Reply to Scott Alexander on Autogenderphilia
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 he calls a "very boring" hypothesis of "autogenderphilia": "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender."
Explaining my view on this "boring hypothesis" turns out to be a surprisingly challenging writing task, because I suspect my actual crux comes down to a Science vs. Bayescraft thing, where I'm self-conscious about my answer sounding weirdly overconfident on non-empirical grounds to someone who doesn't already share my parsimony intuitions—but, well, bluntly, I also expect my parsimony intuitions to get the right answer in the high-dimensional real world outside of a single forced-choice survey question.
Let me explain.
In my ontology of how the world works, "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, it's a natural leap to be attracted to yourself being that gender" is not a boring hypothesis. In my ontology, this is a shockingly weird hypothesis, where I can read the English words, but I have a lot of trouble parsing the English words into a model in my head, because the antecedent, "If you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender, then ...", already takes a massive prior probability penalty, because that category is multiply disjunctive over the natural space of biological similarities: you're grouping together lesbians and gay men and heterosexual males with a female gender identity and heterosexual females with a male gender identity, and trying to make claim about what members of this group are like.
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, such that we expect to make useful inductive inferences about this group?
Well, they're all human; that buys you a lot of similarities!
But your hypothesis isn't about humans-in-general, it's specifically about people who identify "identify as a gender, and [are] attracted to that gender".
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 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 hypotheses of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me predictions about lots of stuff.
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. (That is, it looks like homosexuality—not the kind of trans people Scott and I know—is probably a brain intersex condition, and the extreme right tail of homosexuality accounts for the kind of trans people we mostly 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. "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 the same kind of lives. (Indeed, 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 correspond to?
Imagine a Bayesian network with real-valued variables with a cause C at the root, whose influence propagates to many effects (E₂ ← E₁ ← C → E₃ → E₄ ...). If someone proposes a theory about what happens to the Ei when C is between 2 and 3 or between 5 and 6 or above 12, that's very unparsimonious: why would such a discontinuous hodge-pause of values for the cause, have consistent effects?
In my worldview, "gender" (as the thing trans women and cis women have in common) looks like a hodge-podge as far as biology is concerned. (It can be real socially to the extent that people believe it's real and act accordingly, which creates the relevant conditional independence structure in their social behavior, but the kinds of sexuality questions under consideration don't seem like they would be sociologically determined.
Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this might seem dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm explaining why I can't take Scott Alexander's theory seriously without even addressing the survey data that he thinks his theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What is this "but causal mechanisms" technobabble, 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 "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being him/her?" questions asked on the survey.
The reason I'm sold that autogynephila (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 someone's survey, but as the output of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a massive confluence of a real-life experiences and observations in a naturalistic setting. (That's how people locate which survey questions are worth asking in the first place, out of the vastness of possible survey questions.)
If you're not acquainted in a naturalistic setting with the phenomenon your survey is purporting to measure, you're not going to be able to sensibly interpret your survey results. Alexander writes that his data "suggest[s] that identifying as a gender is a prerequisite to autogenderphilia to it." This is obvious nonsense. There are mountains of AGP erotica produced by and for men who identify as men.
The surprising thing is that if you look at what trans women say to each other when the general public isn't looking, you see the same stories over and over again (examples from /r/MtF: "I get horny when I do 'girl things'. Is this a fetish?", "Is the 'body swap' fetish inherently pre-trans?", "Could it be a sex fantasy?", &c., ad infinitum).
The AGP experiences described in such posts by males who identify as trans women seem strikingly similar to AGP experiences in males who identify as men. I think the very boring hypothesis here is that these are mostly the same people—that identifying as a trans woman is an effect (of AGP and other factors) rather than a cause.
After observing this kind of pattern in the world, it's a good idea to do surveys to get some data to learn more about what's going on with the pattern. Are these accounts of AGP coming from a visible minority of trans women, or is it actually a majority? When 82% of /r/MtF users say Yes to a "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realized you were trans?" survey, that makes me think it's a majority.
