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-In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of dysphoria onset, interests, and personality. Many authors have noticed this clustering of traits under various names, [while disagreeing about the underlying causality](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/).
+In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphilic and non-androphilic trans women seem to be different from each other—not just in their sexuality, but also in their age of dysphoria onset, interests, and personality. Many authors have noticed this bimodal clustering of traits under various names, [while disagreeing about the underlying causality](/2021/Feb/you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality/).
[Blanchard]
At the high level of taxonomy—if I have to choose between a one-type and a two-type theory—then I think the two-type theory is superior. But I also think we can do better and say more about the underlying causal structure that the simple two-types story is approximating, and hopefully explain anomalous cases that look like "noise" to the simple theory.
-
-In the language of causal graphs
-
-I think I do have a pretty good guess at what's going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph ]
+In the language of [causal graphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causal_graph) (where the arrows point from cause to effect), here's what I think is going on:
Let me explain.
-[What are the reasons transitioning could possibly make sense to someone?—]
+What are the reasons a male-to-female transition might seem like a good idea to someone? Why would a male be interested in living socially as a woman? I see three prominent reasons, depicted as the parents of the transition node in a graph.
-[1. actually being really feminine]
+First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with female-typical psychological traits, then [...]
-[2. beautiful pure self-identity thing related to AGP]
+Second—second is hard to explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, [...]
[3. cultural/ideological factors]
+[Threshold model]
+
+[Okay, but where do the two types come from? The graph is just showing cause-and-effect, but if this were actually a Bayes net, there would be numbers representing a probability distribution, and I claim that the distribution clusters into two types]
+
+[The sexual orientation node increases femininity and decreases AGP, so those pathways are anti-correlated; however, the fact that straight AGP men also vary somewhat in their degree of femininity; some accounts have emphasized how masculine (even hypermasculine) AGPs are, but this seems wrong]
+
+[People who don't quite seem to fit the coarse taxonomy might still be explained by the graph and a threshold model]
+
+[Why do I believe this? All six arrows in the graph are something that I think we have a huge weight of evidence for, either formally, or just looking at the world]
+
+[Sexual orientation effect on femininity documented by Lippa and Bailey-Zucker]
+
+[femininity->transition would be obvious even if it weren't in th]
+
+[ETLE sexual orientation AGP v-structure, and effect of AGP on transition documented by Lawrence]
+
+[I don't have a good formal citation on cultural factors, but it seems really obvious if you've been paying attention for the last decade]
+
+[quantifying the two-type effect:
+Lippa 2000 "Gender-Related Traits in [...]"
+2.70 effect of femininity for gay vs. not-day and 1.07 for "any" vs. "no" attraction to men
+mean GD score for non-lesbian women as 0.31; mean score for gay men was 0.30!
+—oh, maybe I want to be using Study 2, which had a better sample of gays
+GD occupations in study 2
+gay men are at .48 (.14); straight women at .36 (.13); straight men at .68 (.12)
+that's d=–1.61 between gay and straight men
+a gay man only needs to be 1 standard deviation (.48-.36 = 0.12) more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight women
+whereas a straight man needs to be (.68-.36 = 0.32) 0.32/0.12=2.67 more feminine than average to be as feminine as a straight woman—that's rarer, but not impossible
+]
+
+[okay, my inner Tailcalled is telling me I need to quantitatively model the joint effect of AGP and femininity to see if two types actually emerge]
+[further implications: as cultural factors increase, the late-onset type becomes more of a "NOS" rather than AGP type]
_(Thanks to the immortal [Tailcalled](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/) for discussion.)_
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