An Overture

Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition. Intuitively, they tend to be quite aware of what they do and don't like about inhabiting their chosen bodies and gender roles. But when it comes to explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences, they almost universally to come up short. I've even seen several smart, thoughtful trans people, such as Natalie Wynn, making statements to the effect that it's impossible to develop a satisfying theory of aberrant gender identities. (She may have been exaggerating for effect, but it was clear she'd given up on solving the puzzle herself.)

I'm trans myself, but even I can admit that this lack of introspective clarity is a reason to be wary of transgenderism as a phenomenon. After all, there are two main explanations for trans people's failure to produce a good explanation for their own existence. One is that transgenderism is the result of an obscenely complex and arcane neuro-psychological phenomenon, which we have no hope of unraveling through normal introspective methods. The other is that trans people are lying about something, including to themselves.

Now, a priori, both of these do seem like real possibilities. And reasonable theories have been put forward on both sides. Let's survey a couple of them now.

On the "arcane neuro-psychological phenomenon" end of the spectrum, there are theories that pertain to so-called body-maps, where trans people's brains expect their bodies to have cross-sex anatomy, and feel pain when those expectations aren't met. This old, obscure blog post articulates a shallow version of this concept. I used it as an aspect of a more detailed biological theory, in my previous LessWrong post on trans issues.

The body-map theory used to seem plausible to me, in large part because I have a near-constant, almost physical discomfort with my own penis. I thought that maybe, that's what drove me to transition, even though my personality and sexuality are broadly masculine. To my current self, though, that sounds like at most, that's just one part of the story. My trans-feminine friends (including ones with masculine personalities) generally don't report this kind of intense, constant bodily discomfort, suggesting the body-map theory at least doesn't apply to all transgenderism.

However, none of my friends have ever really put forth a parsimonious theory of what their actual motivations may have been. This brings us back to the self-deception hypothesis: that trans people are obscuring vital information from themselves and others, facts about their psychologies that would make their transition motives slot right into place.

What might those hidden motives be? Well, probably the best-known theory comes from Ray Blanchard. He categorizes trans women with a two-type typology: autogynephiles (AGP) and heterosexual transexuals (HSTS). Per Blanchard, AGP trans women lived previously as straight men, but transitioned due to an overpowering fetish for inhabiting women's bodies. HSTS trans women, on the other hand, previously lived as feminine gay men, but transitioned because society is more accepting of feminine behaviors when they come from women than men. Both types of trans people are often unable to admit that these are their true motives for transitioning.

This theory has been deeply influential. And to be fair, it does make some accurate predictions, including about me. I am attracted primarily to women, and I do have AGP, at least in the strict sense of the term. I've gotten off to the thought of being a woman quite a bit over the years, especially closer to the start of my transition. But this never felt like a parsimonious theory of why I transitioned, in light of all the social and financial costs associated with doing so. I've sacrificed far less in the name of my other fetishes, some of which are considerably more intense.

So, perhaps I was motivated by a combination of a genuine body-map problem (my intense penis discomfort), and autogynephilia? That was my least bad guess for a long time. But in recent months, I think I've actually uncovered a third, more significant motive for my transition. It's embarrassing, not unlike AGP is embarrassing, so it makes sense that I was introspectively blocked on acknowledging it for several years. But I think it makes a lot of puzzle pieces finally fall into place.

I don't want to claim my motives are representative of trans people in general. However, there's a chance that they explain more transitions than just my own. So, I've decided to recount my motivations in public.

You float like a feather

In a beautiful world

I want a perfect body

I want a perfect soul

But I'm a creep

I'm a weirdo

In the Case of Fiora Starlight

When I was about 14 years old, I got extremely into anime. In particular, I was into anime analysis YouTube, where people made brief video essays intellectualizing about anime-related topics. This is where I made all my early online friends, and it's where the most interesting parts of my life were taking place.

You might be able to predict from this that I was extremely lonely in the real world. By this point in my life (around ninth grade), I was a total social outcast. It's hard to untangle the original causation here, but my social gracelessness and my status as a weird nerd formed a feedback loop: I wouldn't talk to the vast majority of my classmates at school, supposedly because "I probably wouldn't find it interesting anyway". And whenever I did talk to other students, or speak in front of a class, I tended towards spergy faux pas monologues, without adjusting for what others may have wanted to talk about.

