Why I Transitioned: A Case Study

[-]25Hour15d8178

This essay is introspective and vulnerable and writing it was gutsy as hell. I have nothing substantive to contribute with this comment beyond that.

[-]SarahNibs14d3220

CW: I will not be doing a thorough editing pass for fairness, tone, etc, or anything remotely like that; otherwise I would never post the comment and I think it's probably better to post than not.

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.

Is this... true? If so, I did not know it was famous. Or, rather, it seems false that trans people are worse at explaining the origins and intensity of those preferences than most people are at explaining the origins and intensity of lots of preferences. Why do I dislike cantaloupe but love kiwis? No idea. Why do I hate the feeling of digging bare-handed in the garden but my husband loves it? No idea. Why do I adore the feeling of an all-over light sunburn, but most people have a, well, different relationship to pain? While I hate the feeling of a scratchy clothing tag but many people don't seem to notice? No idea. Why did I experience gender euphoria when I changed my Google display name to Sarah on a whim and then after experimenting on another half dozen axes found so many other strong preferences I had not previously noticed for various reasons? No idea.

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.

Is this true? "main" explanations? Neither of these was ever my own explanation. It might be true that they're popular, I have stayed away from immersing myself in what seems like pretty terrible discourse because it's, uh, pretty terrible. Blanchard's stuff in particular seemed obviously ridiculous when I first read about it, well before I had any idea I was trans.

my alternative to autogynephilia theory

Please. Everyone. Do not privilege Blanchard's "hypothesis" as anything remotely like a default explanation. I mean I'd go so far as to say ignore it entirely. It is extremely easy to come up with psychological "theories" which touch on some aspects of some people's experience, come up with a "typology", claim that it's causal rather than a story about what might cause the observations that motivated it, claim that it covers all (or the vast majority) of the phenomenon, and then downplay or dismiss heaps of evidence that it doesn't and write convincing-sounding articles and papers about your shiny "theory". We get that all the time in so many domains. And then you look into it, notice that some of their observations resonate with you ('cause they're legit observations!), and accidentally think all that causal stuff and typology stuff has any worth and whoops there goes your sanity.

This whole post? Sounds like a plausible impetus for you choosing to transition, but (to me) not at all a plausible reason that transitioning didn't feel like a terrible idea to you.

My own theory is this:

Human minds are surprisingly different from each other, on more axes than we are conditioned to expect. If we project a map of this high dimensional space onto a one-dimensional space there are lots of ways to do it which result in a mostly two-humped distribution where most XX-havers are solidly in one and most XY-havers are solidly in the other; in practice societies usually draw boundaries around two fairly arbitrary volumes in the high dimensional space, constrained only by "the two volumes should end up solidly within the two humps in most of those projections, or be reasonably easily moved there through deniable individual choices", and call these volumes "the two genders". Then, having reified the concepts, they apply implicit and explicit pressure for everyone to mold themselves to appear to be solidly within one of the two volumes.

Depending on which aspects of yourself you have ignored, pressured, mutilated, transformed, etc to make yourself conform, you will be more or less okay with this; many will not even notice! (That single constraint does do a lot of work.) Trans people are those who are particularly harmed by conforming. Yes, of course, this is a spectrum. Yes, sometimes it's biological, sometimes it's psychological (primarily-brain biological plus upbringing plus social context), sometimes it's cultural, usually it's some mix. Yes, it can be different in different cultures, often because different arbitrary volumes in that high dimensional space were chosen; yes it can (clearly!) change over time. One common reason someone is particularly harmed by conforming is when, for some reason, their brains are much happier with the body parts common to the volume they weren't assumed to be inside.

Transitioning consists of moving closer to where you feel good about in that high-dimensional space, which can occur on one or many axes, can occur by relaxing the conforming you were attempting to perform, can occur by transforming yourself in a different direction, etc. Any individual can likely, with sufficient introspection, identify a substantial subset of the reasons for their discomfort with their original conformity; it seems likely to me that there are large correlations, unlikely that there are a small handful of "types" which are in any way fundamental (though we may of course draw boundaries around more volumes in that high-dimensional space and label them! we love to do that). We might want to privilege a few of the axes, for various reasons, like "people who are particularly better off by transforming that brain/body disconnect into something that is much less disconnected", if only to tell trans people "hey if taking hormones for a while didn't Solve All Your Problems or seem to help you as much as it helped that other trans person you've observed, like whatever, that's common, that too is on a spectrum".

Isn't this an instance of

obscenely complex and arcane neuro-psychological phenomenon

? I don't think so. To me it feels like business as normal, for the human brain. It's lots of fairly simple (though maybe unexpected) separate neuro-psychological phenomena, many correlated with each other, all mushed together because humans lumped 'em together in those arbitrary volumes constrained only to contain big clusters of humans, which in particular contain a few phenomena directly and clearly related to sexual dimorphism. Reality has a surprising amount of detail, but that doesn't make it obscenely complex and arcane. Metabolic pathways, on the other hand... :D

[-]Fiora Sunshine13d*130

the issues you take with the first two paragraphs of my post are valid, and largely the byproduct of me rushing my post out since otherwise i'd never have published it at all. my psychological default is to be kind of cruel towards trans people, and the editing passes over this post i did bother to do managed to tone that down a lot, but artifacts of it remain. "either transness is incomprehensibly convoluted or trans people are lying to themselves" was very much an artifact of me trying to appease the part of me that's hostile to trans people. (and, judging by the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people, it was a pretty effective rhetorical choice, albeit unconscious.)

re: the rest of your comment: the paragraphs in my post about my personality having something of a natively cutesy component, and my mention of having penis dysphoria, do point at potentially intersex-ish parts of my brain, which potentially pushed me somewhat closer to transition. i don't think these alone would have been enough to motivate or justify transition on my part though. indeed, i've been pretty heavily considering detransition for the past year or so, and especially since July (at which point i did MDMA about this and accepted that some of me really does deeply want to detrans). i'd just been suppressing this for years, for fear of being rejected by the trans community + having to awkwardly re-integrate into the world of cis people.

in other words, i was kind of being steered by neurosis and denial of reality, when i chose to transition. it made me happier for awhile, because the trans community gave me lots of wanted i wanted. but what i wanted back then was a kind of pica, something that i technically desired, and appreciated on some level, but which didn't really address my underlying psychological needs very well. currently, i'm mostly trying to address those psychological needs (e.g developing social skills and self-love). mostly separately, i might detrans if i ever decide the costs of losing my relationship and access to the trans community and so on are lower than the befits of going back to a social role my authentic self would probably be better suited to.

[-]Daphne_W9d137

Psychologically speaking, I wouldn't expect your loathing of trans people to stick after you properly resolved such a big mental knot. If your theories were correct, trans people would be victims of a mental health crisis scarcely more accountable than people with untreated schizophrenia or agoraphobia. Pity, grief, and horror would make more sense than cruelty.

So I don't think you've gotten to the heart of your own emotional matter. There is clearly part of you that loathes your current place in life, but I don't think you've identified what it is yet. My ~70% confidence guess based on this post would be that you feel like you can only be safe if you're socially accepted by loathing/denying yourself, either directly or by letting a group identity subsume yours.

Gender dysphoria and self-loathing can easily reinforce each other, but most trans people I know who experienced self-loathing before transitioning (myself included), the transition process alleviates the dysphoria enough that the self-loathing can be resolved with little or no therapy. I too visited /r/traa and /tttt/ early in my process, but I left those spaces once I felt more comfortable with myself.

I would recommend you go to therapy rather than try to find comfort in the support of others who "understandably have some animosity towards trans people", because if I'm right that would just continue the cycle and get you to another place where you hate yourself. Self-love won't come from being showered with upvotes for being cruel to your past self.

[-]eggsyntax3d5-2

the success of this post, which i assume was mostly upvoted by cis people who have some animosity towards trans people

Thaaaat seems like a very weird theory. I expect it was mostly upvoted by cis people since most people are cis, but it seems way more likely to me that people upvoted it because it's an attempt at taking an unflinching look at yourself to try to understand what's real, independent of what you would prefer to be real — which is a major, explicit goal of this community.

That's just my intuition, but I note that as of now the top-voted comment, by a factor of 2.6, mostly just says 'This essay is introspective and vulnerable and writing it was gutsy as hell'. I would suggest taking that as probably-representative rather than imputing some other hidden motive to the upvotes.

[-]StartAtTheEnd14d00

I've read that autistic people (who tend to have poor introspective abilities) are about 10 times more likely to be trans. The whole topic is related to crisis of identity, and young people naturally engage in self-discovery in ways which are easily disturbed by peer pressure. With post-modernism dissolving the traditional labels with which people of the past could identify themselves, I think it's natural that identity has become more fluid. I also think it's quite common for people to rebel in a way which isn't true rebellion, but rather just the appearance of such (we're social creatures, so if we don't fit into mainstream communities, we tend to find niches. But this is still a kind of conformity. True non-conformity is much more rare).

I have to disagree with your idea that trans people are hurt by conforming. There has been a great increase in transsexualism as a result of transsexualism becoming socially acceptable. There seems to be a bit of a bandwagon effect, similar to the self-diagnosis of neurodivergency caused by TikTok.

The biggest reason for taking the theory of autogynephilia seriously is that it's sexual in nature. Your explanation would explain transsexualism, but not the things which with it correlates. Transsexual people fixate more on sexual aspects of life, as do homosexuals and furries. Non-standard sexual orientations are more involved in fetishism. There's more correlations which will seem even stranger if your model doesn't include deep psychological mechanisms. For instance, all three group mentioned previously seem more likely than average people to prefer strong or unnatural colors. There are even times where I can guess somebodies sexual tendencies on the art styles which they draw or are drawn to. Similar to this, so I'm not the only one who has picked up on these correlations. I also believe that it's these correlations which gives certain labels their negative connotations. People don't care what genitals you prefer, what gender you feel like, or what your skin color or hair color is, but if they've met other people who shared these traits with you, then you will be judged according to the behaviour of those who share said traits with you).

[-]Liz Lovelace16d270

The cute girl theory of transfemininity explains my transition as well. At age 16, I didn't want to be a girl or woman, I wanted to be an anime girl (or perhaps an anime trap, aka anime trans girl), and that was the main source of motivation behind my transition. I never really had gender dysphoria before transitioning, but I was lonely, a bit autistic, and wanted to occupy a social role that doesn't really exist. You see a lot of this type of trans girl in lesswrong circles, while the HSTS/non-online/older trans girls are in their own world

I wonder if we could do a big ealla-style survey of trans girls to find out more about their sexuality, relationship to their body, anime, programming, joint hypermobility, etc.

[-]Kya Online6d10

Hi, I think @gynemimesis on twitter (x) has been doing surveys including variables like hypermobility. I'd also like to recommend some of my own work. My surveys haven't exactly touched on all of these things you mention, but you might find this one interesting.

Dissecting Gender Dysphoria: Personal Theories & Narratives of MtF Transsexuals (Substack)

This is a write-up for an online convenience survey (sourcing mostly from twitter and reddit, n=72) I put out with two main goals:

The first goal was to see how trans people responded to a questionnaire consisting of a very broad net of potential components of dysphoria/incongruence (e.g. "I was distressed by the gendered ways people treated me" or "I was aroused by the thought of being the opposite sex" etc.). Then I used Exploratory Factor Analysis to uncover potential themes. The theme I uncovered that seems most relevant to the theory in this article is one I dubbed Gender-Perception Dysphoria:

Factor Summary: This Factor seems to be characterized by concern over what gender one is perceived as. The highest loaded item is explicitly about a tendency to see oneself through a self-conscious lens. The 2nd and 3rd Items are about aspects of appearance most related to social presentation. (as opposed to —for example— concerns about private anatomy)

and maybe to a lesser extent Gender-Attraction Dysphoria

Factor Summary: This Factor seems to be characterized by concern about sex-based appraisal. The kind of appraisal that makes you insecure at least, and maybe specifically appraisal related to mate-value (i.e. people’s attraction to you)

The second goal was to get some qualitative responses to two questions. The first asked subjects to describe their childhood gender non-conformity (or lack thereof), after referencing Anne Lawrence's claim that AGP-Transsexuals exaggerate their childhood femininity or interpret mundane deviations as more extraordinary. The second asked subjects to explain why they think they are trans. What caused it.

The first part of this Substack article covers the qualitative aspects of the study. The second part covers the quantitative aspects

[-]cousin_it15d2314

Can't comment much on the trans stuff, but the main thing I wanna say that if you were lonely in high school, it wasn't your fault. Don't blame yourself for it. Society should do a much better job at making schools more accepting, or sorting kids to schools where they'll be accepted, or at minimum just not forcing them to be there all the time. School does serve a purpose, but it's still a miserable place for too many of the children confined in it, and that should be fixed.

In any case it's great that you didn't get get hung up on "improving social skills" somewhere that didn't accept you, and instead found a group that accepted you. This is the only real way, I think. Next I'd encourage you to find more such groups and live a fun life between them, unless of course you're doing that already :-)

[-]Eli Tyre13d*211

Thank you for sharing this detailed account of your experience.

I'm a libertarian and a transhumanist. I strongly believe in and stand up for the principle that people should be able to do whatever they choose to with their own lives and their own bodies. People can be wildly different from each other, and what would be a terrible existence for one person is often a happy and fulfilling life for another.

Also, I'm attending to your addendum, and not assuming that your experience generalizes to all transpeople, or all transwomen.

But that said, speaking personally, I find this account disturbing. And more analytically, this makes me more sympathetic to the view that the increasing transgender identification is a symptom of some kind of social problem.

On the face of it, people taking drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology as a strategy to cope with social isolation seems unhealthy? I would guess that, for most people transitioning for broadly these reasons, that strategy will fail to address the underlying desire to be loved, and will impose additional large costs on their life.

It's additionally concerning if, as you describe, the motivating desire is to be loved as a cute anime girl. Feminists complain about the unreasonable body-image expectations imposed by "society". But anime girls are literally cartoons, with inhumanly cute proportions. From the post, it sounds like it's not so a desire to look like an an anime girl, but to adopt the social role of an anime girl, and to be loved and appreciated the way they are loved?

(I'm not sure how concerning that should be to me. People often take inspiration from fictional examples, and that can be totally healthy and good. Maybe this is no different than eg someone who starts studying martial arts after watching anime? Real martial arts are different, from the fictional versions, but there's some overlap in what's cool about them.)

Also, while socially or even medically transitioning doesn't preclude having kids, my understanding is that fertility rates are much lower for transpeople. I don't think that "some people switching sexes" is even on the top 10 list of the reasons for declining fertility in developed countries, but I also think there's something to "family values", and that it's not unreasonable for society to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families. My impression is that there are plenty of transwomen who, if they had lived only a few decades ago, would have have been fathers.

Possibly they would have been fathers living lives of quiet desperation, much worse for them the now more-available option of socially or medically transitioning (which is why it's so important to allow people the freedom to opt out of societal defaults). But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that's a better fit for their essential being, but because it's a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.

While transitioning might be the right choice for some people, I'm now newly worried that there are a small number of people who have a strong innate self-identity that differs from their sex-assigned at birth and a larger number of people who are lonely and depressed, and who are latching on to a drastic and a priori harmful^[1] life choice, as a misguided attempt to address those basically social and and emotional problems.

Is this a wrong takeaway for some reason?

I'm attempting to be careful writing this. I imagine that a comment like this can be threatening to lots of transpeople, because it seems to invalidate their identity and give license to disregard their experience or limit their freedoms. I'm confident that there are people that would read a post like the above and weaponize it in the culture war. But I'll, just say again, I don't want to do that, at least. I'm interested in the project of how to build a healthy and flourishing society, and committed to allowing people to make choices, including those that seem bad to me.

^{^}
ie In almost all contexts, we consider it a tragedy if someone's body parts, and maybe especially sexual organs, are amputated

[-]marisa10d156

I'm attempting to be careful writing this..

Thanks for saying this! Do you mind if I push back on a few points? I think I don't find your post threatening for identity reasons, but I think the data you are drawing from may be a bit miscalibrated.

drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology

I see phrasing like this a lot, I don't mean to pick on you in particular, but in general I think there is a level of rhetorical alarmism with language like this that isn't justified by the medical reality, and IME people using phrasing like this rarely have a gears-level understanding of trans medicine (I don't know if that's true for you or not). I'm trying not to say stuff that sounds like nitpicking, but I realize it will probably read like that.

Nothing is trans care is altering our genetic physiology at a deep level AFAIK. Basically there is hormones and surgery. In most places including the US we only use bioidentical hormones and in particular the effects of estrogen on a male are a lot less drastic and permanent than I think many people understand. I can go into more detail if you're interested. Surgery is more complicated so I don't think I can get into that here without this comment becoming painfully long. The irreversible surgeries for MtFs aren't terribly common (<20%). The anime girl phenomenon the author describes seems to be exclusive to MtFs. If you're interested in the latest research on detransition (skewed towards the FtM side), see https://www.thedarestudy.com/

to try to incentivize people, on the margin, to follow life paths that entail having kids, in the context of stable marriages and families...
But if many of those transwomen are following a life path that disproportionately entails not having kids, not because that's a better fit for their essential being, but because it's a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.

This is all darkly ironic to me, because outside of the terminally-online-anime-LW memeplex, getting married and having kids is a common coping strategy. To your credit, you're aware that this is something that can happen. But I think you're underrating the frequency and the harms, especially if you care about happy stable families, vs just getting the birth rate up. In particular, it can be really horrible and unfair for the wives. I personally tried to do this when I was young (unconsciously, long story), and I know several others who got further along and had kids. Our brains are shifted female so some of us can end up much more predisposed to childrearing monogamy than the median cishet man. I just worry that people reading this post are overindexing on a particular kind of MtF.

I can't give you a full accounting of the internal/external factors affecting fertility among trans people. I can say that people generally aren't aware it's possible to restore the production of viable sperm in most MtFs:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9873819/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12456576/

I believe very strongly that-- if you care about happy, stable families-- at the margin, having a default attitude in society that pushes questioning trans people to get married and have kids is bad-- it's not fair to the spouses and kids. Spouses deserve to be married to people who are happily and fully embodied and sexually present with them, and kids deserve to grow up with parents who aren't fighting each other over a divorce, because one parent got to a point where they couldn't repress any more, and needed to transition.

Last-- and this is kinda separate-- I felt surprised reading your post, given you said in the 2nd paragraph you're a libertarian and a transhumanist.

I wouldn't expect someone who identifies with either of those labels to endorse some of the things you said, including about voluntary amputation (implied) of a trans person's gonads being tragic in almost all contexts. Can you help me understand that? Am I miscalibrated about what libertarian/transhumanist means?

My assumption was that a LW libertarian would basically say it's fine for people to do whatever they want, and if it affects fertility, well, there is an equilibrium process at work, and eventually changing allele frequencies will right the ship.

[-]Auspicious7d40

I don't have a lot to say in response. I think you make several good points, especially about fertility. I'm not so sure about the following though:

On the face of it, people taking drastic, permanent, alterations to their biology as a strategy to cope with social isolation seems unhealthy? I would guess that, for most people transitioning for broadly these reasons, that strategy will fail to address the underlying desire to be loved, and will impose additional large costs on their life.

Maybe I'm way too pessimistic, but for many people, it may be very difficult (or even impossible) to otherwise satisfy this desire.

But if many of those transwomen are following a life path [...] not because that's a better fit for their essential being, but because it's a life path that functions as a coping strategy, which is more cognitively and socially available than (possibly more effective or more functional) alternatives, then I think something has gone badly wrong.

Likewise, I'm not sure there are viable alternatives in many cases, much less more effective or functional ones.

[-]marisa10d191

This post is well-written, thoughtful, genuinely interesting, and articulates a theory that may be very helpful to some trans or questioning people.
I strongly disagree with some of the main peri-factual claims. In particular, I think there is confounding of ASD and being trans.
It likely perpetuates epistemically shallow attitudes of suspicion towards trans peoples' cognitive health, ability to function rationally, and introspect accurately.
The author is clearly going through a hard time emotionally.

The attitudes of (3) had a negative effect on me personally (I'm trans). So (2) and (3) make we want to post criticisms, but I also feel a lot of warmth and compassion towards the author (i hope that comes through and i REALLY hope this doesn't sound patronizing), and I don't want to hurt her. So I feel pretty torn.

Mainly I just want to say that this post underrates medical theories of transness. I'm deeply into this, and I think the frontier here is significantly further along than most people realize. But the political situation is so bad, it's not safe to share our knowledge openly.

I would bet with 80% confidence that current knowledge (iykyk) is already enough to develop a genomic screen for gender dysphoria with enough significance to be medically useful.

[-]Propo112d10

As a matter of fact, I do not know.

[-]Julian Bradshaw15d1815

I think the "anime girl transwomen" archetype is also motivated by a desire to express love, selflessness, and care - not merely receive it. Obviously those expressions are possible as a man, but difficult when you perceive yourself as undesirable or having low social skills, especially when those beliefs are true. Who would give you the opportunity? Meanwhile the archetype provides a role model and community that is very oriented around providing opportunities to express care.

(disclaimer: I'm not a transwoman so this is outside speculation)

[-]Caleb Biddulph15d16-1

From Fiora's Twitter:

oh geez. i wonder if it wasn't "i want to be cute/hot/beautiful so i can be loved by *others*," so much as to finally be worthy of loving *myself*. that... cuts even closer to the core of it, probably.

I was about to comment the same thing here. I think for many lesbian trans girls, being loved by men isn't appealing except maybe insofar as it affirms that one is the kind of person who could be loved by one's (past, male) self

[-]speck144716d153

Interesting and informative, thank you for sharing. I've suspected that something along these lines was a better explanation than AGP and it's useful to have a detailed/complete version written down.

I think there are two things I should mention though? First, this falls into a broader class of origin theories for transness along the lines of "person has a certain social role, wants a different social role, develops an identity capable of making the journey between those roles, and because gender is complicated adopting that identity may involve taking on a different gender." This characterization is too broad to be useful for tasks like prediction (relies too much on internality, so less useful externally), but I think it's basically correct in all cases and gives us the correct sort of path-dependence and prevalance among relative outcasts and age dynamics. It's also useful as a depathologizing tool: it seems to me, and I could be misreading, that you're treating the desire to be loved in a certain way as pathological, and I do not think this is a correct way to understand your desires.

The other thing is that this theory must somehow be incomplete for some of the same reasons that AGP must be complete. Namely, as a ~completely cisgender man, I have felt this:

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.

(by "this" I mean the yearning to be loved/desired in the way women often are and to be socially championed and treated as inherently deserving of help in the way women often are) pretty strongly for most of my life, and I remember explicitly identifying these as things that trans women might hope to get by transitioning, and I remember encountering transness as an idea and realizing that my social circles were unusually progressive and would likely accept any gender exploration I did. But I had, and still have, no desire to transition.

Maybe the difference here is just age, maybe you were 14 and I was 15 and that extra couple of months of life meant that your self-concept of gender was more fluid than mine, but this seems wrong to me. Of course everything is path-dependent, and if your experiences had been different at 14 maybe this particular ball wouldn't have started rolling and your identity might be very different today, and the same is true for me. But things are not different, your ball started rolling and mine didn't. So I suspect that womanhood was appealing to you for reasons other than just solving all of your problems, I don't think identity-formation is best understood as a problem-solving exercise, and I suspect that (being clearly unusually good at productive introspection) yo may be able to identify the thing that happened for you and not for me, prior to these motivating factors. (Incidentally, if you do identify it I'd love to be informed of that, since I am somewhat less good at introspection and so have not been able to do so.)

[-]James Camacho16d75

Somewhere around 10% of men would rather be a woman. However, many fewer wish to transition, as it's costly, difficult, and might not even get them the love and attention they desire (assuming this is the primary motivation).

[-]speck144716d40

I see 5% here, with another 7% who say they don't know? Perhaps we're looking in different places. In any case, maybe it would have been more precise to say that I have no desire to be a woman despite sharing these experiences and motivations, so I suspect something is missing in this explanation. Good clarification.

[-]Samuel Hapák16d113

Thank you for sharing, though I can imagine it was hard to write.

In my teen years, I was very depressed, yearning love. I was often fantasizing about being born a girl, thinking it would give me the attention I craved. During that time, in my country, transitioning wasn’t really a thing. So it never occurred to me as an option. I don’t know what would happen if it did. I wonder how many kids feel like this during their teen years.

Nevertheless, I eventually fixed it with acquiring needed social skills.

