So the question becomes, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
-Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQ+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared _social_ experience could induce similarities.
+Well, sociologically, they're demographically eligible for our Society's LGBTQIA+ political coalition, living outside of what traditional straight Society considers "normal." That shared _social_ experience could induce similarities.
But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experience; you're saying "it's a natural leap to be attracted ...", appealing to the underlying psychology of sexual attraction in a way that doesn't seem very culture-sensitive. In terms of the underlying psychology of sexual attraction, what do lesbians, and gay men, and heterosexual males with a female gender identity, and heterosexual females with a male gender identity have in common, that they _don't_ have in common with heterosexual males and females without a cross-sex identity?
I think the answer here is just "Nothing."
-Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypothesis of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
+Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans).
-_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_ is probably a kind of brain intersex condition, at least in many cases.)
+_Sometimes_ I want to categorize people by gynephilic/androphilic sexual orientation: this helps me make sense of how [lesbians are masculine compared to other females, and gay men are feminine compared to other males](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_—not the kind of trans people we know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we don't know.)
-But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a within-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a _different_ [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense as a _political coalition_ (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
+But even so, when thinking about sexual orientation, I'm usually making a _within_-sex comparison: contrasting how gay men are different from ordinary men, how lesbians are different from ordinary women. I don't usually have much need to reason about "people who are attracted to the sex that they are" as a group, because that group splits cleanly into gay men and lesbians, which have a _different_ [underlying causal structure](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" (...QUIA+) makes sense as a _political coalition_ (who have a shared interest in resisting the oppression of traditional sexual morality), not because the L and the G and the B and the T are the same kind of people who live common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" is one thing.)
-And so, given that I _already_ don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest (because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately), "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?!
+And so, given that I _already_ don't have much use for "if you are a sex, and you're attracted to that sex" as a category of analytical interest, because I think gay men and lesbians are different things that need to be studied separately, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender" (with respect to "gender", not sex) comes off even worse. What causal mechanism could that possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?!
Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" gibberish, in the face of _empirical_ survey data, huh?
-The thing is, I don't see my theory as _making_ particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "imagine being him/her" questions, because I consider it highly nonobvious whether the survey responses mean the same thing in different populations.
+The thing is, I don't see my theory as _making_ particularly strong advance predictions one way or the other on how cis women or gay men will respond to the "imagine being him/her" questions.
+
+The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.4 on anyone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. If you look at what trans women say _to each other_ when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories (examples from /r/MtF: ["I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/qy4ncb/i_get_horny_when_i_do_girl_things_is_this_a_fetish/), ["Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/q8k57y/is_the_body_swap_fetish_inherently_pretrans/), ["Could it be a sex fantasy?"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rd78kw/could_it_be_a_sex_fantasy/), _&c._, _ad infinitum_) _over and over and over_ again.
+
+Without making any pretentions whatsoever to rigor or Science, but _just_ looking at the world and trying to describe it in words, I think there is clearly a _thing_ here. When I look at what women write, and when I look at what gay men write, I don't see the _same thing_.
+
+I freely admit that this art of looking at how people behave in the world and trying to describe what you see, is not a Science, because it relies on your brain's magical (as the term of art for "capabilities we don't know how to program") pattern-matching abilities that other people might doubt, whereas if you have a pre-registered survey of fixed questions, and the target demographic comes back and says 3.4, other people can't seriously doubt that they did, in fact, say 3.4.
+
+Nevertheless, looking at how people behave in the world and trying to describe what you see is a form of _empiricism_, even if it's less third-party-legible than Science. In trying to upgrade our naïve empiricism to a Science, we should hope to design careful surveys to give us quantitative measurements of the qualitative patterns we see "in the wild", but getting this right is a surprisingly tricky endeavor. We're not obligated to throw away all our qualitative observations, in favor of single (!) survey question, just because the latter is quantifiable.
