From a9b2ec2d649ee8900bef82835ef06608a93cec4a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" Date: Wed, 10 Feb 2021 10:13:05 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] drafting "Sexual Dimorphism" (Wednesday morning) --- ...ences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md | 10 ++++--- ...exual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md | 26 ++++++++++++++----- 2 files changed, 26 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md index 8e0d612..75ee693 100644 --- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md +++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md @@ -128,9 +128,9 @@ I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but there were definitely some SJW-like patterns in my comments, inherited from my time in the feminist blogosphere. -[TODO: smoother transition: this was before Overcoming Bias, but it gives the flavor of my attitude—] +[TODO: smoother transition from talking about antisexism to Overcoming Bias: the Amy Alkon song was before Overcoming Bias, but it gives the flavor of my attitude—] -There was an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-columns-blog/newindex.html), whose column got syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences. Since I knew that believing in psychological sex differences was _bad and wrong_, one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head went— +There was an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), whose column got syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. Since I knew that believing in psychological sex differences was _bad and wrong_, one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head went— > _I hope Amy Alkon dies tonight > So she can't give her bad advice @@ -140,6 +140,8 @@ There was an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/ag-colum > Because the world's not girls and guys > Cave men and women fucking 'round the fire in the night_ +Looking back with the outlook later acquired from my robot cult, this is abhorrent. You don't _casually wish death_ on someone just because you disagree with their theory of psychology! Even if it wasn't in a spirit of personal malice (this was a song I sung to myself, not an actual threat directed at Amy Alkon's inbox), the sentiment just _isn't done_. But at the time, I _didn't notice there was anything wrong with my song_. Having not yet been socialized into the refined ethos of "False ideas should be argued with, but we too may have ideas that are false", I was still inhabiting the natural mode of lamenting the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad. + [TODO: this denial was in the background in "The Opposite Sex" (https://web.archive.org/web/20130216025508/http://lesswrong.com/lw/rp/the_opposite_sex/), Yud on "men should think of themselves as men" / "I often wish some men/women would appreciate" Me pretending to be dumb about someone not pretending to be dumb about my initials https://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/04/inhuman-rationa.html @@ -552,7 +554,7 @@ Or there's a piece that makes the rounds on social media occasionally: ["I Am A If boys are shit, and the rules say that you have to see someone as a girl if they _say_ they're a girl, that provides an incentive [on the margin](https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marginalism.html) to identify as trans, which could intensify the interpretation of autogynephilic attraction as a [ego-syntonic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egosyntonic_and_egodystonic) beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (rather than an ego-dystonic sex thing to be ashamed of), or be a source of gender dysphoria in males who aren't autogynephilic at all. -To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as sex dysphoria is common (or has _become_ more common), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); it might not be as easy for a clinician to distinguish autogynephilia from "cognitive" gender problems in the grab-bag of all other males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason. +To the extent that "cognitive" things like internalized misandry manifesting as sex dysphoria is common (or has _become_ more common in the recent cultural environment), then maybe the two-type taxonomy isn't androphilic/autogynephilic so much as it is androphilic/"not-otherwise-specified": the early-onset type is very behaviorally distinct and has a very straightforward motive to transition (it would be _less_ weird not to); it might not be as easy for a clinician to distinguish autogynephilia from other sources of gender problems in the grab-bag of all males showing up to the gender clinic for any other reason. Whatever the True Causal Graph looks like—however my remaining uncertainty turns out to resolve in the limit of sufficiently advanced psychological science, I think I _obviously_ have more than enough evidence to reject the mainstream ["inner sense of gender"](https://www.drmaciver.com/2019/05/the-inner-sense-of-gender/) story as _not adding up_. @@ -605,7 +607,7 @@ https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1092472430465929216 > I'm so mad. wow. like. I look like this right now, how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say??? It was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice - + Ziz's complaint that I'm siding with the oppressors in conceptual warfare the political incentives propagate recursively, a phase transition: in a culture it's normal for AGP males to transition, any sub-culture where they don't is subject to attack as transphobic I want to stay aligned with _actual women_, many of whom have an interest in excluding me and Ziz diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md index 2d17ac6..2910f26 100644 --- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md +++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md @@ -11,11 +11,24 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jNAAZ9XNyt82CXosr/mirrors-and-paintings * aren't all those transwomen going to be _embarrrassed_ after the Singularity, when telepathy tech makes everything obvious -* the time I snuck a copy of MTiMB into the MIRI library (In my defense, it seemed like something HPEV would do—and noticeably not like something Hermione would do) +like the time I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library. (It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.) -What happens when every sensitive bookish males who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to this aggressive recruitment campaign? -Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months. + +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!" + +I have [no grounds to fault anyone for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I really think this is reading me wrong? + +https://sinceriously.fyi/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare/ + +I'm not at war with trans _people_: open, creative, brilliant people who are just like me—I want to believe that even the natal females are "just like me" in some relevant abstract sense—but who read different books in a different order. + +I'm at war with an _ideology_ which I think is making a lot of philosophical and empirical claims that I think are _false_. + + +Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of cultural awareness of it _as_ a phenomenon. ([An analogy someone made on /r/GenderCriticalGuys just before it got banned](https://web.archive.org/web/20200705203105if_/https://reddit.com/r/GenderCriticalGuys/comments/hhcs34/autogynephilic_male_here_big_rant_about_denial_of/): imagine living in a Society where people _were_ gay at the same rates as in our own, but the _concept_ of homosexuality didn't exist—and was [actively suppressed whenever someone tried to point it out](/2017/Jan/if-the-gay-community-were-like-the-trans-community/).) Surveys of college students found that 13% (Table 3 in [Person _et al._](/papers/person_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_behaviors.pdf)) or 5.6% (Table 5 in the replication [Hsu _et al._](/papers/hsu_et_al-gender_differences_in_sexual_fantasy.pdf)) of males have fantasized about being the opposite sex in the last 3 months. + +What happens when every sensitive bookish male who thinks [it might be cool to be a woman](https://xkcd.com/535/) gets subjected to this aggressive recruitment campaign? * AGPs dating each other is the analogue of "Failed Utopia 4-2"!!—the guys in "Conservative Men in Conservative Dresses" are doing better in some ways. Tri-S was explicitly not for transsexuals @@ -23,6 +36,7 @@ Autogynephilia, as a phenomenon, is _absurdly common_ relative to the amount of Anne Lawrence described autogynephiles as ["men who love women and want to become what they love."](/papers/lawrence-becoming_what_we_love.pdf) But it's worse than that. We're men who love what we _wish_ women were, and want to become _that_. + * "The Opposite Sex" * EY was right about "men need to think about themselves _as men_" (find cite) @@ -33,10 +47,10 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8 [TODO: my pseudobisexual moments (it's California in the year 2015) our analogues would make a good couple in a nearby alternate universe where at least one of us is female. "Exactly one," he said. "It's California in the year 2015," I said.] -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. A trans woman I know thinks I'm 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 via 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!" -I have [no grounds to fault her for not taking my self-report as unquestionable](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/), but I still think she's reading me wrong. -[agree that scapegoating is real] + + + https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/ -- 2.17.1