complete draft "You Are Right and I Was Wrong"

[Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git] / content / drafts / you-are-right-and-i-was-wrong-reply-to-tailcalled-on-causality.md

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 Title: You Are Right and I Was Wrong: Reply to Tailcalled on Causality
 Title: You Are Right and I Was Wrong: Reply to Tailcalled on Causality

-Date: 2021-02-01
+Date: 2021-02-01 05:00

 Category: commentary
 Tags: causality, Tailcalled, autogynephilia, two-type taxonomy
 Status: draft
 
 Category: commentary
 Tags: causality, Tailcalled, autogynephilia, two-type taxonomy
 Status: draft
 

-Friend of the blog [Tailcalled responds to](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/) my [2016 response](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) to [Ozy on autogynephilia](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/).
+Friend of the blog [Tailcalled responds to](https://surveyanon.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/causality-is-essential-reply-to-mtsw-on-autogynephilia/) my [2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/)!

 
 

-Summarizing—Ozy had claimed that the concept of _autogynephilia_ is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women _also_ have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant gender issues.
+Summarizing—[Ozy had claimed that](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) the concept of _autogynephilia_ is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women _also_ have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant gender issues.

 
 

-I was, and am, intensely skeptical that these are really separate things, but at the time, I didn't have the language to properly articulate the theoretical basis of my skepticism. Frustrated by the tendency I perceived of many trans advocates to [resist making scientific generalizations about psychology](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/) while acknowledging the empirical correlations that motivate the generalizations, I wrote, "Summarizing correlations is the _entire point_ of making a taxonomy."
+I was, and am, intensely skeptical that these are really three separate things. I think it's more parsimonious to suppose that some males are autogynephilic, and that some fraction of them go on to develop sex dysphoria, rather than to posit _different_ causes for what really _looks like_ [the same erotic phenomenon](http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2015/05/reconceptualizing-autogynephilia-as_26.html) depending on whether the person goes on to transition or not. But at the time, I didn't have the language to properly articulate the theoretical basis of my skepticism. Frustrated by the tendency I perceived of many trans advocates to [resist scientific generalizations about psychology](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/) while acknowledging the empirical correlations that motivate the generalizations, I wrote, "Summarizing correlations is the _entire point_ of making a taxonomy."

 
 But as Tailcalled's response points out, this is just wrong! Different causal theories can generate the same correlations in a particular set of observations, while still making meaningfully and drastically different claims about the world.
 
 
 But as Tailcalled's response points out, this is just wrong! Different causal theories can generate the same correlations in a particular set of observations, while still making meaningfully and drastically different claims about the world.
 

-As an illustrative example, suppose you observe that among professional athletes in Chicago, [basketball players wear red jerseys](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/185700267974/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2018-2019), but [gridiron football players wear navy-blue jerseys](http://www.gridiron-uniforms.com/GUD/images/2020_Chicago.png). Reifying these observations into a two-type "basketball/red" and "football/blue" taxonomy of professional athletes is perhaps not the _worst_ theory—it does [compress the length of the message needed to describe your observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)—but it's not a particularly _good_ one, largely because it's so _fragile_: it _completely_ breaks down the moment you leave Chicago, or [the Bulls unveil a new jersey](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/635656121361809408/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2020-2021), or you just look at what the visiting team is wearing. And it's fragile _because_ it doesn't reflect what's "really going on" in the world: in fact, what color shirt you're wearing doesn't causally affect what games you can play, and _vice versa_.
+As an illustrative example, suppose you observe that among professional athletes in Chicago, [basketball players wear red jerseys](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/185700267974/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2018-2019), but [gridiron football players wear navy-blue jerseys](http://www.gridiron-uniforms.com/GUD/images/2020_Chicago.png). Reifying these observations into a two-type "basketball/red" and "football/blue" taxonomy of professional athletes is not the _worst_ theory—it does [compress the length of the message needed to describe your observations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mB95aqTSJLNR9YyjH/message-length)—but it's definitely not a _good_ one, largely because it's so _fragile_: it completely breaks down the moment you leave Chicago, or [the Bulls unveil a new jersey](https://nbajerseydatabase.tumblr.com/post/635656121361809408/chicago-bulls-city-jersey-2020-2021), or you just look at what the _visiting_ team is wearing. And it's fragile _because_ it doesn't reflect what's "really going on" in the world: in fact, what color shirt you're wearing doesn't causally affect what games you can play, and _vice versa_.

 
 

-In the case of sex dysphoria in [developmental males](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), I think the documented correlations between age-of-onset and sexual orientation and history of autogynephilic arousal _do_ reflect what's really going on in the world.
+In the case of sex dysphoria in [developmental males](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), I think the documented correlations between age-of-onset, sexual orientation, history of female embodiment fantasies, _&c._, _do_ reflect distinct taxons in what's really going on in the world. (If I only get one table to showcase the correlational data, I'll pick [Table IV](/images/lawrence_table_vi.png) from Anne Lawrence's ["Sexuality Before and After Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery"](/papers/lawrence-sexuality_before_and_after_mtf_srs.pdf).) I think alternative theories that try to explain the same bimodality in the data, such as [Veale, Clarke, and Lomax's identity defense model](/papers/veale-clarke-lomax-identity-defense_model_of_gender-variance_development.pdf) (which chalks up the difference to whether or not defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity) are a stretch.

 
 

-[TODO: wrap up, talk more about the specifics in Tailcalled's post, maybe cite Veale's identity-defense model or Serano 2020]
+But I'm making that scientific judgment between theories based on my own parsimony intuitions applied to everything I've read and seen; _convincing_ someone else who doesn't already think the same the way is, and should be, a _lot_ more work. Trying to get away with "You agree to the bimodality, therefore you must agree to the taxonomy" would be both _lazy_ and _wrong_, and I thank Tailcalled for his vigilance.