+
+You wrote about this in ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), expressing skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
+
+> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
+
+> Some psychiatrists love this test. I hate it. Patients will say "Yes, that absolutely describes me!" and someone will diagnose them with bipolar disorder. Then if you ask what they meant, they'd say something like "Once my local football team made it to the Super Bowl and I was really happy, but then they lost and I was really sad." I don't even want to tell you how many people get diagnosed bipolar because of stuff like this.
+
+> There was a study that supposedly proved this test worked. But parts of it confused me, and it was done on a totally different population that didn't generalize to hospital inpatients.
+
+The reason it makes any sense at all for you to be skeptical, is because our beliefs about the existence and etiology of "bipolar disorder", don't completely stand or fall on this particular test. People _already_ had many observations pointing to the idea of "bipolar disorder" as a common cluster of symptoms. From your years of clinical experience, you know with your eyes what the cluster looks like. So when people whose favorite team lost the Super Bowl happen to answer "Yes" to the some of the same survey questions as people who you've _seen_ in the frenzy of mania and depths of depression, you generate the hypothesis: "Gee, maybe different populations are interpreting the question differently." Not as a _certainty_—maybe further research will provide more solid evidence that "bipolar disorder" isn't what you thought—but there's nothing un-Bayesian about thinking that your brain's pattern-matching capabilities are on to something important that this particular survey instrument isn't catching. You're not scientifically obligated to _immediately_ jump to "Bipolar Is Common and Not Especially Related to Mania or Depression."
+
+If you're skeptical that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think you should be still more skeptical that that a survey _about sexuality_ might not generalize to people _of different sexes_! Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of sex differences, this is the _one domain_ where I think we have very strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex [empahtic inference](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9fpWoXpNv83BAHJdc/the-comedy-of-behaviorism) to fail!
+
+This is why I expect "But lots of cis women are autogynephilic too!!" claims to fall apart on further examination.
+
+(As I mentioned in my email of [TODO], you're far from the first person to come up with the dodge.) [TODO Moser link]
+
+I'm not unscientifically denying the survey data itself; I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like, to strongly suspect that women who answer Yes to the same survey questions as AGP males are mostly in the position of saying that they got really happy and then really sad when their team lost the Super Bowl.
+
+Naturally, I can't know with any confidence (without more interviewing) what's really going on in Elena's head. But to match one anecdote with another: when I _first_ came out to Sarah Constantin in 2016,
+
+
+
-The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia (in males) "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.2 on anyone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting.
-If I'm not playing the modesty/Outside View politeness game, I actually think this thing is _just obvious_ if you look at the world and try to describe what you see. To illustrate, I was about to include a link to [the search results for "fetish"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/search?q=fetish&restrict_sr=on) on [/r/MtF](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), but before even sending a search query, I see that the top post (with 476 votes) at time of drafting this paragraph is ... ["I have boobs and a pp"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rjehj1/i_have_boobs_and_a_pp/).
-Show that post title to any normal person outside of your tiny and recent ideological bubble, and ask them whether they think the author is a man with a fetish, or a woman trapped in a man's body. You and I, we're intellectuals—in our world, you wouldn't, and shouldn't, let me get away with that leading question. ("Man with a fetish, or ..." is a false dichotomy.) Nevertheless, _pragmatically_, I think the normal person gets this one right with far greater sample-efficiency by means of successfully noticing that actual women don't post about how they "have boobs" in that particular gleeful tone, and the people in your tiny and recent ideological bubble get this one wrong because you're insane religious fanatics who are obligated to pretend you don't have a concept of "actual women."
-[TODO: IRB nightmare and interpretation skepticism]
[TODO: reasons to be suspicious that women aren't reporting the same thing]
----
+I think "Men who sexually fantasize about being women, do not particularly resemble actual women" _is_ the "boring" hypothesis—boring in the sense that Steve Sailer's views on race are boring, in that _everyone knows this shit instinctively_, but no one at your respectibility level can say it out loud because you're insane religious fanatics who are
+
In ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), you express skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder:
> You ask patients a bunch of things like "Do you ever feel really happy, then really sad?". If they say 'yes' to enough of these questions, you start to worry.
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