+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.
+
+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 they're 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 all Heads, but there are vastly more of them.
+
+Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which which set the coin came from, but if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence as to which collection we're looking at.
+
+A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip doesn't tell you much. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_.
+
+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 measurement: [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 magical transformation technology. AI techniques like [generative adversarial networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.10786) and [autoencoders](https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-with-autoencoders-77fd3a8dd368) can learn the structure of the distribution of face photographs, and use that knowledge to [synthesize faces from scratch](https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/) and
+
+[...]
+
+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.
+
+[...]
+
+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]