+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 think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow 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—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to live like that.
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+If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror.)
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+What's going on here? _Speaking_ of mirrors, the sexologist [James Cantor speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons. Way, way back in the 1980s, Italian neuroscientists wired up the brains of macaque monkeys with electrodes, and noticed that some of the _same_ brain regions would light up when the monkey grabbed a rasin, and when the monkey watched the _researcher_ eat a rasin. These "mirror neurons" are speculated to form the basis of empathy.
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+So, the _phrase_ "mirror neurons" is not and _cannot_ be an answer. Real understanding is about detailed predictive models, not [what words to repeat back in school](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password). I can't expect to understand the real answer without spending multiple years studying neuroscience, and if I did, I couldn't expect to transmit the model to you in one blog post. (That would be _several_ blog posts.)
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+Still, the mirror-neurons anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction."
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+One interesting prediction of this story [TODO: explain the ETLE theory]
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+I don't _know_ the details—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's one of those sensitive bookish males rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
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+Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female-typical in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?
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+_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).
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+But I _don't_ think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively _jacking off_ to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various _different_ female bodies ... unless she was _already_ into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a _lot_ of porn in this genre! But it seems to mostly be created for and consumed by ... men?
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+I just don't see any _reason_ to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in _male_ sexuality.
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+(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I _like_ being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" to "variation", but people who don't [understand the naturalistic fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature) aren't going to understand anything _else_ I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male heterosexuality weren't "supposed" to collide like this.)
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+But the obvious explanation has a lot of less-obvious implications—and it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read, and in particular, the methods of rationality I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this is a _hard problem_.
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+We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who didn't know everything I do—perhaps due to [reading different books in a different order](TODO: link "The Feeling Is Mutual"), or maybe just 15 fewer IQ points—might come to very different conclusions about himself.
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+Rather than thinking
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+(As Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarked](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact
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