+Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _y_, _z_)](/images/handwritten_phrase_jazzy_puppy.jpg) because I thought it made my handwriting look more feminine. Or the time when track and field practice split up into boys and girls, and I ironically muttered under my breath, "Why did I even join this team?—boys, I mean."
+
+[TODO: more examples! Initials!]
+
+And so on.
+
+The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing doesn't _feel_ explicitly erotic. The thing I did in the day in class about writing in my notebook about being a girl, was _very different_ from the thing I did in my room at night about _visualizing_ girls with this abstract sense of "But what if that were _me_?" while furiously masturbating. The former activity was my beautiful pure happy romantic daydream, whereas the latter activity was not beautiful or pure at all!
+
+Now I am not a cognitive scientist, and can't claim to _know_ exactly what my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is, or where it comes from—that's [not the kind of thing I would expect people to _know_ from introspection alone](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). But it has always seemed like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between the erotic thing, and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, even if the two things don't _feel_ the same: the overlap in subject matter is too much to be a coincidence. And the erotic thing definitely came _first_.
+
+Maybe this story reads differently in 2020 from how it was to live in 2005? I think that teenage boys in the current year having the kind of feelings I was having then, upon referencing or hinting at the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing—
+
+(and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is _much_ easier to talk about than the erotic thing)
+
+(I mean, the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is much harder to talk about _clearly_, but talking about it _un_-clearly is less shameful and requires much less bravery)
+
+—are immediately provided with "Oh, that means you're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as the definitive explanation. But it was a different time, then. Of course I had _heard of_ transsexualism as a thing, in the form of the "woman trapped in a man's body" trope, but it wasn't something I expected to actually encounter in real life.
+
+At the time, I had _no reason to invent the hypothesis_ that I might somehow literally be a woman in some unspecified psychological sense. I knew I was a boy _because_ boys are the ones with penises. That's what the word _means_. I was a boy who had a weird _sex fantasy_ about being a girl. That was just the obvious ordinary straightforward plain-language description of the situation. It _never occured to me_ to couch it in the language of "dysphoria", or actually possessing some innate "gender". The beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing was about identifying _with_ women, not identifying _as_ a woman—roughly analogous to how a cat lover might be said to "identify with" cats, without claiming to somehow _be_ a cat, because _that would be crazy_.
+
+This brings me to the other thing I need to explain about my teenage years, which is that I became very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_.
+
+So, you know, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_. The one time I special-ordered a book at the physical Barnes & Noble before I turned 18 and got my own credit card and could order books online, it was _Feminist Intepretations of Ayn Rand_.
+
+(In retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)
+
+It also seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between my antisexism and the erotic and beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity things.
+
+True, the [blank slate doctrine](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#blank-slate) has been ideologically fashionable my entire life. In the sense that progressivism has been likened to a nontheistic state religion—uh, bear with me for a moment—I was a _very_ religious teenager.
+
+I remember being in the Crown College library at the University in Santa Cruz in 2007, reading Robert Wright's _The Moral Animal_ (because it had been on [Yudkowsky's old book list](https://web.archive.org/web/20200118114912/https://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/bookshelf.html)), and being _aghast_ at how openly, brazenly _sexist_ it was.
+
+(That is, with respect to what I considered _sexist_ at the time. I wish there was some way to know what my teenage self would think of my current self's writing, which is at least as "bad" as Wright and plausibly worse. Maybe if the whole benevolent-superintelligence thing my robot cult always talks about ever works out, I'll be able to kick off a limited-scope [ancestor-simulation](https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html) to find out. In the meantime, if you're offended, I'd love it if you could let me know in the comments exactly how much and why! [Personal identity doesn't actually exist](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RLScTpwc5W2gGGrL9/identity-isn-t-in-specific-atoms); humans growing up in the same cultural tradition can be seen as being drawn from the same _distribution_ as my teenage self.)