From 7e9ace290ce6ec4c760944a15755ed17fff5313e Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2022 15:28:04 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] Sunday spiritual strength 1: tap at two-types draft MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Even if it's not the memoir, it's vital that I keep moving—keep moving at any cost for a few hours, so that I remember what it's like to be alive --- ...mation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md | 33 ++++++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 24 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md b/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md index ce43feb..9adf98c 100644 --- a/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md +++ b/content/drafts/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model.md @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ In the case of male-to-female transsexualism, we notice a pattern where androphi This claim is most famously associated with the work of [Blanchard](/papers/blanchard-typology_of_mtf_transsexualism.pdf), [Bailey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Would_Be_Queen), and [Lawrence](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html), who argue that there are two discrete types of male-to-female transsexualism: an autogynephilic type (basically, [men who love women and want to become what they love](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf)), and an androphilic/homosexual type (basically, the extreme right tail of feminine gay men). -But many authors have noticed the same 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/). [Veale, Clarke, and Lomax](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf) attribute the differences to whether defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity. [Anne Vitale](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) identifies distinct groups (Group One and Group Three, in her terminology), but hypothesizes that the difference is due to degree of prenatal androgenization. Julia Serano [concedes that "the correlations that Blanchard and other researchers prior to him described generally hold true"](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/serano-agp-a_scientific_review_feminist_analysis_and_alternative.pdf), but denies their causal or taxonometric significance. +But many authors have noticed the same 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/). [Veale, Clarke, and Lomax](/papers/veale-lomax-clarke-identity_defense_model.pdf) attribute the differences to whether defense mechanisms are used to suppress a gender-variant identity. [Anne Vitale](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm) identifies distinct groups (Group One and Group Three, in her terminology), but hypothesizes that the difference is due to degree of prenatal androgenization. Julia Serano [concedes that "the correlations that Blanchard and other researchers prior to him described generally hold true"](/papers/serano-agp-a_scientific_review_feminist_analysis_and_alternative.pdf), but denies their causal or taxonometric significance. Is a two type typology of male-to-female transsexualism a good theory? Is it "really" two different conditions (following Blanchard _et al._), or slightly different presentations of "the same" condition (following Veale _et al._)? @@ -46,33 +46,48 @@ First and most obviously, femininity: if you happen to be a male with unusually Second—second is hard to quickly explain if you're not already familiar with the phenomenon, but basically, autogynephilia is very obviously a real thing; [I wrote about my experiences with it in a previous post](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/). Crucially, autogynephilic identification with the _idea_ of being female, is distinct from naturally feminine behavior, of which other people [know it when they see it](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/). -Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. People who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.) +Third—various cultural factors. You can't be trans if your culture doesn't have a concept of "being trans", and the concepts [and incentives](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) that your culture offers, make a difference as to how you turn out. Many people who think of themselves as trans women in today's culture, could very well be "the same" as people who thought of themselves as drag queens or occasional cross-dressers 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. (Either "the same" in terms of underlying dispositions, or, in many cases, just literally the same people.) If there are multiple non-mutually-exclusive reasons why transitioning might seem like a good idea to someone, then the decision of whether to transition could take the form of a liability–threshold model: males transition if the _sum_ of their levels of femininity, autogynephilia, and culture-related-trans-disposition exceed some threshold (given some sensible scheme for quantifying and adding (!) these traits). -You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm conjecturing that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types". +You might ask: okay, but then where do the two types come from? This graph is just illustrating (conjectured) cause-and-effect relationships, but if we were actually to flesh it out as a complete Bayesian network, there would be additional data that quantitatively specifies what (probability distribution over) values each node takes conditional on the values of its parents. When I claim that Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence's two-type taxonomy is a useful approximation for this causal model, I'm claiming that the distribution represented by this Bayesian network (if we had the complete network) could also be approximated a two-cluster model: _most_ people high in the "femininity" factor will be low in the "autogynephilia" factor and _vice versa_, such that you can buy decent predictive accuracy by casually speaking as if there were two discrete "types". +Why? The key has to do with the parents of femininity and autogynephilia in the graph. + +Gay men are more feminine than straight men. + +And + + +(Of course, it's _also_ the case that the component factors in a liability-threshold model would negatively correlate + +the factors of a + +, due to Berkson's paradox, [TODO— [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 informal accounts (link Sailer) have emphasized how masculine (even hypermasculine) AGPs are, but this seems wrong] [briefly mention ETLE] -[Berkson's paradox is also a thing] [People who don't quite seem to fit the coarse taxonomy might still be explained by the graph and a threshold model] ] -You might ask: okay, but hhy do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_? +You might ask: okay, but why do I believe this? Anyone can name some variables and sketch a directed graph between them. Why should you believe this particular graph is _true_? Ultimately, the reader cannot abdicate responsibility to think it through and decide for herself ... but it seems to _me_ that all six arrows in the graph are things that we separately have a pretty large weight of evidence for, either in published scientific studies, or just informally looking at the world. The femininity→transition arrow is obvious. The sexual orientation→femininity arrow (representing the fact that gay men are more feminine than straight men), besides being stereotypical folk knowledge, has also been extensively documented, for example by [Lippa](/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf) and by [Bailey and Zucker](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf). -The v-structure between +The v-structure between sexual orientation, erotic target location erroneousness, and autogynephilia has been documented by Anne Lawrence: + + + + +The autogynehilia→transition arrow has + +The cultural-factors→transition arrow is obvious if you haven't been living under a rock for the last decade. -[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 [...]" -- 2.17.1