Strongest evidence was a desire to have no facial hair. I’m also intrigued by the idea of having no body hair. Today I consider these to be cosmetic body modifications which I may eventually pay to have, finances permitting.
As a teenager, I sometimes fantasized being a girl; I considered this weak evidence because I found it plausible that doing so as much as I did was within the range of typical variation for cismales. Also I found it annoying to have “dangly bits”, but I concluded that the main consideration seemed to be convenience. I’m weakly convinced that bottom surgery is minus-EV with respect to convenience, though it’s possible for technology to improve. Medium-sized boobs instead would probably be more inconvenient. Small boobs instead would probably be less inconvenient; I suspect they might be more fun than no boobs. And they don’t seem /that/ inconvenient; I should mention that my male bits also don’t seem /that/ inconvenient to me now.
The rest of this comment will be far more articulate than my thinking at the time, but I think it’s close enough.
I think my feelings can be decomposed to two orthogonal categories: Munchkinism, and desire to be androgynous.
Transgender is a particularly conspicuous cluster in hypothesis-space. But my explanation is also simple, and fits well. I’m bothered that I can’t come up with any really strong predictions to distinguish Transgender versus “Androgyny” (defined as shorthand for “desire to be androgynous”), and also that I have no sense of the ratio Pr(Transgender) : Pr(“Androgyny”). Even my rather low level of body dysphoria is not that great for distinguishing. I think this is because the Transgender cluster is spacious enough that it approaches really damn close to “Androgyny”.
Come to think of it, I wonder if Munchkinism influenced the conclusion. You’d expect Transgender-or-not to almost completely outweigh it in a utility calculation, but hmm… (Munchkinism, or at least my brand of it, loves being a guy: tall, big hands (which conflicts with “Androgyny”, at least in my case), fast metabolism at certain ages (actually I’m only somewhat confident about that being preferable), also privilege (which doesn’t seem to show up much in my deliberations, but maybe it does and I haven’t noticed).
edit:
I’m satisfied with my current voice (ofc Munchkinisim would love more control over voice). That does seem to distinguish my Transgender and “Androgyny” hypotheses. I felt a significant burst of relief from having that articulated. Thank you very much.
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I’ve heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don’t go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I’d expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I’d only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I’m 5′6″) for social impressiveness reasons, though now I’m quite happy about my height and my generally not-very-masculine build. And when I was just starting to seriously wonder about this, or possibly even before then, I already had a general sense that I’d probably want to transition at some point, but I hoped I could put it off until after the singularity and put it out of my mind until then. Of course, that didn’t work out, it didn’t go away and after a few months it got to the point where I was almost constantly preoccupied by it. At that point the instrumental considerations didn’t seem that compelling.
Anyway, given my current state of information I’m still satisfied that I’m making the right decision at the moment, but thanks for sharing your experience!
Evidence leading to hypothesis:
Strongest evidence was a desire to have no facial hair. I’m also intrigued by the idea of having no body hair. Today I consider these to be cosmetic body modifications which I may eventually pay to have, finances permitting.
As a teenager, I sometimes fantasized being a girl; I considered this weak evidence because I found it plausible that doing so as much as I did was within the range of typical variation for cismales. Also I found it annoying to have “dangly bits”, but I concluded that the main consideration seemed to be convenience. I’m weakly convinced that bottom surgery is minus-EV with respect to convenience, though it’s possible for technology to improve. Medium-sized boobs instead would probably be more inconvenient. Small boobs instead would probably be less inconvenient; I suspect they might be more fun than no boobs. And they don’t seem /that/ inconvenient; I should mention that my male bits also don’t seem /that/ inconvenient to me now.
The rest of this comment will be far more articulate than my thinking at the time, but I think it’s close enough.
I think my feelings can be decomposed to two orthogonal categories: Munchkinism, and desire to be androgynous.
Transgender is a particularly conspicuous cluster in hypothesis-space. But my explanation is also simple, and fits well. I’m bothered that I can’t come up with any really strong predictions to distinguish Transgender versus “Androgyny” (defined as shorthand for “desire to be androgynous”), and also that I have no sense of the ratio Pr(Transgender) : Pr(“Androgyny”). Even my rather low level of body dysphoria is not that great for distinguishing. I think this is because the Transgender cluster is spacious enough that it approaches really damn close to “Androgyny”.
Come to think of it, I wonder if Munchkinism influenced the conclusion. You’d expect Transgender-or-not to almost completely outweigh it in a utility calculation, but hmm… (Munchkinism, or at least my brand of it, loves being a guy: tall, big hands (which conflicts with “Androgyny”, at least in my case), fast metabolism at certain ages (actually I’m only somewhat confident about that being preferable), also privilege (which doesn’t seem to show up much in my deliberations, but maybe it does and I haven’t noticed).
edit:
I’m satisfied with my current voice (ofc Munchkinisim would love more control over voice). That does seem to distinguish my Transgender and “Androgyny” hypotheses. I felt a significant burst of relief from having that articulated. Thank you very much.
I try not to think (primarily) in terms of convenience, because from everything I’ve heard, it seems like adult cases of gender dysphoria don’t go away and only get worse over time, eventually outweighing almost anything else. Conditional on the hypothesis that I do in fact have a transgender brain, I’d expect that if I decided to avoid transitioning now for instrumental reasons, I’d only end up regretting it later.
I did have some thoughts along those lines… e.g. at one point I was mildly wishing to be taller (I’m 5′6″) for social impressiveness reasons, though now I’m quite happy about my height and my generally not-very-masculine build. And when I was just starting to seriously wonder about this, or possibly even before then, I already had a general sense that I’d probably want to transition at some point, but I hoped I could put it off until after the singularity and put it out of my mind until then. Of course, that didn’t work out, it didn’t go away and after a few months it got to the point where I was almost constantly preoccupied by it. At that point the instrumental considerations didn’t seem that compelling.
Anyway, given my current state of information I’m still satisfied that I’m making the right decision at the moment, but thanks for sharing your experience!