Author: Zack M. Davis
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
+Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, cathartic, epistemic horror, personal, sex differences, Julia Serano, Eliezer Yudkowsky, two-type taxonomy, my robot cult
Status: draft
> I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly be the first time I've found myself in the vulnerable position of sharing the brain-damaged prophet's impairment, down to the last neuron.
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_.
+_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 between _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 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/).
+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" (which is sometimes abbreviated as _AGP_) 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—
>
> 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/>
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 following 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 telling the Whole Dumb Story, 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.
[^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 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.
+He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arguably _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."
(With the caveated understanding that psychology is complicated and there's [a lot to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/), but I need a few paragraphs to first talk about the _simple_ version of the theory that makes _pretty good_ predictions on _average_, as a prerequisite for more complicated theories that might make even better predictions including on cases that diverge from average.)
-The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, but notably popularized (to some controversy) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would be Queen_ in 'aught-three. The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
+The theory was put forth by Blanchard in a series of journal articles in the late 'eighties and early 'nineties, but notably popularized [(to some controversy)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen#Negative_reactions) by J. Michael Bailey in the popular-level book _The Man Who Would Be Queen_ in 'aught-three. The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatments of hormone therapy, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
-In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives going back to early childhood, in a way that's salient to other people and causes big social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
+In one taxon, the "early-onset" type, you have same-sex-attracted males who have just been extremely feminine (in social behavior, interests, _&c._) their entire lives going back to early childhood, in a way that's salient to other people and causes big social problems for them—the far tail of effeminate gay men who end up fitting into Society better as straight women. (Blanchard called them "homosexual transsexuals", which is sometimes abbreviated as _HSTS_.) _That's_ where the "woman trapped inside a man's body" trope comes from. [This one probably _is_ a brain-intersex condition.](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3180619/)
That story is pretty intuitive. Were an alien AI to be informed of the fact that, among humans, some fraction of males elect to undergo medical interventions to resemble females and be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such a phenomenon, just on priors.
So, basically, I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_. It's not an innate gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's _surprisingly easy to misinterpret_ as a gender identity.
-I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I possibly, _possibly_ have the astounding arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
+I realize this is an inflammatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I possibly, _possibly_ have the astounding arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
-Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which had over 28,000 subscribers at the time) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results](https://archive.is/lm4ro): [_82%_ of over 2000 respondents said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
+Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibit, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which had over 28,000 subscribers at the time) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realized you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results](https://archive.is/lm4ro): [_82%_ of over 2000 respondents said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with over 230 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
-Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
+Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing. [Blanchard 1985](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf): 73% of non-exclusively-androphilic transsexuals acknowledged some history of erotic cross-dressing. (Unfortunately, a lot of the classic studies specifically asked about cross-_dressing_, but the underlying desire isn't about clothes; Jack Molay coined the term [_crossdreaming_](https://www.crossdreamers.com/), which seems more apt.) [Lawrence 2005](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf): of trans women who had female partners before sexual reassignment surgery, 90% reported a history of autogynephilic arousal. [Smith _et al._ 2005](/papers/smith_et_al-transsexual_subtypes_clinical_and_theoretical_significance.pdf): 64% of non-homosexual MtFs (excluding the "missing" and "N/A" responses) reported arousal while cross-dressing during adolescence. (A lot of the classic literature says "non-homosexual", which is with respect to natal sex; the idea is that self-identified bisexuals are still in the late-onset taxon.) [Nuttbrock _et al._ 2011](/papers/nuttbrock_et_al-a_further_assessment.pdf): lifetime prevalence of transvestic fetishism among non-homosexual MtFs was 69%. (For a more detailed literature review, see [Kay Brown's blog](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/faq-on-the-science/) or the first two chapters of [Anne Lawrence's _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_](https://surveyanon.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/men-trapped-in-mens-bodies_book.pdf).)
Peer-reviewed scientific papers aren't enough for you? (They could be cherry-picked; there are lots of scientific journals, and no doubt a lot of bad science slips through the cracks of the review process.) Want something more indicative of a consensus among practitioners? Fine. The [_Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSM-5) (the definitive taxonomic handbook of the American Psychiatric Association) [says the same thing](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/american-psychiatric-association-supports-the-two-type-transsexual-taxonomy/) in [its section on gender dysphoria](/papers/DSM-V-gender_dysphoria_section.pdf) ([ICD-10-CM codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICD-10-CM) F64.1 and F64.2):
Don't trust scientists or clinicians? Me neither! (Especially [not clinicians](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/).) Want first-person accounts from trans women themselves? Me too! And there's lots!
-Consider these excerpts from economist Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
+Consider these excerpts from economist Deirdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
> He had been doing it ten times a month through four decades, whenever possible, though in the closet. The quantifying economist made the calculation: _About five thousand episodes_. [...] At fifty-two Donald accepted crossdressing as part of who he was. True, if before the realization that he could cross all the way someone had offered a pill to stop the occasional cross-dressing, he would have accepted, since it was mildly distracting—though hardly time consuming. **Until the spring of 1995 each of the five thousand episodes was associated with quick, male sex.**
The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
-How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge our civilization has managed to accumulate.
+How weaselly am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weaselly than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge our civilization has managed to accumulate.
Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions, in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
+In our feminist era, cultural attitudes towards men and maleness differ markedly from the overt patriarchy of our ancestors. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the University in Santa Cruz back in 'aught-seven, I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions, in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
-I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they _were_ "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces of cisnormativity that let them ever doubt.
+I think most people in roughly my situation (of harboring these gender feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they _were_ "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces of cisnormativity that let them ever doubt.
I ... [went the other direction](https://www.gwern.net/Modus). In slogan form: "Holy crap, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
-Okay, that slogan isn't right. I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accomodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
+Okay, that slogan isn't right. I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accommodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
-The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accomodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
+The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accommodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
My shift in belief, from thinking the standard narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up—from my reading, from correspondence with the aforementioned [Kay Brown](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)—and also as I kept initiating conversations with local trans women to try to figure out what was going on.
-Someone I met at the Berkeley _Less Wrong_ meetup named Ziz[^ziz-privacy] denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her—but it seems worth noting that Ziz was unusual along a lot of dimensions; again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.
+Someone I met at the Berkeley _Less Wrong_ meetup who went by Ziz[^ziz-privacy] denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her—but it seems worth noting that Ziz was unusual along a lot of dimensions; again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.
[^ziz-privacy]: Ziz [wrote about her interactions with me in _her_ memoir](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) and explicitly confirmed with me on 5 November 2019 that we weren't under any confidentiality agreements with each other, so it seems fine for me to name her here, in contrast to how I'm leaving other private individuals unnamed or assigning them pseudonyms.
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Trans-exclusionary_radical_feminists_(TERFs)) 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."
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism) and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
I wrote back:
-> "I don't know," I murmurred, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ["Helen"].
+> "I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ["Helen"].
Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT). 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.
+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-consent 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 prescription.
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.)
-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://old.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".
+<a id="gender-clinic-notes"></a>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://old.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".
The reality was actually worse than my hostile summary that everyone was lying, and the professionals were in on it. [In some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they're incapable of seeing someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly.
I replied:
-> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonony is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
+> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonomy is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with heart decals; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) ...
-But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effeminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
--------
Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.
-The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_. If you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality", in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause).
+The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_. If you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality", in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause). People within the system are indoctrinated into a Whig history which holds that people in the past were bad, bad men, but that we're so much more enlightened now in the progress of time—but the progress of time isn't sensitive to what's _better_; it only tracks what _won_.
-Moldbug contends that all of this is bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance: it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO[^ceo-supervision] who has the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_).
+Moldbug contends that the triumph of progressivism is bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance: it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO[^ceo-supervision] who has the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_).
[^ceo-supervision]: Albeit possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader, but not meddle in day-to-day operations.
-(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more credible after Trump and Brexit and the summer of George Floyd. I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
+(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more credible after Trump and [Brexit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit) and [the summer of George Floyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests). I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wished they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
-When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real, and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This _did_ raise additional questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
+When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dismiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the travails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real, and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This _did_ raise additional questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
------
That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including [inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past](https://www.simulation-argument.com/), there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
-I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest encyclical seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
+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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclical) seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
Anyway, I don't think I should 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 any conversation that _did_ occur would be protected by the privacy-norm-adherence rules that I'm holding myself to in telling this Whole Dumb Story.
------
-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."
+A trans woman named Sophia [commented on one of my real-name blog posts](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/#comment-250406), 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."
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.)
-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.
+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](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)), if you _first_ realize, "Oh, I'm trans," and _then_ successfully 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/))?
+Sophia 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 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.
+I replied that "obviously a man" was an unsophisticated form of trans-skepticism. 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.
-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.
+Sophia replied with an information-theoretic analysis of passing (which I would [later adapt into a guest post for this blog](/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 one's facial structure was of a kind four 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 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.
+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 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 the Weisberg _et al._ 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.
-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.
+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.
+
+(For example, suppose that "height" and "weight" are correlated aspect of a Bigness factor. Given that someone's weight is +2σ—two standard deviations heavier than the mean—it's not plausible that their height is equally likely to be +1.5σ and +2.5σ, because the former height is more than seven times more common than the latter; the second facet should [regress towards the mean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean).)
+
+Sophia built her own model in Excel using the correlation matrix from the paper, and found a classifier with 68% accuracy.
------
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](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.
+But Coming Out Day isn't, strictly, personal. I had self-identified as autogynephilic for ten years without being particularly "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.
------
-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?)
+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 sexual harassment 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 just out of high school, in contrast to most attendees already having a college degree) over the something offensive he had said; someone else had 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?)
-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?"
+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 my 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 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 children 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.)
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_.
-(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.)
+(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.)
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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff