-One interesting prediction of this story is that if the nature of the "confusion" is agnostic to the _target_ of sexual attraction, then you should see the same pattern in men with unusual sexual interests. ("Men" because I think we legitimately want to be [shy about generalizing across sexes](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf) for sex differences in the parts of the mind that are specifically about mating.)
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-And [this "erotic target location error" pattern is actually what we see](/papers/lawrence-etle_an_underappreciated.pdf). Most men are attracted to women, but some fraction of them get off on the idea of _being_ women—autogynephilia. So if some men are attracted to, say, amputees, we would expect some fraction of _them_ to [get off on the idea of _being_ amputees](/papers/lawrence-clinical_and_theoretical_paralells.pdf)—[_apotemnophilia_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria#History). Some men are, unfortunately, pedophiles, and [some fraction of them get off on the idea of being children](/papers/hsu-bailey-autopedophilia.pdf). Some men are interested in anthropomorphic animals, and [_being_ anthropomorphic animals](https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2019-hsu.pdf)—["furries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_fandom).
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-[TODO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia]
-[TODO: I vaguely, vaguely remember having some other transformation fantasies before losing interest in them (perhaps suggesting something ETLE-like as an underlying trait)]
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-I don't _know_ the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to _be_, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's one of those sensitive bookish males rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
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-Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female-typical in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?
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-_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).
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-But I _don't_ think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively jacking off to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various _different_ female bodies ... unless she was _already_ into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a _lot_ of porn in this genre! But it seems to mostly be created for and consumed by ... men? Adult human males?
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-I just don't see any _reason_ to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in _male_ sexuality. I didn't have the fancy vocabulary for it then, but the basic idea seemed pretty obvious in 2005, and seems equally obvious now.
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-(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I _like_ being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" down to "variation", but people who don't [understand the naturalistic fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature) aren't going to understand anything _else_ I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male heterosexuality weren't functionally optimized to collide like this.)
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-But it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The detailed exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read and learned—and in particular, the reductionist methodology I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the very specific warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its predecessor in the Extropians mailing-list archives) that changing sex is a _hard problem_.
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-We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who [read different books in a different order](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/), might come to very different conclusions about himself.
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-If you don't have the conceptual vocabulary to say, "I have a lot of these beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings about being female, but it seems like a pretty obvious guess that there must be some sort of causal relationship between that and this erotic fantasy, which is realistically going to be a variation in _male_ sexuality," you might end up saying something simpler like, "I want to be a woman." Or possibly even, "I _am_ a woman, on the inside, where it counts."
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-(As Yudkowsky [occasionally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarks](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact on how they actually work. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood, but he was just wrong; the theory did not _become true of him_ because he believed it.)
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-What theory I end up believing about myself _matters_, because different theories that purport to explain the same facts can make very different predictions about facts not yet observed, or about the effects of interventions.