Well. The reason I'm blogging this story at all is because I'm scared that in order to finish that sentence in the current year and be understood, I'd have to say, "because I was trans." And with respect to what the words mean in the current year, it's true. But that's not how I think of it, then or now.
-It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love, inseparable from my sense of self—but if it isn't _exactly_ the same thing that most straight men feel, it can only be a slight variation.
+It's because I was _straight_. Because I loved women, and wanted to do right by them. It's an _identificatory_ kind of love—loving women as extension of the self, rather than a mysterious, unfathomable [Other](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Sex#Volume_One). But that's not unusual, is it?—or it _shouldn't_ be. I would have assumed that guys who can't relate to this are probably just sexist.
------
But in a lot of ways that matter, we are _very_ different people. When you compare representative outputs of what we've _done_ with our (roughly) similar intelligence—her chemistry Ph.D. from a top-10 university, my _batshit insane_ secret ("secret") blog about the philosophy of science and the etiology of late-onset gender dysphoria in males—it ... paints a different picture.
-Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to [sight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_(device)) against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister. Not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes. But the angle between the line between me and my sister, and the line between me and my female analogue, is the [arctangent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_trigonometric_functions) of the difference-between-same-sex-siblings and the difference-between-sexes, which is small if sex differences are a lot larger than same-sex sibling differences (with respect to whatever metric on personspace we're using).
+Of course same-sex siblings would _also_ be different pictures. (Identical twins aren't _duplicates_ of each other, either.) But the advantage of having a sister is that it gives my brain's pattern-matching faculties a target to [sight](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sight_(device)) against. As a _second_-order approximation, my female analogue is close to being somewhere on the vector in personspace between me and my sister (but not exactly on that line, because the line spans both the difference-betwen-siblings and the difference-between-sexes).
(All this is in accordance with "Everything is a vector space" philosophy implied by this blog's [TLD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain). (If it turns out that something _isn't_ a vector space, I'm not sure I want to know about it.) I can hope that my description of the _methodology_ is valuable, even if your brain's pattern-matching faculties can't follow along with the same example, because you haven't met my sister and only know the aspects of me that shine through to the blog.)
I had said we're assuming away engineering difficulties in order to make the thought experiment more informative about pure preferences, but let's add one constraint to _force_ the thought experiment to be informative about preferences, and not allow the wishy-washy evasion of "I'm eager to _try_ it."
-What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.
+What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Or (my preference) if some deep "brain sex" transformation only works once, even if a more superficial motor remapping is easy to do or re-do? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.
-In that case, if I have to choose ... I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female? I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't _want_ to stop liking challenges and points as much as I do—and if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.
+In that case, if I have to choose ... I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female? I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't _want_ to stop liking challenges and points as much as I do—and if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.
-At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like _the most appealing thing in the world_. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp for a subjective year and tiles the _rest_ of our future lightcone with paperclips, that's _fine_; I will die _happy_.
+At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like _the most appealing thing in the world_. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp to play with for a subjective year and tiles the _rest_ of our future lightcone with paperclips, that's _fine_; I will die _happy_.
So, I guess ...
(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this. This is the eye of the hurricane; this is the only way I can [protect](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Jul/the-source-of-our-power/)—)
-A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty, and just to live like that.
+A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to live like that.
+
+If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror.)
+
+What's going on here? _Speaking_ of mirrors, the sexologist [James Cantor speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons. Way, way back in the 1980s, Italian neuroscientists wired up the brains of macaque monkeys with electrodes, and noticed that some of the _same_ brain regions would light up when the monkey grabbed a rasin, and when the monkey watched the _researcher_ eat a rasin. These "mirror neurons" are speculated to form the basis of empathy.
+
+So, the _phrase_ "mirror neurons" is not and _cannot_ be an answer. Real understanding is about detailed predictive models, not [what words to repeat back in school](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password). I can't expect to understand the real answer without spending multiple years studying neuroscience, and if I did, I couldn't expect to transmit the model to you in one blog post. (That would be _several_ blog posts.)
