* a post about how sex concepts represent _both_ categorical differences _and_ the conjunction of statistical differences of various effect sizes, such that if you try to unpin the word from the categorical differences, you end up (as per the usual gender-critical complaint) defining gender in terms of stereotypes because there's nothing _left_ for the word to attach to (working title: "Subspatial Distribution Overlap and Cancellable Stereotypes")
* a post about how gender identity ideology is actually _not_ very compatible with the traditional liberal impulse to make gender less of a big deal, because there's a huge difference between omitting category information that's not relevant, _vs._ letting people choose their category-membership (working title: "Elision _vs_. Choice")
* a steelperson of the "assigned at birth" terminology (working title: "'Assigned at Birth' Is a Schelling Point (If You Live in an Insane Dystopia Where the Concept of Sex Is Somehow Controversial)")
- * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) where AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condiiton (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
+ * I occasionally get people telling me that [it doesn't matter](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NG4XQEL5PTyguDMff/but-it-doesn-t-matter) where AGP is causally relevant to late-onset gender dysphoria in males, because we Know that Transition Works and makes people happier. And just—I'm pretty skeptical that you could legitimately be that confident about what the best quality-of-life intervention for a condition is, _without_ actually understanding the nature of the condition (working title: "Model-Free Happiness")
* a post about the motivation for positing peseudobisexuality or meta-attraction as part of the two-type taxonomy of MtF: it may _sound_ like a suspicious _ad hoc_ patch to save the theory from falsification by bi trans women, but it's actually needed to explain the commonality of (a) AGP males expressing attraction to men _only while in "girl mode" themselves_, and (b) self-reports of sexual orientation changing post-transition in trans women who weren't androphilic _before_
* (a) is suspicious is because "bi + AGP, independently" doesn't explain why the interest would be dependent on one's _own_ presentation; (b) is suspicious is because everything else we know about sexual orientation in males (but [not females](/papers/bailey-what_is_sexual_orientation_and_do_women_have_one.pdf)) makes it look awfully _stable_. (Conversion therapy doesn't work; criminally convicted pedophiles still show genital response to child stimuli despite the huge incentives to conceal/repress it; [correlation of homosexuality with childhood behavior](/papers/bailey-zucker-childhood_sex-typed_behavior_and_sexual_orientation.pdf) makes it look like a [prenatal organizational effect, rather than an activational effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational-Activational_Hypothesis) that would respond to HRT as an adult.)
* Maybe these two bullet points suffice and I don't need to pad it out into a whole post?
At first I was imagining a post on my existing blog, but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. So I made up a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/).
-[some misgivings about naming choices, but I don't actively regret it like my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts]
+[TODO: some misgivings about naming choices, but I don't actively regret it like my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts; maybe pull out into a separate post and link]
-[aside (footnote?) on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will"]
+[aside on pen name: hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series, "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in a serial novel whose catchphrase is "Somebody had to and no one else will"]
-[aside
(footnote?) on the blog name: I had already claimed
[email protected]_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) / it's a little bit awkward having the blog title and URL be different, and people think "space" is a separate word]
+[aside on the blog name: I had already claimed
[email protected]_ in 2014, to participate in [a contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html) by one of the [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/) / it's a little bit awkward having the blog title and URL be different, and people think "space" is a separate word]
Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another obvious response to my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy. Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff