Category: other
Tags: cathartic
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> THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. _There's a word for it._ I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.
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And:
> Scarcity is a _metaphysical_ fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic _without_ being gender-dysphoric—_or am I?_ _If_ transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It _has_ to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.
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<a id="views-have-changed"></a>My views on gender have changed a _lot_ over the past ten years—most notably, I'm not a psychological sex differences denialist anymore, so I'm afraid I can no longer endorse that "gender shouldn't exist" stance. (Given that sex differences exist and people aren't going to _pretend not to notice_, social-role defaults are inevitably going to accrete around them.)
Category: other
Tags: HRT diary, not-a-transition
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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.
Category: other
Tags: HRT diary, not-a-transition
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I wish I were more self-aware. People tell me caffiene is a stimulant, and I believe them, but I tend to doubt if I could _tell_, double-blind, from the inside, whether an iced-coffee I just drank was decaf or not.
>
> —"Weird Science" by Oingo Boingo
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So, I took off my estradiol patch during [my recent nervous breakdown](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/). I still [don't think](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) it had much, if any, real effect. (In particular, the stress and sleep-deprivation by themselves seem quite sufficient to explain the breakdown without attributing any of it to a nonstandard hormone balance, especially given how similar it felt to my 2013 nervous breakdown.)
Indeed, if "transness" is a unimodal continuous quantity, we should expect there to be far more maybe-trans-under-the-right-circumstances people than people who would be "trans at any cost", for the same reason there are more "merely" six-foot-tall people than there are towering seven-foot-tall people—
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Those of us who are dysphoric enough for the question to come up, but not so dysphoric for the answer to be overdetermined, have a serious choice to make: would a gender upgrade be worth it, taking into account everything that would be lost?—from the burden of being a lifelong medical patient, to potentially increased difficulty finding a job or a romantic partner.
The intrinsic-identity view can be seen as the limiting special case of the economic view where demand for transitioning is infinitely [inelastic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_(economics))—
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This insight helps us make sense in secular changes in the expression of gender variance. The phenomenon of [increases in transgender identification](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-population.html) that some commentators characterize as [_social contagion_](https://youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org/tag/social-contagion/) could also be seen as an entirely _rational_ response to incentives: as being trans becomes less costly—whether due to increased social acceptance, improvements in surgical or hormone-administration technology, or any other reason—we _should_ see more gender-dysphoric people doing something about it on the margin.
Category: other
Tags: HRT diary, not-a-transition
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Why am I doing this again?
In contrast, adapted bleggs are _both_ easily identifiable _and_ the difference matters to your decisionmaking: a distinction that makes a difference, something your brain wants to have an efficient representation so that you can attend to it.
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You're pleased with the iota of philosophical progress you seem to have made, and will be sure to be on the lookout for more applications of it.
This is definitely compatible with transitioning. It is _not_, I claim, compatible with the ideology of gender-as-self-identification that is rapidly establishing a foothold in Society. Consider this display at a recent conference of the American Philosophical Association (note, the people whose _job_ it is to use careful conceptual distinctions to understand reality)—
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<span class="photo-credit">[(photograph by Lucia A. Schwarz)](https://twitter.com/Lucia_A_Schwarz/status/949315365842116608)</span>
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff