# My Model of Gender Identity

People [sometimes say](https://youtu.be/OjMPJVmXxV8?t=2828) that it's impossible to rationally explain gender identity. I've taken this as a challenge, and spent the past few months trying to put together a more sophisticated model than I’ve seen others espouse. I’d like to share what I have in this post. First, though:

**Some pitfalls I've avoided with this**
----------------------------------------

One common origin of trouble in discussion around transgenderism is that when a cis person is first exposed to the concept of trans people, they’ll understand that this violates their long-held model of male=man | female=woman, and, given low openness, political prejudice, or other biases, often start a motivated search for other, more intuitive reasons for trans people to exist besides gender dysphoria. These can include “trans people are perverts/confused/mentally ill” and so on, which is a problem insofar as gender dysphoria is a hypothesis at least worth considering.[^i78xqpol3p] I have experience with what I consider dysphoria, though, and have been surrounded by people who identify as trans for many years, so this failure mode mostly doesn’t apply to me.

There are also some common failure-modes in trans-positive spaces, though. For example: Gender is a keystone in the belief systems of many if not most trans people, so theories on the topic that try to account for some of the more intuitive observations made by the first group can often feel threatening to the identities of those involved in the conversation (e.g. autogynephilia theory, social contagion, probably others). This leads to ignoring certain realities that legitimately need to be explained. On top of this, many vocal[^60uuw7eh7] trans people are strong members of [the Blue Tribe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/); this gives them an external motive not to pay dues to the possibility that gendered tendencies are biologically innate, so as to preserve feminist blank-slatism and openness to queer variety. This also leads to the discounting of valuable information; [here's an example](https://youtu.be/1pTPuoGjQsI?t=477) of a trans woman very briefly treating and then discounting neurology, and implicitly bio-psychology as at large, as a field we can’t currently use to learn much about trans people.

Despite my status as a trans person, I’ve made efforts to shed my membership with the Blue Tribe, and have [tried to show elsewhere](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JkdrVg4OYpGG6Np7kEdYWLS7gRbNYFqCwylgUY61uCE/edit?usp=sharing) that I’m willing to entertain and accept uncomfortable possibilities about trans people. This means I’m less likely than average to fall into either of the two previous failure-modes, despite also having insider experience to reconcile my theory against. So those are my credentials.

**The core case**
-----------------

I’m now going to explain how I think trans people come to exist. To get everyone up to speed, I’ll start with the [Wikipedia-endorsed basics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation_in_humans) of how sexual dimorphism develops in fetuses in general, and incrementally get less standard from there.

About six or seven weeks into gestation, a fetus will start to either be exposed to more androgens and so gain more masculine traits, from testicles to a more masculine brain, or maintain its femininity, and fit into a vagina, a feminine brain, and so on. In theory, this process is directed by the content of your sex chromosomes – XY leads to masculine traits, XX leads to feminine ones – although in practice things sometimes go astray.

One specific way things can go astray is [congenital adrenal hyperplasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_adrenal_hyperplasia), a disorder which causes the body's adrenal glands (which produce androgens, among other things) to develop without the ability to synthesize certain normal enzymes; this sometimes causes those with XX chromosomes to be born with unusually masculine genitalia, or grow an unusual amount of facial hair later in life, or a host of other symptoms which are often along similar lines.

Writeups on CAH typically focus on these bodily symptoms, but studies suggest it can cause aberrations in gendered behavioral tendencies as well. For example, this [2018 review](https://urology.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Gender-dysphoria-and-XX-CAH-Eyer-de-Jesus-2019.pdf) suggest that, while you'll have better odds raising an XX child with CAH as a girl than as a boy in terms of which role is less likely to give them gender dysphoria, children with CAH nonetheless have higher rates of identifying as men than the full XX population – roughly 10%, as opposed to ~0.3% [in America](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5227946/) at roughly the time the review was conducted.

[Meanwhile](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2020.00038/full), [these](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3085977/) [studies](https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/87/11/5119/2823336) [suggest](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856278/) something similar about other axes of masculinization; CAH-XXs also have increased rates of preference for male-coded toys, such as trucks rather than dolls, as well as increased rates of gynephilic sexualities later in life, e.g. lesbianism or bisexuality. (I didn’t run numbers for these ones, but the direction of the research's leaning is very consistent).

All of this suggests that oddities in prenatal sex development can affect brains just as much as bodies, and result in intersex brains which often enact nonstandard gendered behaviors. (To suggest against this being unique to CAH, consider this [genetic analysis](https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/104/2/390/5104458) which finds that trans women tend to have genes that could plausibly induce some feminine prenatal development, as well as science’s [current](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17563-z/tables/2) [leaning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure) that the brains of early-onset trans women have at least slightly more visible resemblance to the brains of typical XXs than the typical XY brain does).[^8jtl6mjh50t]

Given this data, and a lack of better leads, I cautiously endorse the popular hypothesis that prenatal sex development going astray is the origin of much if not most lifelong human queerness. However, while two of the axes of queerness we’ve mentioned so far are intuitive in what they refer to, namely sexual attraction and gendered personality traits, a third axis is less clear: What does gender *identity *consist of, [reductionistically](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/p3TndjYbdYaiWwm9x)?

After all, gender identity doesn’t strictly align with gender expression; I recommend the documentary *Paris is Burning *for [anecdotal examples](https://youtu.be/Yvlf8IGPlFw) of gay men who act far more like cis women than the average straight man, and yet themselves don’t identify as trans and state they wouldn’t want to, despite including trans women in their social groups without problems.

My attempt to reduce gender identity to something useful requires a quick detour into evolutionary psychology, and specifically my theory of human identity in general.

Unlike most animals, a human can recognize itself in a mirror; this is probably because humans, unlike most animals, have a sophisticated neural model of themselves as coherent beings, which summarizes many disparate brain processes into a larger-scale picture of what they’re currently up to. (Incidentally, this summary seems to be the region of the brain [that’s conscious](https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness)).

As for why humans developed this ability to such a high degree: My idea is that it was basically social, in keeping with many of the pressures that set humans apart in evolution. In general, all animals with advanced senses and adequate cognition perceive *other animals *as unified by default, the same as any object with fairly clear boundaries binding it into a homogenous physical form; for monkeys in particular, given their political natures, it was very important to keep a model of this unity, a model of *how the other monkeys saw you*. Hence, primates developed a concept for tracking others’ social understanding of them, namely self-identity.

This would explain why humans tend to attach so much of their identities to their outward appearances, partly in a metaphorical sense as in attaching self-esteem to one’s social standing,[^8duvho19s89] but partly in a literal sense, as in dressing in all-black and doing intense makeup to signify one’s belonging to the Goth movement.

So, lots of your identity is probably influenced by the broad strokes of what you understand to be your public image. For trans people, the relevant insight is this: Both the gendering of your social behavior and the apparent sex of your body probably inform a *huge chunk* of the identity you currently feel inside.[^ki7e6ixgexl]

Furthermore, since bodily traits in particular turn out to be crucial for the interpersonal song-and-dance that leads up to mating and eventually sex,[^8i75k2c17j4] it’s plausible that the body would have evolved into an *even more* relevant factor in the social identity than the average facet of one's apperance. (For weak evidence that people socially enforce this association between bodily sex characteristics and gender identity, see how we call cowardly men pussies, silly male status competitions dick measuring contests, and so on.).

This brings me to my core proposition: The minimum condition for developing a preference for a cross-sex gender identity is simply *wanting a body of a different sex than the one you were born with*. Personality traits, like agreeability or competitiveness, don’t need to have anything to do with it; and indeed for many trans people this motive is absent. This is what distinguishes trans women from, e.g., gay male drag queens.

To chart out some implications of this, to make sure it sinks in: I’d guess that on average, at least 50% of one's *current *gender identity is an extension of the apparent sex of your body.[^3l7nwjay1gz] Roughly the same fraction of one's *preferred *gender identity has to do with *wanting* a body of a certain sex, possibly different to the one you were born with. This could be at least as relevant to gender identity proper as anything like the sexing of one's behavioral persona, perhaps even more so.

One reason I think this theory is plausible is that it clears up a confusion many other models of gender identity have had to resort to the mostly bad autogynephilia theory in order to explain, namely why many trans women behave so masculinely and many trans men behave so femininely.

In case you aren't familiar: Sexologist [Ray Blanchard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Blanchard), author of [the autogynephilia theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanchard%27s_transsexualism_typology#Autogynephilia), rightly observes that trans women can be mapped to bimodal distribution with a cluster of traits at each end of the X-axis, such that one group is mostly attracted to men, acts more like cis women, and transitions earlier in life; and the other is mostly attracted to women, acts more like cis men, and transitions later in life. Even leftist trans women like Natalie Wynn [acknowledge this](https://youtu.be/6czRFLs5JQo?t=275) as a useful typology, and it mostly maps onto my own social experience as well.

However, I dispute Blanchard by claiming that later-transitioning trans lesbians act more masculine *not* because that they’re what Blanchard calls **autogynephiles**, or men who transition mainly due to obsessive adult paraphilias over the thought of themselves as women (I'll give a detailed counterargument to this hypothesis in an appendix); rather, I think they were possibly exposed to much weaker/more targeted undermasculinization during prenatal development,[^mcf2tl0wyj] therefore developing *an emotional preference to inhabit a female body*, but a weaker or absent preference for feminine social behavior and/or sexuality. A lack of a womanly persona to push an XY into a female social role could plausibly keep them from realizing that they would rather look like a girl at least until puberty, which is when the differences between XX and XY bodies become much more pronounced and dysphoria-inducing. (See also that this is when self-identity becomes more of a concern for everyone).

(As a side note, I think this might also explain why [later-transitioning](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/smarter-than-the-average-bear/) trans women in particular tend to have higher-than-average IQs, or at least did at the time when research on such topics was still permissible. If you don’t have a girl-ish personality, there’s a rather large number of [inferential steps](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances#) between the “I feel faintly uneasy with my life” sense that often comes from latent gender dysphoria[^cji3s227zuh] and the realization that one would prefer a cross-sex body; in other words, one’s transness inhabits a fairly remote region of possibility-space, especially in years past when trans people weren’t such a hot topic in anglosphere politics. This could plausibly select for high-IQ people as those most likely to realize this aspect of their preferred identity.)

I’d like to note that this body-first model of dysphoria has the advantage of reconciling nicely with some of empirical research that exists on body and identity in general. For instance, one especailly strong bit of evidence for the body-first model is the existence of [Body Integrity Dysphoria](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4094630/), wherein patients persistently feel the need to amputate an arbitrary limb so as to feel “whole” or “complete” in a vein very reminiscent of gender dysphoria; this suggests that whatever's going wrong in gender dysphoria is a problem that could theoretically afflict any part of the body.

I also have some weaker, more trans-specific evidence: At least one neuroimiging study  has suggested that trans people process touches on dysphoric body parts [differently than cis people](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5357597/),[^ch2dj4lccz8]  which tracks with how dysphoric people often claim some sort of weird unpleasant sensation in those areas in general. Separately, there's also evidence that post-op trans women tend to experience [lower rates](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288633039_Phantom_penises_in_transsexuals_Evidence_of_an_innate_gender-specific_body_image_in_the_brain) of phantom limb syndrome for their old genetials than men who lose their penises, although I'm less interested in this result due to how easy it is to deliberately construct or dismiss phantom limbs in general, e.g. tails.

(I also remember a study suggesting that pre-op trans people’s brain activity upon seeing edited photos of themselves with their preferred genitals more closely resembled cis people’s brain activity while seeing photos of themselves with their real genitals than cross-sex ones, but I can’t find it anymore.)

From these findings, I derive the hypothesis that the brain keeps an unconscious model of how its host body is supposed to be shaped, perhaps to facilitate self-recognition, and for trans people of any personality type, the sex characteristics on this model have gone astray (probably during prenatal sex development).

Anyway, let's get back to the main line of theory crafting. I’m now going to use what I’ve explained so far to pin down some possible gears-level causes of a few symptoms of gender dysphoria, especially as they exist in later-transitioning trans women (which is the group I have most familiarity with, in case that wasn't obvious).

For instance: Dysphorics often report a sense of vague dissociation from their overall existence; the most memorable phrasing I’ve heard is that before you transition, it can feel like your life is happening to someone else. This doesn’t make sense for later-transitioning trans people if identities are just based on their behavioral tendencies, but it does make sense if they draw their identity *from the apparent sexing of their bodies*; this could plausibly cause a trans person to associate their identity itself with pain, and as a result unconsciously start to filter out some of their sense of self due to it being unpleasant to process. And since the source of the sense of self also just happens to be the region of the brain [that's  conscious](https://aeon.co/essays/how-blindsight-answers-the-hard-problem-of-consciousness), this producing a sort of self-distance on the phenomenological level[^qg10wwb5cjd] makes a certain amount of sense as well.

The weakening of communication between the brain's summary of its internal affairs and its other happenings may also make sense of a common trope in art made by later-transitioning trans women, namely noise and chaos.[^ll6cz67kjj] This [Leah Tigers essay](http://www.trickymothernature.com/asexclosetonoise.html) claims that noise has been a trend within trans women's music for decades, and though I’m just speculating, it makes sense if the brain is structured to work with more data about its overall intentions or tendencies than it’s currently getting in most trans people.

(If you want a shorter-form, more accessible expression of the sense of chaos I think this leads to, I recommend either AwfulFawful’s YouTube Poop [The Art Final](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzdfc_viwXI&list=PLHRxqXOrxjs7wvt1SO9rTsMPoLJaqSaNT&index=3) or Sewerslvt’s [Mr. Kill Myself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1upmhAkFyzo&list=PLHRxqXOrxjs7wvt1SO9rTsMPoLJaqSaNT&index=2) music video).

Lastly, pre-transition trans people frequently express an affinity for a brand of [deep melancholy](https://vimeo.com/484600028) that sometimes bubbles up from within all the noise; my thought is that melancholy is the feeling of longing for something that feels hopelessly out of reach, often because you don’t know what a solution to your problem would even look or feel like, and this tracks with the IQ stuff we talked about earlier, where the fact that transition would ease a dysphoric’s subtle misery is indeed not very intuitive (even right up until you start taking hormones, in my case).

I could keep using my model to explain trans stereotypes – e.g. the bodiless void of cyberspace being part of why later-onset trans women tend to like programming, in addition to intelligence and the masculinity of coding itself – but I’d rather wrap this up by pointing to one last topic my model clarifies: The existence of non-binary gender identities.

One simple possibility I could explore here is that people come to prefer NB identities due to an incomplete masculinization or feminization of their internal body-map; I know nothing that could rule this out, and if it’s true it’s justification for non-binary identity in its own right. To me, though, the more interesting thing is that in many later-transitioning trans people, myself included, there ends up being an irresolvable conflict between the gendering of our preferred body types and the sexing of our personalities, which can lead to non-binary identity by a different route.

By way of a case study in myself: Despite my honest desire to inhabit the body of a cis woman, and the subtle stress that badgers me to the degree that I’m made aware that I don’t, I also can’t deny that my behavior, sexuality, and inner monologue are all clearly male in their directional leaning. I love trying to prove my dominance in hard video games, I get aroused by the sight of women’s bodies more than by any aspect of their personalities or social standings, and I spend weeks of my life trying to pull together Universal Theories of whatever intellectual question currently has my attention. 

So, depending on the current split on whether my behavior or bodily appearance matters more to my understanding of my public image (which itself depends on which social environment I'm currently optimizing for), I’m in constant flux in terms of the degree to which I feel like a boy or a girl or something in between. I set my pronouns as he/she/they/it/any[^suoyhdf924n] as a sort of resignation to the chaos; and I wouldn’t be surprised if varying expressions of this state of mind are behind a sizable fraction of the trans women, enbies, and omni-gender femboys who sometimes seem to me like they're all giving different expressions to this same chaotic psychology.

Anyway, given the potential for a between-space body preference and mixed messages sent by body and persona, there are at least two different manners in which my theory justifies non-binary identity in something approaching gears-level terms. I hope that's sufficient for skeptics.

—-

There’s one last point I feel compelled to mention. Although trans people [very consistently self-report](https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people) satisfaction with their new identities and improved well-being after gender-affirming medical care, [this study](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19010080?cookieSet=1) and its [correction](https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2019.19010080?cookieSet=1) strongly imply that such things don’t actually cause the median trans person to consume any less psychiatric medicine compared to those whose dysphoria goes untreated. This maps onto my intuition that for those of relatively minor queerness, possibly even including most later-transitioning trans women, taking apart one’s life and identity for fairly small and culturally frowned upon gains in self-expression is a toxic tradeoff, even though it has upsides. In other words, between fixating on neuroticism and being disliked by much of society, it's plausible that for most trans people transition would be net-negative. I might be misinterpreting this result; a more thorough analysis would be beyond the scope of this post and probably beyond what science can even confirm or deny right now, but I felt dishonest not bringing it up at all.

Anyway, I hope you found this attempt to explain transness elucidating, or at least on the right track even if you think I mistook some details or drew some wrong conclusions. Preparing for this post has put me through at least one serious [crisis of faith](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BcYBfG8KomcpcxkEg/crisis-of-faith), and prior to that I had to get basically [frame controlled](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bQ6zpf6buWgP939ov/frame-control) into discarding several strong Blue Tribe beliefs about trans people I developed years before becoming a rationalist; basically, even among trans people high in Trait: Interest in Actual Correctness, it takes a huge shift for many of us to start thinking clearly enough to meaningfully contribute to this problem. So I guess, I hope you thought it was worth it.

[*~A credits theme, for any fellow queer people now burning to harass me~*](https://youtu.be/JQXniWb78l4?t=2179)

Edit: Summary of main post
==========================

This is an edit. I should have included this the first time, but here's a list of my biggest claims across the main post.

1.  Queerness is probably what happens when things go oddly in one's prenatal sex development.
2.  Psychological queerness can be usefully divided into three axes: Sexual attraction, gendered personality, and gender identity.
3.  Gender identity can be usefully subdivided into two main categories, current and preferred.
4.  Your *current* gender identity is in large an extension of how you think others are gendering you socially, because evolutionarily, identities were used to track our social standing.
5.  In some cases, people *prefer* inhabiting  a body of a sex other than the one they were born with, possibly due to something going wrong in the prenatal sex-development of their brain's inner body-map (which exists to help with self-recognition).
6.  This cross-sex body preference, combined with outward appearance being a large part of our social identities, often leads people with a cross-sex body preference to prefer a non-cis gender overall identity as well.
7.  Non-binary identity might arise from an edge case in any of these mechanisms, e.g., having an oddly sexed body-map, having an oddly sexed body in practice, having a personality whose gendering mismatches your body + existing in spaces where people gender you at least partly based on your personality, and so on.

Appendix: Counterarguments to autogynephilia as causal to later transition
==========================================================================

The above post focuses on a model of gender identity where caring about the sex of your body plays a large role in determining your self-concept. Personally I think body preference is likely to come from a slight, subtle hiccup in prenatal sex development, although I’m open to the possibility that some other oddity takes place in the brains of transgender people causing them to feel this way. However, one alternate theory of trans body preference that I don’t like is Ray Blanchard’s concept of autogynephilia, which posits adult XYs as desiring female bodies mainly due to a paraphilic obsession with the thought of themselves as women.

In this appendix, I’m going to present a sequence of evidence which I think progressively constrains the autogynephilia model into something implausible, so as not to provke questions as to why I dismissed this established and predictively powerful reading of later MtF transition.

For starters, I’ll note that there are at least some later-transitioning trans women who I think believably claim not to have much or any particular erotic interest in the thought of themselves as women. Natalie Wynn’s [video on autogynephilia ](https://youtu.be/6czRFLs5JQo)is my best reference here, where she explains her relationship to sexuality throughout her transition in humiliating detail and ultimately claims that she just doesn’t have these feelings herself. However, because self-reports and introspection are frequently untrustworthy, not to mention that Natalie’s psychology might just be an extreme outlier, I’ll throw this point out from my formal argument.

A more favorable starting point for Blanchard would be with accepting that many if not most later-onset trans women *actually do* have a lot of autoerotic fantasies about womanhood; Blanchard [has done surveys](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2794988/) on this himself, and for a less biased source I defer to data scientist Aella and her massive Kink Survey, which found that trans women [have more sexual interest](https://aella.substack.com/p/everyone-has-autogynephilia) in the thought of masturbating as women than any other recorded demographic. (I [personally](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nkMgBDE3z0fhtlREB-eQImEXR47Ob4AZ-0Hgmpk5Bgk/edit?usp=sharing) used to have this kink myself, for whatever that’s worth.)

However, that same Aella survey also found that on average, cis men also have some erotic interest in this fantasy (more than they do in the thought of masturbating as men, in fact), and cis women get off on the thought of masturbating as women to an even greater degree than their opposite-sex counterparts.[^44nbtbkq6xo] I think this suggests that “autogynephilia” in a loose sense is very common for psycho-cultural reasons, and that to some degree it’s normal that trans people get caught up in this fantasy, especially since they’re living it.

Blanchardians [consider this a strawman](https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1080/00918360903445749), however, holding that true autogynephilia is getting off to the thought of simply *existing* as a woman, not being a woman plus some other erotic behavior like masturbating. Blanchardians often cite sources saying that [by this metric](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35759067/), trans women actually are uniquely autogynephilic;[^ncvd7jcco3l] this is then used as evidence that later-onset trans women enact what Blanchard calls an [erotic target location error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_target_location_error), in which the arousing part of being female isn’t anything like force-fem humiliation or the thrill of sexual liberation, but rather something aberrational: An AGP paraphile scans the environment for someone to be attracted to, and defectively ends up attracted to himself, specifically a hypothetical version of himself as a woman. The dissatisfaction of not being able to fuck/embody this erotic persona then goes on to cause gender dysphoria.

However, I can think of [a few](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Gst6j1P5YU_DisXaFlAaQfzTrz5gwJ7yyblx4JZbjL8/edit?usp=sharing) data points this argument has a hard time explaining. Most notably, as trans women get further into their transition, they tend to have autogynephilic fantasies [much less often](https://sci-hub.ru/10.1007/s10508-005-1793-y);[^on2r0ebj3e] this poses a problem for Blanchard’s, because despite this lessening mastubatory sex drive, the vast majority of trans women who reach this stage [want to stay transitioned anyway](https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people). This doesn’t make sense if eroticism is the point of womanhood for trans women; you’d at least expect many of them to periodically go off of estrogen to get their libido back, before starting again to maintain their smooth skin and hairless legs and so on, but I’ve only ever heard of two trans people doing this.

Blanchard himself responds to this observation by [speculating](https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1815090/) that trans women who’ve finished transitioning have also unconsciously reached an erotically stale pair-bond with their female alger-ego, and simply stay transitioned so as not to effectively divorce their wife.[^v5c91o6ct8] But since almost no trans women claim to have this self-marriage experience consciously, in terms of a clear alter-ego (I claim not to as well), my strongest formalization of the model goes:

1.  **Unconsciously** confuse part of your mind for another person.
2.  Think it would be hot if this stranger inside your head were a girl, without noticing that part of your brain understands this stranger as indeed a stranger and not yourself.
3.  Sometimes forcibly contort you/the stranger's ego into that of a woman, especially during masturbation, because you unconsciously find it hot to symbolically engage in sex with the stranger.
4.  Subconsciously pine for a world in which the stranger's ego is female by default, so as to make the symbolic sex and romance smoother and more natural.
5.  Slowly develop a conscious desire to re-shape your body, and by extension a shard of your ego, into a woman's full-time, so as to fulfill this unconscious romantic longing (which you consciously interpret as irreducible gender dysphoria).
6.  End up okay with the sex getting duller as you transition, because at least the subconscious romance is still playing out fine, and that's better than regressing to the early, more stressful stages of the relationship.
7.  (Throughout all of this, apparently be so deluded you *can't possibly* make the unconscious bit conscious; I've tried to conceptualize myself as two people, to bring these AGP dynamics to the surface of my mind, but it just feels forced.)

As [Natalie Wynn](https://youtu.be/6czRFLs5JQo?t=2262) pointed out, “this seems like the point where [Occam’s razor](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor) basically shuts down Blanchard’s argument.” Even my attempt to steelman Blanchard involves several unexplained psychic mechanisms—most notably, I can't come up with a gears-level reduction of "unconscious romance". So, if the goal of AGP theory is just to explain why trans women experience higher rates of autogynephilic arousal than other demographics, I think we should go with my strictly simpler theory, which is: “All the reasons cis people experience autogynephilia, plus also sex feels vastly better in a body you actually feel at home within.[^382hksp4b3l]" Thus, Blanchard's view has [no reason](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/PtgH6ALi5CoJnPmGS/p/NunuKwrSg92ST9E8W) to be postulated.

Given all this, the probability I reserve for autogynephilia being the main reason that most later-onset trans people transition is at most ~5%. I don’t doubt that the excitement of autogynephilia might somewhat hasten some trans people to take up their new identity, and it wouldn’t  *rock my world* if there were at least a few who transitioned just because they found it hot (and either later regretted it, or lacked a body-map that was gendered enough either way to care very much?), but I don’t maintain a >5% chance that [the next update-forcing unit of evidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zTfSXQracE7TW8x4w/mistakes-with-conservation-of-expected-evidence) I encounter will suggest that autogynephilia causes a major portion of later-onset gender dysphoria.

[^i78xqpol3p]: In case you disagree, the best quick evidence against I can offer is that if something approximating gender dysphoria isn’t real psychologically, it's hard to explain why transracialism isn't nearly as popular. 

[^60uuw7eh7]: I specify “vocal” because I’ve actually seen weak evidence that trans women (though not trans men) supports somewhat less liberal policies than all other gender demographics; see table three. I'm confused about this. 

[^8jtl6mjh50t]: Likely crazy person Ziz has argued that these studies systematically fail to adjust for the average ~10% difference in brain size between XXs and XYs, on the hypothesis that trans women's brains are structurally female but grow an extra 10% uniformly due to exposure to male puberty/a mostly male hormonal environment/whatever. Here's her data from one study after making this statistical adjustment herself. On priors I have a few reservations about this approach, but I have to admit I haven't done much rigorous analysis here, and think it's possible that Ziz is at least approximating a more nuanced but valuable adjustment, especially when it comes to early transitioners. My first line of inquiry: When exactly do male brains start to get bigger than female ones, and in what areas? (One important prior here is that taking estrogen does seem to shrink XY brains over time.). 

[^8duvho19s89]: I think a lot of stuff Freudians like to attribute to ego-protection are actually better attributed to maintaining one’s social standing, e.g. getting defensive when someone tries to point out when you’re wrong or have more selfish (e.g. sexual) motives than you’ll admit to in public. 

[^ki7e6ixgexl]: Here’s Contra brushing up against but not quite articulating this sentiment. See also her Beauty video noting a fuzzy boundary between gender dysphoria and the desire to be seen as beautiful by society. 

[^8i75k2c17j4]: Sex rituals <--> gender identity also explains why some people feel an especially pronounced sense of gender during sex or romance; testimony I've seen comes again from trans woman Natalie Wynn, who has claimed in separate places to have both felt an amplified sense of manhood during pre-transition sex and to have strongly dissociated during that behavior, as well as Ayn Rand associate Nathaniel Branden, in the section of The Psychology of Romantic Love called Between Man and Woman; although I can’t effectively excerpt his point due to his rambling prose style. 

[^3l7nwjay1gz]: I say “on average” because I think these ratios can shift depending on stuff like how often you’re actually around other people in person, how much time you spend looking in the mirror, or how much time you spend sort of self-unperceived, exposed more to your thought processes than your appearance because you’re dwelling on the Internet or awake in bed in the dark or something. Basically, I think how much body VS personality matters to your identity deals a lot with the social environment your brain is currently optimizing for. 

[^mcf2tl0wyj]: Studies that could confirm or deny this about gynephilic trans women are very sparse; this one suggests that gynephilic trans women’s overall brain densities aren’t feminized at all, but the only other one I could find suggests that some of their white matter microstructures actually are somewhat similar to cis women’s. The former wouldn’t be totally damning for my model anyway, though, since, it to me it sounds plausible that a female-typical body-map isn’t actually that different in neural size or structure than a male one; only differences in broader areas would be more visible using the kind of surface-level neuroimaging we currently have access to. I’m a neuroscience noob though, so correct me if I’m wrong on this. 

[^cji3s227zuh]: It’s an insidious trend that dysphorics often don't notice they're suffering more than anyone else until they hatch, since body dysphoria ramps up subtly at puberty and without obvious cause. Ziz and I have independently written on this causing a presumption of universal misery, and I have a pet theory that it's why a couple of people I think likely to be eggs have constructed philosophies of projecting malaise and/or inhuman chaos onto the state of all modern society (the Unabomber and Nick Land, respectively). 

[^ch2dj4lccz8]: This study failed to placebo control though, which would have been easy by asking a cis woman placebo group to try and phantom limb away their breasts the same way you flip between interpretations of an optical illusion. 

[^qg10wwb5cjd]: ContraPoints seemingly expressed this sentiment in intuitive, poetic form in her short film on gender dysphoria, where she has the half-comedic line "How do I opt out of my own consciousness?". Prior to hormones, I sometimes had this thought myself; my guess is that it conveys a learned reflex against having an identity at all, and while it may be a common depression/self-loathing sentiment, I expect it to be more common among dysphoric depressives. 

[^ll6cz67kjj]: If this is less common among XX trans-art, which I predict it is, the reason is probably that noise is aggressive and masculine-coded. I'd guess transmasc art tends to have softer expressions of chaos. 

[^suoyhdf924n]: Other aspects that contribute to my sometimes liking he/him pronouns may include my still having a penis, which might be artificially pushing my “current gender identity” towards male, and also the erotic thrill of being honest about the part of my personality that still seems boyish. I don’t think this accounts for all of it, though. 

[^44nbtbkq6xo]: This more academic but much smaller survey corroborates this finding, in case you care about formal scientific prestige. 

[^ncvd7jcco3l]: Someone put this study on sci-hub please, so I can see the numbers. 

[^on2r0ebj3e]: This likely has multiple causes, from estrogen decreasing your sex drive to SRS reducing your need to fantasize about how much better sex will feel once you’re inhabiting your preferred body. 

[^v5c91o6ct8]: In steelmanning this view, I would bring up that it predicted brain scans which suggest that gynephilic trans women have weirdly large temporoparietal junctions, a neural area which scientists think regulates self/other differentiation. Although, AGP isn't the only interpretation of that finding; it might just express that the need to question one's identity to hatch their egg  selects for self-absorbed people, or something. 

[^382hksp4b3l]: Technically, this sentence begs the question of why people would feel at home in a body of one sexing but not another, and how one could prefer their non-birth sex in this regard. However, I postulated the plausible "feminized bodymap" explanation for this in the main post, and even if that were wrong this still seems like it demands a less complicated explanation than the weird unconscious ego stuff in my steelman of Blanchard (especially since there's reason to believe most ego stuff is conscious, since the ego overlaps with the conscious region of the brain so strongly).