Something you linked earlier in the year (the Gender Dysphoria Bible I think it was called?) was the first time I'd seen "feeling like your body is a mechsuit you operate rather than a part of you" listed as a symptom of gender dysphoria, after spending more than half my life referring to my body as "this janky meat chassis". To be fair to everyone involved who failed to catch this earlier (including me), I've been chronically ill since I was a teenager, so the answer to "starting around puberty, did you feel like your body was wrong" was "yes, obviously, that's when I experienced my *first* organ failure". So it's understandable that it took a while before I ran across something that made me think "there is that, but also other things going on."
I've been identifying as agender for a few months now, I've done some social transitioning (nothing medical at this point) and been very happy with the results, several of which fit exactly you describe here. But I think I have the advantage of knowing that my body has other issues that transitioning won't do a thing about, so my scope was properly limited. So what you say about managing your expectations makes all kinds of sense. And I guess I wanted to say thanks for pointing me in a direction I hadn't thought to look.
I notice that Ozy says they "don't agree with all" of it, so necessary grain of salt. I'd be curious their thoughts in more detail on that. I do know it was pretty sparse on nonbinary material (it admits this as well) but it made some things click for me that hadn't yet before, so take that for what it's worth.
That document’s explanation of the neuroscience underlying dysphoria and trans identity is massively oversimplified and overconfident for the evidence that exists. It also claims that every cis person would immediately experience biochemical dysphoria if they started transitioning, which isn’t always true. Some detransitioners have reidentified as their assigned gender after being on HRT without having experienced negative direct psychological effects from the other hormone balance.
This is very unintuitive to me. I would expect HRT to have a huge impact on quality of life. QoL is subjective, it's not a matter of how many problems are solved for you or how "objectively" better your life gets. So, like, I would expect it to be about equivalent to curing a chronic pain condition.
(And the one RCT in that systematic review agreed with me. Though its sample size was tiny, it found improvements of, like, 5 points on a 10 point scale.)
"Being a man mostly solves the problem where I wanted to be a man and couldn’t, with some fringe benefits about physical strength and not being harassed on street corners and so on"
I've been reading your work for many years now, Ozy, but not every single piece, and this sentence makes me think I missed something. Last I remember you were nonbinary & using they/them pronouns. This sounds like you now consider yourself a man & use he/him pronouns, but it's indirect enough that I want to check to be sure (eg some people call themselves "men" while still using they/them pronouns, etc.) Did you write about this, or is this just private/not that big a deal? Or am I misunderstanding?
Given the precision that it's "biomedical transition" that's mostly discussed here, would you expect social transition to have a larger measured impact ? (Of course it's probably even harder to control for the inevitable correlates)
To me, "social transition" feels far too diverse to make any sort of generalization about. A fully stealth binary trans person has socially transitioned. So has an amab person who uses he/they in queer spaces but presents as a man in the rest of their life. These are going to have very different effect sizes!
Also, I care about it less, because my support for social transition isn't dependent on whether social transition usually improves QoL. I think people should be able to determine their own social genders as a matter of freedom (similarly to how people get to pick their careers, their religions, and whether they get married).
I could see this being true, at least personally. I don't track my daily mood (not for lack of trying) but my net mood effect might be 0 honestly, my variance is way way higher now though. I went from feeling like I was piloting a meat mecha to actually being in the world so everything hits way harder now and that can be good and bad. Like for social stuff, ALL my friendships are way better and deeper now (for people of all genders) but I am the crux of a lot of family problems now. Both the positive and negative sides of a lot of the things you mentioned (+more) apply I think, so it ends up being a net wash. I'd still choose this pretty average day over most of my meatsuit days tho.
A nitpick: most people are considerably more than one (or even two or three) income-doubling away from where it would fundamentally change their life (i.e. where one could quickly save enough to stop having to work for a living.)
This post made me sceptical of trans people more than other things I have read so far. Trans people are discriminated so much against and transition seems so hard and there are so many complications (I guess). So if transitioning only causes minor benefits they have to be doing it for attention, or be delude or following some trend or ideology. I thought trans people mostly had pretty intense dysphoria or just a very large urge to transition, but if they just prefer it a little that confuses me.
Of course everyone who want's to transition should be able to either way, I'm a transhumanist, if people want to grow tails or so they can do what every they want for the most part. This article just somewhat confuses me.
Some people feel dysphoria more strongly than others. But even people who feel it really strongly won't be happy after transitioning if they have a bunch of other problems. It's the same reason that if you have untreated depression, financial stress, and chronic pain, and you can get the chronic pain treated, you'll still be miserable afterwards even if the pain was really bad.
But most people don't have that many problems of course, e.g., the rates for severe chronic pain or poverty in the US are both only about 10% (people generally seem to be talking about the US).
I guess my main misconception was that I expected that if a pre transition trans person had depression I thought there would be a high chance of it going away if they transitioned (barring things like them then being excluded by their families). But I guess that isn't the case and (maybe) most trans people only feel a little better after transitioning.
Unfortunately, trans people are a lot more likely to be rejected by their families or struggle to find housing and employment than cis people. As for depression, in cases of severe dysphoria the mental health effects of living for years in the wrong body won't always go away overnight.
Also, I imagine that rates of financial stress are a lot higher than rates of poverty - you can be well-off or even rich and still live in constant fear of losing everything.
I guess what it comes down to is that there are so many things that can destroy a person's happiness, and so many people suffer from at least one. Remember, doubling a person's income increases their happiness as much as transitioning. I think most people would tell you that they'd be more than "a little" happier if their income was doubled, but I guess it's hard to appreciate your money when something else is going horribly wrong.
Footnote 2 is likely the main thing stopping me from medically transitioning. I've already socially transitioned to everyone I suspect would take the news well, have a good job, a happy marriage, a great child, and a good relationship with half of my family. I'm worried about jeopardizing all that that to potentially boost my happiness from an 8 to a 9 on a QoP scale. When you are already happy, a major change can cause your score to go down a lot more than it can raise it.
If your life is already pretty good can you explain why you want to transition? Do you think (If everything goes well) it would just make you a little more happy about yourself, maybe the way a cis person would be more happy if they were a little more handsome or so?
Basically, I don't want to transition, even though I wish I was a woman. In a way, you are right. I hate my appearance and there are clothes I want that don't fit my body appropriately. These are problems a lot of cis people have as well, such as someone that is overweight. The main difference is if an overweight person changes their appearance to be in line with what they want, (as difficult as that is for the majority of overweight people) their relationships often improve and people treat them better. If I change my appearance, there's a decent likelihood my relationships would deteriorate and people would treat me worse.
The other reasons I want to transition aren't even guaranteed to occur if I did transition. I really want more women friends and to be part of mom groups, but a lot of them are not that welcoming of trans women anyways. It's not like it's impossible for men and women to be friends anyways. Also, I used to really want the dating role of being a woman, but being married, that's not a concern. Overall, when I compare the benefits to the risks, it's not worth medically transitioning now, but that could change in the future.
Very interesting, why do you think you have these wants?
Do you think you would be happier if you didn't know transitioning was a thing. The way if a person was told that the cake was just finished 5 minutes before they came they might feel worse as opposed to if there never was any cake. Do you think you would feel better if never knew there was an option of transitioning or do you think it wouldn't make a difference? I hope this isn't to personal, I just find it interesting.
Something you linked earlier in the year (the Gender Dysphoria Bible I think it was called?) was the first time I'd seen "feeling like your body is a mechsuit you operate rather than a part of you" listed as a symptom of gender dysphoria, after spending more than half my life referring to my body as "this janky meat chassis". To be fair to everyone involved who failed to catch this earlier (including me), I've been chronically ill since I was a teenager, so the answer to "starting around puberty, did you feel like your body was wrong" was "yes, obviously, that's when I experienced my *first* organ failure". So it's understandable that it took a while before I ran across something that made me think "there is that, but also other things going on."
I've been identifying as agender for a few months now, I've done some social transitioning (nothing medical at this point) and been very happy with the results, several of which fit exactly you describe here. But I think I have the advantage of knowing that my body has other issues that transitioning won't do a thing about, so my scope was properly limited. So what you say about managing your expectations makes all kinds of sense. And I guess I wanted to say thanks for pointing me in a direction I hadn't thought to look.
Do you still have that link, or know what post it was in? I'd really appreciate it, and thank you for your comment :)
This link post: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/linkpost-for-december
The link itself: https://genderdysphoria.fyi/
I notice that Ozy says they "don't agree with all" of it, so necessary grain of salt. I'd be curious their thoughts in more detail on that. I do know it was pretty sparse on nonbinary material (it admits this as well) but it made some things click for me that hadn't yet before, so take that for what it's worth.
I just read through that entire link in essentially one sitting. Thank you for posting.
The claims about the neuroscience etc also seemed off to me, but OTOH it made me want to get a brain scan/chromosome test...
That document’s explanation of the neuroscience underlying dysphoria and trans identity is massively oversimplified and overconfident for the evidence that exists. It also claims that every cis person would immediately experience biochemical dysphoria if they started transitioning, which isn’t always true. Some detransitioners have reidentified as their assigned gender after being on HRT without having experienced negative direct psychological effects from the other hormone balance.
This is very unintuitive to me. I would expect HRT to have a huge impact on quality of life. QoL is subjective, it's not a matter of how many problems are solved for you or how "objectively" better your life gets. So, like, I would expect it to be about equivalent to curing a chronic pain condition.
(And the one RCT in that systematic review agreed with me. Though its sample size was tiny, it found improvements of, like, 5 points on a 10 point scale.)
Maybe I want HRT less than most people do! [laughing]
Yeah, 5 points just seems insane to me. I'm going to dismiss that as the thing where small RCTs often show implausibly large effects.
"Being a man mostly solves the problem where I wanted to be a man and couldn’t, with some fringe benefits about physical strength and not being harassed on street corners and so on"
I've been reading your work for many years now, Ozy, but not every single piece, and this sentence makes me think I missed something. Last I remember you were nonbinary & using they/them pronouns. This sounds like you now consider yourself a man & use he/him pronouns, but it's indirect enough that I want to check to be sure (eg some people call themselves "men" while still using they/them pronouns, etc.) Did you write about this, or is this just private/not that big a deal? Or am I misunderstanding?
Where ever you are, glad you are happy with it.
Given the precision that it's "biomedical transition" that's mostly discussed here, would you expect social transition to have a larger measured impact ? (Of course it's probably even harder to control for the inevitable correlates)
To me, "social transition" feels far too diverse to make any sort of generalization about. A fully stealth binary trans person has socially transitioned. So has an amab person who uses he/they in queer spaces but presents as a man in the rest of their life. These are going to have very different effect sizes!
Also, I care about it less, because my support for social transition isn't dependent on whether social transition usually improves QoL. I think people should be able to determine their own social genders as a matter of freedom (similarly to how people get to pick their careers, their religions, and whether they get married).
Don't you think that people should also be able to modify their bodies as a matter of freedom?
I could see this being true, at least personally. I don't track my daily mood (not for lack of trying) but my net mood effect might be 0 honestly, my variance is way way higher now though. I went from feeling like I was piloting a meat mecha to actually being in the world so everything hits way harder now and that can be good and bad. Like for social stuff, ALL my friendships are way better and deeper now (for people of all genders) but I am the crux of a lot of family problems now. Both the positive and negative sides of a lot of the things you mentioned (+more) apply I think, so it ends up being a net wash. I'd still choose this pretty average day over most of my meatsuit days tho.
A nitpick: most people are considerably more than one (or even two or three) income-doubling away from where it would fundamentally change their life (i.e. where one could quickly save enough to stop having to work for a living.)
I was expecting the "make you a man" link to go to this: https://youtu.be/tEx8__ie6bg?si=ndvk7HxqkGDFNG6M
This post made me sceptical of trans people more than other things I have read so far. Trans people are discriminated so much against and transition seems so hard and there are so many complications (I guess). So if transitioning only causes minor benefits they have to be doing it for attention, or be delude or following some trend or ideology. I thought trans people mostly had pretty intense dysphoria or just a very large urge to transition, but if they just prefer it a little that confuses me.
Of course everyone who want's to transition should be able to either way, I'm a transhumanist, if people want to grow tails or so they can do what every they want for the most part. This article just somewhat confuses me.
Some people feel dysphoria more strongly than others. But even people who feel it really strongly won't be happy after transitioning if they have a bunch of other problems. It's the same reason that if you have untreated depression, financial stress, and chronic pain, and you can get the chronic pain treated, you'll still be miserable afterwards even if the pain was really bad.
But most people don't have that many problems of course, e.g., the rates for severe chronic pain or poverty in the US are both only about 10% (people generally seem to be talking about the US).
I guess my main misconception was that I expected that if a pre transition trans person had depression I thought there would be a high chance of it going away if they transitioned (barring things like them then being excluded by their families). But I guess that isn't the case and (maybe) most trans people only feel a little better after transitioning.
Unfortunately, trans people are a lot more likely to be rejected by their families or struggle to find housing and employment than cis people. As for depression, in cases of severe dysphoria the mental health effects of living for years in the wrong body won't always go away overnight.
Also, I imagine that rates of financial stress are a lot higher than rates of poverty - you can be well-off or even rich and still live in constant fear of losing everything.
I guess what it comes down to is that there are so many things that can destroy a person's happiness, and so many people suffer from at least one. Remember, doubling a person's income increases their happiness as much as transitioning. I think most people would tell you that they'd be more than "a little" happier if their income was doubled, but I guess it's hard to appreciate your money when something else is going horribly wrong.
Footnote 2 is likely the main thing stopping me from medically transitioning. I've already socially transitioned to everyone I suspect would take the news well, have a good job, a happy marriage, a great child, and a good relationship with half of my family. I'm worried about jeopardizing all that that to potentially boost my happiness from an 8 to a 9 on a QoP scale. When you are already happy, a major change can cause your score to go down a lot more than it can raise it.
If your life is already pretty good can you explain why you want to transition? Do you think (If everything goes well) it would just make you a little more happy about yourself, maybe the way a cis person would be more happy if they were a little more handsome or so?
Basically, I don't want to transition, even though I wish I was a woman. In a way, you are right. I hate my appearance and there are clothes I want that don't fit my body appropriately. These are problems a lot of cis people have as well, such as someone that is overweight. The main difference is if an overweight person changes their appearance to be in line with what they want, (as difficult as that is for the majority of overweight people) their relationships often improve and people treat them better. If I change my appearance, there's a decent likelihood my relationships would deteriorate and people would treat me worse.
The other reasons I want to transition aren't even guaranteed to occur if I did transition. I really want more women friends and to be part of mom groups, but a lot of them are not that welcoming of trans women anyways. It's not like it's impossible for men and women to be friends anyways. Also, I used to really want the dating role of being a woman, but being married, that's not a concern. Overall, when I compare the benefits to the risks, it's not worth medically transitioning now, but that could change in the future.
Very interesting, why do you think you have these wants?
Do you think you would be happier if you didn't know transitioning was a thing. The way if a person was told that the cake was just finished 5 minutes before they came they might feel worse as opposed to if there never was any cake. Do you think you would feel better if never knew there was an option of transitioning or do you think it wouldn't make a difference? I hope this isn't to personal, I just find it interesting.