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Until I started working with geniuses, I never really understood the laments you sometimes hear that go, what a pity it is that our brightest minds have all gone off to Wall Street. I thought, that can't really be the case right? But then I joined a quant trading firm, in a sort of supporting role, and suddenly I also find myself wondering, as I interact with certain people at the office: shouldn't you be uncovering the secrets of the universe or something?
It took a while to hit me. I think I spent my first few months constantly debating people on this or that, convinced I had something to teach them, at least in my little domain. After all, it isn't always immediately apparent when someone is far more intelligent than you. But time and again I would have these epiphanies: oh, he is right, he was right two weeks ago, and I should've just listened then, as it would have saved me two weeks of trouble, and now I have to rewrite this code, and he had foreseen all this, and all this time he's been gently, politely nudging me to understand, as with a child, never brashly asserting his superiority, which must have been obvious to him. And I would feel ashamed remembering all my impassioned but mistaken arguments. After a while I picked up a sort of epistemic helplessness: even if my intuitions disagreed completely with one of these people I knew to be brilliant, I would go along with them. Eventually I would understand.
I'll call one of these brilliant and competent people Mark. I hesitate to say "genius" but I wouldn't object if you used the word. If I had to guess, I'd say he's 4 standard deviations above the mean, but really it's kind of impossible to judge people much smarter than you I think. Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore; he always worked remotely. That isn't normal at my company, but I assumed he must have negotiated an arrangement with the director. Perks of being a star. Was he on some beach? I don't know. He was still on Slack, ready to explain some point about statistics whenever I messaged him occasionally.
One day the midwits of HR took it upon themselves to organize mandatory in-person harassment training for everyone. Up till now, the annual training had been online and easy enough to click through without too much thought. But now we were forced to sit and discuss various hypothetical scenarios aloud, under the guidance of a training facilitator. In one scenario, a black employee is offended when someone describes her as "articulate". I wanted to pull my hair out, listening to the facilitator explain to my genuinely confused Indian coworker why this description was problematic. It struck me that our baroque American woke social norms perhaps do more to exclude minorities than to include them, on net. In another scenario, an intern with they/them pronouns is misgendered by those around them. Our guided discussion of this scenario was absolutely farcical. No one managed to utter two sentences about this hypothetical scenario without also accidentally using the wrong pronouns (and amusingly it was always "she", never "he", that people accidentally said), prompting stifled giggles all around. Even the training facilitator slipped up and had to conclude by mumbling something about how “intent matters”. It was as if we all knew subconsciously that individuals such as the hypothetical intern had on some level deluded themselves. Overall, I was (and am) annoyed that HR had been permitted to waste the valuable time of these smart people in this silly way, since the company had otherwise been very no-nonsense. I supposed Mark was somehow exempt from this training.
Weeks later, Mark returns to the office, ending his long absence. Only now he's a she, and goes by Mary.
And now maybe some of you are rolling your eyes at this post: you’ve been duped into reading propaganda. But no, I don’t really know what I’m trying to say here. I’m just trying to reflect on my own perspective on trans people suddenly shifting based on this one person. It’s not that I’d never encountered trans people before, but in the past they were always of the annoying sort, the sort that you could dismiss as a self-deluded victim of a weird sort of social contagion. But I can’t see Mary as self-deluded. Self-delusion is the one thing those of her profession are good at avoiding. Can you tell she’s trans? I dunno, kind of? Is it autogynephilia? No clue. It feels a little impertinent to ponder, though that’s the sort of question that I might have said mattered a lot before. Somehow just witnessing one extremely competent and effective person I respect turn out to be trans made it “real” for me, especially after all the other times I deferred to her judgment.
(I recognize that not everyone worships mathematical talent like I do, and you may find my automatic deferral of judgment weird or even disqualifying of my opinion. I know there are brilliant mathematicians with stupid and wacky beliefs in other domains. I do think, though, that the intelligence of Mary and some of the other quants goes beyond the academic; trading real money tethers your beliefs to the real world. She is not some aloof ideas person. She was and is reasonable levels of well-adjusted, funny, and courteous, and unreasonable levels of good at cranking out code that makes millions of dollars. Make of this story what you will.)
Has my opinion changed on any concrete trans issue? I don’t know. If a random person insists on referring to Mary as a man, and I’m required to say that between the two of them one is a fool, I’d have to say that Mary is not the fool. I don’t know if she’d be very angry about it anyway; she’s a level-headed person. What about sex change therapy for children? Still seems bad. Maybe the main change is just that I feel like I should be less quick to judge people in general.
I wasn’t there when Mary walked into the office for the first time as a woman. I don’t think anyone made a fuss over it or anything, and now everyone respects her new name and pronouns, but it still makes me anxious just imagining what it must have been like. Surely a measure of bravery was required, probably more than I’ve ever mustered on any occasion. What compelled her to do this? On a visceral level, it still doesn’t make sense to me, and I can still make it gross if I want to, just by thinking about it. But why do that? I’m inclined to defer to her, whether or not I understand.
I do wish she'd go and pursue science though.
Of course it is almost certainly autogynephilia. Too high profile and too functional to be some sort of dysfunctional autistic or impressionable personality disordered type.
Plausible transsexuals, the very feminine male-attracted types have feminine interests. They're not into software engineering or mathematics, not moreso than ordinary women who avoid these mind-numbingly boring if lucrative occupations if it's at all possible.. That's why you find more Turkish or Iranian female software devs than Norwegian. They want to not be poor.
Why?
If someone's entire sex fantasies are based around fantasies of being female, why couldn't a relatively sane person, in an environment designed to do so, manage to delude himself into thinking "I'm actually female?" Sex is the most powerful motivational drive there is. Lot of functional, socially adept people are deluded about something for one reason or another.
So, entirely plausible you're dealing with a mostly normal person who, due to the environment it is in, is behaving like this.
There are, at this point, at least 1813 erotic games based around the concept of sex change(page looks innocuous, deeply nsfw classification though).. Despite all the activist claims that autogynephilia is bunk, a whole lot of people seem to find the idea erotic to the point they spends a lot of time making computer games about it.
I mean, there's no reason to condemn the person, you don't choose your main sexual preferences. It is what it is though. Of course, a small part of these people are vocal advocates who believe it is their moral duty to try to convince others that they too, are transsexual..
In the end, it doesn't really matter one way or another, as the amount of these kinds of people and potential cases is way, way too low to matter in the great modernity die-off.
I think there's some element of that, but I don't think that's entirely it. There are definitely people who have sexual thoughts about turning into the opposite sex, but as progressives say, sex is not gender. Reality does not offer anything close to what that experience would be like if it could actually happen, and I think that's pretty obvious to even a casual observer.
I'm pretty certain that in cases of people into coding, wargaming and other almost exclusively male interests and the like, the 'entirety of it' grows on the scaffolding of 'sexual target identification error' which is thought to be behind autogynephilia. People 'fall in love' with the idea of themselves as women.
Yeah which is why ostensible 'women' with stereotypically male interests and male attitudes raise so much eyebrows.
Right, I get that, but that's not my point. I understand the fantasy. But trying to live the fantasy I don't think would bring them the things they want out of the fantasy. If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress. If you want to know what sex is like for a woman, surgery is not going to get you that.
I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment. Not all, but a significant percentage.
Yes, but there's a subset of them who aren't dissuaded by "it'd look terrible and it pisses people off when you aren't being subtle about it".
Which is probably why there's a missing middle of AGPs that want to do it but are more conscious of how they look while doing it (you know, like an actual woman would). But then again, if they were all wearing dress appropriate for the environment and not insisting on going into women's bathrooms while obviously male it would be a non-issue.
From an AGP standpoint, there's nothing qualitatively different between "just the underwear and one of those utility-type skirts that are basically just shorts without the pant legs" and "the showiest red dress you can find"- they're both female clothes, so they should both scratch that itch. It's the fact that they take it beyond parody/have terrible fashion sense/aren't satisfied with the clothes alone that's 99% of the issue.
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Delusions are very powerful. I used to go to lunch with a psychologist, he said that every single trans person he knows is deluded about the outcome of these procedures.
It's unclear what % want to transition as long as it is what it is, but it's believed to be at least half. Hard to find out, but /u/tailcalled (on reddit) did some research thru surveys on it..
There's a lot of people who get off on that and are not really bothered by being guys.
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