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

A very heavy use of parentheses is also common in certain other demographics. Like. Very common. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/adhdmeme/comments/u0w6q5/i_dont_do_this_except_i_totally_do/

• have another person in the room because tons and tons of doctors become vastly more conscientious and less condescending when there is another person in the room
  • especially do this if you present feminine
  • especially do this if your symptoms are chronic or you suspect you are at all deviating from their modal case
• doctors Are Not Magic, doctors are just people like everyone else. if you grew up with a culture of venerating the expertise of doctors, try to expunge that attitude immediately.
• acute problems with visible symptoms are the ones the medical system is best set up to treat as effectively as can be currently, you can likely trust your doctors; chronic problems or problems without visible symptoms (like mental health) are the ones the medical system is worst set up to treat as effectively as can be currently, become as informed as you possibly can

So it looks like CFAR and the Guild both increase comfort in these skills. There’s two giant reasons not to trust this. First, this is self reported comfort levels, aka we’re basically measuring a vibe. Second, my sample size of CFAR goers and Guild of the Rose identifiers is like, a dozen people in the Yes category.

Zeroth, did they increase comfort or select for those already comfortable?

This post describes important true characteristics of a phenomenon present in the social reality we inhabit. But importantly the phenomenon is a blind spot which is harder to notice when acting or speaking with a worldview constructed from background facts which suffer from the blind spot. It hides itself from the view of those who don't see it and act as if it isn't there. Usually bits of reality you are ignorant of will poke out more when acting in ignorance, not less. But if you speak as if you don't know about the dark matter you will be broadcasting that you are a bad choice for those who are hiding to talk honestly with.

By having a handle for the phenomenon in the abstract, that problematic loop is much easier to break; even if you don't see it yet, you may much more easily notice that it might be present and act accordingly to search out information in a different way or simply avoid sticking your foot in your mouth.

Liam alone makes $10

Emma alone makes $20

Liam + Emma make $30

$30 - ($10 + $20) = $0, their synergy.

In general: the synergy is how much more or less the coalition gets than each member's individual contribution plus all subset synergies.

I liked this one! I was able to have significant amounts of fun with it despite perennial lack-of-time problems.

Pros:

• simple enough underlying mechanism to be realistically discoverable
• some debias-able selection bias
• I could get pretty far by relatively simple data exploration
• +4 Boots was fun

Cons:

• I really wanted the in-between-tournament matches to mean something, like the winners took the losers equipment or whatnot and you could see that show up later in the dataset, but of course that particular meaning would have added a lot of complexity for no gain.
• bonus objective was not confirmable (yep real life is like that but still :D)

It feels like this scenario should be fully knowably solvable, given time, except for the bonus guess at the end, which is very cool.

I think the bonus objective was a good idea in theory but not well tuned. It suffered from the classic puzzle problem of the extraction being the hard part, rather than the cool puzzle being the hard part.

I think it was perfectly reasonable to expect that at some point a player would group by [level, boots] and count and notice there was something to dig into.

But, having found the elf anomaly, I don't think it was reasonable to expect that a player would be able to distinguish between

• do not reveal the +4 boots at all
• do not use the +4 boots vs the elf ninja
• give the elf ninja the +4 boots to be used in their combat
• give the elf ninja the +4 boots afterwards but go ahead and use them first

It's perfectly reasonable to expect that a player could generate a number of hypotheses and guess that the most likely was that they shouldn't reveal the +4 boots at all, but they would have no real way of confirming that guess; the fact that they're rewarded for guessing correctly is probably better than the alternative but is not satisfying IMO.