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-[...]
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My sisters! I don't hate you! I'm really jealous of you in a lot of ways, even if I'm not following the same path—not just yet, probably not in this life. But [for the protection](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SGR4GxFK7KmW7ckCB/something-to-protect) of everything we hold sacred, _you have to let me show you what you are_.
"Why, yes, of course my female gender identity is an outgrowth of my paraphilic erotic desire to have a woman's body—after all, that's one of the two and probably only two causal pathways along which male-to-female sex reassignment could possibly seem like a good idea to someone, and you can probably already tell from my appearance and behavior that I'm not one of the androphilic kind."
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-Julia Serano:
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-> There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
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-I don't doubt that Julia Serano is telling the truth about her _subjective experiences_. But "that explanation could not account for" is _not an experience_. It's a _hypothesis_ about human psychology. We shouldn't _expect_ anyone to get that kind of thing right based on introspection alone.
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How to account for people disagreeing?
* ppl can have false beliefs about themselves, have to infer explanations for behavior (picking the gift on the right)
Some trans woman on Twitter posted an anecdote complaining that the receptionist at her place of work compared her to a male celebrity. "I look like this today [photo]; how could anyone think that was a remotely acceptable thing to say?"
-It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand is—
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
-I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _emotionally blackmailing people out of their ability to report what they see_.
-In a world where surgery is expensive, but people desperately want to change sex, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-engineering the culture to bind our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
-But [_the utility function is not up for grabs._](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ddcsdA2c2XpNpE5x/newcomb-s-problem-and-regret-of-rationality) I don't _want_ to reliniqush my ability to notice what women's faces look like, even if that means noticing that mine isn't, even if that seems vaguely disappointing due to an idiosyncracy in my psychosexual development; I don't want people to have to _doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+People can recognize sex from facial structure at 96% accuracy, remember?
+
If I sound angry, it's because I actually _do_ feel a lot of anger, but I wish I knew how to more reliably convey its target. Some trans people who see my writing tend to assume I'm self-hating, suffering from false consciousness, that my pious appeals to objectivity and reason are [just a facade](https://sinceriously.fyi/false-faces/) concealing my collaboration with a cissexist social order, that I'm in cowardly thrall to scapegoating instincts: "I'm one of the good, compliant ones—not one of those weird bad trans people who will demand their rights! _They're_ the witches, not me; burn them, not me!"
How to get over feeling like I'm fetishizing womanhood?
https://archive.ph/6l1W8
+
+someone posted an inflation fetish joke in Kelsey's channel and got a lot of laugh reactions including from Big Yud, and it's salient to me that people don't gaslight people with other transformation fetishes
+https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/458329253595840522/987991378590052402/SPOILER_unknown.png
+
+Anna thinks that committees can't do anything worthwhile; for endeavors requiring a lot of coordination, it's useful for leaders to have slack to make decisions without having to justify themselves to a mob. Anna endorses Straussianism: writing for the few is different from writing for the many, and that some of Ben's stuff may have veered too far towards loading negative affect on EA leaders; I and my model of Michael have reservations about the extent to which \"writing for the few\" could also be described as \"colluding to deceive the rest of the world\
+
+an irony: in my psychosis, I was scared that the world was far less legible than I had imagined, but that _wasn't_ why my ordeal's and Devi's were so traumatic _at all_: the psych ward is _very much_ governed by legible rules, rules that I had no control over
+
+[initial fan mail to Bailey on 7 January, followup to include blog link on 11 February; initial fan mail to Blanchard 10 August]
+
+I had some self-awareness that I was going off the rails—
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state. https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154813104220199
+
+to Ben: "I thought I got a message from Michael Vassar saying that the main coalitions were you, and Sarah Constantine, and Zack Davis vs. the world" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:30:55 GMT-0800
+
+scared that Orion was going to kill me
+
+to Ben: You can use police cars as Ubers???? Fri Feb 17 2017 15:19:59 GMT-0800
+
+]
+
+You gave me hot chocolate last night, right? I was worried that you were subconsciously poisoning me; not on purpose, but because there are just a lot of contaminants in cities; things that taste sweet to children but are actually poisonous; but, Anna said that most events are normal; I don't remember that note"
+Mon Apr 10 08:51:03 PDT 2017
+
+Michael's "Congratulations on not going back to work at the carpet store!" was a reference to Rick & Morty "Mortynight Run" which aired in August 2015, but I hadn't seen it yet
+
+winning Hamilton tickets at $2200
+
+meeting Katie—
+
+Sun Jan 15 2017 08:35:40
+Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF. If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing.\"",
+
+He was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff"
+But in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy
+Not in the way of someone feminine
+The only thing I knew about it at the point we got married was that he thought it was fun to go in drag sometimes
+Like Halloween
+
+And he thought feminization kink was fun
+Like me making him dress up? But he said it was about humiliation
+We didn't even do it more than a handful of times, it wasn't really my thing
+Nothing in my experience ever caused me to think he was trans
+
+"He talked about being a child always feeling out of place
+"But out of place seemed like because he was shy and anxious
+He said he was convinced his anxiety and social problems was *because* he was trans
+
+Spencer seemed much less happy to me after admitting to want transition, often crying about how ugly his body was
+
+because it basically amounts to, \"You rebuilt your entire life around your perverted narcissistic fantasy and didn't even notice\
+like, there's no nice way to say that
+
+My taxon, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.\
+
+all those transwomen are going to be so embarrassed when the FAI gives us telepathy after the Singularity
+and it turns out that what actual women feel as _absolutely nothing to do_ with what AGP fantasy feels like
+
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZEgQGAjQm5rTAnGuM/beware-boasting-about-non-existent-forecasting-track-records
+
+Idle anecdote on zero-sum intutions: I tend to invent fake conservation laws when I'm having a psychotic episode. In 2013, it was "the happiness and suffering in the universe sum to zero". In 2017, it was something more complicated about a pattern where "frenemies" (think Hamilton and Burr in the musical) inevitably get into a conflict where one murders the other, but, in order to make the equation balance, aspects of the dead man's personality and values rub off on the victor. (I'm not claiming there's a moral here other than "Psychosis is good for inventing fake conservation laws.")
+
+ If my so-called "friends" are going to selectively pretend not to know basic Sequences shit in a way that has clearly been optimized for tricking me into cutting my dick off (independently of the empirical evidence determining whether or not we live in one of the possible worlds where cutting my dick off is a good idea), and still won't correct the mistake after I (and Michael, and Ben, and Sarah, and Zvi—and Jessica, who can be presumed to not share my object-level-politically-derived biases, because she seems pretty happy about having had her dick cut off) spend thousands of words patiently explaining the problem ... how do I know these "friends" aren't already secretly in the pay of the mine dwarves? They're certainly acting like it.
+
+A distributed intelligence that's using your former friends for processing power and actuators is trying to confuse you into cutting your dick off. Another former friend says, "Oh, that's just an exception; the distributed intelligence isn't usually that crazy. You shouldn't stop believing its story about how you need to give it your lunch money so that it can save the world." You think for a moment. "I guess that makes sense," you say, and hand over your lunch money.
+
+* the moment in October 2016 when I switched sides http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/ http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/
+https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings
+
+Men who wish they were 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?
+
+I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing, either by design or due to technological limitations.
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff