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Recently on LessWrong: Estrogen: A trip report
(Yes, he's treating estrogen HRT as the type of psychedelic drug that might necessitate a "trip report".)
There's a lot to sift through here, but the most interesting part of the post to me was being introduced to the concept of the schizotypy spectrum, a related-but-distinct counterpart to the autism spectrum. Autistic traits and schizotypal traits both have similar outward manifestations (e.g. introversion and difficulties with social interaction), but they have different root causes and different internal subjective manifestations (principally, autistic types are higher in detail-orientation, and schizotypes are more prone to disorganized and delusional thinking):
The author of the post then goes on to claim that, subjectively, estrogen caused him to experience a shift away from autistic traits and towards schizotypal traits:
Obviously this all has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the risk of confounding factors and psychosomatic/placebo effects in this case is high. Nonetheless, I'm curious whether pre-existing schizotypal traits in an individual (contrary to the author's experience in which HRT induced these traits) might play a causal role in explaining the abnormally high incidence rate of MTF transsexuality among so-called "terminally online" young men. By "terminally online" I mean the prototypical image of this demographic: likely to be in a STEM field, likely to have had little romantic success with women, likely to have obsessive "nerdy" interests like anime and video games, etc. This demographic is often stereotyped as "autistic", although that label may potentially conflict with the fact that MTF transsexuals are disproportionately drawn from this demographic as well, since it's not clear a priori why a disorder that allegedly gives you a "hyper male brain" would also make you more likely to want to be a woman. But if some of these "autistic" men actually belong to other personality clusters that have a tendency to masquerade as autism, it could help us build a higher resolution mapping of this region of cognitive space and provide more accurate explanations of the trajectories of different individuals (especially because one of the schizotypal traits is, as mentioned previously, a predisposition towards delusional thinking).
Regardless of which theory ultimately turns out to be correct, I think the biological basis of LGBT traits (or at least, which intrinsic traits increase one's predisposition towards being LGBT) is a subject that deserves further study. In my experience, anti-wokes are more likely to entertain the possibility of race and sex differences being biologically intrinsic, but they shy away from applying biological explanations to LGBT, preferring instead to endorse social constructivist theories (and in particular, the "social contagion" theory for transsexuality). Wokes are the opposite, heavily opposing biological explanations for race and sex differences but somewhat warmer towards biological explanations for LGBT (although they may not allow themselves to present it in exactly those terms). I prefer the simple, consistent position: it's all (at least partially) biological! Social contagion is undoubtedly a part of why the incidence rate of transsexuality has skyrocketed in the last several decades, although I think it's clear that only some people are susceptible to "catching" the contagion in the first place, and one's individual susceptibility is biologically mediated.
Do these people want to make me actively hate 'trans' people? I mean, I have some difficulties with how some strands of activism are playing out (particularly the rigid reinforcement of simplistic gender roles of the 'blue is for boys, pink is for girls' type) but I don't think I hate anyone.
And then I read shit like this and I want to get a gun and start shooting (in Minecraft).
"Ooh, I tried oestrogen and it made me so girly! I liked tarot and magical stuff and giggling and being all fuzzy brained!"
(And I say this as someone who likes playing around with tarot imagery but don't treat it as serious.)
I have been on oestrogen all my life (up to menopause) and if it made me describe my sensations like this, I would have preferred to jump off a cliff. "Oh gee, the reason I can't maths is because my little girl brain so soaked in hormones, gosh!"
I think there's a lot of "I expect X to be the opposite of Y, and if taking A gives me the sensations of X, then I will behave differently to how I normally behave" going on here. I think there may well be some physical changes, but mucking around like this is just annoying as all hell.
"According to these models, everyone falls somewhere on the autism–schizotypy continuum"
Yeah, and what makes these models worth more than a hole in the ground? "Hey, by our new model, everyone is some flavour of crazy and if you're not Stereotypically Male Brain Things oriented then you must be Stereotypically Female Brain People oriented".
Give me a break. Or a bottle of sherry. I feel the glittery pink girly need to get blind stinkin' drunk after being exposed to this.
EDIT: On a more serious note, why doesn't progesterone get any love? In cis females, oestrogen isn't there on its own. There's a balance between the two (and more). Do trans women/trans experimenters like our guy here ever dose themselves with progesterone as well to get the full female experience?
Oh, I see he did:
Passing a remark about "well duh you stuck a progesterone suppository up yourself all in the name of amateur hour endocrinology, I don't think it was the progesterone that made you stupid" would be too easy - oh darn, there I went and did it. But yeah: wanting the alleged results of oestrogen without figuring out the natural cycle of the cis female hormone levels does lead me to think that there's a lot of "I expect to feel like a, b and c, and I'm going to feel like that even if I have to imagine it!" going on here, I don't think there's a neutral/blind "let's see what happens" trial happening here.
EDIT EDIT: Clearly I'm coming at this from the angle of someone who naturally had these hormones all my life, so I can't speak as to what it would be like to experience the effects for the first time. But I have to say, all the "it's like being on mild psychedelics" - I've never tried psychedelics so I can't say if being female is like being slightly stoned all the time, but the rest of it - cutting down sensory issues, helping with sleep, etc.
Oh how I wish. I've had mild insomnia all my life, and the good old autism spectrum "this tag on the collar of my clothing will drive me insane if I can't tear it off right now" sensory issues. Oestrogen is not a magic cure for that, folks, so I strongly suspect some placebo effect going on, as well as the guy admitting he's doing/had been doing a lot of ketamine at the same time.
Trans women commonly start progesterone after roughly a year on estrogen depending on the provider. The most prescribed dosage is 100mg taken daily, it can be taken orally but many take it rectally because the pills can cause nausea. Doctors prescribe a steady dose rather than a cycle, but some people vary the dose to try to match the natural hormonal cycle. I think 300mg would approximate peak mid-luteal phase progesterone serum levels.
I wonder about the people who are "so I bought some pills off the darkweb/brewed some bathtub HRT/decided for myself I'd try this" instead of being under a doctor's care and getting monitored prescriptions. All the complaining about medical gatekeeping makes me suspicious that every single person deciding "so today I think I'd like to be a little bit more femme" is going the doctor route and not self-dosing.
Doctor's don't really do that much unless things are going wrong with adults. They do blood tests to see if hormone levels are within acceptable ranges every few months and check on liver and kidney functions to see if there's any indication of decline. Interpreting hormone levels and adjusting doses doesn't require much medical expertise.
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In the hope of trying to find something more positive to talk about -
I wonder if there are any other Motters with a passing interest in tarot? I used to be fascinated by it as well. I give no credence whatsoever to divination, but I think the imagery of the tarot is extraordinarily rich and multi-faceted. Its supposed divinatory powers, I hazard, have more to do with the way that that imagery is both endlessly open to interpretation and psychologically provocative. If you find yourself mentally 'stuck', a randomised pile of images from the tarot may well give you the jolt you need to consider new perspectives.
I don't use it for advice myself, but I can still appreciate the symbolic language it provides. If there are any other Motters familiar with it, maybe it's worth a chat in the Fun Thread one day?
This has always fascinated me when I read accounts by trans men. Their description of what testosterone does to their mental processes sounds completely alien to me. I cannot relate to it whatsoever. There are a number of possible explanations for that, one of which is, indeed, that I've had this level of testosterone all my life, and my body is accustomed to it. It's just part of the way I think, and any downsides or difficulties that come with it are things that I have had decades of practice compensating for. Someone who suddenly shifted from a much lower level of testosterone to the level of a natal male like me, however, probably would experience it as an overwhelming flood, and that might explain, for instance, them having problems with impulse control that I have never had.
If so I can only guess that it's plausible that a natal male suddenly taking a much higher dose of estrogen would experience a similar shock, but in the other direction, and that it would be something that natal women cannot relate to either.
Of course, as the top-level poster mentioned, it also seems likely that there's some element of placebo as well. If you're telling yourself that you're taking a chemical that's going to make your more feminine or girly, well, you can probably just think yourself into that absent any chemical effects at all. All the more so if you're also making intentional behavioural or social changes. So plenty of grains of salt seem warranted here.
I've found at least some of their accounts to be startlingly accurate, and quite revealing.
I was once reading a book -- can't at all remember the name now -- written by an FTM transsexual describing her experience with testosterone. She was older and she would have been going through this before the internet (and before free 24/7 porn, keep that in mind).
One of the effects she described was how her visual perception seemed to become "more 3D" (lines up with how men tend to do better on spatial rotation tasks), especially whenever she looked at women or images of women. A billboard showing a sexy woman suddenly "popped" for her in a way that it never had before which consequently made it much more attention-grabbing, despite the fact that she had always been a lesbian even prior to starting testosterone. She was still subjectively viewing women in a new way, which is exactly the sort of effect I would expect testosterone to induce.
