Yup. This is a case (I can think of one more, but I’ll let that be someone else’s crusade) where we have the correct theory in the psychology literature, and all the nice smart socially-liberal people have heard of the theory, but they think to themselves, “Oh, but only bad outgroup people could believe something crazy like that; it’s just some guy’s theory; it probably isn’t actually true.”
Surprise!Everyone is lying! Everyone is lying because telling the truth would be politically inconvenient!
I find the first etiology similar to my model. [...] Writing things like “behaviorally-masculine girls” just sounds like paraphrase to me.
Similar, but the key difference is that I claim that there’s no atomic “identity”: whether a very behaviorally-masculine girl grows up to identify as a “butch lesbian” or “trans man” is mostly going to depend on the details of her/his cultural environment and the incentives she/he faces.
Do you have thoughts on Thoughts on The Blanchard/Bailey Distinction?
I agree that I probably look insanely confident! What’s going on here—
(personal explanation of why I’m investing so much effort into being such an asshole screaming bloody murder about this at every possible opportunity follows; if you’re just interested in the science, read the science; don’t pay attention to me)
—is that I spent ten years having (mild, manageable) gender problems, all the while thinking, “Oh, but this is just autogynephilia; that can’t be the same as actually being trans, because every time I use that word in public, _everyonesays_ ‘That’s completely unsupported transphobic nonsense’, so I must just be some weird non-trans outlier; oh, well.”
… and then, I moved to Berkeley. I met a lot of trans women, who seem a lot like me along many dimensions. People who noticed the pattern started to tell me that they thought I was probably trans.
And I was like, “I agree that it seems plausible that I have a similar underlying psychological condition, and I’m definitely very jealous of all of our friends who get their own breasts and get refered to as she, but my thing looks pretty obviously related to my paraphilic sexuality and it’s not at all obvious to me that full-time social transition is the best quality-of-life intervention when you take into account the serious costs and limitations of the existing technology. After all, I am biologically male and have received male socialization and you can use these facts to make probabilistic inferences about my psychology; I don’t expect anyone to pretend not to notice. If some actual biologically-female women don’t want people like me in their spaces, that seems like a legimate desire that I want to respect, even if other people make different choices.”
And a lot of people are like, “Oh, that’s just internalized transphobia; you’re obviously a trans woman; we already know that transitioning is the correct quality-of-life intervention. Don’t worry about invading women’s spaces; Society has decided that you have a right to be a woman if you want.”
And I’m like, “Okay, it’s certainly possible that you’re right about the optimal social conventions and quality-of-life interventions surrounding late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but how do you know? Where is the careful cost-benefit calculation that people are using to make these enormous life- and society-altering decisions?”
And no one knows. No one is in control. It’s all just memetics and primate signaling games, just like Robin Hanson was trying to tell me for the past ten years, and I verbally agreed, but I didn’t see it.
I trusted the Berkeley rationalist community. I trusted that social reality mostly made sense. I was wrong.
Surprise! Everyone is lying! Everyone is lying because telling the truth would be politically inconvenient!
Good post. I’ve actually seen claims that the description of male homosexuality has been similarly politicized—that the old Graeco-Roman/Mediterranean model of a unusually-feminine “bottom” and a unusually-masculine “top” actually gets closer to the facts in many cases: in this view, modern “egalitarian” gay relationships are arguably a positive development from a pure socialization POV, but they aren’t quite “natural” in the sense of being what the psychology tends to. Oh, and the reason that model is politically inconvenient is the deeply-uncomfortable fact that hyper-masculinized “top” behavior can shade relatively-easily into actual sexual abuse, as seen in the historical ‘pederasty’. (Of course, relative ease is far from implying such abusive behavior as common in absolute terms. But it still counts as a source of unwelcome political controversy!)
Yup. This is a case (I can think of one more, but I’ll let that be someone else’s crusade) where we have the correct theory in the psychology literature, and all the nice smart socially-liberal people have heard of the theory, but they think to themselves, “Oh, but only bad outgroup people could believe something crazy like that; it’s just some guy’s theory; it probably isn’t actually true.”
Surprise! Everyone is lying! Everyone is lying because telling the truth would be politically inconvenient!
Similar, but the key difference is that I claim that there’s no atomic “identity”: whether a very behaviorally-masculine girl grows up to identify as a “butch lesbian” or “trans man” is mostly going to depend on the details of her/his cultural environment and the incentives she/he faces.
My reply.
I agree that I probably look insanely confident! What’s going on here—
(personal explanation of why I’m investing so much effort into being such an asshole screaming bloody murder about this at every possible opportunity follows; if you’re just interested in the science, read the science; don’t pay attention to me)
—is that I spent ten years having (mild, manageable) gender problems, all the while thinking, “Oh, but this is just autogynephilia; that can’t be the same as actually being trans, because every time I use that word in public, _everyone says_ ‘That’s completely unsupported transphobic nonsense’, so I must just be some weird non-trans outlier; oh, well.”
… and then, I moved to Berkeley. I met a lot of trans women, who seem a lot like me along many dimensions. People who noticed the pattern started to tell me that they thought I was probably trans.
And I was like, “I agree that it seems plausible that I have a similar underlying psychological condition, and I’m definitely very jealous of all of our friends who get their own breasts and get refered to as she, but my thing looks pretty obviously related to my paraphilic sexuality and it’s not at all obvious to me that full-time social transition is the best quality-of-life intervention when you take into account the serious costs and limitations of the existing technology. After all, I am biologically male and have received male socialization and you can use these facts to make probabilistic inferences about my psychology; I don’t expect anyone to pretend not to notice. If some actual biologically-female women don’t want people like me in their spaces, that seems like a legimate desire that I want to respect, even if other people make different choices.”
And a lot of people are like, “Oh, that’s just internalized transphobia; you’re obviously a trans woman; we already know that transitioning is the correct quality-of-life intervention. Don’t worry about invading women’s spaces; Society has decided that you have a right to be a woman if you want.”
And I’m like, “Okay, it’s certainly possible that you’re right about the optimal social conventions and quality-of-life interventions surrounding late-onset gender dysphoria in males, but how do you know? Where is the careful cost-benefit calculation that people are using to make these enormous life- and society-altering decisions?”
And no one knows. No one is in control. It’s all just memetics and primate signaling games, just like Robin Hanson was trying to tell me for the past ten years, and I verbally agreed, but I didn’t see it.
I trusted the Berkeley rationalist community. I trusted that social reality mostly made sense. I was wrong.
I still want to at least experiment with the same drugs everyone else is on. But I have no trust anymore.
Good post. I’ve actually seen claims that the description of male homosexuality has been similarly politicized—that the old Graeco-Roman/Mediterranean model of a unusually-feminine “bottom” and a unusually-masculine “top” actually gets closer to the facts in many cases: in this view, modern “egalitarian” gay relationships are arguably a positive development from a pure socialization POV, but they aren’t quite “natural” in the sense of being what the psychology tends to. Oh, and the reason that model is politically inconvenient is the deeply-uncomfortable fact that hyper-masculinized “top” behavior can shade relatively-easily into actual sexual abuse, as seen in the historical ‘pederasty’. (Of course, relative ease is far from implying such abusive behavior as common in absolute terms. But it still counts as a source of unwelcome political controversy!)