dovetailing
No bio...
User ID: 2225
dovetailing
11mo ago
I'm guessing that this is hyperbole but I'm pretty sure that at least in European societies marriage that young was never very common outside royalty/upper nobility (and usually wasn't consummated until later even in those cases).
Marriage at 16-18, on the other hand, is historically pretty common (though not universal).
dovetailing
7mo ago
Have you never heard of gynecomastia? Estrogens produce breast growth in men, too, sometimes quite a bit of it. There are boys who have to get mastectomies because of endocrine issues, even! McBride seems to have been "trans" ever since his early 20s more than 10 years ago, so while that amount of growth would be unusual, it's not unheard of.
It's relevant because your point seems to be that McBride is just acting out a fetish in which he expects the whole world to be involved, as evidenced by his "wear[ing] fake breasts" (I assumed you meant prosthetics, though maybe you mean implants?), and if he's actually on hormones for 10 years, and made permanent changes to his body, I don't think that's very likely.
I don't think you need to insist that every MtF transsexual is just acting out a fetish in order to have a good argument against blanket letting any man who claims to be a woman into women's bathrooms. I actually agree with you on the conclusion! Bathrooms are vulnerable places and women are uncomfortable when men are in the bathroom with them, and that's a good enough reason to forbid it. You don't need to assume the worst about people in order to make the point.
(FWIW, on priors I wouldn't bet against McBride being AGP, but that's not always the same thing as just a fetish, and I would not expect someone who just has a crossdressing fetish to commit literally his whole life to the bit.)
dovetailing
10mo ago
Enjoy your updoot; this is not said enough. You know that 10% giving pledge Scott promoted? I know plenty of Christians who give 10% just to their church (and aside, as much as people like to call this "paying for services", it's really not, even when a lot of it does go to paying the pastor and maintenance -- the priest/pastor has a real role in serving the people who are not financing the operation, and most churches turn around and donate to both local poverty relief and international aid and/or missions), plus more to international charity. (Not to toot my horn but because it's the only numbers I know exactly, my wife and I give 10% of our gross to our local parish, plus about 1% to US charity and 2% to international charity, and we plan to increase the last one in the future.)
dovetailing
2yr ago
Because Hasbro decided that they could make lots of money by having standalone card sets based on random other fantasy IP. The main "multiverse" is still its own setting with no crossover, AFAIK.
dovetailing
11mo ago
the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
- People making this criticism just have moral intuitions that I find alien and abhorrent.
- People criticizing what they call "slave morality" can't keep track of what the thing they are trying to criticize even is.
- People claiming that Christianity exemplifies "slave morality" have a ludicrous caricature of Christianity in their head, and hate that rather than the real thing.
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
dovetailing
11mo ago
I feel like there's conflation in these discussions between four rather different things.
- People who insist on "rules" for "good English" that were never rules of English grammar in the first place. Examples include things like "don't split infinitives" and "don't end sentences with prepositions", or even typographical bits like the use or non-use of the Oxford comma and where to place punctuation relative to quotation marks.
- People who insist that a meaning of a word is wrong because it is not etymologically "correct" or because it was not the "original" meaning, even though it's had the one they object to for centuries.
- People who complain about dialectal differences in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, because these don't match usage in their preferred dialect.
- People who object to trends in speakers of a specific dialect (usually, let's face it, a prestige dialect; nobody cares about other ones) using words or phrases incorrectly per the current or recent standards of that dialect.
People in category 1 or 2 are just silly (or maybe I should say nice rather than silly)? They are often the butt of discussions of prescriptivism and I think that this is what was originally meant by the term.
People in category 3 are either trying to enforce their preferred dialect as the "best" form of the language, or just don't understand that different dialects are not simply inferior or erroneous forms of the prestige dialect. In the latter case they are just wrong; in the former, they simply have a goal that a lot of people disagree with, and therefore those people find it useful to imply that they are just wrong.
Category 4, on the other hand, includes almost everyone at one point or another, and trying to tar them with the same brush as 1-3 is always and only a rhetorical move to try to establish the change that the category-4-person opposes as a fait accompli.
Objections to double negatives might be category 3 or category 4. Objections to "literally" as an intensifier, "could care less" for "couldn't care less", "bemused" meaning "amused" (surely a generation ago this one would have counted as a malapropism?), "irregardless", and the like are pretty much squarely in category 4. Argue about each at the the object level if you want, but these objections are not the result of a misunderstanding of linguistics or a chauvinistic desire to devalue another dialect, but out of a desire to preserve something that the objector finds valuable about the language.
(I'm not sure whether arguments about "enormity" and "peruse" are more category 4 or category 2, but I'm afraid that we're likely stuck with at least a double meaning if not outright replacement by this point.)
PS: If you want a masterclass in analyzing what confusions can result from the same word being used in different senses across time and space, I highly recommend C.S. Lewis's Studies in Words.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.
I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."
It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)
dovetailing
10mo ago
I suppose they also have the issue that their leadership class is mostly celibate as well (including female religious), which also opens them up to accusations like, "Of course you don't empathise, you will never have to deal with this".
One of those convenient sticks to hit the dog with. Of course the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics have married priests (and even some widower Bishops with adult children, at least in the Orthodox church) and are just as pro-life, which somehow doesn't come up. (And you can find plenty of pro-life Evangelicals even in the squishier groups that ordain women.)
dovetailing
7mo ago
I'm not sure we have "evolved as a species" to see women as morally superior. Plenty of societies in antiquity (and even more recently than that) treated women as basically defective (morally, intellectually, and physically) men whose sole redeeming quality was babymaking. Even when Christianity (with a much more egalitarian attitude, at least on the "morally" front) became widespread, it took a long time to purge those ideas from the zeitgeist, to the point that you can find them even in some early Christian writers.
dovetailing
7mo ago
You... may be an outlier. (Not disagreeing that it's good to keep men out of women's bathrooms, even with stalls, though.)
dovetailing
1yr ago
This seems to come up as an explanation a lot, but I don't think it really holds water. We don't have a huge number of people who are experts in pushdown automata or computational complexity or type theory, but can't code. For the most part, the people who didn't learn to code in school also didn't learn any of the theory either.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Red hot CW, but it's a limited-scope question (I hope).
How can I find out the profile(s) for marginal MtF transitioners?
A few definitions:
- MtF transitioner: a male who does at least one of the following:
- Goes on HRT (cross-sex hormones) for long enough to begin to develop female sex characteristics like breast growth
- Gets surgery related to transition (including facial feminization, vocal, genital, but not including non-invasive procedures like hair removal)
- Changes name and presents full time as a woman
- In particular, I'm not counting cross-dressing, deliberate androgyny, a "second identity" as a woman, etc. unless accompanied by one or more of the above, even if the person considers himself "trans".
- Marginal meaning the usual thing, which could cash out in something like one of the following:
- Is "on the bubble" about transitioning in the above ways, narrowly doing so (or narrowly not, but that's harder to measure)
- Wouldn't have transitioned in similar circumstances, in the cultural climate of, say, 20+ years ago, (i.e. comparing to counterfactual of born 20 years earlier, making decision 20 years ago, not comparing to past self) but did transition in recent years (or is about to start transition now)
- Profile meaning:
- Demographics pre-transition, especially including age both at beginning to transition and age when first considering transition (if those are different)
- Motivation: why, in terms of consciously experienced motivation (no psychoanalysis or "no you really did it for X reason", but also not "what theory of themselves do they subscribe to"), did they choose to transition
- Religious and/or ideological background in early life (not immediately prior to transition, as I expect possible ideological shifts to bring beliefs in line with actions)
- Personality / interests
- Psychological comorbidities
I'm not asking for your personal theories (unless you uniquely have an insider or reliable source of knowledge about it); I have my own and most people's ideas about this are half-baked at best and ludicrously ideologically motivated at worst. What I want to know is where I can find one of:
- Many such people (unguardedly) talking about themselves, in places accessible on the public internet.
- High quality data gathered on this topic by people who are not just trying to grind their ideological axes / prove their pet theories.
So far I've read through a bunch of stuff on the sorts of subreddits where I'd expect to find such people, such as /r/mtf, /r/trans, /r/egg_irl. But I suspect that may not be a representative slice of the population I'm interested in.
dovetailing
1yr ago
I don't know why you chose to try to eliminate that desire in yourself, but much respect. It's really difficult, in our culture, to reject seeing that kind of desire as part of one's identity, both because of how these desires present themselves and because of the way that the culture insists on talking about them. You did a difficult -- and IMO praiseworthy -- thing.
I'd also love to see an effortpost on this if you are comfortable with it. In particular I'd like to hear why you think it worked so well for you, when a lot of people, including many who sincerely tried, seem to have met with less success. (I have some theories but they are not particularly well founded.)
dovetailing
2yr ago
Honestly seeing that card makes me glad I quit playing Magic entirely five years ago, and it has little to do with making Aragorn black (which is stupid and jarring exactly because it makes no sense for reasons already outlined). The card's art is bad (nothing new for Magic, but at least the bad art used to be kind of quirky), the card name is stupid, the flavor makes no sense (the war is basically over when they get married, and they don't fight together), the mechanics are completely uninspired and have little sensible connection to the flavor, and the whole "let's make a boring cash-grab set based on random other fantasy IP" ...ugh. About the only thing that makes sense about the card is the color.
In Middle-Earth there's very little to do with (ordinary human) races. The humans, elves, hobbits, dwarves (and, of course, the orcs and various monsters) are all quite different, but they don't at all map onto race-as-we-know-it, and it would be, uh, pretty racist to try to make them match human races. You might be able to pull a Brandon Sanderson and make the elves be East-Asian but extra tall, but even that is questionable. (You could just race-swap the whole setting en masse and have everyone be the same non-white race, and that would be better, but it still misses that the setting is a fundamentally European mythology.) The problem is that while race (as it actually exists) is a non-issue*, genealogy is definitely not (as you point out), so you can't just have random people be random races.
*There's the well-known exception that the Haradrim are called "swarthy" at one point. But this definitely doesn't make them black and doesn't seem to have much to do with mapping to race-as-it-exists; they're just darker-skinned since they live in sunnier climes further south. If anything, the picture is of North Africans: the Haradrim invading with their Mumakil are probably intended to evoke the Carthaginians under Hannibal, and the Corsairs of Umbar, the Barbary Pirates. And going a bit further afield, the shrunken Gondor holding out against Mordor has shades of the Eastern Roman Empire against the Turks. But again, using race to represent this is a bad idea, not least because these resemblances are just evocative, not allegorical and definitely not intended to reflect on real-world races!
dovetailing
11mo ago
The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.
Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.
dovetailing
11mo ago
Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).
(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)
dovetailing
10mo ago
You got me completely hooked on Only Connect with that post, by the way. I have watched so many back episodes these last few months.
dovetailing
1yr ago
For some reason, every time I see the Friday Fun Thread, my brain insists on first abbreviating it to "FFT", then re-expanding "FFT" to "Fast Fourier Transform." Not that I get confused, it's just kind of there in the background.
Anyone else do something similar?
Seconding the "expensive, delicious, and/or rare" thing. There's a reason that tomatoes are a classic home gardener crop: good tomatoes are so much better than what you can find in the grocery that they are basically two different things, and getting the good stuff from a farmer's market is expensive. Berries are also a great choice, though I will warn you that you probably want to invest in some bird netting or you are likely to get most of your crop stolen (by the birds, I mean).
Some other considerations include whether you are more limited on space or time, and to what extent "fun to grow" is important. If you are space limited and just want good bang for your buck, potatoes are a terrible choice; if you are not space limited and want something easy and fun, potatoes are pretty cool; they don't require much maintenance, and digging for buried treasure at the end of the season is great fun (or at least it was when I was a kid; I've been space-limited as an adult, so...).
Like potatoes, onions, carrots, and other cheap stuff that keeps well are not great choices unless you really have fun with them. Greens (lettuce, cabbage, spinach) are really situational; how bad a problem you have with insects can make or break you. Cucurbits are pretty fun, though I'd go for summer squash / zucchini and cucumbers rather than winter squash, as the risks are higher and relative returns lower for winter squash. I liked growing green beans and snow peas, but YMMV there. Both hot and sweet peppers, if you like them, are, like tomatoes, a great choice. Tomatillos are great fun too, but you need to be a little more careful as they don't self-pollinate and need to be picked before they are ripe.
One thing that might not be obvious is how much the variety you plant can matter. Don't just get stuff off the shelf at Home Depot for most things. If you want to eat fresh green beans, get something good like Fortex instead of whatever the big box store sells. Do your research on tomato varieties and select for the things most important to you. There are a million cool hot pepper varieties that you can pretty much only get from specialty stores; you don't have to grow only jalapenos and banana peppers. In general, starting things from seed is a lot of fun and opens up a world of varieties that you'll never see if you buy starts.
As far as other things to do:
- Fertilize (but you already know this). Compost is great because it also provides organic matter, but cheap granular fertilizer will do in a pinch.
- Tomato cages are for dwarf varieties and determinates only, and even then I'm skeptical. Otherwise you want stakes (ideally 6ft) or a tall fence to tie them to. You don't need to aggressively prune your tomatoes, but you do need to keep them off the ground.
- If you have something you would like to grow, look up information about it online -- at your local agricultural extension, not random gardener tips pages (the latter contain nonsense as well as good advice, and take effort to filter). This will tell you more, and more accurately, about what you need to do for the particular plant than some rando can.
I'm skeptical of the strength of the autism connection, but I don't find that in particular much of a mystery:
- Autism (also let's be real, we're talking about what used to be called Asperger's here, not all autism) is only "extreme maleness" along one dimension: a focus on systems/things rather than people. I've never heard of autistic people being more athletic, more competitive, etc. than typical men (though disabuse me if I'm wrong!).
- One typical characteristic of being male is finding feminine characteristics attractive and valuable. It's not too far a jump -- for a certain kind of mind -- to feel that those things would be valuable in oneself.
dovetailing
2yr ago
You mentioned icons; let's talk about actual icons. Specifically, Christian iconography.
When Christianity spreads to another culture (as it has been continuously doing since the beginning), it faces a problem: how do you represent the major figures, including Christ and the saints? You can take two different approaches here:
-
Icons are representative, not realistic. So you can (and should) adapt iconography to the ethnic and cultural makeup of the people using them in order to make them more relatable and less foreign. Hence you have black, white, Chinese, etc. icons of Jesus, Mary, and so on.
-
Icons are representations of real people, so they should picture them as they actually are (as best as we can tell). This entails that Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and so on look eastern-Mediterranean, since that's how they actually looked; if people want icons that look like them, well, there are plenty of saints actually from their ethnicity, or will be soon enough.
Both perspectives are defensible, but if you have perspective (1) you'd be wrong to say that people with perspective (2) are just being racist or ethnocentric.
Now, of course, neither Aragorn nor any other character in Lord of the Rings is a real person. But people frequently have perspective (2) about source material that they are attached to, and I don't think they're entirely wrong!
PS: What amounts to good iconography, especially as it relates to these two perspectives, is apparently a great way to get some scissor statements in Orthodox Christian communities. Is this picture a valid/good icon, or not? Context for those who aren't familiar: this picture is a classic Orthodox icon design, with the Theotokos (Mary) and infant Jesus (the angels are Michael on the left and Gabriel on the right). It's also got all the iconographic writing which is necessary to make something an icon: the "ΜΡ ΘΥ" (which stands for the first and last letters in the Greek for "Mother of God") above her halo, and "ΙC ΧC" (the C's are lunate sigmas; it stands for "Jesus Christ") near the Christ child, and even the "ο ων" (Greek ""He who is", referring to the name for God) on his halo. The problem? It's in a cutesy anime style. (The artist did get the colors wrong; usually Mary has a red outer garment (for holiness) and a blue inner one (for humanity). But it's possible it's imitating a non-standard icon, since those rules are not quite universal.)
dovetailing
11mo ago
Can someone explain why this paper is not hot garbage?
It looks like their methodology was the following:
- Give people a set with some words and some nonwords
- Ask them, for each, to say if they know it or not
- Give them a "score" as feedback based on ("known" words) - (falsely "known" nonwords)
- ...Otherwise throw out any calibration information from people claiming to "know" nonwords, and just assume that they actually know every word they say they know?
Behold my shocked Pikachu face that they found an absurdly unrealistically high number of people who "know" really obscure words. (Just look at that histogram!) No, I do not believe for one second that 55% of men know the word "aileron" or even that 58% know what "azimuth" means. This is not measuring how many people know a word -- neither in the sense that they could give a definition, nor even in the sense that they could vaguely gesture at the correct meaning. It is, at most, a measure of how likely people are to guess that something might be a word, which is a totally different thing!
Well, unless I am completely misreading the paper, anyway. Anyone want to point out where my assessment above is wrong?
dovetailing
1yr ago
I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that
some of these men will choose to undergo transition
is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.
Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.
As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?
In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)
In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.
Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.
dovetailing
7mo ago
Sure, but the "uses women's bathroom" behavior doesn't add any additional strangeness on top of the "made permanent changes to body and lifestyle" part.
Eros vs Venus, AGP, and MtF Trans
Apropos of the preamble to the latest ACX post. In part an evolution of / different angle on my previous post on the subject. (Tagging @zackmdavis as relevant to your interests.)
In the book The Four Loves, in the section on sexual love, C.S. Lewis draws a distinction between Eros and Venus. Eros is romantic love, or the state of "being in love"; Venus is sexual desire (one might say "lust", but without the connotation of immorality); as he writes, "I mean by Venus not what is sexual in some cryptic or rarefied sense [...] but in a perfectly obvious sense." Lewis is at pains to point out that the two are distinct (albeit closely connected) and that one can easily experience one without the other.
He allows that "to the evolutionist, Eros will be something that grows out of Venus" but points out that this is not, generally, "what happens within the consciousness of the individual." With Eros, the lover "is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned."
Conversely, that Venus can exist without any trace of Eros is almost too obvious (at least to most men) as to need mentioning.
Why is this relevant to the autogynephilia/trans/Blanchardianism controversy? Because AGP, framed as a fetish, is seen (by both sides) as being about (a misfiring of) Venus. This makes it disreputable, both in itself and especially as a motive for transition, but perhaps even more importantly this limited concept doesn't seem to fit with the introspective reports of many trans individuals, even those who admittedly have some element of AGP. Blanchardians tend to dismiss these reports as self-serving narratives (admittedly not without some justification, given the occasionally documented confabulations about historical femininity in MtF transitioners, and of course the obvious psychological pressure); anti-Blanchardians tend to take them as proof positive that the AGP->trans hypothesis is false. (Anne Lawrence, a Blanchardian, allows for some nuance with the "AGP as sexual orientation" framing, but this seems to be not quite right and is still a "Venus"-first explanation.)
My strong suspicion is that, while Venus-AGP is the most obvious (and, um, salacious) manifestation, the thing that mostly drives trans-feelings, and thus actual transition, is something of an Eros-AGP. This may or may not co-occur with Venus-AGP, and when it does, may either pre- or post- date it, and either may be the stronger -- just as in normal Eros and Venus.
Why do I think this? Because it is an explanation which seems to account better for reported experiences than the others on offer. "But I don't feel like I'm in love with being a woman, I feel like I am or should be a woman (in some deep sense)!" Yes... but this actually rhymes with an aspect of Eros! Lewis again:
And also, there is my own experience (as a sometime sufferer of AGP of both sorts): my first crush included the confusing and intense desire to be the girl I was crushing on. The purely sexual aspects of AGP -- the fetish part, what I'm calling Venus-AGP -- may be the most externally visible, but it seems likely to me that Eros-AGP, whether manifesting as an intense but nonsexual desire to be female or a sweetness and feeling of rightness in contemplation of oneself as such, as a much more powerful emotional experience, is more likely to lead to transition.
Again, this says little about which set of feelings precedes the other or of their causal relationship. I am pretty confident that they frequently feed each other, and that indulgence and encouragement strengthen them, which is why in many people they seem to intensify over time. (This is true of nearly every other mental and emotional disposition; it would be surprising if it were not the case.) Whether Eros-AGP is preceded by Venus-AGP or not; whether Venus-AGP is seen as important by the sufferer -- these things are maybe not so relevant. As strong as the urges of Venus are, it is Eros which is more powerful, which feels transcendent from the inside, which motivates truly extreme decisions. Perhaps in this case, too, it is the dominant proximate factor.
More options
Context Copy link