Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences, in Relation to My Gender Problems

I'm a gay cis male, so I thought that the author and/or other members of this forum might find my perspective on the topic interesting. 

The confusion between finding someone sexually attractive and wishing you had their body is common enough in the online gay community to earn its own nickname: jealusty. It seems that this is essentially the gay version of autogynephilia, in a sense. As I read the blog post, I briefly wondered whether fantasies of a better body could contribute to homosexuality somehow, but that doesn't really fit the pattern you present. After all, your attraction to women was a constant. 

In regards to your masturbatory fantasies, the gay analogue would probably be growth or transformation fantasies, which are probably around as popular online proportionally. When I think about it from that point of view, it doesn't seem all that strange to desire a body that you would find sexually attractive. Personally, one of the primary reasons I haven't even been seeking any sexual experiences yet (I'm 21) is that I feel like the participation of my current body, which I do not find sexually attractive, would decrease my enjoyment of the activity to the point of uselessness. It makes sense that the inverse, the prospect of having sex where you're sexually attracted to everyone involved, would be alluring.

Anyway, everyone, let me know if you have any questions or feedback about what I've said. 

Thanks; I guess this made me better understand your interest in certain topics. And I liked the idea that there is a difference between imagining "your current mind in the body of the opposite sex" and "also having your mind taken from the distribution for the opposite sex, at the same percentiles where your current mind is for your current sex" (I used my own words here, hopefully I captured the idea correctly). When the Singularitocalypse comes, I might try both, heh.

(On a second thought, nope. Or, I would need to consider carefully which parts of my identity I consider too important to mess with. Trying different emotions, sure; trying different values, I'd rather not; not sure whether there is a clear line between these two, though. Considering the hypothesis that men are more likely to have fringe beliefs than women, and that rationality is a fringe belief, what if my female equivalent is not a rationalist? What if instead of reverting her mind back after the experiment, she decides to e.g. change her mind to be religious, because she will value social conformity highly? Those are scary thoughts...)

I think there is a software that uses machine learning to generate your face with different gender (or race, age, whatever), I wonder if that might be interesting for you to try. Maybe even some deepfake video. (I never tried such software, so I have no idea what is the quality of output or how much computing power it requires.)

Interesting post. Thank you for not trying to extrapolate your experiences to all trans people and kudos for trying hrt. I was shaking my head and thinking just try it halfway through the post and it was a pleasant surprise to find you ahead of me.

I have to say, the apathetic result is not at all what I had expected. I expected you to realize how wrong everything you said was, or possibly discovering what dysphoria really feels like. Instead it was... "not really a big deal, at all)". Seems like that points to the cis-by-default theory I've seen a few times in rationalist circles.

Though I'd like to add that there's nothing wrong with wanting to keep your mind unchanged and have a female body. Even for me, there were significant aspects of my pre-transition mind that I wanted to keep.

I know this misses most of the point of the article, but I also believe it's worth pointing out: I don't think a male wanting a female body form is any weirder or wronger that a male wanting to be 2 inches taller, buff, and having 20/20 eyesight.

PS: I did try reducing "weird and wrong" to their components. Result of the excercise: I find the OP uncontroversially "statistically rare" or "heterodox", but neither "viscerally repulsive" nor "morally reprehensible". I can see the value of explicitly reducing complex concepts in the general case, but I'm not sure it was worthwhile for this instance.

Really appreciated all ~16,000 words. For what it's worth, I agree with what Pablo said above.

The parts about your ideological journey were quite fun to read. Reminded me of HPMOR Harry learning partial transfiguration—maybe in that he finds a way to see category boundaries that others can't.

I'd be interested to hear more about why you think social transition "doesn't seem like a smart move". I read some of your posts on gender categories, and I feel like I'm agreeing for the most part but losing you in the conclusions. I haven't read much about this, so forgive me if I'm retreading obvious ground.

My impression of what you're saying is that even if you asked others to use different pronouns for you, internally they would keep classifying you into the same gender-cluster they always did—the one based on biological features—and this disconnect would be a loss for societal rationality. Specifically, we might lose the common knowledge that our internal classifiers operate mostly on the biological clusters, or that the biological clusters exist at all—or the biological clusters might just become harder to talk about, when commonly-occurring nouns like "man" and "woman" and pronouns like "he" and "she" no longer map to them. [1]

I completely agree that we don't want to lose the common knowledge of biological clusters. But I don't think changing pronouns has to contribute to that loss—I would hope that with careful communication, one could change pronouns without contributing at all to the social pressures that discourage discussion of biological clusters.

As for the terms we use to refer to biological clusters becoming more niche, I guess that possibility doesn't seem obviously bad to me. Maybe it'd be better if we talked a bit less about the biological clusters; I'm not sure why we should privilege the current state of affairs. But in any case, the stakes are low—word frequencies and definitions fluctuate all the time, and alternative names like "biological male" are easily understood and only a few syllables longer.

(On the other hand, if I think of redefining "man" and "woman" as a deliberate attempt, by some contagious meme, to shift the kinds of ideas we think about, then it does seem a lot more worrying.)

TL;DR: Socially transitioning shouldn't have to be/feel like promoting "lying" or bad epistemics.

To the extent that simple agreement is an interesting addition (and it usually is not), I think it might be interesting to note that I am an autogynephilic male, as you are, and most of this is essentially congruent with my own internal experiences of the desire, save for the fact that my autogynephilia seems to be much less... extreme than your own?

E.g., you mention the "beautiful pure sacred self identity thing" rather frequently, and I'm not sure I have that mostly at all, at least right now. Rather, I should say I can recall times in my life (particularly freshman year of college, where I was, in two successive jazz dance classes, the only male among the class and I suspect the whole "desire to do well in class/be someone who does well in class" thing picked up both the fact that the only examples of good dancers around me were female and my autogynephilia and kind of ran away with them) where my own version of the beautiful pure sacred self identity thing was much more prominent or a much larger part of my daily mental life.

There's obviously much more I could say about the matter, and I might edit this comment or post a reply to say parts of that much more if other people are sufficiently interested in the prospect my doing so, but I've not the time right now.

I'll highlight this extract:

(The blog posts did finally get collected into a book, Rationality: From AI to Zombies, but I continue to say "the Sequences" because I hate the gimmicky "AI to Zombies" subtitle—it makes it sound like a commercial book optimized to sell copies, rather than something to corrupt the youth, competing for the same niche as the Bible or the Koran—the book that explains what your life should be about.)

It read me more about being conflicted over being binarist vs non-binarist. You want to keep a man side and you want to gain a woman side. The belief that in order to gain/retain one you need to lose the other can be suspected. You might be forced to only have a single fat distribution but your traits don't need to come from a single bucket. Having human as a "featherless biped" suggests that carving reality at the joints of "featherfull" and "biped" make sense

What's your take on that aspiration toward immortality which seems somewhere between fashionable and universal around these parts of the internet? I'm curious because it seems like that would be a huge factor in the equation of whether you'd consider it desirable to hormonally transition long term, considering the difference between male and female life expectancies.