Title: Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems
-Date: 2021-01-01
+Date: 2020-12-14
Category: commentary
Tags: autogynephilia, bullet-biting, Eliezer Yudkowsky, epistemic horror, my robot cult, personal, sex differences, Star Trek, Julia Serano
Status: draft
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_.
-[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
+[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by sexologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing 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_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body).
-So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard taxonomy or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
+So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
So, you know, as part of my antisexism, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out [_The Feminine Mystique_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feminine_Mystique) and [Susan Faludi's _Backlash_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backlash:_The_Undeclared_War_Against_American_Women) from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—[_Pandagon_](https://web.archive.org/web/20070630211101/http://pandagon.net/), [_Feministe_](https://web.archive.org/web/20080901002058/http://www.feministe.us/blog), [_Feministing_](https://web.archive.org/web/20080605182529/http://www.feministing.com/). 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_](https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01830-5.html).
In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement), Yudkowsky appeals to the complex moral value of sympathy as an argument against the desireability of nonsentient sex partners (_catgirls_ being the technical term). Being emotionally intertwined with another actual person is one of the things that makes life valuable, that would be lost if people just had their needs met by soulless catgirl holodeck characters.
-But there's a problem, Yudkowsky argues: women and men aren't designed to make each other optimally happy. The abstract game between the two human life-history strategies has a conflicting-interests as well as a shared-interests component. (Peter Watts: ["And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete."](https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)) The design of the woman who _optimally_ satisfied what men out of women, corresponding to Total Victory for the ♂ player in the conflicting-interests subgame, wouldn't be drawn from the design-space of actual women. (And _vice versa_ and respectively, but if you didn't notice, this blog post is all about male needs.)
+But there's a problem, Yudkowsky argues: women and men aren't designed to make each other optimally happy. The abstract game between the two human life-history strategies in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness had a conflicting-interests as well as a shared-interests component, and human psychology still bears the design signature of that game denominated in inclusive fitness, even though [no one cares about inclusive fitness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation-executers-not-fitness-maximizers). (Peter Watts: ["And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete."](https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)) The secnario of Total Victory for the ♂ player in the conflicting-interests subgame is not [Nash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium). The design of the entity who _optimally_ satisfied what men want out of women would not be, and _could_ not be, within the design parameters of actual women.
-Yudkowsky dramatized the implications in a short story, ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2), portraying an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because of the mismatch in the sexes' desires, and because the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution (according to the story) turns out to be splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias, complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
+(And _vice versa_ and respectively, but in case you didn't notice, this blog post is all about male needs.)
-At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at the idea in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back a dozen years later—[or even four years later](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/D34jhYBcaoE7DEb8d)—my performative horror was missing the point.
+Yudkowsky dramatized the implications in a short story, ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2), portraying an almost-aligned superintelligence constructing a happiness-maximizing utopia for humans—except that because of the mismatch in the sexes' desires, and because the AI is prohibited from editing people's minds, the happiness-maximizing solution (according to the story) turns out to be splitting up the human species by sex and giving women and men their own _separate_ utopias (on [Venus and Mars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_symbol#Origins), ha ha), complete with artificially-synthesized romantic partners.
-_The argument makes sense_. Of course, it's important to notice that you'd need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI in the story doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other.
+Of course no one _wants_ that—our male protagonist doesn't _want_ to abandon his wife and daughter for some catgirl-adjacent (if conscious) hussy. But humans _do_ adapt to loss; if the separation were already accomplished by force, people would eventually move on, and post-separation life with companions superintelligently optimized _for you_ would ([_arguendo_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arguendo)) be happier than life with your real friends and family, whose goals will sometimes come into conflict with yours because they weren't superintelligently designed _for you_.
-[TODO: the point it about unforeseen maximum, and for the purposes of a dramatic story, it's OK to focus on the big separating hyperplane, even if there are many other hyperplanes
-https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum
-]
-[TODO: skeptical commenters saying that this isn't what they want are missing the point: you would adapt]
-[TODO: "Interpersonal Entanglement" suggests a negotiation]
+The alignment-theory morals are those of [unforseen maxima](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/unforeseen_maximum) and [edge instantiation](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/edge_instantiation). An AI designed to maximize happiness would kill all humans and tile the galaxy with maximally-efficient happiness-brainware. If this sounds "crazy" to you, that's the problem with anthropomorphism I was telling you about: [don't imagine "AI" as an emotionally-repressed human](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zrGzan92SxP27LWP9/points-of-departure), just think about [a machine that calculates what actions would result in what outcomes](https://web.archive.org/web/20071013171416/http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting-device/), and does the action that would result in the outcome that maximizes some function. It turns out that picking a function that doesn't kill everyone looks hard. Just tacking on the constaints that you can think of (make the _existing_ humans happy without tampering with their minds) [will tend to produce similar "crazy" outcomes that you didn't think to exclude](https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/nearest_unblocked).
+
+At the time, [I expressed horror](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/PhiGnX7qKzzgn2aKb) at "Failed Utopia #4-2" in the comments section, because my quasi-religious psychological-sex-differences denialism required that I be horrified. But looking back a dozen years later—[or even four years later](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2/comment/D34jhYBcaoE7DEb8d)—my performative horror was missing the point.
+
+_The argument makes sense_. Of course, it's important to notice that you'd need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI in the story doesn't give every _individual_ their separate utopia—if existing women and men aren't optimal partners for each other, so too are individual men not optimal same-sex friends for each other. A faithful antisexist (as I was) might insist that that should be the _only_ moral, as it implies the other [_a fortiori_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_a_fortiori). But if you're trying to _learn about reality_ rather than protect your fixed quasi-religious beliefs, it should be _okay_ for one of the lessons to get a punchy sci-fi short story; it should be _okay_ to think about the hyperplane between two coarse clusters, even while it's simultaneously true that a set of hyperplanes would suffice to [shatter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shattered_set) every individual point, without deigning to acknowledge the existence of clusters.
On my reading of the text, it is _significant_ that the AI-synthesized complements for men are given their own name, the _verthandi_ (presumably after [the Norse deity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver%C3%B0andi)), rather than just being referred to as women. The _verthandi_ may _look like_ women, they may be _approximately_ psychologically human, but since the _detailed_ psychology of "superintelligently-engineered optimal romantic partner for a human male" is not going to come out of the distribution of actual human females, judicious exercise of the [tenth virtue of precision](http://yudkowsky.net/rational/virtues/) demands that a _different word_ be coined for this hypothetical science-fictional type of person. Calling the _verthandi_ "women" would be _worse writing_; it would _fail to communicate_ the impact of what has taken place in the story.
And this is actually what we see. 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).
-Once I had an occasion (don't ask) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general ETLE hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in X, some fraction of them want to be X" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in X.
+Once I had an occasion (don't ask) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general ETLE hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are interested in arbitrary _X_.
And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for me the thing going on with me being an underlying ETLE-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
Since we _don't_ have that ... the existing approximations don't really seem like a good idea for me, all things considered?
-As a computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit, and no one knows why. (Or _someone_ could figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, but the user who is suffering and in pain has no way of buying their attention.)
+As a computer programmer, I have learned to fear complexity and dependencies. If you've ever wondered why it seems like [all software is buggy and terrible](https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/), it's because _no one knows what they're doing_. Each individual programmer and engineer understands their _piece_ of the system well enough that companies can ship products that mostly do what they claim, but there's a lot of chaos and despair where the pieces don't quite fit, and no one knows why. (Maybe _someone_ could figure it out in a reasonable amount of time, but the user who is suffering and in pain has no way of buying their attention.)
-But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of _biology_, and I think I have reason to be wary of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals, but the idealized forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
+But computing is the _easy_ case, a universe entirely of human design, of worlds that can be made and unmade on a whim (when that whim is specified in sufficient detail). Contrast that to the unfathomable messiness of _biology_, and I think I have reason to be wary of signing up to be a _lifelong medical patient_. Not out of any particular distrust of doctors and biomedical engineers, but out of respect that their jobs—not necessarily the set of tasks they do to stay employed at actually existing hospitals and corporations, but the idealized Platonic forms of _their jobs_—are _much harder_ than almost anyone realizes.
_All_ drugs have side-effects; _all_ surgeries have the potential for complications. Through centuries of trial and error (where "error" means suffering and disfigurement and death), our civilization has accumulated a suite of hacks for which the benefits seem to exceed the costs (given circumstances you would prefer not to face in the first place).
-In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction [TODO: describe effects and risks of HRT]
+In a miracle of science, someone made the observations to notice that human females have higher levels of [(8R,9S,13S,14S,17S)-13-Methyl-6,7,8,9,11,12,14,15,16,17-decahydrocyclopenta[a]phenanthrene-3,17-diol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estradiol) than human males. In a glorious exhibition of mad science, someone did the experiments to notice that artificially synthesizing that ...-iol and administering it to males successfully pushes some aspects of their phenotype in the female direction: [breast growth and fat redistribution and agreeableness—at the cost of increased risk of venous thromboembolism and osteoporosis](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html).
For all that my body is disappointingly male and therefore ugly, it _works_. It makes the hormones that it needs to function without me needing to dissolve a pill under my tongue every day—without saddling me with extra dependencies on the supply chains that make the pills, or the professional apparatus to draw my blood and tell me what pills to take—without me needing to know what "hormones" _are_.
For all that my penis is boring at best and annoying at worst, it _works_. The organ does the things that it's designed to do; it lets me pee while standing up, and reward myself while pretending that it isn't there.
-Did you know that trans women have to dilate their neovagina after surgery? Yeah. There are these glass tubes of various widths, and you're supposed to stick them up there for a [TODO: details] I'm told that there are important technical reasons why it would be objectively wrong to use the phrase _open wound_ in this situation, but the body doesn't know the important technical reasons and you still need to dilate.
+Did you know that trans women [have to dilate their neovagina after bottom surgery](https://www.mtfsurgery.net/dilation.htm)? Yeah. There are these hard tubes of various widths, and you're supposed to stick them up there multiple times a day after surgery (and weekly indefinitely) to prevent the cavity from losing depth. I'm told that there are important technical reasons why it would be objectively wrong to use the phrase _open wound_ in this situation, but the body doesn't know the important technical reasons and you still need to dilate.
I am glad that these interventions _exist_ for the people who are brave and desperate enough to need them. But given that I'm not that desperate and not that brave, would it not be wiser to trust the proverb and not look a gift man in the mouth?
My [laser hair removal sessions](/tag/lasers/) were ... arguably a waste of money, since I still have to shave even after 13 treatments?—but it at least got the density of my ugly–gross facial hair down a bit. Trying it was definitely a _smart move_ given what I knew at the time, and I _just might_ be rich enough and disgusted-by-facial-hair enough to go back for more density-reduction. (Electrolysis gets better results than laser, but it's more expensive and a lot more painful.)
-Men get cosmetic surgery sometimes, right? I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection ...
+People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection ...
+
+But _staying_ on HRT indefinitely—doesn't seem like a smart move? Even though I would be happy with the fat-redistribution effects, I don't expect the health effects to be net-positive, and I don't expect the psychological effects to be net-desirable (even if I [wasn't](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) [self-aware](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/) enough to notice much besides libido change during my five-month experiment).
-But _staying_ on HRT indefinitely—doesn't seem like a smart move? Even though I would be happy with the fat-redistribution effects, I don't expect the health effects to be net-positive, and I don't expect the psychological effects to be net-desirable (even if I wasn't self-aware enough to notice much besides libido change during my five-month experiment).
+And _social_ transition—really doesn't seem like a smart move? If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology, that would happen automatically (people are pretty good at noticing each other's sex), and I would expect to be very happy. (After some socio-psychological adjustment period; remember, in the real world, I didn't even manage to change _nicknames_.) But given that we _don't_ have magical perfect transformation technology, the main objection here is that I _don't expect to pull off_ that kind of ... perma-[LARP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game). I mean _really_ pull it off—everyone in Berkeley and Portland will be very careful to respect your pronouns the minute you come out, but [_they will be lying_](/2019/Dec/reply-to-ozymandias-on-fully-consensual-gender/), and I know because I lie—saying "she" when [the intelligent social web](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AqbWna2S85pFTsHH4/the-intelligent-social-web) requires it, even when I don't really believe it.
-And _social_ transition—really doesn't seem like a smart move? If we _actually had_ magical perfect transformation technology, that would happen automatically (people are pretty good at noticing each other's sex), and I would expect to be very happy. (After some socio-psychological adjustment period; remember, in the real world, I didn't even manage to change _nicknames_.) But given that we _don't_ have magical perfect transformation technology, the main objection here is that I _don't expect to pull off_ that kind of ... perma-[LARP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game). I'm sure it would be _possible_ to do well with a lot of work ([voice training for trans women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)#Voice_feminization) is a thing!), but it's not clear why I would want to put in all that work, when overall, my life is fundamentally _okay_ as ... a man? An adult human male? As a matter of fact, which doesn't care about my feelings.
+It's definitely [_possible_ to pass alright](/2018/Oct/the-information-theory-of-passing/) with a lot of work ([voice training for trans women](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_therapy_(transgender)#Voice_feminization) is a thing!), but it's not clear why I would want to put in all that work, when overall, my life is fundamentally _okay_ as ... a man? An adult human male? As a matter of objective fact, which doesn't care about my beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings.
