Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Author: Zack M. Davis
-Date: 2023-01-01 05:00
+Date: 2023-05-01 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
[^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.
-[^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.
+[^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.
[^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.
-------
+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.
+
+"[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.
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.
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.
-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). 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.
+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.
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.
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.
------
+------
+
+[TODO SECTION: conversations with "Wilhelm" late 2016, early 2017]
+
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend.
+
+I kept in touch with "Wilhelm".
+
+[TODO: election thoughts; Clinton vs. Trump on Russia hawkishness]
+
+I shared with him an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), which fleshed out his idea from back in March about political forces optimizing for people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
+
+[TODO: egregore theory; negotiating with egregores and Aumann agreement; coalition of the fringes burning down organic structure
+
+I've heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this is ridiculous.
+
+I said I was modeling him as possessed by the NRx egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist diaspora.
+]
+
+[TODO: NRx the nice parts, Brazil vs. South Africa]
+
+[TODO: comics and 72 virgins: https://tapas.io/episode/308349]
+
+"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said.
+
+"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
+
+"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
+
+[TODO: hypomasculine men, more paperclips]
+
+[TODO: Susan Fenimore Cooper]
+
+I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was very trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a NRx (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "who cares if you alienate the bitch". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
+
+[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
+
+"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx response:
+
+> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
+> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
+
+I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance woman contributing to the community's endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than the problem thereby solved (with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death).
+
+[TODO: further counter-replies, eminence]
+
+[TODO: egalitarian relationships don't work]
+
+Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _actually had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.
+
+------
"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.
------
-... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about 3 days.
+... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about three 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).
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".
+Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of 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".
Having already started to argue with people in my community under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep"/"may as well be hung for a pound as a penny" started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:
[^terf-allusion]: An allusion to TERFs, "trans-exclusionary radical feminists."
-It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen." "_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
+It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen" (who I had _also_ had an exchange with in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).
+
+"_[O]ne_ of the things trans women want is to be referred to as women," she said. "This is not actually difficult, we can just _do_ it." She was pretty sure I must have read the relevant _Slate Star Codex_ post, ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/).
I replied that I had an unfinished draft [post about this](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/), but briefly, faced with a demand to alter one's language in order to spare someone's feelings, one possible response might be to submit to the demand. But another possible response might be, "_I don't negotiate with terrorists_. People have been using this word to refer to a particular thing for the last 200,000 years since the invention of language, and if that hurts your feelings, that's not my problem." The second response was certainly not very nice. But maybe there were other values than being nice?—sometimes?
I replied, but was circular, right?—that women are people who are happier being categorized as women. However you verbally chose to define it, your mental associations with the word _woman_ were going to be anchored on your experiences with adult human females. I wasn't saying people couldn't transition! You can transition if you want! I just thought the details were really important!
-Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post-visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
-
-I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
-
-"Kevin" said that the distinction was between modeling someone as their gender, and addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity, and it seemed reasonable to care much more about the second thing.
-
-I said I didn't know what the second thing meant. I liked the words "agency" and "identity", too! But the reason I liked the words, is because they were associated with agentic and identificatory things that people do in the world, that my brain could make predictions about. Regarding the predictive value of gender, human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!
-
-"Kevin" asked for some examples where gender-category membership was really important. He wasn't saying that sex differences didn't exist (for example, when doing statistical research), just that they were irrelevant in direct interpersonal situations.
-
-I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"
-
-After one more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some apparent inconsistencies in my excited presentation. I saw what she was getting at, and expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then using "Arc" as a married name):
-
-> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
->
-> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
->
-> help
-
-------
Somewhat awkwardly, I actually had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook, earlier, on 7 February, Brent Dill had said that he didn't see the value in the community matchmaking site _reciprocity.io_, and I disagreed, saying that the hang-out matching had been valuable to me, even if the romantic matching was useless for insufficiently high-status males.
-"Noreen" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematic while replying to Brent. Incidentally, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new _Hidden Figures_ movie if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theatre instead.
+"Noreen" had complained: "again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates (sorry for this reaction, I just find this incredibly annoying)". I had said that she shouldn't apologize; I usually didn't make that genre of comment, but it seemed thematic while replying to Brent. Incidentally, I added, I was thinking of seeing seeing that new _Hidden Figures_ movie if I could find someone to go with? It turned out that she had already seen it, but we made plans to see _West Side Story_ at the [Castro Theatre](https://www.castrotheatre.com/) instead.
The date was pretty terrible. (Or, maybe I was the only one who categorized it as a "date"? Maybe in her ontology, we were just seeing a movie.) We walked around the Castro for a bit continuing to debate the gender thing, then saw the movie. I was very distracted and couldn't pay attention to the movie at all.
> So, unfortunately, I never got very far in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book (yet! growth m—splat, AUGH), but one thing I do remember is that many different Bayesian networks can represent the same probability distribution. And the reason I've been running around yelling at everyone for nine months is that I've been talking to people, and we _agree_ on the observations that need to be explained, and yet we explain them in completely different ways. And I'm like, "My network has SO MANY FEWER ARROWS than your network!" And they're like, "Huh? What's wrong with you? Your network isn't any better than the standard-issue network. Why do you care so much about this completely arbitrary property 'number of arrows'? Categories were made for the man, not man for the categories!" And I'm like, "Look, I didn't get far enough in the _Daphne Koller and the Methods of Rationality_ book to understand why, but I'm PRETTY GODDAMNED SURE that HAVING FEWER ARROWS MAKES YOU MORE POWERFUL. YOU DELUSIONAL BASTARDS! HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY GET THIS WRONG please don't hurt me Oh God please don't hurt me I'm sorry I'm sorry."
-That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge,[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding amount of evidence just to locate it in the space of possibilities.
+That is, when factorizing a joint probability distribution into a Bayesian network, you can do it with respect to any variable ordering you want: a graph with a "wet-streets → rain" edge can represent a set of static observations just as well as a graph with a "rain → wet-streets" edge,[^koller-and-friedman-i] but "unnatural" variable orderings generate a more complicated graph that will give crazy predictions if you interpret it as a _causal_ Bayesian network and use it to predict the results of interventions. Algorithms for learning a network from data prefer graphs with fewer edges as a consequence of Occamian [minimum-message-length epistemology](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length):[^koller-and-friedman-ii] every edge is a [burdensome detail](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yq6aA4M3JKWaQepPJ/burdensome-details) that requires a corresponding [amount of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nj8JKFoLSMEmD3RGp/how-much-evidence-does-it-take) just to [locate it in the space of possibilities](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis).
[^koller-and-friedman-i]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §3.4.1, "Minimal I-Maps".
[^koller-and-friedman-ii]: Daphne Koller and Nir Friedman, _Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques_, §18.3.5: "Understanding the Bayesian Score".
-I thought this shed some light on my recent frustrations. People are pretty observant about what other people are like. If prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. The part of them that talked just didn't see the problem with trying to represent the knowledge using a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. And I didn't think that was what the causal graph looked like.
+I thought this shed some light on my recent frustrations. People are pretty observant about what other people are like. If prompted appropriately, they know how to anticipate the ways in which trans women are different from cis women. The part of them that talked just didn't see the problem with trying to represent this knowledge (about physiological males with male-typical interests and personalities whose female gender identities seem closely intertwined with their gynephilic sexuality) using a variable ordering that put "biological sex" closer to last than first. And I just didn't think that was what the causal graph looked like.
-In another post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
+-----
-> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
-> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
-> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
-> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+In another post, I acknowledged my problematic tone:
-That one ended up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread, she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
+> I know the arrogance is off-putting! But the arrogance is a really fun part of the æsthetic that I'm really enjoying! Can I get away with it if I mark it as a form of performance art? Like, be really arrogant while exploring ideas, and then later go back and write up the sober serious non-arrogant version?
-I replied:
+Someone came to my defense: it was common to have mental blocks about criticizing trans ideology because of the fear that saying anything would hurt one's trans friends and make one an outcast. One way to overcome that block was to get _really angry_ and _visibly having an outburst_, because then people ascribe less agency and culpability to you; it would be clear that you'd cooped up these feelings for a long time because you do understand that they're taboo and unpopular.
->> why you believe what you believe
->
-> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
->
->> what consequences you think this has for people
+The person also said it was hard because it seemed like there were no moderate centrists on gender: you could either be on Team "if you _ever_ want to know what genitals someone has for _any reason_, you are an _evil transphobe_ who should _die_", or Team "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are _invading_ my female spaces for _nefarious purposes_ and we should burn them all".
+
+I added that the worst part is that "trans women are disgusting blokes in dresses who are invading my female spaces for nefarious purposes" view is basically _correct_. It was _phrased_ in a really dismissive manner. But words don't matter! Only predictions matter!
+
+-----
+
+The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
+
+I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
+
+"Kevin" said that the distinction was between modeling someone as their gender, and addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity, and it seemed reasonable to care much more about the second thing.
+
+I said I didn't know what the second thing meant. I liked the words "agency" and "identity", too! But the reason I liked the words, is because they were associated with agentic and identificatory things that people do in the world, that my brain could make predictions about. Regarding the predictive value of gender, human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!
+
+"Kevin" asked for some examples where gender-category membership was really important. He wasn't saying that sex differences didn't exist (for example, when doing statistical research), just that they were irrelevant in direct interpersonal situations.
+
+I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"
+
+After one more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some apparent inconsistencies in my excited presentation. I saw what she was getting at, and expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then using "Arc" as a married name):
+
+> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
>
-> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
+> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
>
-> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
+> help
+
+-----
+
+In another post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").
I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:
-> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.[^avatar-state]
+
+[^avatar-state]: A reference to _Avatar: The Last Airbender_/_The Legend of Korra_, in which our hero can enter the ["Avatar state"](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State) to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable.
I made plans to visit a friend's house that evening, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the person whose house I was to visit, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person _wasn't safe_ in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that _men could be women by means of saying so_.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email, and make my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.
------
-I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post. I'm proud of this one from 12:48 _a.m._:
+I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post, comment, message, _&c._. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 _a.m._:
> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]
-[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; that would be one too many layers of indirection.
+[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.
That is, realistically, the AGP fantasy _about_ "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ actually be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). (At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The _male_ sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._", has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female.)
In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement) (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes.
-The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other was probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately-sexed romantic partner who behaved like a same-sex friend. The T4T phenomenon is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2).
+The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other was probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately-sexed romantic partner who behaved like a same-sex friend. The [T4T phenomenon](https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T) is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2).
[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of cis women who are willing to date trans women.
-The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post had continued.
+The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
-"Chaya" had explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to sacrifice social connections to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
+I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
-I messaged "Chaya", "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
+>> why you believe what you believe
+>
+> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
+>
+>> what consequences you think this has for people
+>
+> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
+>
+> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
+
+(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion past midnight? We should have all been asleep! I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life.)
+
+"Chaya" explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to sacrifice social connections to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
+
+I messaged "Chaya": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
"Chaya" speculated that "Noreen" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"
> In the last hour of the world before this is over, as the nanobots start consuming my flesh, I try to distract myself from the pain by reflecting on what single blog post is most responsible for the end of the world. And the answer is obvious: ["The Categories Were Made for the Man, Not Man for the Categories."](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/) That thing is a _fucking_ Absolute Denial Macro!
-At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention").
-
-A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "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)").
+At 4:18 _a.m._, I pulled the trigger on the email I had started drafting to Yudkowsky earlier (Subject: "the spirit of intervention"), arguing that neoreaction was onto something really important. It wasn't about politics _per se_; it was about reflectivity and moral progress skepticism. Instead of _assuming_ that we know better than people in the past, we should look at the _causal processes_ that produced our current morality, and reevaluate whether it makes sense (in light of our current morality, which was itself created those same causal processes). Insofar as we could see that the egalitarian strain of our current morality was shaped by political forces rather than anything more fundamental, it was worth reëvaluating. It wasn't that right-wing politics are good as such. More like, being smart is more important than being good (for humans), so if you abandon your claim to goodness, you can think more clearly.
+A couple hours later, I was starting to realize I had made a mistake, as reflected to emails sent to Anna Salamon at 6:16 _a.m._ (Subject: "I love you and I'm scared and I should sleep to aboid [_sic_] being institutionalized") and to Michael Vassar 6:32 _a.m._ (Subject: "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)").
+Michael got back to me at 10:37 _a.m._:
-Michael's reply 1037—
> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. [...] 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 ["Noreen"] and ["Kevin"], in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
-I said in an email to Anna on 14 February 14:22, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and messaged Ben at 16:09 with "I just woke up", which suggests that I may have gotten an hour and a half of sleep in between
+Records suggest that I may have gotten as much as an hour and a half of sleep that afternoon: in an email to Anna at 2:22 _p.m._, I wrote, "I don't know what's real. I should lie down? I'm sorry", and in a message to Ben at 4:09 _p.m._, I wrote, "I just woke up". According to my records, I hung out with Ben; I have no clear memories of this day.
-]
+That night, I emailed Michael and Anna about sleep at 12:17 _a.m._ 15 February 2017 (Subject: "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS") and about philosophy and the nature and amount of suffering in the universe at 1:55 _a.m._ and 2:01 _a.m._ (Subjects: "I think I'm starting to understand a lot of the stuff you used to say that I didn't understand!" and "none of my goddamned business").
---------
+[TODO: going off the rails—
+ * morning 15 February Facebook posts, "I got even more sleep and feel even more like a normal human! Again, sorry for the noise!", "Arguing on the internet isn't that important! Feel free to take a break!", and promising to leave Facebook for a week
+ * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
+ * I was not, actually, a normal human
+ * some delusional emails to Kay Brown
+ * I told Sophia I couldn't make it (Subject: "I don't think I can make it to Portland/Wizardworld after all, sorry (eom)")
-email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" Wed 15 Feb 0017
+ * what else happened on 15 February??
- * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
+]
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
[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to trans widow friend, 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, Olivia, and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
+[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "Chaya", 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, "Helen", and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff