+The same moral applies to sex differences in psychology. I'm a pretty weird guy, in more ways than one. I am not prototypically masculine. Most men are not like me. If I'm allowed to cherry-pick what measurements to take, I can name ways in which I'm more female-typical than male-typical. (For example, I'm _sure_ I'm above the female mean in [Big Five Neuroticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits).) But "weird" represents a much larger space of possibilities than "normal", much as [_nonapples_ are a less cohesive category than _apples_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2mLZiWxWKZyaRgcn7/selling-nonapples).
+
+If you _sum over_ all of my traits, everything that makes me, _me_—it's going to be a point in the _male_ region of the existing, unremediated, genderspace. In principle, you could define a procedure that maps that point to the female region of configuration space in some appropriately structure-preserving way, to compute my female analogue who is as authentically _me_ as possible while also being authentically female, down to the proportion of gray matter in her posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex and—the love of a woman for a man.
+
+(Note that we can already basically do this for _images_ of female and male faces, using the [latent spaces found by generative adversarial networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786) and [autoencoders](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368), as demonstrated by the likes of [FaceApp](https://www.faceapp.com/), the _uniquely best piece of software in the world_. Doing it for _actual whole people in the real world_ and not just flat images is a task for future superintelligences, not present-day GANs, but some of same basic principles should apply.)
+
+[TODO: mention https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/ ; we can synthesize images from scratch]
+
+Okay. Having supplied just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would mean to actually become female—is that what I _want_? I mean, I would definitely be extremely eager to _try_ it ...
+
+I had said we're assuming away engineering difficulties in order to make the thought experiment more informative about pure preferences, but let's add back one constraint to _force_ the thought experiment to be informative about preferences, and not allow the wishy-washy evasion of "I'm eager to _try_ it."
+
+What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.
+
+In that case, if I have to choose—I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female. I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. So, I guess ... if I'm being honest ... I guess I _want_ to be a normal man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
+
+Is that weird? Is that wrong?
+
+Okay, yes, it's _obviously_ weird and wrong, but should I care more about not being weird and wrong, than I do about my deepest most heartfelt desire that I've thought about every day for the last eighteen years?
+
+This is probably counterintuitive if you haven't been living with it your entire adult life? People have _heard of_ the "born in the wrong body" narrative, which makes intuitive sense: if female souls are designed to work female bodies, and you have a female soul tethered to a male body, you can imagine the soul finding the mismatch distressing and wanting to fix it. But if, as I'm positing for my case, there _is no mismatch_ in any objective sense, then where does the desire come from? How do you make sense of wanting to change physiological sex, for reasons that _don't_ have anything to do with already neurologically resembling that sex? What's really going on there, psychologically?
+
+Part of what makes this so hard to talk about _besides_ it being weird and wrong, is that we don't really understand how our own minds work in a legible way; we just experience things. Even if you're [not sure that other people really see "the same" colors as you](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYjyQ839MDsZ6E3L/seeing-red-dissolving-mary-s-room-and-qualia) (and you don't know how to [reformulate the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rQEwySCcLtdKHkrHp/righting-a-wrong-question) [to not](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving-the-question) [be confused](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions)), you can at least agree on color _words_ by pointing to [Pantone swatches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone#Pantone_Color_Matching_System), but I'm not sure I have the language to convey the facts about the qualia I associate with the word _autogynephilia_ to someone who doesn't already feel something similar.
+
+But I have to try. A clue: when I'm ... uh. When I'm—well, you know ...
+
+(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—)
+
+A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty, and just to live like that.
+
+If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror.)
+
+What's going on here? The sexologist James Cantor [speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons.
+
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password
+
+
+[in particular, being Actually Female would undermine my _reason_ for wanting a female body]
+[if I could get HRT without the psych effects, that would actually be an improvement]
+[the fact that I'm happy with my breasts is suggestive of body-mods still being positive, even if the desire is a confusion]
+
+(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
+
+[but if you haven't made all these fine mental distinctions, you might think that you want to "be a woman", or at least be attached to the idea even if you don't believe it]