When you pose a superficially similar-sounding question to a different group, are you measuring the same real-world phenomenon in that other group? Maybe, but I think this is nonobvious.
And it contexts where it's not politically inconvenient for him, Scott Alexander agrees with me: he wrote about this methodological issue in "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 sense for Alexander to be skeptical of the screening test 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 taxon. As an experienced clinician, 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."
The failure of surveys to generalize between populations shouldn't even be surprising when you consider the ambiguity and fuzziness of natural language: faced with a question, and prompted to give a forced-choice Yes/No or 1–5 response, people will assume the question was "meant for them" and try to map the words into some reference point in their experience. If the question wasn't "meant for them"—if people who have never had a manic episode are given a set of questions formulated for a population of bipolar people—or if actual women are given a set of questions formulated for a population of males with a sex fantasy about being female—I think you do get a lot of "Am I happy then sad sometimes? Sure, I guess so" out-of-distribution response behavior that doesn't capture what's really going on. In slogan form, you are not measuring what you think you are measuring.
If Alexander is wary that a survey about moods done on a totally different population might not generalize to hospital inpatients, I think he should be still more wary that that a survey about sexuality might not generalize to people of different sexes. Even if you're skeptical of most evopsych accounts of psychological sex differences (for there were no trucks or makeup in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), sexuality is the one domain where I think we have strong prior reasons to expect cross-sex empathic inference to fail.
This is why I expect the standard cope of "But cis women are autogynephilic too!!" to fall apart on further examination. I'm not denying the survey data itself (neither Alexander's nor Moser 2009's); I'm saying we have enough prior knowledge about what females and males are like to 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. The common and normal experience of being happy and proud with one's own sexed body just isn't the same thing as cross-sex embodiment fantasies, even if people who aren't familiar with the lurid details of the latter don't realize this.
The reason this isn't special pleading that makes my theory unfalsifiable is because my skepticism is specifically about these mass survey questions where we haven't done the extra work to try to figure out whether the question means the same thing to everyone; I'm happy to talk about qualitative predictions about what we see when we have a higher-bandwidth channel into someone's mind than a 1–5 survey response, like free-form testimony. The account quoted in Alexander's post from a woman claiming to experience AGP does more to convince me that AGP in women might be a real thing than Slate Star Codex survey data showing straight cis women giving a mean response of 2.4 to the "How sexually arousing would you find it to imagine being her?" question. (And even then, I would want to ask followup questions to hopefully distinguish true female AGP from situations like when a female acquaintance of mine initially seemed to empathize with the concept, but found it bizarre when I elaborated a little more.)
While the promise of psychological research is that it might teach us things about ourselves that we don't already know, I still mostly expect it to all add up to normality—to retrodict the things we've already observed without the research.
My disquiet with Alexander's "Autogenderphilia Is Common And Not Especially Related To Transgender" (and similarly Aella's "Everyone Has Autogynephilia") is that it visibly fails to add up to normality. In a world where it was actually true that "if you identify as a gender, and you're attracted to that gender [...]", I would expect the things trans lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts when the general public isn't looking to look like the things cis lesbians say to each other in naturalistic contexts, and that's just not what I see.
Consider this quip from Twitter—
The eternal trans lesbian question: So do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her?
The answer: Yes
I see this "want her or want to be her" sentiment from trans women and non-transitioned AGP men very frequently. (I speak from experience.) Do cis lesbians often feel this way about each other? I'm inclined to doubt it—and the author seems to agree with me by calling the phenomenon a "trans lesbian" question rather than just a "lesbian" question! I think the very boring hypothesis here is that this is because trans lesbians are AGP men, which are not the same thing as actual lesbians. And I think that authors who can't bring themselves to say as much in those words are going to end up confusing themselves about the statistical structure of real life, even if they can agree that trans lesbians and straight men have some things in common.
