Actually, lots. To arbitrarily pick one particularly vivid exhibition, in April 2018, the [/r/MtF subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/) (which currently has 100,000 subscribers) [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 of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%. 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/)).
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%! (But 82% is evidence for my claim that a _substantial majority_ of trans women under modern conditions in Western countries are essentially guys like me.) Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of opinion among real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_. You could [fill an entire subreddit with them](https://archive.is/ezENv) (and then move it to [independent](https://ovarit.com/o/ItsAFetish/) [platforms](https://saidit.net/s/itsafetish/) when the original gets [banned for "promoting hate"](https://www.reddit.com/r/itsafetish/)).
Reddit isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing.
> 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.
-"It became obvious that explanation could not account."
+"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 how phenomenal experiences are causally related to each other.
-[TODO: I also think about it nonsexually—my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—but "became obvious" is wrong. Contrast to androphilic type is a clue that this is not what brain-intersex looks like. Analogy to broken ankles—there's going to be a fact of the matter. Trust people are telling the truth about their own experiences, but can get the causality wrong. I used to cut myself.]
+Reading the things I do, and talking to the people I do, I see this pattern _over and over and over_ again, where non-exclusively-androphilic trans women will, in the right context, describe experiences that _sound_ a lot like mine.
[TODO: more causal confusion in people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language
[TODO caveated understanding that the same _descriptive_ taxonomy could have a different causal/etiological story behind it /2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/ ]
+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 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.
+
+Even if human brains vary more than human ankles, the basic epistemological principle applies to a mysterious desire to be female. The question 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?
+
+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.
+
After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–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).
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.
So, a striking thing about my series of increasingly frustrating private conversations and subsequent public Facebook meltdown (the stress from which soon landed me in psychiatric jail, but that's [another](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [story](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/)) was the tendency for some threads of conversation to get _derailed_ on some variation of, "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["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/) by Scott Alexander, the _second_ most prominent writer in our robot cult.
-So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words. But because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait.
+So, this _really_ wasn't what I was trying to talk about; _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory in psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words.
Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—not just as a formal profession of modesty, but _actually_ wrong in the real world. But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win. [We had a whole Sequence about this](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong) back in 'aught-eight, in which Yudkowsky pounded home this _exact_ point _over and over and over again_, that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
> ["One may even consider the act of defining a word as a promise to \[the\] effect [...] \[that the definition\] will somehow help you make inferences / shorten your messages."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yLcuygFfMfrfK8KjF/mutual-information-and-density-in-thingspace)
-So I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail, at first in the object-level context of gender on this blog in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/), and later (after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521), and I _flipped the fuck out_) [strictly abstractly](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
+So, because I trusted people in my robot cult to be dealing in good faith rather than fucking with me because of their political incentives, I took the bait. I ended up spending three years of my life re-explaining the relevant philosophy-of-language issues in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail, at first in the object-level context of gender on this blog (in ["The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions"](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/), and the ["Reply on Adult Human Females"](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/)), and later (after [Eliezer Yudkowsky joined in the mind games on Twitter in November 2018](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521), and I _flipped the fuck out_) [strictly abstractly](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) [on](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [the](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fmA2GJwZzYtkrAKYJ/algorithms-of-deception) [robot](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4hLcbXaqudM9wSeor/philosophy-in-the-darkest-timeline-basics-of-the-evolution)-[cult](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YptSN8riyXJjJ8Qp8/maybe-lying-can-t-exist) [blog](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/onwgTH6n8wxRSo2BJ/unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception).
[TODO:
_Everyone else shot first_.
+"You can't define a word any way you want" and "You can" are both true in different senses, but if you opportunistically choose which one to emphasize
+
_I need the right answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_—if I were dumb enough to believe Yudkowsky's insinuation that pronouns don't have truth conditions, I might have made a worse decision
If rationality is useful for anything, it should be useful for practical life decisions like this
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff