Sorry for the sparse blogging lately—I've been busy with other projects. Fortunately, at least one other blogger has been covering the gender politics and social epistemology beat in my absence: at Repeal the Common Era, the author delivers an excellent 4.3K word piece on "The Jenner Shift and …
It was not the sight of Mitchum that made him sit still in horror. It was the realization that there was no one he could call to expose this thing and stop it—no superior anywhere on the line, from Colorado to Omaha to New York. They were in on …
Why idly theorize when you can JUST CHECK and find out the ACTUAL ANSWER to a superficially similar-sounding question SCIENTIFICALLY?
In "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender", Scott Alexander, based on his eyeballing of data from the 2020 Slate Star Codex reader survey, proposes what …
If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.
—Zora Neale Hurston
Recapping my Whole Dumb Story so far—in a previous post, "Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems", I told the part about how I've "always" (since puberty …
I'm beginning to wonder if he's constructed an entire system of moral philosophy around the effects of the loyalty mod—a prospect that makes me distinctly uneasy. It would hardly be the first time a victim of mental illness has responded to their affliction that way—but it would certainly …
I'm going to make this a brief "endorsement" rather than a detailed "review", because the most important thing about this book is that it exists. There just doesn't seem to have been a polished, popular-level book-form introduction to autogynephilia/autoandrophilia before!
(Previously, the secondary sources I've referred to most often …
(a stray observation from December 2016)
Janet Mock's autobiography Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, & So Much More is an poignant example of an HSTS telling her story while adhering strictly to the 2014 mainstream-trans-identity-politics party line about how all this works ("gender identity", sex "assigned at birth …
A lot of people tend to balk when first hearing about the two-type taxonomy of male-to-female transsexualism. What, one scoffs, you're saying all trans women are exactly one of these two things? It seems at once both too simple and too specific.
In some ways, it's a fair complaint! Psychology …
Chinese legend tells of a eunuch named Zhao Gao, a chancellor to the Second Emperor. The power-hungry Zhao Gao wanted to arrange a coup, but was worried that the other members of the imperial court wouldn't cooperate with his designs.
One day, Zhao Gao announced a horse was being given …
Friend of the blog Tailcalled responds to my 2016 response to Ozy on autogynephilia!
Summarizing—Ozy had claimed that the concept of autogynephilia is conflating three things: ordinary female sexual behavior (cis women also have female bodies in their fantasies!), a manifestation of gender dysphoria, and "true" autogynephilia without concomitant …
I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
"No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
—Distress by Greg Egan
In "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", the immortal Scott Alexander argues that proposed definitions of concepts aren't true or …
I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the …
Friend of the blog—I mean, I hope we're still friends even though I'm kind of trying to overthrow them as de facto Gender Czar of the Less Wrong diaspora—Ozymandias of Thing of Things has been running an intellectual Turing test challenging adherents of the gender-identity and two-type theories …
Of course, "Blanchard's" typology is subject to Stigler's law of eponymy.
No, I'm not talking about earlier Western sexologists like Robert Stoller, Magnus Hirchfield, or Blanchard's mentor Kurt Freund.
I'm talking about Abu Zakaria Yahya Ibn Sharaf al-Nawawī writing in the 13th century CE:
A mukhannath is the one ("male …
"No, it turns out that there are actually three types of male-to-female transsexualism: effeminate homosexuality, autogynephilia, and—by far the most common—the third type that we made up in order to keep our jobs."
This post is a response to Ozymandias's "Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction" (and is cross-posted to the comments there).
Autogynephilia does not work like other sexual fetishes. It is relatively rare for a person to upend their entire life to satisfy a sexual fetish
Everyone agrees that virtually no …
I had occasion to sing a little song at a party recently, whereupon a trans woman who was present—let's call her "Deborah"—immediately asked if I was gay. (I'm not.) When talking with her later, mentioning that our mutual friend had been trying to convince me that I was …
Media depictions of trans women, whether they take the form of fictional characters or actual people, usually fall under one of two main archetypes: the "deceptive transsexual" or the "pathetic transsexual." While characters based on both models are presented as having a vested interest in achieving an ultrafeminine appearance, they …