-Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer; Or, Could Self-Reports Really Be That Wrong??
+Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Date: 2020-10-01 05:00
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia
Status: draft
-"all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women"
+This, then, is Blanchard's dangerous idea: "all gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented towards men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women."
-even if you weaken _all_ to _almost all_ (Anne Lawrence: "I am firmly convinced that the overwhelming majority—probably 98% or more—of cases of severe gender dysphoria in men arise in connection with either effeminate homosexuality or autogynephilia; most of the rare exceptions probably arise in connection with conditions such as schizophrenia and certain personality disorders"), or even _most_
+Even if you weaken _all_ to _almost all_ , or even _most_
+Anne Lawrence:
+
+> I am firmly convinced that the overwhelming majority—probably 98% or more—of cases of severe gender dysphoria in men arise in connection with either effeminate homosexuality or autogynephilia; most of the rare exceptions probably arise in connection with conditions such as schizophrenia and certain personality disorders
"Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
+Julia Serano:
+
+> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
+
+I don't doubt that Julia Serano is telling the truth about her _subjective experiences_. But "that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience_. It's a _hypothesis_ about human psychology. We shouldn't _expect_ anyone to get that kind of thing right based on introspection alone.
+
+
How to account for people disagreeing?
-* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (Julia Serano could not explain, picking the gift on the right)
+* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
* exact type of AGP and whether you remember it in childhood make a difference in how obvious the right answer is
-* ppl have heard a strawman of the theory, not read "Becoming What We Love"; innoculated against smart version of theory
+* ppl have heard a strawman of the theory, not read "Becoming What We Love"; innoculated against smart version of theory (Anne Vitale)
+* selection
+* incentives
+
+the selection effect and the incentives are dual: ppl who notice AGP don't transition, people who transition convince selves AGP doesn't matter
type of dysphoria also matters
-two fictional case studies: one with childhood AGP and interpersonal fantasy, another like me (Ranma 1/2, transformation fantasies, sex differences denial, encountering AGP first)
+trans women don't want to talk about it
+stright guys who regard it as a humiliating private kink don't want to talk about it
+
-when they meet in Portland, they note their obvious similarities and know that they have to be the same type of thing (I'm actually trans, you're just AGP is not an option)
-So, when I encountered the word _autogynephilia_ ("love of oneself as a woman") at age 18, I immediately thought, _There's a word for it_, and was actually surprised that it was coined in a the context of a theory of the etiology of transsexuality, because I was a psychological sex differences denialist at the time ()
+To visualize how this ends up looking in practice, I want you to consider the fictitious but (I claim) entirely realistic tale of Katherine and Mark.
-Just, you know, one of those guys who is pointedly insistent on not being _proud_ of the fact that they're guys, and who is romantically obsessed with fantasies about being a girl.
+two fictional case studies: one with childhood AGP and interpersonal fantasy, another like me (Ranma 1/2, transformation fantasies, sex differences denial, encountering AGP first)
+when they meet in Portland, they note their obvious similarities and know that they have to be the same type of thing (I'm actually trans, you're just AGP is not an option)
-Mark is like "You lying bastards!" and the first is like "You poor, soul, misled by the BBL lies"
-"That poor girl!"
+Katherine looks at Mark with a sense of pity. "That poor girl, cowed by Bailey's vicious pseudoscientific lies!"
-Mark looks at Katherine with a mixture of jealousy and contempt. "Wait. Wait a minute. So this _entire fucking time_, _actual trans women_ were really just _guys like me_ who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy erotic and romantic fantasies about being a girl, and then _took them literally_?! I didn't know you were allowed to take them literally! You bastards! You delusional bastards! You beautiful, lucky bastards who get all nice things I can't have, at the terrible cost of never being able to say _why_! I'm so upset about this that I feel motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling the shitty epistemology that led to this absurd situation!"
+Mark looks at Katherine with a mixture of jealousy and contempt. "Wait. Wait a minute. So this _entire fucking time_, _actual trans women_ were really just _guys like me_ who were _less self-aware about it_, who had all the same happy romantic fantasies about being a girl, and then _took them literally_?! I didn't know you were allowed to take them literally. You bastards! You delusional bastards! You beautiful, lucky bastards who get all nice things I can't have, at the terrible cost of never being able to say _why_! I'm so upset about this that I feel motivated to start an entire pseudonymous blog dedicated to dismantling the shitty epistemology that led to this absurd situation!"
but the real takeaway is that everyone should be more skeptical of why they think they do what they do
+idea innoculation: https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/aYX6s8SYuTNaM2jh3/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance
+
+blue-eyed islanders and common knowledge
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