How dumb would I have to think you are, to expect you not to notice?
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 sense more real or more relevant and should take precedence.
-So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness several times in the main body of this post, but I've 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've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Blanchard (who coined 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.
+So where does that leave me? This post is about my _own_ experiences, and not anyone else's (which I obviously don't have access to). I've _mentioned_ transgenderedness a number of times in the main body of this post, but I've 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've said so far is _consistent_ with a world in which Ray Blanchard (who coined 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.
My first clue that I wasn't living in that world came from—Eliezer Yudkowsky. In [a 26 March 2016 Facebook post](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228), he wrote—
> 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/>
-> 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.
+(Reading _this_ 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 (in "Changing Emotions") how blatantly, ludicrously untrue and impossible that is.)
+
+> 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.
> 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 just 4¾ years later, and _I am panicking_. (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 sideways](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative) [in policyspace](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.)
-At the time, this was merely _very confusing_ to hear coming from the guy who wrote "Changing Emotions". I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (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 ...
+At the time, this was merely _very confusing_. I left a careful comment in the Facebook thread (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 ...
-A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek to live on the correct side of the [Caldecott tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldecott_Tunnel), in Berkeley: closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
+A month later, I moved out of my mom's house in Walnut Creek 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: closer to other people in the robot-cult scene and with a shorter train ride to my coding dayjob in San Francisco.
(I would later change my mind about which side of the tunnel is the correct one.)
-[...] doing a little bit more reading ... I _don't_ think Blanchard was dumb and wrong. [TODO: actually explain the typology] I think the two-type taxonomy is _basically_ correct, as a first approximation. (Where psychology is complicated enough such that there's much more to be said about what that means, and what better approximations would look like, but simple theories that [explain a lot of our observations](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2019/04/27/predictions-made-by-blanchards-typology/) are better than pretending not to have a theory.) 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_.
+In Berkeley, I met a number of 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 facilities in Yudkowsky's brain got that 20% from.) This prompted me to do a little bit more reading in some corners of the literature that I had certainly _heard of_, 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.)
+
+Between the reading, and a series of increasingly frustrating private conversations, I gradually became persuaded that Blanchard _wasn't_ dumb and wrong, that his taxonomy is _basically_ correct, at least as a first approximation. So far this post 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.
+
+(With the understanding that psychology is complicated and there's more to be said about what "as a first approximation" is even supposed to mean, but I need a few paragraphs to talk about the simple story before I can get to that.)
+
+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 indicated treatment (HRT, surgery, social transition).
+
+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, in a way that causes huge social problems for them—the far tail of feminine gay men who end up fitting into the world 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. [TODO: cite that from Brown's bibliography]
+
+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 resememble 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 behavior, just on priors.
+
+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, anyway) do _not_ fit this profile. 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_ guess for how this behavior might arise?
+
+What's the _usual_ reason for males to be obsessed with female bodies?
+
+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_.
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_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, I think you're really just a perverted male like me"?
[...]
+
http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
> 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.
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. To get maximally precise predictions about everything, you would have to model the underlying quarks, _&c._, which is impossible. (As it is written: the map is not the territory, but you can't roll up the territory and put in your glove compartment.) [TODO: reductionism links]
+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 written: 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 inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (as 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. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.)
So, 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_ 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 the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman 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 232 upvotes on the /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?!
+But the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_ 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 the _non_-exceptions. If you're a magical third type of trans woman (where, again, _magical_ is a term of art indicating phenomena not understood) 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 232 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. What the hell is an erotic target location error? What _other_ factors influence people's decision to transition?
-[TODO: I have a lot of uncertainty. What is an ETLE, really? What are other factors influencing transition decisions? Desire to be a moral patient. Third casual factor that could be changing in recent years ... Maybe it's really an androphilic–feminine/not-otherwise-specified taxonomy, because non-AGP non-intersex reasons (like Comment 171 internalized misandry) to want to transition would be hard to distinguish from AGP-and-misreporting]
+[TODO: Desire to be a moral patient. Third casual factor that could be changing in recent years ... Maybe it's really an androphilic–feminine/not-otherwise-specified taxonomy, because non-AGP non-intersex reasons (like Comment 171 internalized misandry) to want to transition would be hard to distinguish from AGP-and-misreporting]
Friend of the blog Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/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, favoring spectrum or [simplex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex) models rather than a typology.
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—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 allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case ...]
+[TODO: contempt and political posioning]
My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
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