[-]CronoDAS14d*102

I have a number of fantasies that involve being female (sexual or otherwise), but the benefits that I'd imagine being able to have by having a female body and being able to occupy a particular female social role aren't really ones that current transition technology can give me - and they can also be things that often go badly when actual women try them in real life. It's a little like fantasizing about being a celebrity with a glamorous job - there are a lot of perks to being a rock star, but mundane reality has a way of asserting itself and the day to day life of being a touring musician has a tendency to turn into a job a lot like any other when you have to actually do it.

So I just play female characters in video games sometimes and otherwise fantasize about things that don't work that way in real life ;)

[-]CronoDAS14d53

On a related note, have you ever had an "This person is amazing and I don't know if I'd rather fuck them or be them" feeling toward someone of a desirable gender, and do you think it's more common among men or women?

[-]Looked At To Win15d*93

Throwing in a bit of self reflection here, may or may not be of interest to anyone: I'm a straight cis-male with no body dysphoria but I really like the cutesy-anime girl oriented online trans community and associated culture and have found myself feeling that it would be cool to be a cute anime girl for what I think are similar reasons to those you outline (though I would not want to remain in that state permanently). It's interesting to observe how much I like that culture and would like to fit into those communities. I do wonder if I would entertain the idea of transitioning if becoming a cute young anime girl (or cute egirl, I suppose) was a possibility but I do not think resembling that is possible with my body now, and that's fine as I have no body dysphoria in the first place. I see eboys or softboys or femboys replicating a similar cutesy look in a way that seems half a step more achievable to someone like me and I have been exploring expressing myself in those kind of ways which I have mostly found pretty fun. I can confidently say no aspect of my interest is sexual or fetishy.

It sounds like I am probably ~5 to 10 years older than the OP here so these types of sizable online cutesy anime trans girl communities did not exist for me to be exposed to at that age (and I strongly suspect that I would have bounced off of them at that time), but I was extremely online in 4chan anime circles at that age and too idolized the NHK-esque hikikomori otaku lifestyle, so really quite similar to what OP describes in many ways. I cannot say I remember having any desire to play with gender expression at all until after undergrad, though I think it has been slowly increasing to a still rather mild (but high for a straight guy) level.

[-]ddd16d82

I transitioned not for any social reasons. If anything, I assumed transitioned would mean I would be ostracized my friends and family and I was prepared for that.

I transitioned because the moment I experienced puberty I recognized that it was deeply wrong. I always wanted to look more like my mother, but I realized then I was on track to look like my father. Whatever anyone says I'm not a man and never have been. I don't want a deep voice, or to be hairy, or have big muscles, big feet and hands and a pronounced jaw and brow bone. I find men attractive but I would never want to have their bodies. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to have puberty blockers so I was forced to go through a male puberty which permanently affected me, but the moment I was 18 and free I got hormones and stopped that nightmare. That was 15 years ago and I didn't end up losing my friends and family and i'm married now. I ended up looking like one of my aunts. I'm so happy i got to transition but I do wish I could have started before puberty.

[-]cat214d60

I have briefly considered transitioning, or identifying as non-binary, explicitly for the reasons you elaborate here, and also a sense that my own sexuality was inappropriate or harmful compared to the sexuality of a queer person, which I saw celebrated.

I decided not to, because I never actually felt deeply and internally that I was the wrong gender or not well-described by 'male', and it is very costly to affect a transition and on reflection I didn't expect the results to be worth it.

[-]anithite4d42

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

Wanting a specific type of attention and changing yourself to get it isn't strictly speaking bad. Terminal goals don't need justification though they can be incoherent, or in conflict with higher level meta goals (What you'd prefer to want if you could self-modify).

Wanting to be a cute anime girl is:

somewhat incoherent since you live in reality and not the world of anime. Certain tropes just don't work.
Somewhat incompatible with wanting to dominate social hierarchies (by being competent?).

But wanting a desirable body isn't bad. If society forced men to wear really ugly clothes or otherwise made them repulsive in some way, that would be bad and fixing that would create a lot of value. Some things are positional goods (eg:height) but in general, more beauty and desirability seems good.

Is transition technology not good enough?

If much better future transition technology was available that made changing bodies as trouble free as changing clothes would you regret it less? Are the medical consequences awful or something?

Is the social role not fitting right?

I'd expect that male dominated spaces would be very comfortable for psychologically male but physically female people. Worst case those people have to put up with flirting etc. which could be unwanted attention but ... well ... *points at above post talking about wanting that* ... maybe you don't want precisely that, the lived experience sucks for some reason (feeling of unearned social gains) or you want something incoherent (the full cute anime girl experience which doesn't hold together in reality).

My opinion on the abstract issue

Females are the gender that elicits more attention/attraction. This is similar to saying that certain kinds of clothing make people more attractive/fashionable, or that being fat and smelly is unattractive. It's not universal (straight women exist and are not attracted to other women) but given cultural norms today (men are the pursuers, men generally say yes to sex when propositioned etc.) it's true enough in practice.

From a relationship perspective, gender is usually a rule-out criteria. If two female attracted males who aren't too attached to their own gender transition to being female and pair up, that's value being created. More females in male dominated spaces/niches or the opposite in female dominated to balance gender ratios seems again like value being created. Eliminating obesity would improve average relationship prospects similarly.

If "cis-by default" is common enough, then once tech exists to allow flipping genders on a whim IMO the world gets better. Mind you there are second order effects and to some degree the good being captured(attention) is a limited resource and so positional. There's scenarios where "cis by default' people start flipping genders, grab an unfair share of a positional good and then people attached to their gender feel pressure to flip as well. Still, IMO probably for the for the better.

To quote "The Erogamer":

"Male sexuality is shit. It's worthless. My junk is priced at zero dollars. Nobody wants what's in my pants. The only person who'd ever be eager for faster access through my underwear is a gay man. And even then, I'd have to present as feminine!" There was as much bitterness in Ziquan's voice as Maggie had ever heard there, like something was bursting out after years of festering. "Fuck this shit, I'm out. I'm going to be a hot girl and have people flirt with me."

Disentangling cuteness and sexual market value

These are separate things. Kittens are cute but not hot as an example. But when comparing females vs. males they're hopelessly entangled. IMO transitioning to female doesn't really allow for getting all the cuteness without the sexual parts too. Needs proper transhuman tech to allow swapping into the body of a small cute animal or similar.

So perhaps it's unfortunate but cute/beautiful/hot are not things you can get separately via transitioning.

[-]James Camacho16d40

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 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.

As someone who ended up in a similar situation (though AoPS, not anime), and then made the effort to connect with classmates in highschool, it was not worth it for me. When you say, 'autistic', do you mean autistic, or that you were smarter than most people and had different priorities (like studying)? I am very confident I am not autistic in the medical sense, though I have had one or two people say, "well maybe you are a little," because I've diverged mentally from the rest of the population since birth.

In elementary school, I got along pretty well with my classmates, but my gifted class took the smartest 5–10 students per grade in the city (several grades were combined). In sixth grade (first year of middle school), I was mostly a loner, because my classmates were no longer as awesome. In seventh grade, I transferred to the better middle school (most of my elementary school yearmates did too that year), and was pretty social once again. In eighth grade, I moved to another state, where once again I was a loner, and this time I am confident in saying everyone was pretty stupid and no one cared much about the maths or the sciences. After all, I spent the next four years with them in high school.

In tenth grade, I finally decided to make some friends, because I didn't like being a loner. I ended up making friends in cross country, because that was the only shared interest I really had with anyone else. It was alright, but I feel like I was always pushing them to study more math/science, and they were always interested in just having fun.

In college, I finally met smart people again, and realized the issue wasn't me, it was them. My highschool classmates claimed to care about academics and had a lot of natural talent, but never applied themselves. They had different interests and different priorities, and trying to contort myself to fit in was not good. So, when I look back, I do not think it was a worthwhile endeavour to try making friends, even though I succeeded. It would have been worthwhile if I had remained in my old state, and went to highschool with my elementary classmates, but not in my new locale. I think it could be the case that you were in a similar situation.

[-]owjo7d*30

I guess this theory could help explain the trans puppygirl phenomenon. wanting to be a puppy is similar to wanting to be a moe anime girl. I don't think the theory is perfect or comprehensive though (sorry lesswrong for not elaborating)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2025.2556256#abstrac
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2johWOAvPck

[-]cesspool14d31

[disclaimer: I'm a cis, hetero, straight, white male who has never struggled with any issues around gender identity, so my perspective on trans issues is entirely an outside one]

I think another factor here is the "bubble" effect that happens in many online communities. Many chronically-online people who get a lot of their social interaction within a single niche online community can begin to form distorted views where they believe the views, beliefs and norms in their online niche are much more representative of society at large than they actually are. I've seen it happen with niche communities related to conspiracies, political beliefs, health and wellness, all kinds of things, and I think that r/traa subredit mentioned is a classic example of this. I feel bad for the lonely teenager that stumbles on those communities while curious about transitioning, gets way deep in the bubble and begins believing that they'll receive all kinds of love, validation and acceptance, proceeds to transition, and then realizes too late that much of society outside trans communities or politically progressive urban areas will react to them with indifference at best, or outright disgust and hostility at worst. The whole anime/cutesy side of transgender subculture is something that most people outside that subculture don't understand, and if a trans person who's used to viewing themselves and others through that lens expects the rest of society to see them that way, they'll be sorely disappointed--sometimes with tragic consequences.

I'm not some conservative saying that "people who think they are trans need to get off the gay Internet and go touch grass", though maybe some do. I'm sure that for plenty of people, transitioning is the right decision to make and it has resulted in a better overall life for them. I'm just saying that this cute-anime-trans-online-space bubble can introduce some biased and erroneous thinking to people weighing important decisions about transitioning. I'm really impressed by this article for acknowledging and really exploring the complexity here. Usually, it's only very anti-trans commentators that will even admit that AGP is a factor at all. I'm also impressed by your willingness to discuss those things openly that most people consider extremely humiliating about your own psyche, and by doing so you are moving the whole conversation forward in a meaningful way. (I guess I shouldn't say that it took a lot of balls?)

[-]danielms14d30

I watched this youtube video about the manga "Inside Mari" about a year ago. It had a similar thesis iirc.

[-]Fiora Sunshine14d30

yeah lol. the author of that video, ceicocat, was actually a member of the anime analysis community as far back as 2017, which is when i was into it myself + first considering transitioning. i guess that's evidence that at least within that community, my reasons for transitioning were at least roughly similar to those of the other trans people.

(when i saw that video for the first time, i was like "seriously!? fucking ceicocat of all people is the first person i know of who's managed succinctly articulate this theory of transgenderism!? incredible...")

[-]CronoDAS14d61

I don't know who ceciocat is, so what makes it so weird that the video was by them in particular?

[-]Michael Roe14d10

At the risk of this being a plot spoiler for Inside Mari, there is something that surprises me about that manga…

it suggests, I think, that the character has a sudden, abrupt dissociation, where they suddenly perceive themself as a different gender. I think, from talking to a bunch of trans people, that what they have is just not like that. On the other hand, I think it’s entirely possible that some minority of trans people really do have something like that.

[-]Michael Roe15d30

“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.”

From reading Ray Blanchard, I get the impression that this is not AGP in his typology. He thinks AGP is paraphilic attraction to being a woman, which — in his view — is quite different from wanting a sexual or romantic relationship with a person, and regarding transition as a means to get sex, love, etc.

[-]Kya Online6d20

Hi, I really liked this article. The ideas you're developing here ring some bells for me personally and are very similar to a theory of transsexuality I'm developing based my own experiences and grounded in Early Maladaptive Schema (EMS) Theory. I'd like to write a sort of response to this article, recontextualizing this theory as potentially a special case of a broader EMS-Transsexualism framework, I hope that's okay

[-]Hazel Bebx11d1-1

This post is excellent because it puts into words thoughts I imagine many others have been thinking about for quite some time, but haven't taken the time to put into words.

The seed for my transition was probably born out of similar reasons. However, it doesn't feel so existentially dreadful for me to realise this, probably because when I was young, I committed to a belief of "yeah, whatever, I'll try this, it's probably an interesting way to live life anyways, even if it doesn't work. How hard could it be?"

Actually transition is quite hard and is not a sufficient method to receive the same moe-love I feel for anime girls doing cute things. I consciously accept that now. But I guess an unconscious part of me still irrationally believes that I'll one day recieve the same unconditional love and appreciation I feel for moe anime girls. My transition is probably fueled in no small part by the protection of sunk cost towards this goal.

And again, yes, that should be an existentially dreadful realisation, but maybe I've been honest with myself from the start about that, and always viewed transition as an experiment, so it really isn't so bad.

I suppose then, what's "the" reason people transition is an incorrect question. Wanting to be moe was 1 reason for me to want to transition. After discovering that isn't possible though, I never felt that gutted. Clearly there are more reasons people transition. Finding those reasons is still hard though because people are not good at being honest about those reasons.

[-]StartAtTheEnd13d10

I agree with basically all of this. Cuteness is a social strategy and defense. I once watched a video which jokingly suggested that cats domesticated humans, using their cuteness as a psychological weapon. But isn't that fairly close to the truth?

I once reflected on "How do less intelligent people survive in this world?". I'm a quick learner who take pride in being independent, and even I think life is difficult, so how do regular people cope?

I recently came across this book quote online: "The voice belonged to a plump round-faced woman of the sort that develops a good personality because the alternative is suicide." In short, "become likable" is the answer.

It hit me quite hard, not only because it put it so bluntly, but because I'm familiar with the sort of people who are pleasant to be around because their past is filled with misfortune and suffering. I think there's a lot of truth to statements like "There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth". We create light in order to cope with the darkness, and we like others to the extent that they make life seem more appealing. The reason Japan has so much Slice of Life anime is because of 'black companies'.

I love cute things myself, also for non-sexual reasons. But it's not uncommon that trauma and unmet needs result in fetishism and hypersexual behaviour which attempts to fill these needs (often without success - no amount of casual sex will make you feel loved). There's also a correlation between vulgarity, porn addiction and chronic internet use, and I dislike most of these people because they cannot emulate beautiful things well enough to deceive me (because they project aspects of themselves into their artwork). There is both healthy and unhealthy behaviour involved in these dynamics.

[-]Fiora Sunshine13d1-1

I agree with basically all of this. Cuteness is a social strategy and defense.

(I should have emphasized both of the following points more in the original post, but: For some trans people, it seems to be more about wanting to be beautiful or attractive, rather than cute like an anime girl, as a social strategy/defense. Many of them aren't into the anime stuff at all, and play more conventional feminine beauty status games, and I think this is sometimes a major reason for that.

Beyond that, there's probably also self-worth tied up in here too, not just worth in the eyes of others. I.e., if you become a cute anime girl or a beautiful women, maybe you'll start loving yourself in the way you love them.)

Good comment overall. I think people with miserable pasts do often find ways to stay miserable indefinitely into the future. But on the other hand "bad experiences with reality" are exactly the thing that fosters becoming well-adjusted (to reality, including social reality), a la reinforcement learning. So like, when people do become socially graceful, this is often partly the byproduct of negative experiences with failing to be graceful (alongside positive experiences with the opposite.)

[-]StartAtTheEnd13d11

Thank you.

Some people do seek beauty. Beauty has a similar effect to cuteness, people who look good are generally treated better. People probably prefer traits which "feel like them", and traits which they have a natural advantage at. The goal is to bring out as many real aspects of yourself as you can, and to make them as appealing as possible. Being forced to roleplay as something you're not is painful, and losing yourself in the process of fitting into a group will make you feel empty. Society is generally correct about this problem, but I think that artistic skills is sufficient to solve it.

I think self-worth is a factor, as you say, but I expect most people to have a hard time accepting themselves unless they can find a community which accepts them.

Finally, yes, suffering can push one towards either extreme. Fetishism also has this dual component - somebody who was abused might become a masochist, but another possibility is that they will search for a partner who is extremely gentle. It depends which side wins the battle, so to speak.

Successful reinforcement learning requires being around people with better taste than yourself, or consuming material made by people with better taste. Sometimes I worry that individuals with good taste might instead be harmed by their environment (I'm friends with a vtuber. I know that her chat will have inappropriate comments, and I know that sexual topics will be rewarded with more engagement). In an abstract sense, I think people want to increase their value, and that graceful behaviour is behaviour which protects value (and treats things as if they have value in order to reinforce the illusion that they have value - the polar opposite of vulgarity/blasphemy/profanity)

[-]Myron Hedderson15d10

This was informative for me. One of my best friends from elementary school got back in touch last year after 30+ years, and is currently in the process of mtf transition. I don't think that her reasons for transitioning match or parallel yours, but I don't fully know what her reasons are in the level of detail you've shared about yours - I feel like now is not the time to ask questions that might come across the wrong way if I'm not careful. And your explanation of how things are for you makes me go "OK, that makes sense", which transitioning hadn't for me up until this point.

Re: "Famously, trans people tend not to have great introspective clarity into their own motivations for transition."... I did not know that. My friend is pretty introspective, and she's the only trans person with whom I have enough direct experience to assess level of introspective ability. Although my model of "trans people in general" won't get a strong update from your description of your motives and thought process (I figure your experience is that of one subgroup of mtf trans people), this fact that you who are in a position to know claim is famously generally true, will update my general model.

I would personally have been hesitant to speculate about motives along these lines, because the generic line of ~~reasoning~~ speculation "people are doing a thing I don't understand because they're <insert something with negative connotations, like mental illness or being socially ostracized>" is an easy answer to jump to that makes one feel superior, but is often wrong. So hearing your reasons were rooted in finding social acceptance is extra useful, because I would have just not allowed myself to put much probability on that unless I'd heard from someone directly that it was true for them.

I see below that some people on twitter have apparently pushed you to delete links to this essay or the essay itself. I vote you keep it up.

[-]Fiora Sunshine16d10

A quick addendum: I claim that this post is basically a better explanation of what's actually going on, inside the heads of trans people Blanchard would have classified as AGP. But I still think there's a genuine two-type typology of trans people. I wonder: Is there an equivalent, better explanation waiting to be found for the other group? The group Blanchard would classify as HSTS?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

[-]owjo14d113

Why only two types, why not three or more?

[-]Liz Lovelace15d70

One simple observation about the HSTS cluster: it seems to me like they try to be "actual" women, without as many caveats about gender nonconformism or strong ties to transfem culture. I'm an AGP/anime-girl trans girl, and many "mainstream" trans women seem kind of alien to me, in the same mental category as cis women

[-]Michael Roe15d73

The comedy account HalimedeMF says:

“personally I think a lot of white transgender women would benefit from not basing their entire ideas of femininity on the wrong anime girls. as a woman you're supposed to be defined by your mother's failings”

[-]Fiora Sunshine15d*34

soooo true. re: the wrong anime girls: there are some anime girls who i think make for better role models for transfems with somewhat masculine personalities. for instance, major kusanagi from the ghost in the shell franchise is an awesome, beautiful, ultra-competent badass. these days, i'm aspiring to be more like her, rather than an ultra-cutesy k-on! character.

[-]morwwrong16d0-4

It's a very common life path for many autistic transfems, incluidng myself, but you're still hella wrong about the motivation behind it. How is it getting easier to be loved by others if you're female attracted? You're complicating your dating life if anything. And do you really expect any male social outcast to just accept female traits on their body instead of feeling really gay and experiencing reverse dysphoria? (of course, FTMs are forgotten again)

Also unrelated, but it is not possible to train autistic traits out of yourself and get the normie social skills. Your best bet would be engaging people neurologically similar to you, which is why t4t is so prevalent.

[-]Fiora Sunshine15d*212

How is it getting easier to be loved by others if you're female attracted? You're complicating your dating life if anything.

It's notable that in practice, transitioning did get me more love and affection, but only from other trans people (who I now effectively date exclusively). This is why the r/traa stage in this pipeline was critical: It provided a community of people who were willing to collectively look past all the costs of transitioning, and group up to provide trans people with what they actually wanted: love and affection and support, just coming from each other rather than the outside world.

And do you really expect any male social outcast to just accept female traits on their body instead of feeling really gay and experiencing reverse dysphoria?

This straightforwardly happened to me: I'm physically uncomfortable with my breasts the same way I am with my penis, and womanhood slightly impairs my ability to express my masculine personality traits. But I stayed transitioned anyway. Partly this is because the trans community means a lot to me, especially the LGBTESCREALs and even more especially my girlfriend. Partly, this is because surgery for breast removal is just really expensive. (I think before transition, I was lying to myself, trying to convince myself I had dysphoria about lacking breasts, because the alternative seemed like it was not being accepted into transgender-hood at all?)

[-]Fiora Sunshine15d40

there may also be an aspect that's more like "if i was cute/hot/beautiful, i would finally love myself." like, not routing through the affection others lavish onto you.

[-]CronoDAS14d52

How is it getting easier to be loved by others if you're female attracted?

This might be TMI, but is it weird that, in fantasies and when reading/watching erotic material, I can identify with the female characters and performers as easily as the male ones? M/M scenes in written or video porn don't do much for me, but imagining being a woman that's having sex with a man seems to satisfy the "I'm turned on by female sexuality" switch in my brain just as effectively as imagining being my male self having sex with a woman. So if I fell into the same magic spring that Ranma did, I wouldn't be too surprised if I found myself becoming attracted to men during only those times that I had a female body.

[-]Eli Tyre13d51

If we're adding TMI impressions, when I imagine myself as a woman having sex...

>! When I imagine myself as a woman, being penetrated, I feel a sense of creeping distaste, which is not exactly disgust and not exactly horror, but close to those. It seems violating.

>! (Specifically the feeling of friction on my imagined vagina freaks me out a little.)

[-]mako yass14d31

How is it getting easier to be loved by others if you're female attracted?

A very male-cultured kinda autistic person might see the love that a cis woman would have for a man as invalid. I wouldn't love me, I am wretched, so she shouldn't love me, because to love me would be to love and sustain what is wretched. I cannot stomach her love.

There could be two things going on in that case:

Misandry. Some kids can't imagine men deserving of love. Every man they've known has seemed vicious or in some way deeply (truly) ugly. (I imagine many straight cis women would be both sympathetic to and transcended of this view that they'd basically be able to write a cure for it if society were asking for one. Society wasn't asking for works that redeem men 2 years ago, but I think it is very much asking for such works today.)

And I wonder if there might be a real conflict in values between the sexes. I think this probably isn't true in general, cultural background seems to determine aesthetics and there is no discernible sex-linked limit to access to aesthetic sense. But due to personalised media, there is some (arguably tragic) divergence of aesthetic background anyway, so it may still be the case that for everyone to be happy we would have to accept some fairly painful disagreement about aesthetics within the average relationship. There is a cure for this pain, but it is love, and sometimes a robust enough love takes work to build, and a person can't imagine it before it's been built.

[-]CronoDAS14d32

I don't know if anyone transitions for this reason, but people are sometimes more willing to foregive certain "flaws" in one gender than another. For example, it seems to me that a lack of career ambition is more socially acceptable in a woman than in a man - a man who wants to be a househusband rather than a breadwinner has to confront negative stereotypes that a woman that wants to be a housewife does not. And men are often able to be more direct and aggressive without suffering social repercussions.

As for myself, I think that, holding as much else constant as possible, I might have been a little bit happier having been born female, but I think not being short might have helped even more - in addition to having been a short kid, my adult height ended up being about six inches below the median, which is also the kind of thing that's worse if you're male...

[-]abstractapplic16d-1-19

I feel like this would benefit from a content warning of some kind.

[-]James Camacho16d97

I feel like the title is a pretty good content warning.

[-]Fiora Sunshine15d*6-1

The thumbnail in the Twitter link to this post was the first frame of the cutesy K-On! GIF, which may have set inappropriate expectations. I've since deleted the Twitter linkpost (because someone there argued me into deleting everything associated with this post. I later changed my mind, and could reverse the LessWrong deletion, so the essay is still here). If I externally link it anywhere else I'll put a content warning there. I don't change the thumbnail because, by more or less total coincidence, it's a very eye-catching thumbnail.

[-]Satya Benson15d2948

Thank you for not deleting

[+][comment deleted]15d10

^{^}

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

^{^}

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, UwU, =^^=

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
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Why I Transitioned: A Case Study

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Is transition technology not good enough?

Is the social role not fitting right?

My opinion on the abstract issue

Disentangling cuteness and sexual market value

An Overture

In the Case of Fiora Starlight

Was it worth it?