earlier Tuesday drafting "Sexual Dimorphism in the Sequences"

I really want to finish this piece! It sets down in words so many
things I haven't been writing about quickly enough for four years!

diff --git a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
index 305f091..078df63 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
+++ b/content/drafts/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md
@@ -315,6 +315,8 @@ https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/rescue_utility
 
 -------
 
+<a id="coda"></a>
+
 ### 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."
@@ -337,19 +339,19 @@ But after moving to Berkeley and doing a little bit more reading ... I _don't_ t
 
 So, I realize this is an inflamatory and (far more importantly) _surprising_ claim. Obviously, I don't have introspective access into other people's minds. If someone claims to have an internal sense of her own gender that doesn't match her assigned sex at birth, on what evidence could I _possibly_ have the _astounding_ arrogance to reply, "No, actually I think you're just a perverted male like me"?
 
-Actually, lots. For example, in 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit (which currently has 90,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
+Actually, lots. For example, in April 2018, the /r/MtF subreddit (which currently has 90,000 subscribers) [posted a link to a poll: "Did you have a gender/body swap/transformation "fetish" (or similar) before you realised you were trans?"](https://archive.is/uswsz). The [results of the poll](https://strawpoll.com/5p7y96x2/r): [_82%_ said Yes](/images/did_you_have-reddit_poll.png). [Top comment in the thread](https://archive.is/c7YFG), with 232 karma: "I spent a long time in the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp".
 
-Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of real-world MtFs. But if you just _look_ at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_.
+Certainly, 82% is not 100%. Certainly, you could argue that Reddit has a sampling bias such that poll results and karma scores from /r/MtF fail to match the distribution of real-world MtFs. But if you don't take the gender-identity story as a _axiom_ and [_actually look_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SA79JMXKWke32A3hG/original-seeing) at the _details_ of what people say and do, these kinds of observations are _not hard to find_.
 
 Informal Reddit poll isn't "scientific" enough for you? Fine. The scientific literature says the same thing: [TODO: cite as many 80% surveys as I can from Kay Brown's bibliography].
 
-Worried about leading survey questions pointing to the wrong conclusion, and want more detailed (if not standardizable and quantifiable) accounts? Me too! 
+Worried about leading survey questions pointing to the wrong conclusion, and want more detailed (if not standardizable and quantifiable) accounts? Me too! And there's lots!
 
 [TODO: McCloskey, or how did I missed this from Serano 2007]
 
 > There was also a period of time when I embraced the word "pervert" and viewed my desire to be female as some sort of sexual kink. But after exploring that path, it became obvious that explanation could not account for the vast majority of instances when I thought about being female in a nonsexual context.
 
-[TODO: Nevada]
+[TODO: Nevada. Nevada specifically dissess the Blanchard account, as do people I talk to. One said AGP transition could be possible but very rare, and the same goddamned person is on the record as being into TF porn at 19 when their dysphoria kicked in; or someone dissed Blanchard, but endorses Anne Vitale, which makes the same observations and arrives at the same taxonomy, but dresses it up in socially-desirable language]
 
 [...]
 
@@ -357,5 +359,30 @@ http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm
 
 > As sexual maturity advances, Group Three, cloistered gender dysphoric boys, often combine excessive masturbation (one individual reported masturbating up to 5 and even 6 times a day) with an increase in secret cross-dressing activity to release anxiety.
 
-Got that? To release anxiety—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
+Got that? To _release anxiety_—their terrible, terrible _gender expression deprivation anxiety!_
+
+After having seen enough of these _laughable_ denials of autogynephilia, the main question in my mind has become not, _Is the two-type feminine–androphilic/autogynephilic taxonomy of MtF transsexualism approximately true?_ (answer: yes, obviously) and more, _How dumb do you (proponents of gender-identity theories) think we (the general public) are?_ (answer: very, but this assessment is accurate).
+
+How weasely am I being with these "approximately true" and "as a first approximation" qualifiers and hedges? I claim: not _more_ weasely than anyone who tries to reason about psychology given the knowledge and methodology our civilization has managed to accumulate. Psychology is very complicated; every human is their own unique snowflake, but it would be impossible to navigate the world using the "every human is their own unique _maximum-entropy_ snowflake; you can't make _any_ probabilistic inferences about someone's mind based on your experiences with other humans" theory. Even if someone were to _verbally endorse_ something like that—and at age sixteen, I might have—their brain is still going to go on to make predictions inferences about people's minds using _some_ algorithm whose details aren't available to introspection. Much of this predictive machinery is going to be instinct bequeathed by natural selection (predicting the behavior of conspecifics was very useful in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness), but some of it is the cultural accumulation of people's attempts to organize their experience into categories, clusters, diagnoses. (The cluster-learning capability is _also_ bequeathed by natural selection, of course, but it's worth distinguishing more "learned" from more "innate" content.) No one matches any particular clinical-profile stereotype _exactly_, but the world makes more sense when you have language for theoretical abstractions like ["comas"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/11/does-the-glasgow-coma-scale-exist-do-comas/) or "depression" or "bipolar disorder" or "autogynephilia".
+
+So, if some particular individual trans woman writes down her life story, and swears up and down that she doesn't match the feminine/early-onset type, but _also_ doesn't empathize at all with this "autogynephilia" idea, I don't have any definitive data with which to accuse her of lying, because I don't _know_ her, and the true diversity of human psychology is no doubt richer and stranger than my fuzzy low-resolution model of it. But the fuzzy low-resolution model is _way too good_ not to be pointing to _some_ regularity in the real world. 
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+But if so, I would _also_ expect 
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+the 'it's probably just a fetish' camp
+
+
+(Friend of the blog Tailcalled argues that [there's no discrete typology for FtM](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blanchardianism/comments/jp9rmn/there_is_probably_no_ftm_typology/) as there is for the two types of MtF, because the various causes of gender problems in females vary more independently, favoring spectrum or [simplex](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex) models rather than a typology.)
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+If some particular trans woman pours out her life story, and 
\ No newline at end of file

diff --git a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
index d6e3b70..9f32518 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
+++ b/notes/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-notes.md
@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qCsxiojX7BSLuuBgQ/the-super-happy-people-3-8
 * wipe culturally defined values
 * finding things in the refrigerator
 *  https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xsyG7PkMekHud2DMK/of-gender-and-rationality
+* make sure the late-onset/AGP terminology is introduced in a coherent order rather than being inserted willy-nilly
 
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