+
+Still, the mirror-neurons anecdote is at least _suggestive_ of hypotheses in the _general area_ of, "The brain uses _shared_ representations for 'self' and others, in a way such that it's possible for the part of the brain that computes sexual attraction to 'get confused' about the self–other distinction in a way that manifests as sexual desire to _be_ the object of attraction."
+
+One interesting prediction of this story [TODO: explain the ETLE theory]
+
+I don't _know_ the details—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's one of those sensitive bookish males rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
+
+Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female-typical in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?
+
+_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).
+
+But I _don't_ think she/he would spontaneously invent obsessively _jacking off_ to fantasies of being able to magically transform into various _different_ female bodies ... unless she was _already_ into that stuff before being magically transformed into my twin. But ... is that even a thing among many (or any) lesbians? To be clear, there is a _lot_ of porn in this genre! But it seems to mostly be created for and consumed by ... men?
+
+I just don't see any _reason_ to doubt the obvious explanation that the root cause of my gender problems is specifically a bug in _male_ sexuality.
+
+(A "bug" with respect to the design criteria of evolution, not with respect to the human morality that affirms that I _like_ being this way. Some, fearing stigma, would prefer to tone-police "bug" to "variation", but people who don't [understand the naturalistic fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YhNGY6ypoNbLJvDBu/rebelling-within-nature) aren't going to understand anything _else_ I'm saying, and I want to emphasize that the mirror-neurons-or-whatever and ordinary male heterosexuality weren't "supposed" to collide like this.)
+
+But the obvious explanation has a lot of less-obvious implications—and it might not be obvious to _everyone_. The exposition above about what it would even mean to change sex is the result of a _lot_ of thinking influenced by everything I've read, and in particular, the methods of rationality I learned from Yudkowsky, and in even more particular, the warning in "Changing Emotions" (and its mailing-list predecessor) that this is a _hard problem_.
+
+We can imagine that a male who was _like_ me in having this erotic-target-location-erroneous sexuality and associated beautiful pure sacred self-identity feelings, but who didn't know everything I do—perhaps due to [reading different books in a different order](TODO: link "The Feeling Is Mutual"), or maybe just 15 fewer IQ points—might come to very different conclusions about himself.
+
+Rather than thinking
+
+
+(As Yudkowsky [sometimes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences) [remarked](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4RJtHBPvDRJcCTva/when-anthropomorphism-became-stupid), our _beliefs about_ how our minds work have very little impact
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-If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror.)
-What's going on here? The sexologist [James Cantor speculates](https://youtu.be/q3Ub65CwiRI?t=281): mirror neurons.
-[TODO: I don't know enough neuroscience for "mirror neurons" specifically to not be https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-the-teacher-s-password , _however_, the real answer almost has to be _something_ in the vicinity of "something in the brain is getting confused between sex-target and sense-of-self"; that's _the only way to make sense_ of the "I love her, but also, I want to be her" qualia in otherwise-ordinary males that I feel and _lots_ of trans women self-report (including lots who claim it's an effect of "gender"/"gender identity" rather than a cause)]
[TODO implication that departs from the standard narrative: being Actually Female would undermine my _reason_ for wanting a female body]
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+### Coda
+
+> And Durham—the software puppet, the lifeless shell animated by a being from another plane—looked him in the eye and said, "You have to let me show you what you are."
+>
+> —_Permutation City_ by Greg Egan
+
Anyway, that—briefly (I mean it)—is the story about my weird obligate sex fantasy about being a woman and how I used to think that it was morally wrong to believe in psychological sex differences, but then I gradually changed my mind and decided that psychological sex differences are probably real after being deeply influenced by this robot-cult blog about the logic of Science. It's probably not that interesting? If we were still living in the socio-political environment of 2009, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be blogging about my weird sexual obsessions (as evidenced by the fact that, in 2009, I wasn't blogging about them).
Imagine my surprise to discover that, in the current year, my weird sexual obsession is suddenly at the center of [one of the _defining political issues of our time_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_rights).
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