-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.
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-If I have some objective inner female gender as the result of a brain-intersex condition, then getting on, and _staying_ on, feminizing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) would presumably be a good idea specifically because my brain is designed to "run on" estrogen. But if my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings are fundamentally a misinterpretation of misdirected _male_ sexuality, then it's not clear that I _want_ the psychological effects of HRT: if there were some unnatural way to give me a female body (or just more female-_like_) _without_ messing with my internal neurochemistry, that would actually be _desireable_.
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-Or, you might think that if the desire is just a confusion in male sexuality, maybe real life body-modding _wouldn't_ be desirable? Maybe autogynephilic men _think_ they want female bodies, but if they actually transitioned in real life (as opposed to just having incompetently non-realistic daydreams about it all day and especially while masturbating), they would feel super-dysphoric about it, because (and which proves that) they're just perverted men, and not actual trans women, which are a different thing. You might think so!
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-But, empirically, I did grow (small) breasts as a result of [my five-month HRT experiment](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/), and I think it's actually been a (small) quality-of-life improvement for approximately the reasons I expected going in. I just—like the æsthetic?—and wanted it to be part of _my_ æsthetic, and now it is, and I don't quite remember what my chest was like before, kind of like how I don't quite remember what it was like to have boy-short hair before I grew out my signature beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (Though I'm _still_ [kicking myself for not](/2017/Nov/laser-1/) taking a bare-chested "before" photo.) I don't see any particular reason to believe this experience wouldn't replicate all the way down the [slope of interventions](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/).
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-Fundamentally, I think I can make _better decisions_ for myself by virtue of having an accurate model of what's really going on with me—a model that uses all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, such that I can talk about my paraphilic desire to be shaped like a woman without wanting to actually be a woman, similarly to how the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" aren't actually women.
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-If the _actual_ desire implemented in one's actual brain in the real physical universe takes the form of (roughly translating from desire into English) "You know, I kind of want my own breasts (_&c._)", it may be weird and perverted to _admit_ this and act on it (!!)—but would it be any _less_ weird and perverted to act on it under the false (in my case) pretense of an invisible female gender identity? If you know what the thing is, can it be any worse to just _own it_?
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-Even if I never took the beautiful pure sacred self identity thing too literally, owning it for what it really is—an illusion, the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought—takes a different tone in the harsh light of my deconversion from psychological sex differences denialism. In "Changing Emotions", Yudkowsky wrote—
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-> If I fell asleep and woke up as a true woman—not in body, but in brain—I don't think I'd call her "me". The change is too sharp, if it happens all at once.