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, you know, as part of my antisexism, I read a lot about feminism. I remember checking out _The Feminine Mystique_ and Susan Faludi's _Backlash_ from the school library. Before I found my internet-home on _Overcoming Bias_, I would read the big feminist blogs—_Pandagon_, _Feministe_, _Feministing_. 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_.
+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 retrospect, it's notable how _intellectualized_ all of this was—my pro-feminism was an ideological matter between me and my books, rather than arising from any practical need. It's not like I had disproportionately female friends or whatever—I mean, to the extent that I had any friends and not just books.)
Sex differences would come up a couple more times in one of the last Sequences, on "Fun Theory"—speculations on how life could be truly _good_ if the world were superintelligently optimized for human values, in contrast to the cruelty and tragedy of our precarious existence [in a world shaped only by blind evolutionary forces](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god).
-According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this appeal-to-black-box](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well. And from this empathy, evolution also coughed up the [moral miracle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow) of [_sympathy_, intrinsically caring about what others feel](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds).
+According to Yudkowsky, one of the ways in which people's thinking about artificial intelligence usually goes wrong is [anthropomorphism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RcZeZt8cPk48xxiQ8/anthropomorphic-optimism)—expecting arbitrary AIs to behave like humans, when really "AI" corresponds to [a much larger space of algorithms](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tnWRXkcDi5Tw9rzXw/the-design-space-of-minds-in-general). As a social animal, predicting other humans is one of the things we've evolved to be good at, and the way that works is probably via "empathic inference": [I predict your behavior by imagining what _I_ would do in your situation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Zkzzjg3h7hW5Z36hK/humans-in-funny-suits). Since all humans are very similar, [this appeal-to-black-box](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) works pretty well in our lives (though it won't work on AI). And from this empathy, evolution also coughed up the [moral miracle](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGvyqAQw6yqTjpKf4/the-gift-we-give-to-tomorrow) of [_sympathy_, intrinsically caring about what others feel](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NLMo5FZWFFq652MNe/sympathetic-minds).
-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 holodeck characters.
+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.
-Women and men aren't
+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.)
+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.
-[TODO WORKING: ... rewrite/expand description here—"Sympathetic Minds" first, then bridge to "Failed Utopia #4-2"]
-[TODO: mention that I'm responsible for the protagonist's name getting changed]
+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.
+_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.
-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, the _argument makes sense_.
-
-You need an additional [handwave](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HandWave) to explain why the AI 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).
+[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]
-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 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, and 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.
+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.
Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
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" (given some suitably exhaustive parsing of the human design into individual "traits"), 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″.
+The "obvious" way to to do the mapping is to keep the same percentile rank within each trait (given some suitably exhaustive parsing and factorization of the human design into individual "traits"), 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? 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.
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 brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
+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 Heads-biased and 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 brain scans can predict sex at 96.8% accuracy](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6374327/).
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 in a bit of _relative_ good news for antisexism, apprently evolution didn't need to go that far. Um, in humans—a lot of other mammals actually have [a penis bone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baculum).)
-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. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed this preference was coherent), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).
+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. In the course of _being myself_, I'm going to do more male-typical things than female-typical things, not becuase I'm _trying_ to be masculine (I'm not), and not because I "identify as" male (I don't—or I wouldn't, if someone could give me a straight answer as to what this "identifying as" operation is supposed to consist of), but because I literally in-fact am male in the same sense that male chimpanzees or male mice are male, whether or not I like it (I don't—or I wouldn't, if I still believed that preference was coherent), and whether or not I _notice_ all the little details that implies (I almost certainly don't).
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 would _prefer_ 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? When I look around me—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_](/2020/Nov/survey-data-on-cis-and-trans-women-among-haskell-programmers/) in [my open-source programming scene](/2017/Aug/interlude-vii/) are male. Am I not supposed to _notice_? I could _assert_ that it's all down to socialization and stereotyping 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 still 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. (Yudkowsky: ["It seems to me that male teenagers especially have something like a _higher cognitive temperature_, an ability to wander into strange places both good and bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality)) I can't assert _with a straight face_ that all the gaps _must_ 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 _relatively unlikely_.
_Alright_. So _in principle_, you could imagine having a PersonApp that maps me to a point in 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.
+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, she's probably smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) [_g_-loaded](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) and her 1580 (out of 1600) trounces 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.
+But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare resumés and representative work-samples of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my dropout–autodidact's passion culminating in this _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).
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: ...] There are important technical reasons why it would be objectively wrong to use the phrase _open wound_ in this situation, but you still need to dilate.
+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.
+
+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 beautiful–beautiful ponytail was a _smart move_ (and hair length isn't sexually dimorphic anyway; it's only our culture's sexism that makes it seem relevant in this context).
-I am not _ungrateful_. I am glad that these interventions _exist_ for the people who are brave and desperate enough to need them.
+My [five-month HRT experiment](/tag/hrt-diary/) was a _smart move_, both for the beautiful–beautiful breast tissue, and [For Science](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ForScience).
+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.)
-rather not look a gift man in the mouth?
+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 ...
+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'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.
+
+How dumb would I have to think you are, to expect you not to notice?
+
+And how dumb would you have think I am, to expect me to expect you to _pretend_ not to notice?
+
+-------
-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—
+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—
> 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.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff