Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in order to finish that sentence in the current year and be understood, I'd have to say, "because I was trans." And with respect to what the words mean in the current year, it's true. But that's not how I think of it, then or now.
-It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love, inseparable from my sense of self—but if it isn't _exactly_ the same thing that most straight men feel, it can only be a slight variation.
+It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable [Other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex#Volume_One). But that's not unusual, is it?—or it _shouldn't_ be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.
------
I think I have just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would mean. Since sex isn't an atomic attribute, but rather a high-level statistical regularity such that almost everyone can be cleanly classified as "female" or "male" _in terms of_ lower-level traits (genitals, hormone levels, _&c._), then, abstractly, we're trying to take points from male distribution and map them onto the female distribution in a way that preserves as much structure (personal identity) as possible. My female analogue doesn't have a penis (because then she wouldn't be female), but she is going to speak American English like me and be [85% Ashkenazi like me](/images/ancestry_report.png), because language and autosomal genes don't have anything to do with sex.
-The hard part has to do with traits that are meaningfully sexually dimorphic, but not as a discrete dichotomy—where the sex-specific universal designs differ in ways that are _subtler_ than the presence or absence of entire reproductive organs. (Yes, I know about [homology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology))—and you know what I meant.) We are _not_ satisfied if the magical transformation technology swaps out my penis and testicles for a functioning female reproductive system without changing the rest of my body, because we want the end result to be indistinguishable from having been drawn from the female distribution (at least, indistinguishable _modulo_ having my memories of life as a male before the magical transformation), and a man-who-somehow-magically-has-a-vagina doesn't qualify.
+The hard part has to do with traits that are meaningfully sexually dimorphic, but not as a discrete dichotomy—where the sex-specific universal designs differ in ways that are _subtler_ than the presence or absence of entire reproductive organs. (Yes, I know about [homology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology))—and _you_ know what I meant.) We are _not_ satisfied if the magical transformation technology swaps out my penis and testicles for a functioning female reproductive system without changing the rest of my body, because we want the end result to be indistinguishable from having been drawn from the female distribution (at least, indistinguishable _modulo_ having my memories of life as a male before the magical transformation), and a man-who-somehow-magically-has-a-vagina doesn't qualify.
The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait, but take it with respect to the target sex's distribution. I'm 5′11″ tall, which [puts me at](https://dqydj.com/height-percentile-calculator-for-men-and-women/) the 73rd percentile for American men, about 6/10ths of a standard deviation above the mean. So _presumably_ we want to say that my female analogue is at the 73rd percentile for American women, about 5′5½″.
-You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow _less female_ on that account, so why can't I keep my height? But if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that _some_ women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.
+You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow _less female_ on that account, so why can't I keep my height? The problem is that if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that _some_ women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.
The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads. Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
Take faces. People are [verifiably very good at recognizing sex from (hair covered, males clean-shaven) photographs of people's faces](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf) (96% accuracy, which is the equivalent of _d_ ≈ 3.5), but we don't have direct introspective access into what _specific_ features our brains are using to do it; we just look, and _somehow_ know. The differences are real, but it's not a matter of any single, simple measurement you could perform with a ruler (like the distance between someone's eyes). Rather, it's a high-dimensional _pattern_ in many measurements you could take with a ruler, no one of which is definitive. [Covering up the nose makes people slower and slightly worse at sexing faces, but people don't do better than chance at guessing sex from photos of noses alone](/papers/roberts-bruce-feature_saliency_in_judging_the_sex_and_familiarity_of_faces.pdf).
-Notably, for _images_ of faces, we actually _do_ have transformation technology! (Not "magical", because we know how it works.) AI techniques like [generative adversarial networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948) and [autoencoders](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368) can learn the structure of the distribution of facial photographs, and use that knowledge to [synthesize faces from scratch](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)—or [do things like](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786) sex transformation, as demonstrated by the likes of [FaceApp](https://www.faceapp.com/), the _uniquely best piece of software in the world_.
+Notably, for _images_ of faces, we actually _do_ have transformation technology! (Not "magical", because we know how it works.) AI techniques like [generative adversarial networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.04948) and [autoencoders](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368) can learn the structure of the distribution of facial photographs, and use that knowledge to synthesize faces from scratch (as demonstrated by [_thispersondoesnotexist.com_](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/))—or [do things like](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786) sex transformation (as demonstrated by [FaceApp](https://www.faceapp.com/), the _uniquely best piece of software in the world_).
-If you let each pixel vary independently, the space of possible 1024x1024 images is 1,048,576-dimensional, but the vast hypermajority of those images aren't photorealistic human faces. Letting each pixel vary independently is the wrong way to think about it: changing the lighting or pose can change a lot of pixels in what humans would regard as images of "the same" face. So instead, our machine-learning algorithms learn a [compressed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex63DPisEjomutkCw/msg-len) representation of what makes the tiny subspace (relative to images-in-general) of _faces in particular_ similar to each other, and that [latent space](https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d) is a lot smaller—say, 512 dimensions.
+If you let each pixel vary independently, the space of possible 1024x1024 images is 1,048,576-dimensional, but the vast hypermajority of those images aren't photorealistic human faces. Letting each pixel vary independently is the wrong way to think about it: changing the lighting or pose changes a lot of pixels in what humans would regard as images of "the same" face. So instead, our machine-learning algorithms learn a [compressed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ex63DPisEjomutkCw/msg-len) representation of what makes the tiny subspace (relative to images-in-general) of _faces in particular_ similar to each other. That [latent space](https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-latent-space-in-machine-learning-de5a7c687d8d) is a lot smaller (say, 512 dimensions), but still rich enough to embed the distinctions that humans notice: [you can find a hyperplane that separates](https://youtu.be/dCKbRCUyop8?t=1433) smiling from non-smiling faces, or glasses from no-glasses, or young from old, or different races—or female and male. Sliding along the [normal vector](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_(geometry)) to that [hyperplane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane) gives the desired transformation: producing images that are "more female" (as the model has learned that concept) while keeping "everything else" the same.
-[TODO: separating hyperplane / Face editing with Generative Adversarial Networks: https://youtu.be/dCKbRCUyop8?t=1433 ]
+Two-dimensional _images_ of people are _vastly_ simpler than the actual people themselves in the real physical universe. But _in theory_, a lot of the same _mathematical principles_ would apply to hypothetical future nanotechnology-wielding AI systems that could, like the AI in "Failed Utopia #4-2", synthesize a human being from scratch (this-person-_didn't_-exist-dot-com?), or do a real-world sex transformation (PersonApp?)—and the same statistical morals apply to reasoning about sex differences in psychology and (which is to say) the brain.
-[...]
+Daphna Joel _et al._ [argue](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) [that](https://www.pnas.org/content/112/50/15468) human brains are "unique 'mosaics' of features" that cannot be categorized into distinct _female_ and _male_ classes, because it's rare for brains to be "internally consistent"—female-typical or male-typical along _every_ dimension. It's true and important that brains aren't _discretely_ sexually dimorphic the way genitals are, but as [Marco del Guidice _et al._ point out](http://cogprints.org/10046/1/Delgiudice_etal_critique_joel_2015.pdf), the "cannot be categorized into two distinct classes" claim seems false in an important sense. The lack of "internal consistency" in Joel _et al._'s sense is exactly the behavior we expect from multivariate normal-ish distributions with different-but-not-vastly-different means. (There aren't going to be many traits where the sexes are like, _four_ or whatever standard deviations apart.) It's just like how sequences of flips of a very Heads-biased and very Tails-biased coin are going to be unique "mosaics" of Heads and Tails, but pretty distinguishable with enough flips—and indeed, with the right stats methodology, [MRI scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
-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).
+Sex differences in the brain are like sex differences in the skeleton: anthropologists can tell female and male skeletons apart (the [pelvis is shaped differently](https://johnhawks.net/explainer/laboratory/sexual-dimorphism-pelvis), for obvious reasons), and [machine-learning models can see very reliable differences that human radiologists can't](/papers/yune_et_al-beyond_human_perception_sexual_dimorphism_in_hand_and_wrist_radiographs.pdf), but neither sex has entire _bones_ that the other doesn't, and the same is true of brain regions. (The evopsych story about complex adaptations being universal-up-to-sex suggests that sex-specific bones or brain regions should be _possible_, but apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Good news for antisexism!—relatively speaking.)
-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.
+Maybe this should just look like supplementary Statistics Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows? 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 my mosaic is 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).) ["[A] weakly negative correlation can be mistaken for a strong positive one with a bit of selective memory."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/veN86cBhoe7mBxXLk/categorizing-has-consequences) 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.
-[...]
+Okay, maybe I'm _not_ completely over my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism?—that belief still feels uncomfortable to put my weight on. I want to believe that there are women who are relevantly "like me" with respect to some fair (not gerrymandered) metric on personspace. But, um ... it's not completely obvious whether I actually know any? Most of the people in my robot cult (and much more so if you look the core of old-timers from the _Overcoming Bias_ days, rather than the greater Berkeley "community" of today) are male. Most of the people in my open-source programming scene are male. These days, [most of the _women_ in my open-source programming scene are male.](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and self-fulfilling prophecies—and I know that _some_ of it is. (Self-fulfilling prophecies [are coordination equilibria](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/).) But I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps will vanish after the revolution, because _I've read the literature_ and can tell you several observations about chimps and [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](/images/cah_diffs_table.png) that make that seem _unlikely_.
+
+I want to speculate that the nature of my X factor—the things about my personality that let me write the things I do even though I'm [objectively not that smart](/images/wisc-iii_result.jpg) compared to some of my robot-cult friends—is a pattern of mental illness that could realistically only occur in males.
+
+I was once told by a very smart friend (who, unlike me, is not a religious fantatic), "Boys like games with challenges and points; girls like games with characters and stories."
+
+I said, "I like characters and stories! I think."
+
+He said, "I know, but at the margin, you seem suboptimally far in the challenges and points direction. But that's fine; that's what women are for."
+
+And what evidence could I point to, to show him that he's _bad and wrong_ for saying that, if he's not already religiously required to believe it?
+
+_Alright_. So _in principle_, you could imagine having a PersonApp 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 her pelvis shape, and the proportion of gray matter in her posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and—the love of a woman for a man. What is she like, concretely? Do I know how to imagine that?
+
+Or if I can imagine it, can I _describe_ it in this blog post? I am presently sorrowful that [(following John Holt)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/S8ysxzgraSeuBXnpk/rationality-quotes-july-2009/comment/DtyDzN5etD4woXtFM) we all know more than we can say. I have mental models of people, and the models get queried for predictions in the course of planning my social behavior, but I don't have introspective access to the differences between models. It's easier to imagine people in hypothetical situations and say things like, "That doesn't sound like something she'd _do_, but _he_ would" (and be correct), than to say exactly it is about her character and his that generated these predictions (such that [my words would paint a picture in your head](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) that would let you make your own predictions about her and him without having met them)—just like how you're better at recognizing someone's face, than at describing their face in words in enough detail for an artist to draw a portrait.
+
+As a _first-order approximation_, I do have a sister. I think the family resemblance between us is stronger than with either parent. We're about equally intelligent. (OK, plausibly she's smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty _g_-loaded](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) and her 1580 (out of 1600) solidly beats my 2180 (on [the out-of-2400 scale used between 2005 and 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes,_including_a_new_2400-point_score), such that 2180 proportionally scales down to 1453 out of 1600).) Our dark hair curls into helices with similar radius. We even have similar mannerisms, I think? She's 5′6½″.
+
+But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare representative outputs of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my _batshit insane_ secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of science and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.
+
+Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to [sight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_(device)) against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).
+
+(All this is in accordance with "Everything is a vector space" philosophy implied by this blog's [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain). (If it turns out that something _isn't_ a vector space, I'm not sure I want to know about it.) I can hope that my description of the _methodology_ is valuable, even if your brain's pattern-matching faculties can't follow along with the same example, because you haven't met my sister and only know the aspects of me that shine through to the blog.)
-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, if it's reversible, I would definitely be extremely eager to _try_ it ...
+Okay. Having supplied just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would even mean to actually become female—is that what I _want_? I mean, if it's reversible, 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 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.
+What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Or (my preference) if some deep "brain sex" transformation only works once, even if a more superficial motor remapping is easy to do or re-do? 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.
+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. I don't _want_ to stop liking challenges and points as much as I do—and if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.
+
+At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like _the most appealing thing in the world_. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp to play with for a subjective year and tiles the _rest_ of our future lightcone with paperclips, that's _fine_; I will die _happy_.
+
+So, I guess ...
+
+If I'm being _really_ honest with myself here ...
+
+And I successfully make-believe that I can tell the truth with no consequences on my secret ("secret") blog even though at this point my paper-thin pseudonymity is more like a genre convention rather than providing any real privacy ...
+
+I guess I _want_ to be a normal man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
Is that weird? Is that wrong?
(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.
+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 think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow 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—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but 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.)
+If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length 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.
+What's going on here? _Speaking_ of mirrors, the sexologist [James Cantor speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons. Way, way back in the 1980s, Italian neuroscientists wired up the brains of macaque monkeys with electrodes, and noticed that some of the _same_ brain regions would light up when the monkey grabbed a rasin, and when the monkey watched the _researcher_ eat a rasin. These "mirror neurons" are speculated to form the basis of empathy.
+So, the _phrase_ "mirror neurons" is not and _cannot_ be an answer. Real understanding is about detailed predictive models, not [what words to repeat back in school](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password). I can't expect to understand the real answer without spending multiple years studying neuroscience, and if I did, I couldn't expect to transmit the model to you in one blog post. (That would be _several_ blog posts.)
-https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password
+Still, the mirror-neurons anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction."
+One interesting prediction of this story [TODO: explain the ETLE theory]
-[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]
+I don't _know_ the details—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?
-(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
+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?
+
+_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).
+
+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?
+
+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.
+
+(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" 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 "supposed" to collide like this.)
+
+But the obvious explanation has a lot of less-obvious implications—and it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The 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 in particular, the methods of rationality I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this is a _hard problem_.
+
+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 didn't know everything I do—perhaps due to [reading different books in a different order](TODO: link "The Feeling Is Mutual"), or maybe just 15 fewer IQ points—might come to very different conclusions about himself.
-[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]
+Rather than thinking
+
+
+(As Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarked](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[TODO implication that departs from the standard narrative: being Actually Female would undermine my _reason_ for wanting a female body]
+
+[TODO implication that departs from the standard narrative: if I could get body-mods _without_ psych effects of HRT &c., that would actually be desirable]
+
+[TODO concern: if the desire is just a confusion in male sexuality, wouldn't that imply that body mods aren't desireable? Like, maybe staight non-trans AGP men _think_ they want to mod female, but if they actually did it, they would get super-dysphoric because (and which proves that) they're perverts and not Actual Trans Women, which are a different thing. You might think so! But, _empirically_, I'm pretty happy with my 5.month-HRT breasts for about the reasons I expected. From what I hear from people braver than me, that experience continues down the slope of interventions]
+
+[TODO: but if you haven't _made_ all these fine mental distinctions using the everything-is-a-vector-space skill, you might interpret the qualia as simply (wanting to) "be a woman", or at least be attached to the idea even if you don't quite believe it]
+
+(The scintillating but ultimately untrue thought.)
[...]
+[Back to Yudkowsky's "Changing Emotions"—]
+
> 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.
In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions/comment/4pttT7gQYLpfqCsNd)—
-------
+### Coda
+
+> And Durham—the software puppet, the lifeless shell animated by a being from another plane—looked him in the eye and said, "You have to let me show you what you are."
+>
+> —_Permutation City_ by Greg Egan
+
Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science. It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights).
_Why would I?_ In the English of my youth, "gender" (as a single word, rather than part of the phrase "gender role") was understood as a euphemism for _sex_ for people who were squeamish about the potential ambiguity betweeen _sex_-as-in-biological-sex and _sex_-as-in-intercourse. (Judging by this blog's domain name, I am not immune to this.) In that language, my "gender"—my sex—is male. Not because I'm necessarily happy about it (and I [used to](/2017/Jan/the-erotic-target-location-gift/) be pointedly insistent that I wasn't), but as an observable biological fact that, whatever my pure beautiful sacred self-identity feelings, _I am not delusional about_.
+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 should take precedence.
/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/
-
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?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff