From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2021 03:40:12 +0000 (-0800) Subject: drafting reply to Scott on AGenP X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=3b1de499aa2703280167d453610606bda418a9f1;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git drafting reply to Scott on AGenP --- diff --git a/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md b/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md index d8240a0..84c3a6e 100644 --- a/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md +++ b/content/drafts/reply-to-scott-alexander-on-autogenderphilia.md @@ -28,6 +28,30 @@ But your allegedly boring hypothesis is not appealing to a shared social experie I think the answer here is just "Nothing." +Oftentimes I want to categorize people by sex, and formulate hypothesis of the form, "If you're female/male, then ...". This is a natural category that buys me [predictions about lots of stuff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans). + +_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](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/lippa-gender-related_traits_in_gays.pdf). (That is, it looks like _homosexuality_ is probably a kind of brain intersex condition, at least in many cases.) + +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](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vhp2sW6iBhNJwqcwP/blood-is-thicker-than-water). "LGBT" 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 common lives. (Indeed, as you know, I don't even think the "T" alone are the same kind of people.) + +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 possibly, _possibly_ correspond to?! + +Again, I'm self-conscious that to someone who doesn't already share my worldview, this seems dogmatically non-empirical—here I'm telling you why I can't take your theory seriously without even _addressing_ the survey data that you think your theory can explain that mine can't. Is this not a scientific sin? What's with that? + +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 "imagine being him/her" questions, because I consider it highly nonobvious whether different populations are interpreting the survey questions the same way. + +The _reason_ I believe autogynephlia "is a thing" and causally potent to transgenderedness in the first place, is not because trans women gave a mean Likert response of 3.2 on anyone's survey, but because of my brain's inductive inference algorithms operating on a _massive_ confluence of a [real-life experiences](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) and observations in a naturalistic setting. + +If I'm not playing the modesty/Outside View politeness game, I actually think this thing is _just obvious_ if you look at the world and try to describe what you see. To illustrate, I was about to include a link to the search results for "fetish" on [/r/MtF](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/), but before even sending a search query, I see that the current top post (with 476 votes) is ... ["I have boobs and a pp"](https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/rjehj1/i_have_boobs_and_a_pp/). + +Show that post title to any normal person outside of your tiny and recent ideological bubble, and ask them whether they think the author is a man with a fetish, or a woman trapped in a man's body. You and I, we're intellectuals—in our world, you wouldn't, and shouldn't, let me get away with that leading question. ("Man with a fetish, or ..." is a false dichotomy.) Nevertheless, _pragmatically_, I think the normal person gets this one right by means of successfully noticing that actual women don't gleefully post about how they "have boobs", and the people in your tiny and recent ideological bubble get this one wrong because you're insane religious fanatics who are obligated to pretend you don't have a concept of "actual women." + +[TODO: IRB nightmare and interpretation skepticism] + +[TODO: reasons to be suspicious that women aren't reporting the same thing] + +[TODO: behavioral genetics and trans] + ---- In ["My IRB Nightmare"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/), you express skepticism about a screening test for bipolar disorder: