+++ /dev/null
-Title: Blanchard's Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
-Author: Zack M. Davis
-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
-
-> 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.
->
-> —_Quarantine_ by Greg Egan
-
-In a previous post, ["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I told the story about how I've "always" (since puberty) had this obsessive erotic fantasy about being magically transformed into a woman and used to think it was immoral to believe in psychological sex differences, until I read these Sequences of _super great_ blog posts about how reasoning works by someone named Eliezer Yudkowsky—where one _particularly_ influential-to-me post was [the one that explained](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) why the idea of "changing sex" is much easier said than done, [because the tantalizingly short English phrase doesn't capture the complex implementation details of the real physical universe](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).
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-At the time, this was my weird personal thing, which I did not anticipate there being any public interest in blogging about. In particular, I didn't think of myself as being "transgender." The whole time—the dozen years I spent reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych, and doing various things with my social presentation (sometimes things I regretted and reverted after a lot of pain, like [trying to use my initials as a name](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials)) to try to seem not-masculine—I had been _assuming_ that my gender problems were not of the same kind as people who were _actually_ transgender, because the standard narrative said that that was about people whose ["internal sense of their own gender does not match their assigned sex at birth"](https://www.vox.com/identities/21332685/trans-rights-pronouns-bathrooms-sports), whereas my thing was obviously at least partially an outgrowth of my weird sex fantasy. I had never interpreted the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing as an "internal sense of my own gender."
-
-_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I'm not immune to this, either.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
-
-Okay, so trans people aren't delusional about their [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/); the claim is that their internal sense of their own gender is in some way more real or more relevant, and should take precedence. So where does that leave me? In ["Sexual Dimorphism ..."](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/), I wrote about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times, but I tried to cast it as explanation that one might be tempted to apply to my case, but which I don't think fits. Everything I said is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined "autogynephilia" as the obvious and perfect word for my thing while studying actual transsexuals) was dumb and wrong, a world where my idiosyncratic weird sex perversion and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are taxonomically and etiologically distinct from whatever brain-intersex condition causes _actual_ trans women. That's the world I _thought_ I lived in for the ten years after [encountering the obvious and perfect word](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
-
-My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. (Well, not my first _clue_. In retrospect, there were lots of _clues_. My first wake-up call.) In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
-
-> I'm not sure if the following generalization extends to all genetic backgrounds and childhood nutritional backgrounds. There are various ongoing arguments about estrogenlike chemicals in the environment, and those may not be present in every country ...
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-> 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.
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-(***!?!?!?!?***)
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-> 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/>
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-(Reading _that_ post, I _did_ realize "oh hey that's me"—it's hard to believe that I'm not one of the "20% of the ones with penises" Yudkowsky is talking about here—but I wasn't sure how to reconcile that with the "are actually women" (***!?!?!?!?***) characterization, coming _specifically_ from the guy who taught me [how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#changing-sex-is-hard).)
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-> But I'm kinda getting the impression that when you do normalize transgender generally and MtF particularly, like not "I support that in theory!" normalize but "Oh hey a few of my friends are transitioning and nothing bad happened to them", there's a _hell_ of a lot of people who come out as trans.
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-> If that starts to scale up, we might see a really, really interesting moral panic in 5–10 years or so. I mean, if you thought gay marriage was causing a moral panic, you just wait and see what comes next ...
-
-Indeed—here we are over seven years later, and _I am panicking_.[^panic] (As 2007–9 Sequences-era Yudkowsky [taught me](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good), and 2016 Facebook-shitposting-era Yudkowsky seemed to ignore, the thing that makes a moral panic _really_ interesting is how hard it is to know you're on the right side of it—and the importance of [panicking](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [sideways](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/05/policy_tugowar.html) when the "maximize the number of trans people" and "minimize the number of trans people" coalitions are both wrong.)
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-[^panic]: Or rather, I _did_ panic from mid-2016 to mid-2021, and this and the next four posts are the retrospective accounting of that panic, a memoir written in the ashes of my defeat.
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-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.
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-A casual friend who I'll call "Wilhelm" messaged me, complementing me on my comment.
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-For background, "Wilhelm" was a fellow old-time _Less Wrong_-er who I had met in the South Bay back in 'aught-nine, while I was doing an "internship"[^internship] in Santa Clara for what was then still the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.[^siai]
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-Relevantly, "Wilhelm" [was also autogynephilic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions?commentId=93u4sgeARSHfPkqPN) (and aware of it, under that name). The first time I had ever gone crossdressing in public was at a drag event with him in 2010.
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-<a id="confided-to-wilhelm"></a>As it happened, I had just messaged him a few days earlier, on 22 March 2016, for the first time in four and a half years. (My opening message: "Ray Blanchard's Twitter feed is kind of disappointing, but I'm not sure what I was expecting".) I confided to him that I was seeing an escort on Saturday the twenty-sixth[^twenty-sixth] because the dating market was looking pretty hopeless, I had more money than I knew what to do with, and three female friends agreed that it was not unethical.[^unethical]
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-[^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.
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-[^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.
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-[^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.
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-[^unethical]: Another ethically mitigating factor is that the escort had a blog where she wrote in detail about how much she liked her job. The blog posts seemed like credible evidence that she wasn't being morally-relevantly coerced into it. Of course all escorts have to put up marketing copy that makes it sound like they enjoy their time with their clients even if they privately hate it, but the blog seemed "real", not part of the role.
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- (I didn't _have sex_ with her, obviously. _That_ would be unethical.)
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-He had agreed that seeing escorts is ethical—arugably _more_ ethical than casual sex. He had said that he had gotten interested in politics and developed in a socially and sexually conservative direction. "Free love is a lie," he said, noting that in a more traditional Society, our analogues would probably be married with kids by now.
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-He also said that his gender dysphoria had receded. "At a certain point, I just cut my hair, give away a lot of clothes, and left it behind. I kept waiting to regret it ... but the regret never came," he said. "It's like my brain got pushed off the fence and subtly re-wired."
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-I had said that I was happy for him and respected him, even while my own life remained very pro-dysphoria, pro-ponytails, and anti-politics.
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-After complimenting me on my comment on Yudkowsky's post on the twenty-sixth, "Wilhelm" elaborated that he thought Yudkowsky's post was really irresponsible, because virtually all of the men in Yudkowsky's audience with gender dysphoria probably had erotic target location errors. "Wilhelm" went on:
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-> To get a little paranoid, I think the power to define other people's identities is extremely useful in politics. If a political coalition can convince you that you have a persecuted identity or sexuality and it will support you, then it owns you for life, and can conscript you for culture wars and elections. Moloch would never pass up this level of power, so that means a constant stream of bad philosophy about identity and sexuality (like trans theory).
->
-> So when I see Eliezer trying to convince nerdy men that they are actually women, I see the hand of Moloch.[^moloch]
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-[^moloch]: The references to "Moloch" are presumably an allusion to Scott Alexander's ["Meditations on Moloch"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/), in which Alexander personifies coordination failures as the god Moloch.
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- (Incidentally, the quotation in "Meditations on Moloch" of [a poem I wrote in the _Less Wrong_ comments in 2011](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkRpALFAwJQuntHiF/the-gift-we-give-tomorrow-spoken-word-finished?commentId=ZkoKnj4nLbScHHHJC) is probably the most exposure my writing has ever gotten, and will ever get.)
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-We chatted for a few more minutes. I noted [Samo Burja's comment](/images/burja-shape_of_the_moral_panic.png) on Yudkowsky's post as a "terrible thought" that had also occurred to me: Burja had written that the predicted moral panic may not be along the expected lines, if an explosion of MtFs were to result in trans women dominating previously sex-reserved spheres of social competition. "[F]or signaling reasons, I will not give [the comment] a Like", I added parenthetically.[^signaling-reasons]
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-[^signaling-reasons]: This brazen cowardice makes for a stark contrast to my current habits of thought. Today, I would notice that that if "for signaling reasons", people don't Like comments that make _insightful and accurate predictions_ about contemporary social trends, then subscribers to our collective discourse will be _less prepared_ for a world in which those trends have progressed further.
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-A few weeks later, I moved out of my mom's house in [Walnut Creek](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek,_California) to go live with a new roommate in an apartment on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in [Berkeley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley,_California), closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
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-(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
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-While I was waiting for internet service to be connected in my new apartment, I read a paper copy of _Nevada_ by Imogen Binnie. (I don't recall how I came across the recommendation.) It's about a trans woman in New York City named Maria Griffiths who steals her girlfriend's car to go on a road trip, and ends up meeting an autogynephilic young man named James H. in a Wal-Mart in Star City, Nevada, whereupon she tries to convince James that _autogynephilia_ is a bogus concept and that he's actually trans.
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-In Berkeley, I met some really interesting people who seemed quite similar to me along a lot of dimensions, but also very different along some other dimensions having to do with how they were currently living their life! (I see where the pattern-matching faculties in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% figure from.)
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-This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_ (as discussed above), but hadn't already mastered and taken seriously in the previous twelve years of reading everything I could about sex and gender and transgender and feminism and evopsych. (Kay Brown's blog, [_On the Science of Changing Sex_](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/), was especially helpful.)
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-Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became increasingly persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this story has just been about _my_ experience, and not anyone's theory of transsexualism (which I had assumed for years couldn't possibly apply to me), so let me take a moment to explain the theory now.
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-(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 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.)
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-The idea is that male-to-female transsexualism isn't actually one phenomenon; it's two completely different phenomena that don't actually have anything to do with each other, except for the (perhaps) indicated treatment of HRT, surgery, and social transition. (Compare to how different medical conditions might happen to respond to the same drug.)
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-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/)
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-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 aspire to be perceived as females socially, "brain-intersex condition such that they already behave like females" would probably be its top hypothesis for the cause of such a phenomenon, just on priors.
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-Suppose our alien AI were to be informed that many of the human males seeking to become female (as far as the technology can manage) do _not_ fit the clinical profile of the early-onset type—it looks like there's a separate "late-onset" type or types, of males who didn't exhibit discordantly sex-atypical behavior in childhood, but still ended up reporting a desire to change sex later. If you [didn't have enough data to _prove_ anything, but you had to guess](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xTyuQ3cgsPjifr7oj/faster-than-science), what would be your _second_ hypothesis for how this desire might arise?
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-What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
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-So, yeah. Basically, I think a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are, essentially, guys like me who were _less self-aware about what the thing actually is_. It's not an innate gender identity; it's a sexual orientation that's _surprisingly easy to misinterpret_ as a gender identity.
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-So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I possibly, _possibly_ have the astounding arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
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-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".
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-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/)).
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-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).)
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-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):
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-> In both adolescent and adult natal males, there are two broad trajectories for development of gender dysphoria: early onset and late onset. _Early-onset gender dysphoria_ starts in childhood and continues into adolescence and adulthood; or, there is an intermittent period in which the gender dysphoria desists and these individuals self-identify as gay or homosexual, followed by recurrence of gender dysphoria. _Late-onset gender dysphoria_ occurs around puberty or much later in life. Some of these individuals report having had a desire to be of the other gender in childhood that was not expressed verbally to others. Others do not recall any signs of childhood gender dysphoria. For adolescent males with late-onset gender dysphoria, parents often report surprise because they did not see signs of gender dysphoria in childhood. Adolescent and adult natal males with early-onset gender dysphoria are almost always sexually attracted to men (androphilic). Adolescents and adults with late-onset gender dysphoria **frequently engage in transvestic behavior with sexual excitement.**
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-(Bolding mine.)
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-Or consider Anne Vitale's ["The Gender Variant Phenomenon—A Developmental Review"](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm), which makes the _same_ observations as Blanchard and friends, and arrives at the _same_ two-type taxonomy, but dressed up in socially-desirable language—
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-> As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
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-Got that? They _often combine excessive masturbation_ with an _increase in secret cross-dressing activity_ to _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
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-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!
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-Consider this passage from Dierdre McCloskey's memoir _Crossing_, writing in the third person about her decades identifying as a heterosexual crossdresser before transitioning at age 53 (bolding mine):
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-> 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.**
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-Or consider this passage from Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl_ (I know I [keep](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) [referencing](/2020/Dec/crossing-the-line/) [this](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#whipping-girl) book, but it's _so representative_ of the dominant strain of trans activism, and I'm never going to get over the [Fridge Logic](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) of the all [the blatant clues that I somehow missed in 2007](/2016/Sep/apophenia/))—
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-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
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-"It became obvious that explanation could not account." I don't doubt Serano's reporting of her own phenomenal experiences, but "that explanation could not account" is _not an experience_; it's a _hypothesis_ about psychology, about the _causes_ of the experience. I [don't _expect_ anyone to be able to get that sort of thing right from introspection alone!](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/).
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-Or consider _Nevada_. This was a popular book! Part 2, Chapter 23 is our protagonist Maria's rant about the self-evident falsehood and injustice of autogynephilia theory. And she starts out by ... acknowledging the phenomenon which the theory is meant to explain:
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-> But the only time I couldn't lie to myself about who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be, and like, the way I needed to exist in the world if I was going to actually exist in the world, is when I was jacking off.
->
-> [...]
->
-> I was thinking about being a girl while I jacked off, she says, Like, as soon as I started jacking off. For years I thought it was because I was a pervert, that I had this kink I must never, ever tell anyone about, right?
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-If the idea that most non-androphilic trans women are guys like me is so preposterous, then _why do people keep recommending this book?_
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-I could go on ... but do I need to? After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
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-An important caveat must be made: [different causal/etiological stories could be compatible with the same _descriptive_ taxonomy.](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/) You shouldn't confuse my mere ridicule with a serious and rigorous critique of the strongest possible case for "gender expression deprivation anxiety" as a theoretical entity, which would be more work. But hopefully I've shown _enough_ work here, that the reader can perhaps empathize with the temptation to resort to ridicule?
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-Everyone's experience is different, but the human mind still has a _design_. If I hurt my ankle while running and I (knowing nothing of physiology or sports medicine) think it might be a stress fracture, a competent doctor (who's studied the literature and seen many more cases) is going to ask followup questions about my experiences to pin down whether it's a stress fracture or a sprain. I can't be wrong about the fact _that_ my ankle hurts (that's a privileged first-person experience), but I can easily be wrong about my _theory about_ why my ankle hurts.
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-Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question I need to answer is, do the trans women whose reports I'm considering have a relevantly _different_ psychological condition than me, or do we have "the same" condition, and (at least) one of us is misdiagnosing it?
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-The _safe_ answer—the answer that preserves everyone's current stories about themselves without any need for modification—is "different." That's what I thought before 2016. I think a lot of trans activists would say "the same". And on _that_ much, we can agree.
-
-How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate.
-
-Reality has a single level (physics), but [our models of reality have multiple levels](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gRa5cWWBsZqdFvmqu/reductive-reference). To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As [it is](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tPqQdLCuxanjhoaNs/reductionism) [written](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y5MxoeacRKKM3KQth/fallacies-of-compression): the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.)
-
-Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions about people's behavior using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (because predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses, taxons.[^cluster-learning-capability]
-
-[^cluster-learning-capability]: The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.
-
-There could be situations in psychology where a good theory (not a perfect theory, but as good as our theories about how to engineer bridges) would be described by (say) a 70-node [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models), but it turns out that some of [the more "important" variables in the graph happen to anti-correlate with each other](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/10/27/the-mathematical-consequences-of-a-toy-model-of-gender-transition/), such that stupid humans who don't know how to discover the correct 70-node graph, do manage to pattern-match their way to a two-type typology that actually is better, as a first approximation, than pretending not to have a theory. No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but [the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions) like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder"—or "autogynephilia".[^lucky-simplification]
-
-[^lucky-simplification]: In some sense it's a matter of "luck" when the relevant structure in the world happens to simplify so much. For example, [friend of the blog](/tag/tailcalled/) Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2023/02/12/there-is-probably-no-ftm-typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently and aren't as stratified by age.
-
-[I claim that femininity and autogynephilia are two such anti-correlated nodes in the True Causal Graph](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). They're anti-correlated because they're both children of the sexual orientation node, whose value pushes them in _opposite directions_: gay men are more feminine than straight men,[^gay-femininity], and autogynephiles want to be women because we're straight.
-
-[^gay-femininity]: [It's a stereotype for a reason!](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) If you're justly not satisfied with stereotypes and want Science, see [Lippa 2000](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) or [Bailey and Zucker 1995](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf).
-
-Sex-atypical behavior and the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought are two different _reasons why_ transition might genuinely seem like a good idea to someone—different paths through the causal graph leading the decision to transition. Maybe they're not mutually exclusive, and probably there are lots of other contributing factors, such that a strict interpretation of the two-type taxonomy is false. If some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with the experiences I've grouped under the concept of "autogynephilia", I don't have any definitive knockdown proof with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it.
-
-But [the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world, and I expect honest people who are exceptions that aren't well-predicted by the model, to at least notice how well it performs on all the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where [_magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)) who isn't super-feminine but whose identity definitely isn't ultimately rooted in a fetish, [you should be _confused_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5JDkW4MYXit2CquLs/your-strength-as-a-rationalist) by the 230 upvotes on that /r/MtF comment about the "it's probably just a fetish" camp—if the person who wrote that comment has experiences like yours, why did they ever single out "it's probably just a fetish" [as a hypothesis to pay attention to in the first place](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X2AD2LgtKgkRNPj2a/privileging-the-hypothesis)? And there's allegedly a whole "camp" of these people? What could _that_ possibly be about?!
-
-I _do_ have a _lot_ of uncertainty about what the True Causal Graph looks like, even if it seems obvious that the two-type taxonomy coarsely approximates it. Gay femininity and autogynephilia are obviously very important nodes in the True Graph, but there's going to be more detail to the whole story: what _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition, including [incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) and cultural factors specific to a given place and time?
-
-Cultural attitudes towards men and maleness have shifted markedly in our feminist era. It feels gauche to say so, but ... as a result, conscientious boys taught to disdain the crimes of men may pick up an internalized misandry? I remember one night at the Univerity in Santa Cruz when I had the insight that it was possible to make generalizations about groups of people while allowing for exceptions, in contrast to my previous stance that generalizations about people were _always morally wrong_—and immediately, eagerly proclaimed that _men are terrible_.
-
-Or consider computer scientist Scott Aaronson's account (in his infamous [Comment 171](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2091#comment-326664)) that his "recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man [...] [a]nything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which [...] meant being consumed by desires that one couldn't act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness."
-
-Or there's a piece that has made the rounds on social media more than once: ["I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42), which (in part) discusses the author's frustration at having one's feelings and observations being dismissed on account of being perceived as a cis male. "I hate that the only effective response I can give to 'boys are shit' is 'well I'm not a boy,'" the author laments. And: "Do I even _want_ to convince someone who will only listen to me when they're told by the rules that they have to see me as a girl?"
-
-(The "told by the rules that they have to see me" (!) phrasing in the current revision is _very_ telling; [the originally published version](https://archive.is/trslp) said "when they find out I'm a girl".)
-
-If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to disidentify with maleness. Like in another one of my teenage song-fragments—
-
-> _Look in the mirror
-> What's a_ white guy _doing there?
-> I'm just a spirit
-> I'm just a spirit
-> Floating in air, floating in air, floating in air!_
-
-This culturally-transmitted attitude could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all.
-
-In one of my notebooks from 2008, I had written, "It bothers me that Richard Feynman went to strip clubs. _I wish Richard Feynman had been trans._" I guess the sentiment must have been (not in so many words) that male sexuality is inherently exploitative and Bad, but being _trans_ is morally pure and Good; I wanted Famous Science Raconteur to be Good rather than Bad.
-
-But the _reason_ strip clubs are considered Bad is the same as the reason single-sex locker rooms, hospital wards, _&c._ were, until recently, considered an obvious necessity: no woman should have to expose herself and be leered at by men. It would have been _more_ scandalous if Feynman had violated the sanctity of women's spaces. Is it supposed to be an _improvement_ if physics-nerd incels who might have otherwise gone to strip clubs, instead declare themselves women? Why? Who is the misandry _helping_, exactly? Or rather, I could maybe see a case for the misandry serving some useful functions, but not if you're allowed to _self-identify out of it_.
-
-To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as cross-gender identification is common (or has recently _become_ more common in the cultural environment of the current year), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (in some ways, it would be _more_ weird not to); in contrast, it might not be as easy to distinguish autogynephilia from _other_ sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason.
-
-Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_.
-
-Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
-
-Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and [I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the intellectually serious people will either agree with me (in public), or at least be eager to _clarify_ (in public) exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of humanity's knowledge forward together, in order to advance the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
-
-Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answers in public _for ourselves_.
-
-(It later turned out that this whole "rationality" subculture is completely fake, but I didn't realize this at the time.)
-
-Straight men who fantasize about being women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? _Telling the difference between fantasy and reality_ is kind of an important life skill?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that as an option—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is ever allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
-
-I think most people in roughly my situation (of haboring these gender-feelings for many years, but thinking that it's obviously not the same thing as being "actually trans", only to later discover that it's _not_ obviously not the same thing) tend to conclude that they were "actually trans" all along, and sometimes express intense bitterness at Ray Blanchard and all the other cultural forces that let them ever doubt.
-
-I ... [went the other direction](https://www.gwern.net/Modus). In slogan form: "Holy crap, _almost no one_ is actually trans!"
-
-Okay, that slogan isn't right. Again, I'm a transhumanist. I believe in morphological freedom! If someone wants to change sex, that's a totally valid desire that Society should try to accomodate as much as feasible given currently-existing technology! In that sense, anyone can [_choose_ to](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) become trans.
-
-The _problem_ is that the public narrative of trans rights doesn't seem to be _about_ making a principled case for morphological freedom, or engaging with the complicated policy question of what accomodations are feasible given the imperfections of currently-existing technology. Instead, we're told that everyone has an internal sense of their own gender, which for some people (who "are trans") does not match their assigned sex at birth.
-
-Okay, but what does that _mean_? Are the things about me that I've been attributing to autogynephilia actually an internal gender identity, or did I [get it right the first time](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)? How could I tell? No one seems interested in clarifying!
-
-My shift in belief, from thinking the narrative is true about other people but not me, to thinking that the narrative is just a lie, happened gradually over the course of 2016 as the evidence kept piling up—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 talked to](https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/) denied experiencing autogynephilia at all, and I believe her. (This person was unusual along a lot of other dimensions, and again, I don't think a psychological theory needs to predict _every_ case in order to be broadly useful for understanding the world.)
-
-But many of the people I talked to seemed to report similar experiences to me—at least, to the low resolution of the conversation; talking about this stuff _at all_ was hard enough, that I wasn't going to press people for the specific details of their sexual fantasies—but seemed to me to be either pretty delusional, or privately pretty sane but (from my view) oddly indifferent to the state of public knowledge.
-
-One trans woman told me that autogynephilia is a typical element of cis woman sexuality. (This, I had learned, was a [standard cope](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/01/05/the-gostak-distims-the-doshes/), but one I have [never found remotely plausible](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#am-i-supposed-to-claim).) She told me that if I don't feel like a boy, I'm probably not one. (Okay, but again, _what does that mean?_ There needs to be some underlying truth condition for that "probably" to _point to_. If it's not sex and it's not sex-atypical behavior, then _what is it?_)
-
-Another wrote a comment in one discussion condemning "autogynephilia discourse" and expressing skepticism at the idea that someone would undergo a complete medical and social transition because of a fetish: it might be _possible_, she admitted, but it must be extremely rare. Elsewhere on the internet, the _same goddamned person_ reported being into gender-bender manga and finding it arousing at the same time when she was first seriously questioning her gender identity.
-
-Was it rude of me to confront her on the contradiction in her PMs? Yes, it was extremely rude; all else being equal, I would prefer _not_ to probe into other people's private lives and suggest that they're lying to themselves. But when they lie to the public, that affects _me_, and my attempts to figure out _my_ life. Is it a conscious political ploy, I asked her, or are people _really_ unable to entertain the hypothesis that their beautiful pure self-identity feelings are causally related to the fetish? If it's a conscious political ploy, [I wished someone would just say, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret, now keep quiet about it or else,"](/2016/new-clothes/) rather than trying to _undermine my connection to reality_; I wasn't trying to hurt anyone, but this was _really personally disturbing_.
-
-She said that she had to deal with enough invalidation already, that she had her own doubts and concerns but would only discuss them with people who shared her views. Fair enough—I'm not entitled to talk to anyone who doesn't want to talk to me, even if I personally find it pathetic that grown adults need to protect themselves from "invalidation".
-
-I gave someone else a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_. She didn't like it—which I would have respected, if her complaint was just that Lawrence was overconfident and overgeneralizing, as a factual matter of science and probability. But my acquaintence seemed more preoccupied with how the book was (in her words) "seemingly deliberately hurtful and disrespectful", using "inherently invalidating language that is very often used in people's dismissal, abuse, and violence towards trans folk", such as calling MtF people "men", referring to straight trans women as "homosexual"—or using "transgendered" (with an _ed_) instead of "transgender". (I would have hoped that the fact that Lawrence is trans and (thinks she) is describing herself would have been enough to make it credible that she didn't mean any harm by saying "men" instead of "a.m.a.b."—and that it should have been obvious that if you reject authors for not speaking in your own ideology's shibboleths, you lose an important chance to discover if your ideology is getting something wrong.)
-
-The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
-
-Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all TERFy and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
-
-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 made friends with a trans woman who I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing. (We bought a couch for the occasion.)
-
-There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are very obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't necessarily self-identify as "autogynephilic"). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together under the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but _I know the secret_."
-
-And from the trans woman's end—I'm not sure. Maybe pity. Maybe the blackmail victim's fear.
-
-One day, "Helen" mentioned having executive-dysfunction troubles about making a necessary telephone call to the doctor's office. The next morning, I messaged her:
-
-> I asked my counterfactual friend Zelda how/whether I should remind you to call the doctor in light of our conversation yesterday. "If she was brave enough to self-actualize in the first place rather than cowardly resign herself to a lifetime of dreary servitude to the cistem," she said counterfactually, "—unlike _some_ people I could name—", she added, counterfactually glaring at me, "then she's definitely brave enough to call the doctor at some specific, predetermined time today, perhaps 1:03 p.m."
->
-> "The 'vow to call at a specific time' thing never works for me when I'm nervous about making a telephone call," I said. The expression of contempt on her counterfactual face was withering. "Obviously the technique doesn't work for _boys_!"
-
-I followed up at 1:39 _p.m._ (while I was at my dayjob):
-
-> "And then at one-thirty or so, you message her saying, 'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' And if the call had already been made, it's an affirming comment, but if the call hadn't been made, it functions as a social incentive to actually call in order to be able to truthfully reply 'yeah' rather than admit to still being paralyzed by telephone anxiety."
->
-> "You always know what to do," I said. "Nothing like me. It's too bad you're only—" I began to say, just as she counterfactually said, "It's a good thing you're only a figment of my imagination."
-
-"Helen" replied:
-
-> i'm in the middle of things. i'll handle it before they close at 5 though, definitely.
-
-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"].
-
-Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
-
-(I'm not saying I was _right_ to say it; I'm admitting that I _did_ say it)
-
-—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.
-
-I don't think I would have _ever_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different, I thought. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
-
--------
-
-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]
-
-[^naming-choices]: For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from [a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/). For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever did stoop to the depravity of starting one of my own one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL more than the title, and as far as the URL goes, to be led by the dot before the TLD to interpret "space" as a separate word, rather than my intent of "genderspace" being analogous to "configuration space"—but it doesn't bother me that much.
-
-... the pseudonymity quickly became a joke—or rather, a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name and not an Actually Secret pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified social identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side.
-
-I kept the Saotome-Westlake byline because, given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), I figured it was _probably_ a smarter play (re: future employment searches) if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results wasn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog. Plus, after having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there were _already_ a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I didn't want to throw away or rewrite that history. (The backwards-compatibility problem is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.)
-
-It's only now, just before publishing this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that I've decided to drop the pseudonym—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be absurd and dishonorable to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on future job opportunities on account of my open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.
-
-(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
-
-Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
-
-Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-constent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW) before finally getting approved for an HRT perscription.
-
-I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was happy to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read (for example) the note about one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
-
-I 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.)
-
-Actually, it's worse than if they were in on it; [in some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they don't know how to interpret observations of someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly. Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
-
-> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
-
-I replied:
-
-> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonony is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
-
-Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
-
-However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever 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 hearts; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty ...
-
-But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
-
---------
-
-Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my [break with progressive morality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
-
-Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Wilhelm", I was starting to question it now.
-
-Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
-
-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). 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_).
-
-[^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.)
-
-In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
-
-Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
-
-Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
-
-> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
-
-This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
-
-It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
-
-Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who 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. And this experience _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".)
-
-------
-
-While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. What _was_ going on with that?
-
-<a id="cheerful-price"></a>I wasn't, like, _friends_ with Yudkowsky, obviously; I didn't have a natural social affordance to _just_ ask him the way you would ask a dayjob or college acquaintance something. But ... he _had_ posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy about he trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2 hour conversation, and I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in '12, so on 29 September 2016, I wrote him offering $1,000 to talk about what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong."
-
-<a id="cheerful-price-reasons"></a>At this point, any _normal people_ who are (somehow?) reading this might be thinking, isn't that weird and kind of cultish? Some blogger you follow posted something you thought was strange earlier this year, and you want to pay him _one grand_ to talk about it? To the normal person I would explain thusly—
-
-First, in our subculture, we don't have your weird hangups about money: people's time is valuable, and paying people money in exchange for them using their time differently from how they otherwise would is a perfectly ordinary thing for microeconomic agents to do. Upper-middle–class normal people don't blink at paying a licensed therapist $100 to talk for an hour, because their culture designates that as a special ritualized context in which paying money to talk to someone isn't weird. In my culture, we don't need the special ritualized context; Yudkowsky just had a somewhat higher rate than most therapists.
-
-Second, $1000 isn't actually real money to a San Francisco software engineer.
-
-Third—yes. Yes, it _absolutely_ was kind of cultish. There's a sense in which, _sociologically and psychologically speaking_, Yudkowsky is a religious leader, and I was—am—a devout adherent of the religion he made up.
-
-By this I don't mean that the _content_ of Yudkowskian rationalism is much comparable to Christianity or Buddhism. But whether or not there is a God or a Divine (there is not), the _features of human psychology_ that make Christianity or Buddhism adaptive memeplexes are still going to be active. If the God-shaped whole in my head can't not be filled by _something_, it's better to fill it with a "religion" _about good epistemology_, one that can _reflect_ on the fact that beliefs that are adaptive memeplexes are not therefore true, and Yudkowsky's writings on the hidden Bayesian structure of the universe were a potent way to do that. It seems fair to compare my tendency to write in Sequences links to a devout Christian's tendency to quote Scripture by chapter and verse; the underlying mental motion of "appeal to the holy text" is probably pretty similar. My only defense is that _my_ religion is _actually true_ (and that my religion says you should read the texts and think it through for yourself, rather than taking anything on "faith").
-
-That's the context in which my happy-price email thread ended up including the sentence, "I feel awful writing _Eliezer Yudkowsky_ about this, because my interactions with you probably have disproportionately more simulation-measure than the rest of my life, and do I _really_ want to spend that on _this topic_?" (Referring to the idea that, in a sufficiently large universe where many subjectively-indistinguishable copies of everyone exists, including inside of future superintelligences running simulations of the past, there would plausibly be _more_ copies of my interactions with Yudkowsky than of other moments of my life, on account of that information being of greater decision-relevance to those superintelligences.)
-
-I say all this to emphasize just how much Yudkowsky's opinion meant to me. If you were a devout Catholic, and something in the Pope's latest encyclical seemed wrong according to your understanding of Scripture, and you had the opportunity to talk it over with the Pope for a measly $1000, wouldn't you take it? Of course you would!
-
-<a id="cheerful-price-privacy-constraint"></a>Anyway, I can't talk about the results of my cheerful price inquiry (whether he accepted the offer and a conversation occured, or what was said if it did occur), because I think the rule I should follow for telling this Whole Dumb Story is that while I have complete freedom to talk about _my_ actions and things that happened in public, I'm not allowed to divulge information about what Yudkowsky may or may not have said in private conversations that may or may not have occured, because even without an explicit secrecy promise, people might be less forthcoming in private conversations if they knew that you might blog about them later. Personally, I think most people are _way_ too paranoid about this, and often wish I could just say what relevant things I know without worrying about whether it might infringe on someone's "privacy", but I'm eager to cooperate with widely-held norms even if I personally think they're dumb.
-
-(Incidentally, it was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
-
-------
-
-I wrote about my frustrations to Scott Alexander of _Slate Star Codex_ fame (Subject: "J. Michael Bailey did nothing wrong"). The immediate result of this is that he ended up including a link to one of Kay Brown's study summaries (and expressing surprise at the claim that non-androphilic trans woman have very high IQs) in his [November links post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/01/links-1116-site-unseen/), and he [got some pushback even for that](https://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152736458066/hey-scott-im-a-bit-of-a-fan-of-yours-and-i).
-
-------
-
-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."
-
-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.
-
-She said she would recommend _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ on her Facebook wall. I said she was very brave—well, we already knew she was very brave because she _actually transitioned_—but, I suggested, maybe it would be better to wait until [October 11th](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day) ([October 11th](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2015/10/october-eleventh/))?
-
-As an afterthought to an explanation of why she thought successfully transitioning is more feasible than I seemed to believe, she suggested a folkloric anti-dysphoria exercise: look at women you see in public, and try to pick out which features /r/gendercritical would call out in order to confirm that she's obviously a man.
-
-I replied that "obviously a man" is unsophisticated. I had been thinking of gendering in terms of [naïve Bayes models](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes): you observe some features, use those to assign (probabilities of) category membership, and then use category membership to make predictions about whatever other features you might care about but can't immediately observe. Sure, it's possible for an attempted clocking to be mistaken, and you can have 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.
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-------
-
-On the evening of 10 October 2016, I put up my Facebook post for Coming Out Day:
-
-> Happy Coming Out Day! I'm a male with mild gender dysphoria which is almost certainly causally related to my autogynephilic sexual/romantic orientation, which I am genuinely proud of! This has no particular implications for how other people should interact with me!
->
-> I believe that late-onset gender dysphoria in males is almost certainly not an intersex condition. (Here "late-onset" is a term of art meant to distinguish people like me from those with early-onset gender dysphoria, which is characterized by lifelong feminine behavior and a predominantly androphilic sexual orientation. Anne Vitale writes about these as "Group Three" and "Group One" in "The Gender Variant Phenomenon": [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) ) I think it's important to not let the political struggle to secure people's rights to self-modification interfere with the pursuit of scientific knowledge, because having a realistic understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying one's feelings is often useful in helping individuals make better decisions about their own lives in accordance with the actual costs and benefits of available interventions (rather than on the basis of some hypothesized innate identity). Even if the mechanisms turn out to not be what one thought they were—ultimately, people can stand what is true.
->
-> Because we are already enduring it.
-
-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.
-
-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?)
-
-In short, I wanted to consult her feminism expertise; she seemed like the kind of person who might have valuable opinions on whether men could become women by means of saying so. "[O]n the one hand, I'm glad that other people get to live my wildest fantasy", I said, after explaining the problem, "but on the other hand, maaaaaybe we shouldn't actively encourage people to take their fantasies quite this literally? Maybe you don't want people like me in your bathroom for the same reason you're annoyed by men's behavior on trains?"
-
-She asked if I had read _The Man Who Would Be Queen_. (I had.) She said she personally didn't care about bathrooms.
-
-She had also read a lot about related topics (in part because of her own history as a gender-nonconforming child), but that this area of it (autogynephilia, _&c._) was difficult to talk about except from one's lived experience because "the public narrative is very ... singular". She thought that whether and how dysphoria was related to eroticism could be different for different people, but thought that the singular narrative had been culturally important, in the same way as the "gay is not a choice" narrative had been, letting people with less privilege live in a way that makes them happy with less of a penalty. (She did empathize with concern about kids being encouraged to transition early; given the opportunity to go to school as a boy at age 7, she would have taken it, and it would have been the wrong path.)
-
-She asked if I was at all suicidal. (I wasn't.)
-
-And just—these are all very reasonable opinions. If I were her (if only!), I'm sure I would believe the same things. But if so many nice, smart, reasonable liberals privately notice that the public narrative is very singular, and none of them are interested in pointing out that the singular narrative is _not true_, because they appreciate how the singular narrative has been culturally important—doesn't that—_shouldn't_ that—put a damper on how trustworthy the consensus of the nice, smart, reasonable liberals is? How do you _know_ what's good in the real world, if you [mostly live in the fake world of the narrative](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/)?
-
-------
-
-Of course, not all feminists were of the same mind on this issue. In late December 2016, I posted [an introductory message to the "Peak Trans" thread on /r/GenderCritical](/ancillary/what-i-said-to-r-gendercritical/), explaining my problem.
-
-The first comment was "You are a predator."
-
-... I'm not sure what I was expecting. I spent part of Christmas Day crying.
-
-------
-
-At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally started HRT. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new secret blog was for.
-
-... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it, at least a little, at least subtly.
-
-"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread in mid-January. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
-
-As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman 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.
-
------
-
-"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.
-
-I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
-
-She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off, next to set of pliers (which had presumably done the snapping), and told me to go away.
-
-------
-
-I made plans to visit Portland for the weekend of 18 February 2017, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be nice to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River[^river-fka]) to lend versimilitude to the charade.
-
-[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) is a suburb of Portland; the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), but the vignette was inspired by my attendance of a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.
-
- I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.
-
-[^river-fka]: Formerly known as William River??
-
-At the close of a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I wrote:
-
-> (Thanks very much for your promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I am interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet you; unfortunately, I kind of feel motivated to generally avoid trans women now, because the conjunction of validate-everyone's-identity social norms and my continuing obsession with last year's shocking mega-update make me feel like I'm made out of social antimatter: better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing, mutually annihilating me and my interlocutor and killing everyone in the room in a shower of gamma rays.)
-
-------
-
-... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about 3 days.
-
-In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).
-
-[^amelia-rip]: Clicking on Amelia's profile years later, it's a memorial page, which is ominous.
-
-I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."
-
-(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas Amelia seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)
-
-Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):
-
-> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
-
-Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: XX-cluster for when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes, _&c._
-
-So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words can be used in many ways, and are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—given the context of my comments to Amelia, I think it should have already been clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to Amelia's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (Amelia, to her credit, did.)
