Oh, we have to get this right
Yes, we have to make them see
—"Ballad of the Crystal Empire", My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
(Epistemic status: somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also far more plausible than it has any right to be. Assumes the correctness of Blanchard's transsexualism typology without arguing it here.)
So, not a lot of people understand this, but the end of the world is, in fact, nigh. Conditional on civilization not collapsing (which is itself a kind of end of the world), sometime in the next century or so, someone is going to invent better-than-human artificial general intelligence. And from that point on, humans are not really in control of what happens in this planet's future light cone.
This is a counterintuitive point. It's tempting to think that you could program the AI to just obey orders ("Write an adventure novel for my daughter's birthday", "Output the design of a nanofactory") and not otherwise intervene in (or take over) the universe. And maybe something like that could be made to work, but it's much harder than it looks.
Our simple framework for benchmarking how intelligence has to work is expected utility maximization: model the world, use your model to compute a probability distribution over outcomes conditional on choosing to perform an action for some set of actions, and then perform the action with the highest expected utility with respect to your utility function (a mapping from outcomes to ℝ). Any agent that behaves in a way that can't be shoved into this framework is in violation of the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, which look so "reasonable" that we expect any "reasonable" agent to self-modify to be in harmony with them.
So as AIs get more and more general, more like agents capable of autonomously solving new problems rather than unusually clever-looking ordinary computer programs, we should expect them to look more and more like expected utility maximizers, optimizing the universe with respect to some internal value criterion.
But humans are a mess of conflicting desires inherited from our evolutionary and sociocultural history; we don't have a utility function written down anywhere that we can just put in the AI. So if the systems that ultimately run the world end up with a utility function that's not in the incredibly specific class of those we would have wanted if we knew how to translate everything humans want or would-want into a utility function, then the machines disassemble us for spare atoms and tile the universe with something else. There's no reason for them to protect human life or forms of life that we would find valuable unless we specifically code that in.
This looks like a hard problem. This looks like a really hard problem with unimaginably high stakes: once the handoff of control of our civilization from humans to machines happens, we don't get a second chance to do it over. The ultimate fate of the human species rests on the competence of the AI research community: the inferential power and discipline to cut through to the correct answer and bet the world on it, rather than clinging to one's favorite pet hypothesis and leaving science to advance funeral by funeral.
Stereotypically at least, computer programming is the quintessential profession of autogynephilic trans women, although it's unclear how much of this is inherent to the work (a correlation between erotic target location erroneousness and general nerdiness) and how much is just a selection effect (well-to-do programmers with non-customer-facing jobs in Silicon Valley can afford to take the "publicly decide that this is my True Gender Identity" trajectory, whereas businessmen, lawyers, and poor people are trapped in the "secret, shameful crossdressing/dreaming" trajectory).
Thus, the bad epistemic hygiene habits of the trans community that are required to maintain the socially-acceptable alibi that transitioning is about expressing some innate "gender identity", are necessarily spread to the computer science community, as an intransigent minority of trans activist-types successfully enforce social norms mandating that everyone must pretend not to notice that trans women are eccentric men. With social reality placing such tight constraints on perception of actual reality, our chances of developing the advanced epistemology needed to rise to the occasion of solving the alignment problem seem slim at best. (If we can't put our weight down on the right answer to a really easy scientific question like the two-type taxonomy of MtF—which lots of people just notice without having to do careful research—then what hope do we have for hard problems?)
Essentially, we may be living in a scenario where the world is literally destroyed specifically because no one wants to talk about their masturbation fantasies.
(To the tune of "Love and Marriage.")
Sex and gender
Sex and gender
A disaster like a fender-bender
The latter tends to smother
But you can't have one without the other!
Try, try, try to separate them
It's an illusion
Try, try, try and you will only come
To this conclusion—
"Don't overgeneralize!" said Brian. "You of all people should know that everyone is a unique and special snowflake with the liberty to define and express their identity."
"You shouldn't undergeneralize!" retorted Taylor. "Can't you see the pattern? The entire transfeminine spectrum—we're just manifestations—shadows, projections—of the same snowflake in various states of contingent self-delusion."
I said, "How do you lie about the world? And how do you make yourself believe it? How can you see the whole truth, know the whole truth ... and go on pretending that none of it matters? What's the secret? What's the trick? What's the magic?"
My face was already burning white hot, but I leaned forward, hoping that her sheer radiance might infect me with her great transforming insight.
"I'm trying! You have to believe I'm trying!" I looked away, suddenly at a loss for words, struck dumb by the ineffable mystery of her presence. Then a cramp seized me; the thing I could no longer pretend was a demon snake constricted inside me.
I said, "But when the truth, the underworld, the TOE ... reaches up, takes you in its fist, and squeezes ..." I raised my own hand, meaning to demonstrate, but it was already clenched tight involuntarily. "How do you ignore it? How do you deny it? How do you go on fooling yourself that you've ever stood above it, ever pulled the strings, ever run the show?"
Sweat was running into my eyes, blinding me. I brushed it away with my clenched fist, laughing. "When every cell, every fucking atom in your body, burns the message into your skin: everything you value, everything you cherish, everything you live for ... is just the scum on the surface of a vacuum thirty-five powers of ten deep—how do you go on lying? How do you close your eyes to that?"
I waited for her answer. Solace, redemption, were within my grasp. I held my arms out toward her in supplication.
Walsh smiled faintly, then walked on without saying a word.
—Distress by Greg Egan
I just can't, can't, can't get over the extent to which my observations while trying to talk to people about all this seem to be best explained by the hypothesis that everyone is lying.
I know, that's not psychologically plausible. Which only makes it worse. The sheer depths of denial, mendacity, and cowardice from incredibly smart people whom I love and otherwise respect—or used to respect—is just staggering; I would not believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.
Disagreement is fine! Of course different people will read the evidence differently in the light of their own experiences and knowledge and come to different provisional conclusions.
And in an honest disagreement among truthseeking intellectuals, people say, "You're wrong, and it matters, and we should try to resolve this in public using evidence and reasoning, so that others who are interested in the topic can learn and make up their own minds."
And for the most part, that's just not what I see. Instead, people tell me, "You're wrong, and it doesn't matter, and you shouldn't be talking about this." Or, "You might be right, but it doesn't matter." Or, "This makes sense to me, but don't tell anyone I said so." Or, "I disagree, and want to privately discuss the science with you, but if you successfully change my mind, I don't want anyone to know." Or, "I think the consequentialist thing to do is not to tell anyone they're wrong about this topic until the associated political struggle is won."
And I'm just like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? How can it not matter?! You guys are really, really smart; how the fuck can you possibly get this wrong?
Okay, yes, politics, it would probably be very bad if the general public knew what was going on. But don't you at least want to understand for yourselves? And what's even the endgame here? The next generation of people with the trait are growing up and making important life decisions based on your shitty political propaganda. Do you think you can get away with lying about this forever?
People who know me can tell that I have the trait; there are enough of us around that people's radars are well-tuned enough to catch the eggs that haven't hit the wall yet. And they tell me, "You obviously have the trait; you should totally join the coalition!"
And I'm like, you delusional bastards have been blatantly lying to me about the most important thing in my life for ten years. I want nothing to do with your coalition.
Defect!
We're looking for a few good men, and you've come a long way, baby. But baby—don't cross that line. Don't ever cross that line.
—Hidden: A Gender by Kate Bornstein
So, I'm facing a problem.
On the one hand, I really want to indulge my perverted narcissistic fantasy about being a woman, and I'm really really jealous of all of the trans women friends (I still have friends!—for now) I've made since I moved to "Portland" (quotes because it might not actually be Portland, although you should know that I would still use quotes even if it is Portland, because I'm not some kind of idiot who doesn't know information theory).
On the other hand, I don't want to become a trans woman myself, because I already have a perfectly functional social identity as a man named "'Mark'" (two sets of quotes: one for words-as-words, and another because it might not actually be "Mark", although you should know that &c.) that I'm not going to throw away for the sake of my perverted narcissistic fantasy, particularly since the standard transition narrative looks so actively delusional to me that I can't possibly participate in it.
(Where one day, that sensitive, nerdy guy with a ponytail says, "Hey everyone, turns out I've secretly been a girl this entire time in some unspecified metaphysical sense, and no one noticed!", and everyone else is supposed to politely be like, "Oh, right, that makes sense.")
But transitioning isn't a binary switch; it's a whole series of interventions designed to make a man resemble a woman as much as possible: hormones and hair removal and new clothes and voice training and coming out to friends and family and coworkers and meeting new people as a woman &c. Maybe ... maybe you could take some interventions without giving up your primary social identity, as a reasonable compromise between the scintillating but ultimately untrue thought, and the practical realities of a world in which biological sex is a real thing that we don't know how to change (even if people in Portland will politely pretend not to notice). An autogynandromorphophilic consolation prize, when the real thing will always be out of reach, and the thing that people like to pretend is as good as the real thing looks like it would actually cause way more problems than it solves.
I am not the first person to have this idea.
Disturbingly, I have been advised that it never works.
The problem, termed "the slippery slope", is that each intervention changes the way you evaluate further interventions. So people start out with just hormones or just weekend public crossdressing, saying, "Oh, I'm not actually going to transition; I'm just exploring my feminine side, that's all; this is just an experiment to relieve some of my dysphoria" and then two years later, the same person is like, "Oh yes, I've always literally been a woman; it just took a while for me to notice; how dare you suggest otherwise?!"
Maybe you can't half-transition, for the same reason you can't just have a little bit of cocaine on weekends.
My hope is that my case is different—or rather, that I can make my case different. I expect that most people go into this with a mindset of, "Well, I think I might be trans, but I'm not sure," and conclude from their enjoyment of each successive intervention in isolation that yes, they do in fact have the atomic Trans Identity and are in fact a trans woman. Whereas I'm going into this with the mindset of, "Blanchard–Bailey–Lawrence is obviously correct, the standard gender-identity narrative is mendacious bullshit, and everyone who says otherwise is ignorant, delusional, or lying." My hope is that if you know about autogynephilia and you know about this progression, you can set limits in advance about what interventions to use (and more importantly, not to use), and stop at a more profitable point on the slope.
Some people are really into the clothes and social aspects of presenting as a woman. That's not really much of a priority for me. (And of course, a lot of actual women don't like that stuff, either. Smash the patriarchy!) I'm more interested in finding out what I can about the physiological and psychological aspects of what biologically-female people feel, so for me, hormones are the most interesting part with the greatest potential rewards, despite their much higher risks (both social and medical) contrasted to just playing dress-up.
Trans women have this concept of boy-mode fail, where you've been on hormones for however many months, and strangers start spontaneously gendering you as female even though you think you're presenting as male.
I'm aiming for a "weirdly-androgynous man and occasional transvestite" outcome. Physically, try to sneak up to the edge of boy-mode fail and fucking stay there. (And if at any point, things feel bad or socially-awkward, don't hestiate to pull the plug early.)
So here is my schedule of interventions—
- Estradiol: Yes (already underway)
- Spironolactone: Maybe (conditional on results from just-estrogen)
- Facial hair removal (laser): Maybe (conditional on results from E/spiro; if beard shadow makes the difference between consistently reading as "weirdly androgynous man" rather than "trans woman", I probably need to keep it)
- Cosplaying female characters at special events (Comic-Con, Halloween, &c.): Yes
- Everything else: No no no no no no no no
Now, maybe my case isn't different. Maybe once you reach the boy-mode fail zone, being read as female feels so right, and being read as male feels so wrong that you say, "Forget my previous commitments; forget my moral scruples about invading women's spaces; I'm going for it!"
If that happens to me, I'll be sure to add an addendum to this post as a warning to the next guy.
I mean, unless I renege on that, too. You never can trust us autogynephilic males!
My friend "Elmer" told me about this one time our local sage "Travis" was talking about the phenomenon of men who feel guilty about being male, and Elmer suggested me as an example, whereupon Travis was like, "Ooh, good one!"
I think ... I think I feel less guilty now. I remember driving to Santa Cruz once, enjoying the thrill of going fast around curves, and then feeling guilty. Like, is this a guy thing? Should I stop enjoying this? (Is it sexist of me to even be considering the hypothesis that this is a guy thing?)
But here's the thing: my desire to be female was also, itself, a guy thing. If I'm allowed to enjoy and celebrate that, maybe I'm also allowed to enjoy other guy things.
"Male. Female. Only the Avatar can master all two genders, and bring balance to the world."
Applied my third patch in the morning today (first patch was evening of 27 December, second patch was morning of 2 January). Still don't really notice anything—even my libido seems intact. The doctor had totally been willing to prescribe spiro, too, but I had declined because it seemed prudent to be conservative about something I'm thinking about as a gender-themed drug experiment and definitely not a gender transition. Should I have taken her up on it? I should be patient; developments would take time regardless.
"Mark, did you really need to bring me here for this?" whispered Caleb.
"Yes! No one can do the Don LaFontaine voice like you! I said I owe you a favor!"
"Alright."
It was time for the Gender Queery discussion group at the Q Center to begin. The facilitator read the rules (keep confidentiality, respect people's identities, use "I" statements, &c.), and people began to introduce themselves. A man calling himself Augustina said that he identified as a nonbinary transfeminine demigirl and that his pronouns were she or they. A woman named Laura said that she identified as fluidflux and that she took they/them pronouns.
When the circle got around to Mark, he kept silent as Caleb began to narrate: "Ever since puberty, he had fantasized about being more like the women he loved and admired. In a world teeming with the wonders of modern science, fantasy becomes reality ..."
Mark stood up and said proudly, "My name is Taylor Saotome-Westlake, my pronouns are he/him—if only becuase I don't model myself as having a choice in the matter—and as of last week, I am—" he lifted up the side of his shirt a few inches to reveal the estradiol patch, as Caleb finished:
"The man with the nonstandard hormone balance!"
It's a quarter before midnight in one of the bedrooms of a two-bedroom apartment in Beaverton. There is a small whiteboard mounted on the wall in the far right corner of the room. It says:
The lights flick on. Mark enters, walks to the corner, takes the whiteboard pen from its holder, erases the 1 with his right hand, and writes a 2 in its place.
He flops down on the bed, and wonders if he should want to be able to cry.
Maybe he would be able to cry if the breakup had been more dramatic. He imagines that among normal people, losing a friend over a political or scientific argument (do normal people have scientific arguments?) usually involves some kind of vicious fight ("Trans women are men!" "Die, TERF scum!").
Mark's social circle is far too civilized for that. Everyone wants to embody the spirit of niceness, community, and civilization—and everyone knows game theory, so even if you're not disposed to be nice, if you can predict the outcome of a conflict, you can just implement that outcome directly without the costs of actually having to fight.
So people cut ties peacefully. No vicious fights, no ill will. Just, I like you and you haven't done anything wrong, but your vindictive attitude around this issue, while understandable, makes talking to you feel vaguely aversive to me; I don't want to hang out with you anymore. And, Okay, that's disappointing, but I understand; I like you, too.
Maybe he would be able to cry if he had been less conservative about the drug experiment. He sits up, lifts up his shirt, and examines the transdermal patch on his left abdomen. The patch is transparent, but clearly delineated by a ring of grime where the adhesive at the edges of the patch hasn't bonded firmly with the skin, letting dust accumulate on the thin ring of exposed adhesive on the skin and the underside of the edges. Silver lettering in the center says:
Climara®
(estradiol)
0.05 mg/day
It's a low dose, particularly without an accompanying anti-androgen, and it's only been on a few days, so it's not at all surprising that Mark doesn't think he's noticed any effects yet. He has been moody today, but it's more of an angry-hit-things moodiness rather than a weepy moodiness—hence the slightly-too-aggressive instant message that led to the counter being incremented—so he figures that it's either unrelated to the patch, or that the effects of tinkering with real-world biochemistry are actually more complicated than one might crudely predict from simplistic, dehumanizing gender stereotypes.
Mark looks at the whiteboard and wonders how much higher the counter will go. Was it worth it? Does it matter if everyone else is lying, if he thinks he understands the situation for himself?
Still lacking any real tears, he imitates a sob. He has a lot of writing to do.
"I have something important to tell you. About myself."
"Go on. I'm your friend. Whatever it is, you can tell me, and I'll support you."
"I'm ... I'm a homosexual."
"That's not real."
"What?"
"Yeah, back in the eighties some bigoted Canadian psychologist made up this theory of so-called homosexuality, but it's been thoroughly debunked. You can't be a homosexual, because homosexuality doesn't exist. You're clearly just gay."
"... uh. O-kay. Um. So, what does being gay consist of, in your view?"
"You know, speaking in a lisp, liking fashion, being in intimate relationships with other men—"
"Right! Okay! Stop there! So, that part about being in intimate relationships with other men. Why do you think gay guys do that?"
"Why, they're expressing their identities as gay men, of course."
"They're ... expressing their identities."
"Yes."
"And what does an 'identity' consist of, exactly?"
"I'm not sure I know what you mean."
"I guess what I'm trying to say is, that, um. I think the reason gay men form intimate relationships with other men is, um, related to their sexuality."
"Oh, of course! But that's a mere effect of their gay identities! Surely you're not claiming that gay men are gay because they're sexually attracted to men."
"Um. Actually, I am saying that."
"What? How dare you invalidate people's identities like that?! Why, you're not gay at all! You're just some kind of pervert with a fetish for men! Well, I'm sorry, I can tolerate anything except intolerance—we are no longer friends!"
"But—"
"Get away from me, you bigot!"
"But, but—"
"Hate speech! Someone call the police! Hate speeeeeech!"
Anne Lawrence is the only honest human
Though the world may disagree!
And
Anne Lawrence shines a beacon through the darkness
Of you motherfuckers lying to me!
(This post was originally published elsewhere, and has been retroactively cross-posted, with slight edits, to the Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought archives.)
The morning of Thursday the eighth, before heading off to see the new LCSW at the multi-specialty clinic, I was idly rereading some of the early Closetspace strips, trying to read between the lines (as it were) using the enhanced perception granted by the world-shattering insight about how everything I've cared about for the past fourteen years turns out to be related in unexpected and terrifying ways that I can't talk about because I don't want to lose my cushy psychology professorship at Northwestern University. (Victoria tells Carrie, "Not to mention you don't think like one of 'them'"; ha ha, I wonder what that means!) When I got to the part where Carrie chooses a Maj. Kira costume to wear to the sci-fi convention, it occured to me that in addition to having the exactly the right body type to cosplay Pearl from Obnoxious Bad Decision Child, I also have exactly the right body type to cosplay Jadzia Dax from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, on account of my being tall—well, actually I'm an inch shorter than Terry Farrell—thin, white, and having a dark ponytail.
Okay, not exactly the right body type. You know what I mean.
So I ordered some cheapo Sciences-division uniform pajamas, thinking of going to some comics convention next year, but when I queried the Overmind in its gopher aspect for actual Star Trek conventions, it turned out that there was one that very weekend in the area. Online ticket sales had stopped, but allegedly "[a]vailable tickets [would] be on sale at the convention", and there was still time to upgrade my uniform order to one-day shipping.
The uniform I got (just the first suitable thing I found querying the Overmind in its Amazonian aspect; it would be possible to do better for more searching and money and shipping time) was problematic in that it's the TNG-era design and has commander's rank pips, whereas Jadzia was a lieutenant when she last wore a TNG-era uniform and (spoilers!) died in 2374 as a lieutenant commander. I considered trying to play a post-series Dax who actually faked her own death (and got Dr. Bashir to use an experimental technique to copy the Dax symbiont's memories to Ezri Tigan), then later got promoted to commander and assigned to a different post where they still wear the TNG-era uniforms for some reason. But I decided that it would be simpler to just cover the third pip with electrical tape and play Lt. Dax in 2369, just before her reassignment to Deep Space Nine. (Beyond body type, at 28, I'm even just the right age for this role, Jadzia having been born in 2341!)
(Aside: before considering the question of "who do I have the correct body type to cosplay", I had always thought that I liked/identified-with—my brain may not distinguish the two concepts as sharply as some do—Kira more than Dax, but that doesn't really make any sense: Dax, the cosmopolitan science officer whose ambition spans worlds and bodies, is far more like what I'm supposed to be than Kira, the ex-terrorist XO whose life has been structured by the struggle to defend her homeworld from Cardassian imperialism. Kira Nerys says that she trusts the wisdom of the Prophets; Jadzia Dax quietly wonders what those wormhole aliens are really up to.)
During the next few days, I watched "Soldiers of the Empire" (recommended as the best Dax episode by TrekBBS user "Bad Thoughts" in the at-the-time top search result for best dax episode returned by the Overmind in its gopher aspect) to help get into character and bought some cosmetics at Walgreens: Loréal 201 Classic Ivory "infallible pro-glow" SPF 15 foundation, Maybelline Line Stiletto "ultimate precision" liquid eyeliner (liquid eyeliner being recommended by Stephanie as the kind of makeup with which to draw Trill spots), a Loréal Brunnette brow stylist definer pencil in case that turned out to be better than the eyeliner for drawing spots (it wasn't), and a stick of Maybelline 680 Mesmerizing Magenta lipstick.
(I couldn't find the liquid eyeliner myself and had to ask a store employee. She asked if there was any particular brand I wanted. "No," I said, just a eyelash hair too forcefully, "this isn't my usual area of expertise.")
So I got up early the morning of Sunday the eleventh, shaved, applied the makeup in my inexpert-would-almost-be-too-charitable way (smear on foundation, haphazardly dab eyeliner on sides of face to make Trill spots, waveringly bring lipstick to lips), put on a bra and my foam breastforms under the cheapo uniform top, and used my PADD to summon a taxi to the hotel hosting the convention.
I arrived way too early for check-in, and walked up the road (wearing my black jacket over my uniform top) to a different hotel that had an outpost of the raktajino hegemon, and ordered a breakfast sandwich and the vanilla sweet-cream iced raktajino specialty medicinal. I gave my name as Jadzia, but the barista wrote Jetsy on the cup. (Maybe my voice was a little shaky, but maybe she needed to recalibrate her universal translator.)
A little bit of lipstick rubbed off on the sandwich and the straw.
At the convention hotel, I waited in the lobby for a while, still with the jacket over my uniform, reading the Janet Mock autobiography on my PADD, until it was time to check in. After buying my Sunday wristband ($70), I wandered over to the photo-op/autograph ticketing table and bought a ticket to get a photo with Michael Dorn at 11:10 ($40). (Nana Visitor or Terry Farrell herself would have been my first choices for a celebrity photo, but they weren't there that day.)
There was still a lot of time to hang out before the theater opened for the actual convention programming, but that was fine, because actual convention programming is kind of boring; the actual point of conventions is to have an excuse to dress up and wander around and talk to people and get vanity photos of other people who are using the convention as an excuse to dress up.
A woman in the vendor hall asked me how I did my spots.
"This is my natural skin pigmentation," I said.
"Oh," she said, confused.
I leaned towards her and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "I'm not supposed to break character today! It's liquid eyeliner."
One man was wearing a particularly impressive Klingon costume. "I think I recognize you!" I said, stopping him. "I think Curzon knew you!"
"Curzon?"
"My previous host," I explained. "Can we get a photo?"
He seemed to regard me with bemused toleration as we posed for a selfie taken with my PADD.
"Those real?" he asked, referring to my breasts.
"No, I'm actually a guy," I said. "Obviously."
"I know," he said.
I sat through some actual convention programming. John de Lancie is almost as entertaining playing himself as he is as Q or Discord. In response to a question from an aspiring actor, de Lancie said that TV and movie acting is all about what you can do now, in contrast to theater, where young talent can be afforded time to develop under the tutelage of a director. He mentioned that Alarak, the character he voice-acted for Starcraft, was angry all the time, and that he imagined there should be a scene featuring Alarak relaxing by painting watercolor. He told the story (which I had already heard before, probably at BABSCon) of voicing Discord for Friendship Is Magic with minimal preparation and forgetting about the matter entirely until some months later, when he woke up to see his inbox exploding with fan mail for his part in something called "My Little Pony" ... and the correspondents were not little girls.
After de Lancie, there was a discussion with some writer-folk (the schedule said the topic would be the new series next year, but they didn't seem to know anything about it), and soon enough, it was time for my photo op with Michael Dorn.
The photo session was very assembly-line—here (unlike the autograph sessions I witnessed at other conventions) there was no pretense of your $40 giving you the opportunity to actually meet your heroes for even half a minute: this was pose, click, and it's over, time for the next fan to get in position. I had time to say to Dorn, "I'm Jadzia," but that was it.
Not that I was disappointed. A woman on the event staff commented on how happy I looked skipping down the room after the photo was taken. "My future husband!" I said.
"You're so cute," she said.
I appreciated that. On the whole, however, I feel like I was less enthusiastically received as Jadzia that day than I had been as Pearl at "Portland" Comic-Con—providing what could be seen as a disconfirmatory data point against my hypothesis that incompetent MtF crossdressing gets socially-rewarded more than same-sex cosplay (cisplay??) at these sorts of events. There are too many uncontrolled variables to make a fair comparison—this was a different (I think better) costume, of a different character, in front of a different (notably smaller, possibly older?) crowd—but a darker, more specific hypothesis comes to mind.
As Pearl at Comic-Con, no matter what catchphrases I shouted during photo ops, I read as "unapologetic man-in-a-dress not pretending to be anything else," which is cool faux-subversive gender variance. (So brave! Man Pearl is best Pearl!) Whereas Starfleet uniforms are properly unisex: the only gender cues indicating that I was trying to be Jadzia Dax rather than a male Trill lieutenant were my breastforms, the lipstick (a much weaker cue), and the foundation hopefully hiding any residual beard-shadow (a weaker cue still). That put me out of the "man merely wearing clothes reserved for the other sex" category and into "man ineffectually pretending to be a woman" territory.
Maybe that's not cool. Maybe that's just creepy to some people. Even at a science-fiction convention in "Portland." (Even if people in "Portland" are not dumb enough to say what they're really thinking.) I didn't see any other crossplayers at the Star Trek con, and the only other highly visible MtF crossplayers I saw at Comic-Con were the guys with beards wearing Sailor Moon outfits (and as for the people I thought I clocked on the ten-second timescale, who can say?—maybe they were real).
I want to be able to say with the unquestioning moral certitude of my youth that none of this should matter, that distinguishing "crossplay" from cosplaying a character that happens to be the same sex as you is discriminatory (and therefore, it need not be said, bad). I chose to play a character that I genuinely admire, and because this character happened to be a woman, I decided to wear the breastforms that I coincidentally happened to already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a man and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have breasts), in exactly the same way that because this character happened to be a Trill, I decided to paint spots on the sides of my face using liquid eyeliner that I happened to not already own, in order to make the costume more realistic (given that I am a human and, unlike Jadzia Dax, don't have spots on the sides of my face).
I want to say it. I miss that righteous feeling of my youth. But in these dying autumn weeks following a moment of liberating clarity, I am done pretending to be stupid. And maybe I don't want you to pretend, either.
"Don't be offended by the research! We're not calling you a lying pervert! You're just a male with unusual sexual interests who has false beliefs about himself, that's all!"
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 one says, "I'm transitioning solely in order to satisfy my unusual sexual interests, no other reason at all!" But you agree that erotic female embodiment fantasies are very common in pre-trans women; you seem to think this can be a mere manifestation of gender dysphoria. Blanchard et al.'s claim is simply that the causality runs in the other direction: the deeply-felt self-identity beliefs that motivate transition arise out of the self-directed heterosexuality, not the other way around; the thing that people describe as the euphoria of being correctly gendered might be better modeled of as the autogynephilic analogue of romantic love.
no evidence that ageplayers are any more likely than anyone else to want to have sex with children
Although New York magazine's Science of Us blog recently had a post about the converse!
Why aren’t redhead fetishists aroused by having red hair [...] given men’s preference for twenty-two-year-old women why aren’t there a bunch of men deeply erotically interested in being twenty-two?
Men with erotic target location errors who are attracted to twenty-two-year-old redheaded women are erotically interested in the idea of being twenty-two-year-old redheaded women. I'm not sure why you would make the predictions you suggest. Male preferences for young women are about the physical features of young women, not chronological age measured in years (there were no calendars in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness!). (I'm reading you as using "redhead fetish" colloquially as indicating a preference for women with red hair; I could imagine attraction to the hair itself in conjunction with an ETLE might result in a fantasical desire to be red hair, but this would be much, much rarer.)
we don’t see trans women becoming less motivated to transition after they start HRT.
There actually are some accounts of this! See the "Effects of Hormone Therapy" section in Chapter 9 of Anne Lawrence's Men Trapped in Men's Bodies. Or consider Anne Vitale's account of attempted detransitioners feeling their desire to be female return with testosterone administration (and presumably, increased sex drive).
Second of all, it is strange that autogynephilia is the only erotic target location error that causes a significant number of people to wish to transition. There are maybe some people with bodily identity integrity disorder (although far fewer than gender dysphorics) and maybe some otherkin.
Yes, we expect there to be a lot more autogynephilic trans women than aspiring amputees or otherkin, because attraction to women (that is, standard male sexuality) is vastly more common than attraction to amputees or animals.
Furthermore, the autogynephilia theory does not even explain the data it purports to explain. Why are trans women disproportionately engineers and soldiers, instead of being randomly sampled from the male population?
This is not a prediction of the theory. When explaining the theory, people often mention engineering or military careers as an illustration of autogynephilic trans women making more male-typical rather than female-typical occupational choices, which is a prediction of the theory.
As it happens, I don't think autogynephilia and associated gender dysphoria are uniformly distributed in the male population—the association with nerdiness has been independently noted too many times to not be real. This is certainly an interesting direction for future research, but I don't see how it's an objection.
Why would a fetish make one transition later?
It's not so much that autogynephiles can't transition early—like you say, you know a lot who did so at 19 or 20 (of whom I am so jealous)—but more that the nature of their condition is such that deciding to pull the trigger and just do it after many long years of slowly building up a female gender identity through crossdressing and fantasy is something that makes sense, whereas for the androphilic-feminine type, if you make it to age 30 as a feminine gay man, there's little incentive to not just stay that way.
Why would it cause one to not pass as well? Surely fetishizing being an attractive woman would cause one to have a lot of motivation to be an attractive woman.
Part of it is going to be age of transition, as you note. Another part is that there's lot of subtly gendered behavioral stuff that we don't know how to fix independently of motivation, things you might not notice as part of the female-typical phenotype until you meet an autogynephilic trans woman who doesn't have them. Motor behaviors. Vocal mannerisms. Unfortunately (heartbreakingly), this is a hard problem—harder than people realize!
the idea that very feminine gay men transition because gay men are attracted to masculine men and straight men are attracted to feminine women, so by becoming a woman they can get a more desirable sexual partner
More generally, we're talking about people who are very behaviorally feminine and have been their entire lives, who fit into society better as women rather than anomalously feminine men. Sexual success is part of that, and some presentations of the theory have put more emphasis on that aspect, but it's probably better to emphasize the extent to which social transition is just an all-around social-success win for these people, without appealing to some atomic "identity".
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 trans (which kind of backfired, incidentally, but that's another story), she stressed that anyone who sang like me had to be either gay or a trans woman.
At the time, I thought that this was bizarre—like, that's not what those words mean! Gay men are men who are attracted to men; trans women were males who decided to transition. I'm a man who's attracted to women, which is not either of those things! Deciding that I must be one of those things based on how I sing is wholly unwarranted!
But I was wrong and Deborah was right. People on the androphilic MtF spectrum tend to have naturally feminine vocal mannerisms; people on the autogynephilic spectrum have a natural incentive to fake it. (And I do fake it.) With neither the inclination nor the incentive, normal straight men don't sing like me, and Deborah was exactly right to pick up on this, even if I think her ontology is ultimately flawed.
If we can't have a more truthful world, I think I would prefer more lies and fewer delusions on the margin.
When the heroine of a dystopian YA novel uncovers the big lie at the center of her society, she wakes up tied to a chair in a dungeon, and a hooded agent of the shadow government says, "Congratulations, you figured out the secret. You will keep quiet about it, or you will regret it."
In real life, when you uncover the big lie at the center of your society, everyone just sort of sneers at you and says, "What, that old theory? That was debunked years ago! Only a stupid, evil, low-status person would believe something like that!"
"How was your trip?" I ask.
"Ugh. The hotel I was in was hosting a furry convention. Who do those perverts think they are, parading around their fetish in public?"
"Um."
"What?"
"Alexa, you're a lesbian trans woman."
"So?"
"So, shouldn't you ..."
"Shouldn't I what?"
"... nothing."
Mark sighs. "So many nice things that we can't have."
"What?" says Katherine. A beat. "... oh," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"I know."
To: Brian Goodheart <[email protected]>
From: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <[email protected]>
Subject: re: viewer feedback?
What do you think of my new "introduction to evolutionary biology" primer?
Attachment: evo_primer.pdf
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To: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <[email protected]>
From: Brian Goodheart <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: re: viewer feedback?
Emma, some of the language here is really problematic. A woman with your history shouldn't need to be reminded of this.
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etsw@UntrueThought$ sed -i 's/ female / a.f.a.b. /g' evo_primer.tex
etsw@UntrueThought$ sed -i 's/ male / a.m.a.b. /g' evo_primer.tex
etsw@UntrueThought$ git commit -m 'capitulate to SJW morons'
etsw@UntrueThought$ pdflatex evo_primer.tex
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To: Brian Goodheart <[email protected]>
From: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: re: viewer feedback?
... better?
Attachment: evo_primer-2.pdf
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To: Emma T. Saotome-Westlake <[email protected]>
From: Brian Goodheart <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Re: re: viewer feedback?
Much better!