She described an episode where she went with some female friends (all of them lesbian or bisexual) to watch a series of film screenings at an indie theater. One of them was a short reel that showed various women in bikinis and underwear doing things like dancing, striking sexy poses, maybe a bit of a striptease, things like that. And all of her friends were laughing at it: like, oh look at these girls being so silly, haha. But she couldn't help but be struck by how serious the images seemed to her. She looked at her friends laughing and thought, "why are you laughing? This isn't a joke. Stop laughing." And I just thought... yes, this is it! This is the difference between male and female sexuality! You couldn't ask for a more perfect illustration, it's amazing.
Kind of frightening to think that one little chemical can unlock such complex emotional states. But, there you have it.
I fully believe that this is the testosterone experience, because it matches observed behaviors. But I've always wondered how people on testosterone from birth reconcile that hormone-induced aura of intense seriousness and urgency around whatever their sexual desire of the moment is, with the fact that if you look at it objectively the sexual impulse is pretty ridiculous.
Like, rub your penis on her foot. Rub it. On her foot. Or on that corpse. Go on, DO IT. Rub your penis on that unconscious person. Rub your penis on that toddler. Look at that girl's nipple. It's very important that you look at it! Go on, make visual contact with the external part of our mammalian glands designed for feeding young. You need to see it! You do! Look at it!
In service to this feeling of seriousness, men have betrayed their friends, their families, their country, they've lied, stolen, squandered fortunes, murdered and courted their own deaths because it was so deadly important to rub their penis against this specific thing in this specific way. I mean, I totally get why the evolutionary programming would exist, and ours isn't even that extreme in a world where some spiders' mating instincts get them slowly eaten alive. It just seems as though it would be weird to be a self-aware, reasoning person who's nonetheless in the grip of that kind of perceptual distortion. Women also do dumb things for biology, and women also have plenty of our own weird animal instincts, but for the most part we don't have anything quite so trippy as "this specific flap of somebody else's flesh is now the literal most important thing in the whole world."
Well, from my point of view,
the Jedi are evilthe female attraction in the extreme is insane. (I won't quote the specifics, but you can check out some of the more out-there fanfiction on the web to see what I'm hinting at). You say thinking a flap of flesh is important is trippy, but that's not really much different from thinking food or water are important. Isn't it just weird and kind of gross how digestion works, if you look at it through a lens?You describe intense seriousness and urgency, and I fail to see how women wanting lavish marriages and being bridal carried to bed and less tame things aren't serious and urgent. Do you just pretend you're serious about enjoying them while in your mind there's "heeheehee" on loop?
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It's a good question!
All humans are familiar with the experience of impulse control, and the failure thereof. You should start that project tonight, but you don't. You shouldn't eat that donut because you're on a diet, but you do. You know that rationally you should be able to control your impulse, and it would be better for you if you did, but that often doesn't help much in the moment. These are universal experiences. The only difference with men is that they experience particularly strong sexual impulses, of a variety which many women find foreign. Like many impulses, they're fundamentally immune to examination by reason (knowing that the donut is unhealthy for you doesn't stop it from tasting good).
Impulse control follows a bell curve. Most men are able to rein in their sexual impulses and live perfectly normal lives in accordance with social expectations. The ones who are cursed with a sufficiently deleterious combination of high impulse intensity / poor impulse control are the ones who become criminals.
The fundamental point you're gesturing at is correct: men are insane! Their insanity has been the engine of so much death and destruction throughout history. But it's also been the engine of so much beauty and goodness. Things in life have a habit of working out like that.
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I’m not familiar with tarot but I’d like to be. I had a set somewhere - always wanted to learn how to do readings.
In some ways I'm surprised that it's not more popular among nerdy male rationalist types. That's the kind of demographic that gets really into Campbellian monomyths, loves mythology, and is also obsessed with creating and then tweaking complicated symbolic languages. It's exactly the sort of thing I would expect to be popular.
But for some reason tarot is female-coded, and maybe that's a killer?
Fortune-telling is stupid-coded. Side effect of the millennial emphasis on science and downstream emphasis on atheism.
For a long time, even if you said ‘I tell fortunes but I don’t take it seriously’ people would assume that you are just trying to hide your embarrassing beliefs. Same with conspiracy theories - ‘I’m just asking questions’ often codes as ‘let me rant at you for hours, and don’t criticise my theories because they’re (not) only for fun’.
The benefit of fortune telling is that it lets you understand yourself if you are too clever by half.
There’s a strategy you can use to make a decision where you flip a coin, and (while it is midair) think about what you want it to land on. Tarot is the same thing, but is complicated enough that you can’t outsmart yourself in the way you could with a coin toss.
To take a very simple example: if you draw the fool as your “problem” card, and have the upright 4 of swords as your “obstacle”, it can represent quite a few things.
The fool represents the start of a new journey, or it can represent naïveté, or it can represent letting go of problems. The 4 of swords can represent interpersonal conflict, intellectual conflict, or someone who limits your potential. So valid readings of the two cards are that you should forgive someone as they don’t understand what you are trying to do, or that you should avoid someone who is making your life more challenging, or that someone has your best interests at heart and you should reconsider a decision.
A good fortune teller will present the card meanings so that someone listening can make their own choices based on what they actually feel.
Also, if you are a dude - I mentioned once that I knew tarot to one of my female coworkers, then spent the next 3 months doing readings for a huge number of women my age, so…
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Female- and especially wiccan-coded. If the first doesn't kill its appeal, then the second is certain to by making the cringe LARP nature of it too obvious.
Given how jhanas and tulpas get far more rat/postrat attention, the wiccan-coding acting as preventative strikes me as particularly accurate.
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The irony being that it was men who did much of the work on Tarot and other systems, such as de Gébelin (who is the one responsible for popularising the idea that the Tarot was mystic secret Egyptian wisdom).
As you say, then it got picked up as witchy-woo vibes and that is where the current interest is - women like astrology, divination and the likes.
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Can you give some examples? What I can recall is trans men talking about becoming incredibly and uncontrollably horny after starting T, and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, but that seems reasonably accurate to the experience of any man who’s ever gone through puberty.
I remember reading an article (can't find it now) in which a trans man had recently started taking testosterone and was driving to a session of his trans support group, when another driver cut him off in traffic, which so enraged him that he found himself experiencing the worst episode of road rage he'd ever have had in his life: heart racing, temples pounding, furiously cursing, to the point that he had to pull over his car to calm himself down. He'd never felt anything like it. Upon arriving at the trans support group, he described this experience and how unlike any previous road rage episode it was, whereupon the older members of the group smiled knowingly and explained that he'd gotten "boy angry" for the first time.
Male aggression is qualitatively different from female: like most stereotypes, the male urge to punch holes in walls or break things when you feel angry or frustrated has a large basis in fact, and seems comparatively rarer among women. It must be very alarming to experience this all of a sudden without the benefit of a years-long puberty in which to acclimate oneself to it.
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I was thinking particularly of descriptions of impulsivity, immediacy, and emotional intensity. I read accounts by trans men saying that all their desires become both powerful and immediate, as if someone had switched caps lock on for their desires. They didn't get hungry, they got HUNGRY. NOW! And so on. Ironically, the emotional balance they described reminded me more of being a child, prior to puberty, so it was hard for me to associate that with puberty or testosterone.
For what it's worth, I myself had a quite gentle puberty - it was a gradual slope, rather than a wall breaking. As such I've never subjectively understood either why some kids fear it, or why some adults describe it as a very painful, tempestuous time of their lives. It just happened to me quite smoothly, and over a few years my voice dropped lower, I got more hair, and I experienced sexual attraction, but there was never a moment where I found it painful or disconcerting. I was even a little disappointed that nothing dramatic happened. Maybe sex ed at school had just hyped it up too much.
Anyway, their descriptions of getting very horny on testosterone didn't seem to match my experience of sexual desire. I had my sexual awakening just like anyone else, the phase where I hid pictures of sexy women underneath the bed and snuck guilty glances at bikini-clad models on magazine covers, and so on. But it was never a consuming fire for me. Maybe I'm just unusual and this is a universal experience I'm missing, but I don't think that's it? I got turned on by the hot girl sitting in front of me in class. All the basics seemed to happen to me. It just internally didn't feel like this overwhelmingly, uncontrollably powerful force. It felt like, "oh hey, that's happening to me, all right, deep breaths, focus on something else".
I'd be somewhat interested in other men's experiences of this. It's not something I really talk about with other people, since it's obviously a personal and embarrassing subject, and I suspect that the kinds of men who talk about it openly are self-selected for being uninhibited and horny.
Totally agree with your description of puberty. It was a nothingburger, way overhyped.
I actually think Olive will find their experience of puberty is more common around here than not. Guys for whom testosterone is overwhelming get driven to different interests than mostly polite arguments with strangers about ephemera.
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I think it really is a question of degree and immediateness. I had some problems with violence around elementary school, like many boys, but over time realised how destructive that was, adapted & looked for new friends, and by the time testosterone really hit in puberty I was already well-adjusted to dealing with it. I haven't had a brawl or anything similar in more than a decade by now, but I also know that I still very much enjoy violence, so it's not hard at all for me to imagine that if a person was suddenly hit with my level of testosterone without any time to adapt or critically reflect on it, they may struggle with their temper.
I can understand it with violence, or I'd speculate possibly with competition or dominance in general? There is a thrill I get from competition, including physical competition, and that involves a certain level of aggression. When I was going through puberty I was involved in fencing, at school, and that was one of the co-ed sports. I remember trying to be chivalrous about it, but... you can't really go all out against the girls, and it's not the same. I wanted to push myself. I wanted to be allowed to be fierce.
That was probably a major difference, because I did recognise that trait in some other boys, but much more rarely in girls. There was definitely a female kind of aggression, but it did not manifest the same way.
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I recently started on hrt and as someone who has been an insomniac her entire life, the progesterone gets all my love. Sure, the estrogen may be helping with aches and pains and vaginal atrophy but the progesterone is letting me occasionally fall asleep before midnight and sometimes sleep past 3am. It's magical! (My mom had a mild peri/menopause and mine was starting in that direction too, but when I read some women found progesterone helped with sleep I had to give it a try.) I will probably stay on hrt for the bone benefits. I recently got a weighted vest to try out. I bet the tricksy girlie hormones made me do it - math is hard, let's go shopping!
We're all just Barbie Girls in our pink and our shopping sprees 😁
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This and your other comment in this thread makes me wonder whether you're autistic. No judgment, it just sounds like that's what you're implying.
No formal diagnosis, but reading up on it certainly sounds like "somewhere on the spectrum" as well as it probably being in my paternal family. There's plenty of gossip about cousins etc. going back generations who were "odd" or "weird" and the described behaviour matches up with autism-spectrum behaviours.
Of course, self-diagnosis is no diagnosis, but the descriptions of sensory issues made so much sense to me about "okay this explains why tags on my clothing drove me nuts as a child when nobody else seemed to mind them".
Ah, that makes sense. I have never suspected autism in myself — not least because my development showed the exact opposite of the typical pattern for autism, where non-verbal development outpaces verbal development. But the sensory issues are similar: certain soft fabrics (velvety fabrics? I don’t actually know) are uncomfortable for me. My parents and I started calling it “the fuzzies” when I was a kid, which I admit does sound like an autism origin story.
Ooh, the unpleasantness jittery fuzz of felt versus the soothingly orderly corrugation of corduroy. Tags have never bothered me, but I used to have to cover my ears at basketball games. (To be fair, UNM’s B-ball arena “The Pit” is famously loud.)
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You could ask the same of many "terminally online" types of people.
They don't want you to hate them. But, they kinda just are the way they are. Which contributes to their persistent social difficulties.
Ideally, predictive power.
The original paper on the autism-schizotypy spectrum that was cited in the blogpost didn't actually have anything to do with gender. The single determining criteria of autism vs schizotypy was an oversensitivity vs undersensitivity to errors in sensory prediction. All other differences in cognitive and personality traits were taken to be downstream of that criteria.
This could be cashed out in terms of predictions about e.g. how subjects will perform on tasks related to attention and context-switching, and how those results will be correlated with personality traits.
I think (from what might be described as a TERF adjacent position, at least when it comes to "no, trans women are not exactly the same as cis women") that the problem is sixty or more years of feminism trying to knock down the idea of "male brains (logic, reason, science, progress, all that good stuff)" versus "female brains (feelings, emotions, silly little fluffy heads)" and the gender-essentialist roles of "some interests are only for boys, some are only for girls", then along come the (worst of the online visible) trans set to go all "I knew I was really a girl because as a kid I didn't want to play sports or I liked cooking".
This defeats "boys can like cooking! and wear pink! girls can like diggers! and wearing trousers!" efforts and drops us all back into the "but okay as a girl I was not girly, I don't like makeup and fashion, I don't feel like I am going around with the fuzzy brained 'ooh I love little puppies and kitties' mindset, are you now telling me I'm not a real woman?" dilemma.
That is what is frustrating about the description of "this is what happened to me when I went on oestrogen":
"Ooh I like astrology and don't like having to think about hard things like finances" makes it sound all too much like this Harry Enfield sketch.
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Im sceptical of this because for me this differs a lot between different kinds of sensations. E.g. I can never "forget that youre wearing it", whatever "it" is, but it takes effort to not tune out music in under a minute, even if Im not doing anything else.
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