marisa
I don’t know if the point you’re making in your last paragraph is...
I don’t speak at all for the trans community, nor do/would they listen to me. But I think the current genetic evidence is actually reassuring for those who worry about “trans genocide”. Because it looks difficult to achieve.
I do think it would be best if trans activism focuses on trying to preserve healthcare access.
I don’t intend to express an opinion on whether there “should be” more or fewer trans people born into this world. I don’t think it’s possible to have a productive conversation about this in public right now. If at all possible, it would be good to lower the political temperature on the issue.
Preimplantation Genetic Testing can in theory catch specific catastrophic mutations. Whether you are cis or trans, it is not good to have a stop codon at the wrong place in your estrogen receptor gene, full stop (literally). Ditto for the androgen receptor.
After digging into the (speculative) science on this, my personal view is that is that there is still a large biological component in E for most trans people. And being trans looks like a complex polygenic trait. GWAS has struggled to fully explain heritability https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than
So I think even in a “maximal eradication” scenario, eradication looks difficult to achieve. I am much more worried about health insurance coverage in the present. A lot of trans people are poor and basically unable to afford surgery without insurance.
that’s probably true in general. I just don’t believe you can often rely on, like, school staff. Not enough context. Fwiw my middle school “health” / sex ed teacher said some stuff to me then than was very unhelpful. And she herself was queer! Not that she told us, but obvious 2000s lesbian, very short hair, piercings, etc.
I don’t know, I mostly got pretty lucky with my parents. But there were a couple big things they handled badly when I tried to tell them about my depression. I’ve long since forgiven them. The fact remains that I was really depressed, and, honestly, needed some kind of medical intervention, better therapy if not gender medicine. I didn’t want SSRIs but in hindsight they may have been better than nothing. If they didn’t help at least that would be a data point.
I was floundering and had little will to live. This had long term repercussions. Dysregulated, procrastinated everything. Smart but bad grades, didn’t get into a good college → more social isolation in college, because I didn’t fit in in the party atmosphere. I didn’t actually start going to therapy regularly until 2021, though I realize now, looking back, it was something I needed. In college I used the 2 free sessions at the health center, but I had no money to continue beyond that, even though I wanted to.
I would love it if there were more funding for youth psychotherapy in the US. But when it comes time to vote for this, voters continue to not vote for it. So I have become a libertarian on gender medicine for similar reasons as most trans people. The problem with gatekeeping is less the gatekeeping itself but that in the US we have no money to pay for it.
thank you for appreciating it <3
hi Lucie, thank you for the comment :)
Basically full on gender binary
I think it is underappreciated how much of the trans* trauma and conflict is downstream of the gender binary.
I am hesitant to say this because it sounds woke. But if you think about it, if something has gone “wrong” within a trans person’s brain, what are the odds that it just totally flipped them to being the other gender? It doesn’t work like that.
We were seen as shameful, deviant, taboo, perverted, and so, early trans care focused on assimilation. Passing as “assumed cis”, not “correct pronouns”, so we would not be a cognitive burden to mainstream society, and not cause fear.
Transmedicalism internalized this, which led to trans people over-identifying with the binary. But actually there is no rational reason why transmedicalism and being nonbinary must be in conflict.
I lol’d! Yes, totally checks out. Aliens, if you are reading this, PLEASE kidnap me!!
hey thanks for the comment :)
I feel like I don’t have a great read on where the actual level of introspective clarity is for trans people. All my trans friends are introspective, I don’t really know if I’m really capable of being friends with someone who isn’t. I can’t imagine not being curious about why I’m like this. So I was really surprised to read in Fiora’s post “none of my friends have ever really put forth a parsimonious theory of what their actual motivations may have been”.
Most of my impressions of not-my-friend trans people comes from social media and support groups I went to early in transition and just observing these community dynamics. I think people have the potential to be a lot more introspective, but they are held back by trauma and the stress of political doomerism. Which like, is genuinely stressful. Maybe we’re gonna lose healthcare. People will post about this while also not doing anything behavioral in the real world to prepare for it. Basically I think the transes need to get off social media.
The other toxic dynamic—and I am not the first one to describe this—is that community spaces for babytrans (online and support groups) tend to be filled with two kinds of trans: (1) babytrans (2) trans who is no longer baby but also never really graduated from that stage, again, usually because of trauma or addiction. So often there aren’t a lot of healthy role models or elders around for the young ones who need that.
It’s easy to fit a theory to existing data. That doesn’t mean the theory is true or useful.
I mean, I transitioned MtF at 31 and I’m posting on LessWrong. I’m not beating the allegations. lol. I called myself an AGP in my [substack linkpost](https://quinoam.substack.com/p/why-i-transitioned-a-response) because it’s funny. I have no problem doing so.
Also, I can honestly say that I transitioned because my health was falling apart, I had a lot of repressed psychological desires to act and be more feminine, a lot of dysphoria over my body, and most important, taking estradiol dramatically improved my happiness and cognitive function.
The person I was at the start of transition—he was more sexually gratified staying as a man.
Some MtFs do find AGP relatable and that doesn’t bother me. But Blanchard/Bailey et al appear, to me, needlessly cruel, and deliberately inflammatory. That doesn’t mean the theory is false. But circumstantially their behavior looks detrimental to truth-seeking.
So the predictive power of the theory better be really good for me to want to spend time on it.
I find the Gender Mosaic theory (cf Daphna Joel) to be the most plausible, but I see it as a Sex Mosaic where there are male-typical and female-typical neural wirings for different brain regions. It’s very high-dimensional and the sex of each region can vary independently and (mostly) continuously based on the prenatal hormone wash. This easily explains the vast phenotypic variation in gendered behavior, and why it seems like we have every different possible combination of person.
The reason we don’t see “male” or “female” brains with neuroimaging is that the vast majority of these regions are for general cognition (neocortex), where prenatal estrogen/androgen signaling does influence structure but not in ways that have any effect on subconscious sex. I expect the brain regions / wiring patterns that cause dysphoria are small. If we knew the connectomes for a bunch of trans people, I predict we could find them. The imaging tools we have now are extremely rudimentary.
All of this can coexist with ETLE, but again, as far as I know, ETLE doesn’t have any mechanistic basis in neuroscience. So it’s very uninteresting to me. If Blanchard actually predicted furries, then please link me to the source for that. What is surprising about furries is not the bestiality of it all (humans have been having sex with animals since the dawn of domestication), but the anthropomorphic cartoon aesthetic.
Can you give me an example of a testable prediction that isn’t something we already know? Or an example from the past where ETLE made a falsifiable prediction that was either proved or disproved by empirical research?
Why not just index on the psychological traits directly then?
I’m not an expert on this but ETLE seems more like a hypothesis than an explanation to me. Let’s suppose ETLE is true. What else would we expect to then be true then as a consequence of ETLE that wouldn’t be true under the standard “brain sex” model?
yup definitely a mix! appreciate your perspective and going through transition has made me more of a libertarian on health issues.
Being transgender is in some ways similar to an ethnicity or a culture. I think some of the intuitions about “eradication” are coming from the same place as for people who fear the end of their race, ethnicity, or culture. I think it’s a tribal intuition that evolution engraved deeply into us. I’ve never been deaf so I can’t really compare the two. I think it’s extremely difficult to discuss productively without a general theory. Otherwise we’ll be heavily biased by our priors on politics and whether we like deaf people, trans people, and so on.
imagine a perfect genetic therapy that could fully change adults person sex, like growing true new reproductive organs, no need for hormonal supplements, etc.
I’m sure some people would find it very threatening. “God doesn’t make mistakes”.
The thing is, I have a Y chromosome with an SRY gene. Even if we could make me XX in all my cells that wouldn’t regrow my anatomy. (I don’t know how it would affect my brain.) So there would have to be some kind of surgical step.
I would still consider this meaningfully “trans” since I would have the memories and experiences of living first in an XY body and then moving to an XX one. My brain would still have the neuroanatomy my confused XY genotype laid down during gestation. I doubt there would be a way to give me a “fully XX” brain without wiping out my identity.
But you’re right that this would hopefully solve a lot of problems.
I appreciate your comment, and thank you for reading my post :)
I do think what you wrote may be missing the point a bit. The debate is not over whether there is an observable-in-principle physical cause for being trans somewhere in a trans person’s body.
The debate is over whether that cause was itself caused by biology (genes, epigenetics, hormone disruptors in the water, random errors of prenatal neuroendocrine development) or social factors. Because the answer to this question has massive implications for what healthcare should look like for trans people.
When I talk about “trans eradication” in the post I am speaking descriptively (not normatively) about other people.
I like “aim to explain rather than persuade” a lot. I tried really hard to keep my personal beliefs out of this essay, and stick to description only.
I just want to double check—is your confusion about my personal normative belief, or about the feelings and beliefs of other trans people? Which are you curious about? It’s important to keep these separate.
Personally, I think the question is impossible to answer in a coherent way without an ethical stance on bringing new sentience into the world, in general. And that is an extremely difficult problem. I’m working on it but I don’t have a developed view on it yet.
“what’s the basis of sexual orientation?”
One of my friends who gave feedback on my draft is a gay cis man who very helpfully pointed out that there was a similar Double Bind dynamic in the gay community, complete with the medicalization piece (AIDS, PrEP), and worries about finding a “gay gene” leading to eradication. I overlooked this because of the Eye of Sauron effect you mentioned. It’s certainly not limited to the trans issue.
It also seems to me less than obvious that biology serves as a standard of legitimacy more broadly, even within medicalized discourse. Schizophrenia and bipolar are generally seen as mostly biological in etiology but “illegitimate,” for instance.
I think the key distinction is social legitimacy versus ‘the medical community believes insurance should cover this’. The second isn’t apolitical but I do think it’s mostly downstream of biological reality.
Scott’s post on this You Don’t Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders is great.
categorizing all of this under the rubric of “trans identity” continues to seem like a horrible civilization-wide confusion-inducing mistake to me.
I agree! Unfortunately, people are not smart. Also, politics.
I think the utility of “transgender” is that people (including my teenage self) have a visceral irrational reaction to anything “sex” and it is useful to give people space to talk about gender variance without it being inherently sexual. Of course, sex is a factor. But I was very squeamish and prudish about it and that held me back. Also, there are many aspects of my transition and femininity I value highly which I see as non-sexual. Being emotionally effusive, empathic, and caring in social situations, for instance. I am closer now to my mother and sister (both cis) and that means a lot.
I still like the term “transsexual”. It is quite fun to deploy when people aren’t expecting it.
hi Zack, thank you for the comment :)
I was actively introspecting about AGP as a possibility so I don’t consider it repressed/unconscious.
Please correct me if you disagree but my understanding is the following:
- Standard model: brain sex mismatch causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
- Blanchard: ETLE causes FEF, dysphoira, and transition
Blanchard still says AGPs should transition. He doesn’t propose a mechanism for what causes ETLE. So these theories look the same to me. I don’t think there is an experiment we can run to determine which is true, and I don’t know if that experiment would have consequences for clinical practice or policy.
So my understanding is that AGP the theory is only potentially useful at an individual therapeutic/psychological level.
ok based. yes, this is why we need to accept people who just want to change their pronouns. I don’t personally understand with why someone would want to join the trans community if they’re not dysphoric, but these people clearly exist.
Trying to exclude them from the trans community for not medically transitioning probably increases the likelihood that they do, simply as a means to gain entry. Nor should we push anyone to go on HRT after they’ve joined the community. HRT is the single best thing I’ve ever done for myself but I try not to project that onto others.
Oh totally. In my case I decided transitioning was unethical so I spent over 13 years willfully avoiding the “am I trans?” question. I convinced myself my dysphoria was just regular depression combined with sexual perversity. Some take it to the grave.
Based on:
if you decide “maybe I am trans” you will be more likely to undergo such medical procedures than you would ever be if you decided “maybe I like cosplay” and hung out with that community.
I got the impression you maybe had a stronger opinion on “social contagion”. I.e. society should downplay/discourage the social aspects of transition to reduce the risk that cis people who just want community end up transitioning medically. I would really like to talk to a cis person who has a sincere steelman for the social contagion hypothesis.
hi Laureana, thanks for the comment :)
I’m not sure how the piece reads because I tried to pare down most of my subjectivity and stick to objective description.
I didn’t intend to give the impression that I feel bad about being trans. I don’t anymore. I took a couple months to write it to try to make sure it wasn’t coming from a place of defensiveness.
I disagree with this. Science is good. For me, knowing is freedom.