- 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.
1rationalist social circle? To me, that is pretty unusual behavior. I read it as if you meant to point out a general phenomenon perpetrated by specific trans women online that the reader might know about.
I know a lot of trans women online and off and I've honestly never seen this behavior, except in spaces like 4chan, where it's piled under at least 4 layers of self-hate, irony, and sadism. One of the "gender ideology" (i.e. mainstream trans) platitudes you hear over and over again is that gender identity ≠ gendered behavior ≠ sex and people should only transition if they want to, to better match their gender identity. The whole point is that acting masculine doesn't disqualify you from being a woman, nor does acting feminine make you one (whether you agree with that or not).
Pressuring an effeminate boy into transitioning if he doesn't experience gender dysphoria is immoral. If you or anyone else reading this comment has examples of people doing this online, please link them in reply to this comment, I would be interested to see how this is happening.
certain trans women's rather insistent attempt to normalize the idea of effeminate boys transitioning for social acceptance
sincere question, do you have a source for this?
I don't know of any good studies on this, but from reading lots of anecdotes on reddit, yeah, some trans people do have quite atypical reactions to starting HRT. Unfortunately these can sometimes be negative changes to energy and mood, though 'no change' or 'positive change' is more common. Among those who have negative changes, some stay on HRT anyway because the psychological benefits from the physical changes (less dysphoria) are more significant than the negative energy/mood impacts.
wow, those changes in color perception are really interesting! I haven't heard of that before.
Your points about the NMDA receptor are really interesting, thanks for writing!
I'm transfem, HRT for 2+ years, just wanted to share my data point. The strength of the positive mental changes I experienced on E shook me existentially. I've since been fascinated by this topic. But it is pretty fraught with bias, since starting HRT almost always coincides with massive psychological turmoil, so the confounds of subjective experience here are massive. We should be careful drawing general conclusions. I still think a lot of the self-reported mental changes for most trans people are due to finally embracing feelings they've struggled with for a long time-- at a psychological level-- and that process is just as likely to produce subjective perceptual changes as are physiological effects of the HRT.
I've also read a lot of self-reports on reddit. I'm not sure how obvious this is to other LW-ers but I feel like I have to mention that your experience of changes on E seems to be in the 95th+ percentile of salience.
My own subjective data point:
- no changes in taste
- more averse to bad smells, especially male BO
- greater depth of olfactory perception in general
- no changes in visual perception
- no immediate changes in motor output. Noticed loss of strength and increased difficulty gaining muscle around month 6. Has only become more apparent since.
- laugh more easily, and it's harder to stop laughing once I start. More empathic. External stimuli cause stronger reactions internally, and it's more difficult for me to override these. I could go on and on, but I'm really not certain these emotional changes are direct effects of the hormones so much as finally "unrepressing" my gender. I was horribly repressed.
- More social anxiety but pretty sure that was due to being visibly trans rather than the estrogen.
- no changes in systematizing or attention to detail, no change in interest in associative or magical thinking
By far the biggest change for me was that I simply felt inexplicably calmer and happier. Less dissociated, more present. Less depressed, less anxious, and I had an easier time focusing, and maintaining sustained attention.
I'm naturally neurotic, so I spent months interrogating my experience to try to figure out whether this was some kind of mega-placebo. As best as I can figure out, no. It really does feel like my brain was deficient in estradiol, and fixing that made everything better. I don't know how else to describe it. This all happened in about a week, all before most physical changes, and before social transition.
This may not be true in any meaningful neurochemical way. But I feel estrogen made me less "schizo" as I am now so much more happy and present in whatever I'm doing.
also I agree with this:
sexual differentiation is a fragile rube goldberg machine, prone to random breakage. I speculate that humans have intersex brains
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.
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/
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.