-
-To be fair to Bensinger, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").
-
-But ... in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I think I was perhaps justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher, that seems like a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions.
-
-Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about put a Like on my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl", I explained, then elaborated, "well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
-
-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:
-
-> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
-
-I followed it up the next morning with a hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends".[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, "being a woman", but apparently I felt like being vague) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
-
-[^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/).
-
-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?
-
-In this case, the value being served had to do with there being an empirical statistical structure of bodies and minds in the world that became a lot harder to talk about if you insisted that everyone gets to define how others perceive them. I didn't _like_ the structure that I was seeing, because (like many people in my age cohort, and many people who shared my paraphilic sexual orientation) I had this ideological obsession with androgyny as a moral ideal. The cost of making it harder to talk about the structure might outweigh the benefit of letting everyone dictate how other people should perceive them!
-
-Nick Tarleton asked me to clarify: was I saying that people who claim that "trans women are women" were sneaking in connotations or denotations that were false in light of so many trans women being (I claimed) autogynephilic?—even when those people also claimed that they didn't mean anything predictive by "women".
-
-Yes! I replied. People seemed to be talking as if there was some intrinsic gender-identity switch in the brain, and if a physiological male had the switch in the female position, that meant they Are Trans and need to transition, and I thought that was a really bad model of what the underlying psychological condition was. I thought we should be talking about clever strategies to maximize the quantity "gender euphoria minus gender dysphoria", and it wasn't at all obvious that full-time transition was the uniquely best solution.
-
-"Noreen" said that what she thought was going on was that I was defining _woman_ as someone who has a female-typical brain or body, but _she_ was defining _woman_ as someone who thinks of themselves as a woman or is happier being categorized that way; on the latter definition, the only way someone could be "wrong" about whether or not they were a woman is by trying it and finding out that they were less happy that way.
-
-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.
-
-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.
-
-------
-
-I continued to be very distracted the next day, Monday 13 February 2017. I went to my office, but definitely didn't get any dayjob work done.
-
-I made another seven Facebook posts. I'm proud of this one:
-
-> 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.
-
-[^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 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/)
-
-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 replied:
-
->> 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!
-
-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.
-
-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._:
-
-> 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.
-
-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).
-
-[^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.
-
-"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 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!"
-
-I said that I probably wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I was going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things" phase, like trying to spin a complaint ("again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates") into a date.
-
-"Chaya" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign:
-
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I really _was_ getting to the point that I hated transwomen
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I hate them, too!
-> Fuck those guys!
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
-> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
-> But you're actually changing that for me
-> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
-> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
-> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
-> Because I have a model
-> I understand the problem
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> I understand why it's hard
-> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
-> This is a better thing for me
-> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person
-> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
-> I think now I can do it more honestly
-> They might not want _me_ as a friend
-> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
-> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
-> I'm very grateful for that
-
-... in retrospect, I wish I had taken that as a cue to try to get some sleep. I had already been to the psych ward for sleep-deprivation-induced madness once, in 2013. That was a very bad time which I didn't want to repeat. But I was so amped up from my war, that I continued to stay up and post—and email.
-
-At 3:30 _a.m._, I sent an email to Scott Alexander:
-
-> 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)").
-
-
-
-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
-
-]
-
---------
-
-email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" Wed 15 Feb 0017
-
- * 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
-
-16 Feb 0042
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I told "Chaya."
-"[N]ow that I no longer believe self-reports are true, I can see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're right"
-"I mean, I knew that that was a thing verbally"
-"but now I'm actually seeing it"
-
-Thu Feb 16 0102
-in the thread where I said "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to
-Brent", at the time I thought I saw a beautiful aesthetic reason, but maybe a better description of my behavior would be that I was beating up on low-status Brent / I said it seemed thematically appropriate in order to get a date with Anna
-"Chaya": But you were really calling out Brent as low status
-me: yeah
-
-"questions" to Anna and Michael 16 Feburary 1027
-> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
-in this thread, I claimed that, "I did in fact get sleep, but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to."
-
-[a couple of delusional emails to Yudkowsky at 11XX on 16 Feb]
-
-[16 February, I ask to meet Orion to talk about taking a sabbatical "Can I come to the city and meet with you?" at 1317 p.m.]
-
-Cooperate messages—
-Jonah 4x, Jack, Ziz 6x, "Wilhelm" 2x, Katie 6x, Anna T. 6x, Jenna 8x, Linda 5x, Ben 5x, Brent 4x, Boyd
-
-That I was on a trip and don't want it to be a bad trip
-
-Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
-Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
-Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
-
-I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
-
-"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
-
-Thu Feb 16 16:39:06 PST 2017: Ziz says, "Am still here. Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors. Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face."
-Thu Feb 16 18:18:43 PST 2017: Ziz says "Watson returned. Am currently in ur house, using ur wifi. Are you coming here? Am unclear on your intent, but am happy to sit here and work on stupid resume padding stuff for a while if you're coming."
-
-Fri Feb 17 14:19, "I'm so confused I just woke up / I'm so sorry"
-
-previous psych episode, repeating two words, Science and Female; but this time, it was Cooperate and Defect
-
-to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
-
------
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-
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-/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
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-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
-
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
-
-[another happy price offer to Yudkowsky on 2 March
-> That makes sense. Sorry for being boring; I'm kind of going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development. Hopefully this is not too socially-disruptive! Michael said he thinks I'm doing good work??
-]
-
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
-
-7 March—
-> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (e.g., from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
-reply—
-> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-
-12 March—
-> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
-
-I met Jessica in March
-
-
-I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
-
-At standup meeting on my last day, I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
-
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
-
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to "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