In other words, I wasn't really even trying to connect to my peers in person, and instead spiraled into my own corner of weirdness of the internet. This was especially bad for me because, as it turns out, many of my peers on anime analysis YouTube were themselves miserable, self-destructive outcasts. My friend group practically worshipped art about misery, such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Welcome to the NHK. And in a similar vein, many of our favorite YouTubers were openly unemployed shut-ins, who aspired to make sad art about their own sad lives.

So, I was trapped in a downward spiral of bad online role models, who encouraged me to become weirder and worse, more miserable and less capable. I was lonely, I wanted to be loved and taken care of. But I had no understanding of how to go about achieving this, or any of my other goals. I certainly wasn't being encouraged to try and become the kind of person most people would respect or want to associate with. Overall, I wasn't steering my life in a very healthy direction. I looked like I was on a path to ending up as a depressed denizen of my mother's basement.^[1]

However, there was at least one notable escape route that was salient to my community: becoming a cute anime girl. After all, many anime girls are explicitly engineered to maximize the extent to which onlookers will love, adore, and want to protect them. The so-called "cute girls doing cute things" genre of anime exists more or less to exploit this instinct in humans, and my corner of the anime analysis community was keenly aware that this worked. Most of us were huge fans of shows like K-On!, whose primary appeal consisted of 39 episodes and a movie's worth of adorable banter between cute girls.

Fluffy marshmallow girls, engineered for maximal cuteness.

K-On! (and similar shows we liked, such as MLP:FiM) made a stark counterpoint to the darkness of my community's other favorite works, like Evangelion and NHK. In standing as rare fountains of optimism in our miserable lives, the "cute girls doing cute things" genre planted a seed in our heads: "If you want to become less miserable, one viable strategy would be to attract adoring attention via cuteness, in the same way these anime girls manage to extract adoring attention out of you." I could never have verbalized it so clearly at the time, but the subconscious priming was real.

(This seems related to the fact that yearning-to-be-her feelings sometimes co-occur with observing women one find hot and attractive. Partly, this is Blanchardian AGP, but the more important thing might be yearning to be loved. Straight men practically worship the bodies of attractive women, and some of them want that same love directed back at themselves.^[2] This is structurally isomorphic to anime fans who are psychologically manipulated by fluffy marshmallow girls, adoring them in ways they may wish to be adored themselves.)

So anyway, by our upholding shows like K-On! as classics, my community primed me to see "become a cute girl" as a privileged solution to the "I'm a lonely, miserable outcast" problem. I wasn't yet thinking about any of this consciously, though. So, the next significant event was encountering this video essay about the anime series Wandering Son, which explicitly focuses on trans identity. I'm not sure I'd even heard about trans people prior to watching that video, but the way the video and the show it was about presented them basically one-shotted me.

Nitori, the protagonist of Wandering Son, wearing a wig and feminine clothes.

Not only was the main character capable of becoming a cute anime girl, by means of gender transition. But both the show and the video were hugely sympathetic to trans people. This meant that, from my perspective, undergoing gender transition myself might get me the love and compassion I yearned for from two different angles at once: both being a cute girl, and being a championed victim of societal oppression. The video was even by a major figure in the anime analysis community, which caused me to view this attitude towards transition as inside my social group's Overton window.

Watching the video, I cried a sea of tears, it having pressed my emotional buttons with extreme force and precision. But I misunderstood the reasons why this was the case. Had I been older and more self-aware, I may have recognized the true pattern here. My autistic, socially maladaptive personality had resulted in me being rejected by the social order, and I wanted something, anything to make me feel loved again. Regardless whether I chose to transition, my primary strategy should have been working on my social skills. But instead, I banked everything on gender transition.

(You know, gender transition, that ultra-reliable strategy for gaining acceptance from society...)

To be fair to my 14-year-old self, I did think about whether transition was a good idea in some detail. And I did come up with some defenses of the decision that seem relatively plausible even now. For instance, "cuteness-maxxing" was a strategy I'd shown some affinity for ever since childhood. I'd often played up a kind of emotive, childish enthusiasm, and this did in fact get people to like and respect me in elementary school. So in some sense, transitioning into a cute girl seemed like it was playing to my strengths. I'd have been a passable real-life K-On! character, at least if I passed as any kind of woman at all.

So that was another reason I was motivated to transition: It would have made me better at playing a social role I already enjoyed playing anyway. I'm not sure this outweighed the social costs of gender transition. Even assuming I passed, misogyny may have posed a real problem for me. After all, women are often discouraged from fierce, explicit competition and dominating status hierarchies. I, on the other hand, love that shit.

But in any case, there was more that made me interested in transition than just "being a cute girl was a strategy I randomly stumbled into hyper-fixating on, for addressing the more general problem of being a love-starved social outcast."

I continued to debate myself internally about this stuff for a long time. At some point, I turned 15 and actually started high school, with my internal struggle with whether to transition or not in a state of deadlock. I eventually decided it was best to shelve the question for the time being, and focus on less uncomfortable aspects of my life (such as my budding friendships with depressed otaku on Discord).

Within a few months of starting high school, though, I was finally saddled with a straw that broke my back. It was the somewhat infamous r/traa, a now-defunct forum for memes by and for questioning/newly out trans people. This community appealed to me for all the same reasons K-On! and Wandering Son appealed to me. Its memes frequently positioned ultra-cutesy, often quite sexualized anime characters as transition targets, whom I envied for being worshiped and adored by those attracted to them. And they framed trans people as an oppressed class innately deserving of sympathy, again appealing to the part of me that yearned for unconditional compassion.

This reignited my ideation about transitioning. Only this time, there was the mental lubricant of knowing there was an entire community full of people who had, apparently, extremely similar hang-ups to my own. It's sometimes remarked that r/traa-influenced trans-feminine people act out a kind of parody of womanhood. Natalie Wynn once confessed to viewing it as "a queasy combination of the hypersexual and the infantile." But it felt like a home to me, at age 15. It was a place where everyone could relate to everyone else's emotional needs, and was willing to coordinate to meet them as a group.

Probably, not all of these people were motivated to transition for quite the same reasons I was. But I'd bet that a lot of them were. Lots of them were neurodivergent kids, who dropped out of social reality as children or teenagers. Then, for path-dependent reasons, they sometimes just happen exposed to the concept of transgenderism, specifically in a way that makes it seem like a privileged or socially encouraged strategy for getting the love and acceptance they've been deprived of. Often, this transition-advocating media highlights the love and care males direct at attractive and/or adorable females, such as anime girls. They want something like that for themselves.

Sometimes, these desires synergize with an existing femininity in their personalities, sometimes it doesn't, but the result is the same: transition.

Ever since I came out online, I've been moving between communities filled with these people. I've found them in the anime analysis community, and the Twitter leftist scene, and the rationality community. Even post-transition, many of them maintain masculine overall personality profiles, but also remain socially anxious, and deeply disposed to cutesy dynamics with each other.^[3] It's almost like most of them had deep emotional wounds, often stemming from social rejection, and had transitioned to become cute girls or endearing women as a kind of questionably adaptive coping mechanism.

At the end of the day, this is my alternative to autogynephilia theory. Most of these trans people would probably be classified as AGP by Blanchard's typology, but I don't think that's quite right. The truth is similarly embarrassing, but much less absurd than "AGP fetish so powerful it's worth upending your entire life over." It's not that they're driven by being obsessively turned on by the thought of being women. It's that they know what it feels like to feel attracted to women, and are desperate to have that same kind of loving attention directed back at themselves.

My theory even has the benefit of being one candidate explanation for autistic, female-attracted trans women who claim not to experience AGP at all. (Although, with some of the people I have in mind, I suspect they want more badly to be seen as beautiful than adorable.) It also provides a relatively clean explanation for traits like the autism and mental illness of the "AGP" subset of trans-feminine people as well.

(And it explains the cutesy aspect of certain classic baby-trans tropes, such as pink thigh-high stripey socks; AGP theory only directly explains the sexual aspect. Separately, my theory also makes room for the existence of openly autogynephilic men who claim not to have social dysphoria at all; the existence of such men is implied by the fairly high rates of strict-sense AGP in cis men, as recorded in Aella's massive kink dataset. I could keep going, but pacing demands I cut it short here.)

... Although, of course, my theory also calls into question whether people with my motives should even transition in the first place.

Was it worth it?

[i can't write this]

addendum: please do not take this as a universal theory of gender identity. several have said this post resonated deeply, but others have said it's completely alien. it captures one archetype cleanly, but it's not a full solution to the puzzle. for example, i still don't know what's going on with people whose gender identities formed before/without becoming mentally ill outcasts, some of whom exist.

please don't assume all trans people you run into are going to have this psychological profile.

1. ^{^}

   This is in fact what ended up happening to me after high school, before I found the rationality community.

2. ^{^}

   Speaking about her pre-transition relationship with gender, Natalie Wynn says: "An early romantic disappointment involved my realization that women would never be attracted to me in the same way that I was attracted to them."

3. ^{^}

   :3, UwU, =^^=