think it should have already been clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to Amelia's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (Amelia, to her credit, did.)
-
-To be fair to Bensinger, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").
-
-But ... in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I think I was perhaps justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher, that seems like a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions.
-
-Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about put a Like on my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "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", I explained, then elaborated, "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".
-
-[TODO public meltdown—
-
- * I ended up escalating into a full-on public meltdown on my own Facebook wall. First posts, 11 Feb "some of you may have noticed" and 12 Feb "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends; summarize discussion
-
- * My terrible, terrible date with "Noreen" was on Sunday 12 February. We saw _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theater. We walked around the Castro and debated the gender thing beforehand. I was so distracted!!
-
- * Elsewhere on Facebook, "Noreen" complained about the difficulty of dating, I used the opportunity to ask her for a date. (I later commented to "Chaya", "I wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I'm going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things like try to spin a complaint ("As if only guys have trouble getting dates") into a date")
-
- * more discussion on "nice, mean versions" 13 February
-
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I really *was* getting to the point that I hated transwomen
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I hate them, too!
-> Fuck those guys!
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
-> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
-> But you're actually changing that for me
-> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
-> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
-> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
-> Because I have a model
-> I understand the problem
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> I understand why it's hard
-> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
-> This is a better thing for me
-> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person
-> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
-> I think now I can do it more honestly
-> They might not want _me_ as a friend
-> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
-> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
-> I'm very grateful for that
-
-]
-
-[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.
-
- * "Chaya" 14 Feb 10:52:04: So my theory is ["Noreen"] 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!
-
- * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
+I messaged an _alumna_ of my [App Academy](https://www.appacademy.io/) class of November 2013. I remembered that on the first day of App Academy, she had asked about the harrassment policy, to which the founder/instructor hesitated and promised to get back to her; apparently, it had never come up before. (This was back when App Academy was still cool and let you sleep on the floor if you wanted.) Later in the cohort, she started a quarrel with another student (an 18-year-old boy, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over the offensive political implications of something he had said; someone else pointed out in his defense that he was young. (Young enough not to have been trained not to say anything that could be construed as anti-feminist in a professional setting?)
-[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
-
-15 Feb 0803
-> I'm taking the week off work; today I'm trying to stay grounded and then I'm going to Portland later; I wanna talk to you but not now
-
-16 Feb 0042
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I told "Chaya."
-"[N]ow that I no longer believe self-reports are true, I can see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're right"
-"I mean, I knew that that was a thing verbally"
-"but now I'm actually seeing it"
-
-Thu Feb 16 0102
-in the thread where I said "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to
-Brent", at the time I thought I saw a beautiful aesthetic reason, but maybe a better description of my behavior would be that I was beating up on low-status Brent / I said it seemed thematically appropriate in order to get a date with Anna
-"Chaya": But you were really calling out Brent as low status
-me: yeah
-
-"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/
+In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining the problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
+She asked if I had read _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. (I had.) She said she personally didn't care about bathrooms.
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
+She had also read a lot about related topics (in part because of her own history as a gender-nonconforming child), but that this area of it (autogynephilia, _&c._) was difficult to talk about except from one's lived experience because "the public narrative is very ... singular". She thought that whether and how dysphoria was related to eroticism could be different for different people, but thought that the singular narrative had been culturally important, in the same way as the "gay is not a choice" narrative had been, letting people with less privilege live in a way that makes them happy with less of a penalty. (She did empathize with concern about kids being encouraged to transition early; given the opportunity to go to school as a boy at age 7, she would have taken it, and it would have been the wrong path.)
-[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??
-]
+She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
+And just—these are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe all the same things. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them are interested in pointing out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they appreciate how the singular narrative has been culturally important—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—put a damper on how trustworthy the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals is? How do you _know_ what's good in the real world, if you [mostly live in the fake world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
-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
+Of course, not all feminists were of the same mind on this issue. In late December 2016, I posted [an introductory message to the "Peak Trans" thread on /r/GenderCritical](/ancillary/what-i-said-to-r-gendercritical/), explaining my problem.
-I met Jessica in March
+The first comment was "You are a predator."
+... I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.
-I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
+------
-At standup meeting on my last day, I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
+At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally [started HRT](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/): Climara® 0.05 mg/day estrogen patches, to be applied to the abdomen once a week. Allegedly, the patch was supposed to stay on the entire week despite showering, _&c_.
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
+(Interestingly, the indications listed in the large fold-out sheet of drug information that came in the box of patches are all for symptoms due to menopause,
+post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure"; if it had become common to prescribe to intact males with an "internal sense of their own gender", neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.)
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
+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 secret blog was for.
-[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]
+Maybe it should have been obvious that that wasn't going to be a stable solution. Still, it seems like there ought to have been some way for it to not blow up quite so dramatically as it would. To be continued.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff