Cracking the Code of Gender Dysphoria: How I Developed My Model, Part 1 – Forming My Initial Model

This is an account of how I developed my theory of an innate core gender identity and my model of gender dysphoria. The core gender identity is our knowledge of being male or female, which emerges early in our lives. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition experienced by people who have a certain condition of being. It will all be explained in this article series. Most of the work in developing my model was done on Twitter/X, and the series will have images that illustrate my journey at key moments in time.

Background

Using Twitter/X Platform to Pass the Time

I am disabled with severe, chronic PTSD and related neurological impairment. Due to my handicap, all that I can do much of the time is browse the web and use social media. As of April 2023, I had an established Twitter account and a habit of using it daily. I had been doing such for a good bit of time. I would post about a battle I am fighting, which was my main purpose for developing my account. I only had so much, related to that, and I would pass the time by opining on and debating other issues.

Sudden Drama, Chaos, and Trance-Like Phenomena

In mid to late April 2023, as I recall, there was a big controversy surrounding an athlete named Riley Gaines and transgender swimmer named Lia Thomas. Riley Gaines had been assaulted after giving a speech on the unfairness of “men,” to use her word, competing in women’s athletics. There was quite a buzz about this on Twitter, which is now known as X.

As the drama unfolded, one development was that the president of the college, that hosted Riley Gaines’s speech, commended the protesters for their “peaceful” protests and apologized to the trans community for the tone of the speech. This was incredibly bizarre to me, that a college president would call actual violence “peaceful.” It also seemed to me to be completely uncontroversial and a self-evident reality that people who have male biology have a huge athletic advantage statistically. At the time, I did not know about the requirement to take hormones for 1 to 2 years. It seemed like people were in a trance. It was fascinating, and I jumped into the discussion on X.

Researching Trans People

Motivated by Curiosity

I have a personality trait of extreme curiosity. My curiosity is of an unusual type, in that it is not only very intense, but it functions almost like a physical drive. I am someone who seeks to crack whatever puzzle is put in front of him. I do it for its own sake, as it is intensely rewarding and will satisfy a tension that builds in my mind. That tension is part of what motivates me.

A Lack of Preexisting Knowledge

I didn’t know much at all about trans people. I was familiar with the concept that there are people who are “born in the wrong body,” which I intuitively construed to mean people who have a female brain and a male body or vice versa. The concept made sense to me, as it was obvious to me that males and females behave differently, in the aggregate, and that they have different personalities, in the aggregate. These differences hold true at the level of the individual quite reliably, and they obviously have a basis in the brain. The notion of a male brain and a female brain thus made sense. This was just my intuitive hunch as to what was meant, however.

Finding Out What the Experts Say

I wanted some real knowledge and real understanding, as I participated in this discussion. My curiosity had been activated, and I was on the case, so to speak. I had always trusted Dr. Drew Pinsky on matters involving medicine and psychology, so I googled him and eventually ended up on his website.

Main Takeaways from Drew Pinsky's Website

On his website, he had a page about a certain transgender woman. He explained some things about her life, and then he explained some things about the science of her condition and its typical presentation. I was interested in the second part, about the science of the condition and its presentation. That part was pretty short.

The first main piece was that the brain and the body undergo independent sexual differentiations prenatally. This creates a possibility for a mismatch. That is the obvious implication of that fact.

The second main piece was that, for people who have this woman’s condition, their orientation to being a woman is not expressed in terms of what they “wish” they were, it is “a definitive I am,” to use Drew Pinsky’s words. His website said that the experts in this condition say that such a person’s identity should be affirmed.

It Immediately Made Sense to Me

From those last two items, the definitive sense of “I am” and the protocol of affirmation, I had a sense of what it would be like to talk to such a person. I pictured myself facing a person who has obvious male physiology. I pictured this person also having a relentless insistence that they *are* a woman. I pictured that attempts to persuade such a person otherwise would be futile. It would be an almost childlike battle of repetition: “you’re a man” “no I’m not” “yes you are” “I am not. I am a woman” “look at yourself; you are a man just like me” “none of that matters. I *am* a woman.”

This intuition, of the futility of arguing with such a person, was triggered by the experts’ prescribing that the person’s identity be affirmed. It was immediately clear to me that this protocol of affirmation was largely a product of experience. The professionals in this area of medicine had tried to argue with such persons in previous times, to try to get them to accept the “reality of their sex” or to be comfortable with it, and other such notions, and experience had shown this to be a guaranteed dead end.

It’s Not a Delusion—Not at All

I also immediately recognized that such a person’s conviction or sense of “I am” was not a delusion. It is something fundamentally different. Part of this is my experience with serious mental illness. Another part was my experience with others who have serious mental illness.

I had been hospitalized, in 1999, for a drug induced psychosis that ultimately led to the onset of bipolar disorder type I. I was hospitalized for 72 days, and during the first 2 weeks or so I would experience delusions. I also witnessed others who were ill with thought or mood disorders.

It is not typical of the type of thing that people with thought or mood disorders will say, to make a claim as boring as being the opposite sex. When I say boring, I am referring to the way that such a claim has no feel of “conspiracy” or of some force out there in the world, that is unseen by others but has malice for the affected person. It has no feel of grandiosity either. The person doesn’t see him or herself as the king or the queen of the world, they simply see themselves as an ordinary person who belongs to the sex class opposite their physiology.

The things that people who are experiencing delusions will say have a certain ring to them, and an obvious man saying “I’m a woman” does not resonate at all with what delusional people say. If a man said “I’m the queen of another planet, who has arrived on this earth. The government is trying to suppress the truth, because they don’t want everyone to know that they’ve been hiding aliens since 1950,” then he would be in the territory of what has the feel of a delusion.

I Was on the Same Page as the Experts

I had a sense, that I was very certain of, that what we are dealing with here are people for whom their perceptual system is intact and functioning properly. They are not people who are disconnected from reality in any generalized way. They had just somehow come to have an unbreakable conviction that they are the opposite sex, and this seemed to most likely tie back, in some way, to the independent sexual differentiations of the brain that happen prenatally, but I wasn’t sure exactly how.

It is an honorable mention, for why it is that I understood that these people do not have a thought or mood disorder, that Drew Pinsky’s website mentioned nothing of the sort. This would be an obvious and very relevant fact to a professional, and it would not go undisclosed. A thought disorder or a mood disorder would be a complete game changer, in terms of what we are dealing with, with this medical condition.

I didn’t go off of that, though, even though it was so obvious. It was more like I had sensed the reality of the situation, and I was on the same page with Drew Pinsky and everyone else involved in this affirmation model. I knew that it wasn’t a thought disorder or a mood disorder. I knew that all the professionals knew that this isn’t a thought disorder or a mood disorder. I knew that the person’s perceptual system is functioning and intact, and I knew that all the professionals knew that the person’s perceptual system is functioning and intact. It all made sense to me.

I Quickly Become Confused

Following getting this info, in around April 2023, up until the first week of June 2023, I did research on transgender people. This was primarily through talking to people on Twitter and looking at stuff online, like a documentary called What is a Woman. It was quite a confusing scene. The transgender people I saw didn’t seem to fit the profile given on Drew Pinsky’s website.

They seemed to have all sorts of different reasons and explanations for why they were transgender and what it meant to be transgender. There was a lot of stuff about social roles and social norms. There were people who became transgender following a “gender identity development journey.” There were trans people who said that they didn’t even know what a woman was. There was a shared definition, among many people, that “a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman” and “a man is anyone who identifies as a man.” There was also an assortment of people who called themselves nonbinary or some other special category of gender.

Drew Pinsky’s description of the transgender woman on his website highlighted an element of distress involved in being transgender. It mentioned gender dysphoria. I had some trouble putting the picture together, as to what exactly a transgender person was. I had a pretty good intuitive understanding of the people with the sense of “I am,” but I was not sure what condition of being the term “transgender” was meant to describe in broader terms.

There seemed to possibly be some biological thing involved in the broader category, and also something related to social roles and expectations, that perhaps interacted with whatever biology was involved. I got that idea from watching a small piece of a YouTube video, on Drew Pinsky’s channel about the intersection between autism and being transgender. It mentioned how autistic people don’t fit into typical gender norms.

Shifting My Focus to Gender Dysphoria - Leading to Developing My Model

I Never Thought Much About Gender Dysphoria

Due to all that I had seen, in my time studying transgender people, I didn’t think of transgender people in terms of gender dysphoria. I thought of them in terms of transgender people, and I recognized that some among their ranks were affected by a condition of being. Being transgender, not gender dysphoria, was the focus of the questions I asked and the questions that I sought to answer.

A Handful of Text From an iBook and a Few Tidbits from Elsewhere

Concerning gender dysphoria, other than the brief mention on Dr Drew’s website, I had heard a psychiatrist make a brief mention of people who have a “deep loathing” of their bodies on a documentary. That same documentary made references to children who were given “chemical castration drugs” over distress about their bodies developing. I had also gotten a bit of info from a book written by a trans woman. I was too handicapped to read much of this book at all, and I only got a page or two, on the split screen view on my iPad.

The book said that the dysphoria experienced by trans women is a result of their brains expecting to see a female body but seeing a male one instead. I believe it may have said that this was only a hypothesis about what causes dysphoria. I cannot recall, I just know that I discounted this info to some degree. I didn’t take it as rock solid truth, but it was an interesting concept. That idea, of a male brain expecting to see a female body, was the only meaningful information I got out of that book, and following reading that, the total information I had read about gender dysphoria would not fill up a single sheet of 8.5 by 11-inch paper.

Sudden Realization of The Biology That Underlies Gender Dysphoria

A Desperate Inquiry

What spawned my realization of what is going on with people who have gender dysphoria, that has proven to be extremely accurate, was an answer I got on a question I left on a tweet. I had left a long comment, with an almost desperate question, on a thread on Twitter. I wanted someone to set the record straight for me, as to what in the hell it means to be transgender.

The scene in front of me was a scene of mostly chaos, that made little sense, and I couldn’t find any consistency in how being transgender was explained. A gender dysphoria patient, who was well versed in the science, responded to my question. This person didn’t give an to answer my question in terms of simply being transgender, she gave an answer it in terms of “GD,” meaning gender dysphoria. That is what provoked me to think in terms of gender dysphoria instead of terms of simply being transgender.

We got in an exchange of a handful of tweets. and at one point, she linked me a research paper. The research paper had images of brain scans at the top, and then several pages of text and images. I was unable to read it due to my neurological impairment. I was only able to glance at the first page and a few sentences before my brain couldn’t take it. This gender dysphoria patient told me that "it is more about passing to ourselves than passing to other people.”

Image 1 - my desperate inquiry

Image 2 - I get a response

Image 3 - the comment that caused me to see

It Just Hit Me

As soon as I read what that gender dysphoria patient said it hit me, in an instant, how that type of gender dysphoria works. I understood what was happening biologically, with such people. Following this instantaneous realization, I did a thought experiment. That’s the part that took from under a minute to 3 minutes.

My realization about this person’s gender dysphoria, which I immediately recognized as being the exact same thing that the trans woman from Drew Pinsky’s webpage has, was that her brain “thinks” that she is a female. Note that I don’t know this person’s birth sex or identity. His or her profile photo online is ambiguous. I am assuming it is a natal male with an identity of female.

To continue her brain “thinks” that she is a female. The distress is produced by brain structures unconsciously recognizing sensory input that indicates that the person is *not* the sex their brain thinks they are.

Something We All Share Has Ended Up Different

I had already recognized that what is at play, whatever it is, is something that everyone shares. There is nothing “extra” going on with these people, so to speak; it is that something we all have has developed or is working atypically somehow.

I could see, here, that a natal female with gender dysphoria has a brain that thinks she’s a male, as a result of some commonality in the way her brain is configured with the way that mine is configured. It was part of how I saw what was at play here, in general terms. Human brains, on an unconscious level, “think” that they are male or female. You could also say that they “know that they are male and female.”

The Calculus Is Under the Hood

I recognized this as an unconscious process from the way that such a person’s conviction is unbreakable. That there is no reasoning with the person’s conviction means that this conviction is produced by some area of the brain with which there is no such thing as reasoning. Whatever neural calculus is at play in producing this conviction, the person knows nothing of it.

I thought of it as being similar to a person feeling hungry. Hunger is the conscious end result of an otherwise totally unconscious process. The basic structures in our brains do work totally behind the scenes and then route the end product to our conscious experience. I could sense that this was the type of thing that is at play here.

A Conceptual Model That Maps to Reality

I could see that it was more than just to do with the body. These are not people who merely have a conviction that they are supposed to have another body, they have a conviction that they are the other sex, and “passing to ourselves” is what alleviates their distress. These are people who, first and foremost, seek to quiet their own brains. My idea of brains “thinking” or “knowing” that they are one sex or the other was largely conceptual, but it ran in parallel with how brains really work. It was all I needed to see and understand what was happening.

The distress, of these people, I could see, is every bit as exempt from being reasoned with as is their conviction of who they are. It is their brains sounding the alarms, every time that their senses take in information that conflicts with what their brain “thinks” or “knows” that they are. It is part of how our mind-body system works, in general. Our mind-body system has a policy, that goes like this- “I’m going to let you know when something is wrong, and the way I’m going to do that is to make you feel like absolute hell.”

I use the word “knows” as an equivalent of “thinks,” in describing whatever brain structures are involved, as this reflects the nature of primitive brain structures. “Thinks” implies uncertainty, a possibility of being incorrect, or an openness to the idea of being incorrect. None of the above apply to our most primitive brain structures. They are brain structures that tell you what is real; you are not allowed to tell them. That is why I say that a FtM person’s brain “knows” that she is a male. Her brain is no more open to negotiation than mine is, and the appropriate thing is to refer to “her” as a he.

Thought Experiments About the Core Gender Identity

How Do We Know That We Are Male or Female?

Upon having this realization or insight, I immediately asked myself “how do people know if they are a male or a female,” and I did a thought experiment, that was actually a series of thought experiments. I realized that they were a series of thought experiments after I did some of them with my therapist. That’s how others would perceive it, but to me it was just one big thing at the time.

It was apparent to me, in doing these thought experiments, that our knowledge of being one sex or the other is entirely innate.

Jenny, Johnny, and Tommy

In one thought experiment, I imagined a house in which there were some tiny children at play in the living room and some adults gathered around nearby, doing things like playing cards and eating. It is a scene like that you would see when two families get together and bring their children. I pictured 3 toddler children, that I will call Jenny, Johnny, and Tommy.

What stuck out to me is how that there is a conspiracy that everyone who comes in the house is in on. They have all conspired to be in total agreement with a certain set of facts; those facts being that little 4-year-old Johnny is a boy, little 2-year-old Jenny is a girl, and little 3-year-old Tommy is a boy.

I call it a conspiracy because it felt to me like some kind of research experiment involving confederates and real participants. In such research experiments, the confederates will agree to a predetermined state of affairs beforehand. The confederates are in on it together, unbeknownst to the real participants.

The difference in the household was that everyone is a confederate. It’s as if they’ve all huddled together, to agree to this set of facts, without critically examining if these facts are true. They are all in on it together, just like a group of confederates, but something is odd. They are all in on this conspiracy, despite not only having never critically examined these facts to determine if they are true, but despite never sitting down to make an agreement at all.

That little Johnny and little Tommy are boys, and that little Jenny is a girl, is a completely uncontroversial reality. It is a reality that needs no defending and needs no explaining. It is so beyond a need of defending or explaining, that even the notion that it might need defending or explaining would never occur to anyone, not in a million years. Very conspicuously, this is a reality that needs no defending and needs no explaining, even to 2-year-old little Jenny and her two toddler friends. It is every bit as an uncontroversial reality to them as it is to the adults, despite their tiny little brains.

The knowledge, that Jenny is a girl, Tommy is a boy, and Johnny is a boy, is like an ether that pervades the room. It is invisible and yet it exists everywhere, held up by nothing, having no weight, and taking up no space. When I expanded the picture to include the entire neighborhood, the ether was in every home, on every street corner, and in every front yard where children are at play. The inhabitants of my imagined neighborhood live their lives immersed in this ever-present ether, just like the inhabitants of every real neighborhood I had ever known.

Shape Toys

In another thought experiment, I pictured children I had seen in my own life. I thought of them knowing that they are a boy or a girl relative to learning what is called a shape sorter bench. I will call it a shape toy. A shape toy is a classic toy for young children. It has a round peg, a round hole, a square peg, a square hole, and then a peg and a hole for triangles. That’s how I remember them from my childhood. The newer ones have more shapes, but I thought in terms of the old ones from my youth.

I pictured all of these children, watching them play, and what stuck out is that there is no visible learning process. I compared their knowledge of being a boy or a girl to a child mastering a shape toy.

In mastering the shape toy, a tiny child will go through a series of steps, as he traverses a learning curve. He might start by flailing the round peg at each hole, with it eventually passing through the round hole at random, as he hits the round hole by chance in a sort of blind flailing. The next step might be dragging the round peg or the square peg across the surface of the toy. This is more systematic, as the peg will naturally sink into the hole that fits it as it passes. Then, in the final step, the child may look at the round peg, analyze its shape, and then look at each hole, seeing which one matches the shape of the peg.

I pictured that, if I had undergone such a process in the presence of my mother, at that last step of the learning process, in which I carefully examine the peg and the holes, she would say to herself “he’s got it.” She would have observed this learning process, and she would have witnessed me putting the last piece of the puzzle together, so to speak, when I had finally mastered that toy.

When Did Your Child "Get It"?

I thought to myself, thinking of children I had known over my life, my baby sister, and also myself. Thinking about it, it was obvious that had I asked any one of these children’s parents “tell me about that crucial moment, at which your little girl put the final piece to the puzzle together and realized ‘I’m a girl’, and you said to yourself ‘she’s got it’”, the parent would draw a blank.

In their life, they knew that they had a girl from an ultrasound or, at the very least, from when the child was born. It was a self-evident reality to them, that needs no defending or explaining. Their little girl developed to be old enough to talk, and she knew she was a girl. The parent never considered, for even a second, the possibility that she would not. That the little girl is a girl seems to the parent to be a very easy to discern and obvious fact. There never was any consideration given to the notion that there are any steps that might need to be taken to make sure she got the right answer.

The Missing Element at Family Reunions

In this light, I thought about all the family reunions I had attended, in which it was a commonplace thing for mothers, sometimes from 2 or 3 generations, to break into conversations in which they share experiences they had in raising their children.

Motherhood is a challenge all its own, and when mothers across generations compare their experiences, it is as if they are unearthing timeless truths about who we are as people. Children in the 1950s have the same peculiar struggles as did children in the year 2000, despite their radically different environments. It is like a controlled experiment in which every single variable has been changed, and yet children are the same.

This would be a perfect opportunity for it to arise, the laughter and the joy about how “my son Michael didn’t know that he was a boy until…” and “it took my daughter Mary just a little longer to realize she was a girl, but kids back then didn’t have color TVs. I was standing in the kitchen about to do the dishes, on the day that she finally got it.”

The day that her son realized he is a boy, or that her daughter realized she is a girl, would be one of the key milestones in every mother’s journey, on par with a child’s first words and his first steps when he learned how to walk. Conversations of this type among mothers were nowhere to be found in my memories of any event I had ever been to. This key milestone has gone completely unnoticed by everyone. The only plausible explanation would seem to be that is has never occurred.

The Most Inconspicuous Thing of All

What stuck out in all of these examples is how that this very conspicuous phenomenon, in which tiny children with tiny brains know their sex, is the most inconspicuous thing of all. No one ever notices this very odd thing, that would seem to require an explanation. The limitations of tiny brains do not at all apply to this knowledge, and yet no one ever stops to ask why.

Difficulty and Effortless Ease

I pictured a small boy, aged 3, sitting in a room with a shape toy. I thought of how that when an adult enters the room, two things are instantaneously apparent to the adult. One is that this child is a boy; the other is that the round peg goes in the round hole, the square peg goes in the square hole, and the triangle peg goes in the triangle hole. As soon as the adult sees the shape toy, he knows this. If you asked the adult which fact was harder to recognize, he would tell you that neither was. From his perspective, both facts are immediately obvious.

From the little boy’s perspective, however, one of these facts requires effort. The shape toy poses him a level of difficulty. Knowing that he is a boy is completely effortless. His tiny brain is not a factor. It was apparent to me, in this and in all of the other thought experiments, that this is something that children just know.

Your Intuition Helps You See But Makes You Blind to Reality

In thinking about this, I realized that there was a step, that every adult had skipped in understanding how children know if they are boys or girls. There have been people who opine on this, going back at least to John Money. I cannot even recall which explanations I had heard as of the time in question, but it was part of my general sense of how things were, that everyone assumed that this is knowledge that is somehow obtained through learning.

It became apparent to me, that it is actually a very out of touch thing to even consider that this knowledge is learned. All that it takes, to see this, is to detach yourself from your own intuition. That is the crucial step of the analysis that everyone misses. Their failure to detach themselves from their own intuition is what prevents them from noticing this very conspicuous phenomenon, in which tiny children, everywhere you go, know their sex with effortless ease.

This is not exceptional, as it is not part of human nature to detach yourself from your own intuition, and many, perhaps most, people cannot tell the difference between which “fact” is an intuition and which is simply their senses taking in an objective feature of reality.

Our intuitions about what sex a given person is have been honed by nature. We recognize the sex of other humans with effortless ease. It happens in an instant, and we are all extremely accurate in doing this. It is an innate ability, that is obviously propped up by an underlying biology. This is what makes it seem so obvious to us that little Jenny is a girl, etc. It is what makes it seem like such a no brainer and what is behind this odd thing in which we never really think about it.

Look at It Again—But This Time, Leave Your Intuition on the Nightstand

If you detach yourself from your own intuition, you will see that learning what one’s sex is would be a very complex cognitive learning process, for a 3- or 4-year-old child. What is sexually unambiguous about such small children, that they are also able to observe about other small children? When you grant them our innate ability to recognize the sex of others, you still come up short. Little children still can’t do a learning exercise of that complexity, not at the level of consistency that we observe.

If little Jenny recognizes that her little friend Mary is a girl and her little friend Johnny is a boy, what is the process by which Jenny compares them to her, to determine which she is? She determines that Mary has slightly different cheekbones than Johnny, and then feels her own cheekbones? Is that what she does? No child can do that, and if they tried, it would be an extremely conspicuous event. It would be very evident in every child’s learning process.

Two Contrarians Get Into a Debate—One of Them Is Only 3 Years Old

In another thought experiment, I imagined that I had a tiny child, a 3-year-old girl, in front of me. I imagined us getting in a debate over whether she is a boy or a girl. In this thought experiment, I played the role of the contrarian, in which I incessantly tell her that she’s not a girl, she’s a boy. With my ability to reason, as an adult with a fully grown brain, and her being a tiny child, there is no argument that she could bring up, to argue that she is a girl, that I could not refute. My ability to reason would overpower her ability to reason.

If she says: “I have long hair,” I could say “little Timmy down the road has long hair, and he’s a boy just like you are.” If she says: “I am wearing a pink dress,” I could say “if we took little Michael at the house next door and put him in a pink dress, he’d still be a boy just like you’re a boy.”

In this thought experiment, I could see that the little girl would have one or both of two different reactions. She would either relentlessly tell me that she is a girl, she would cry, or she would do both, as our debate continued. Both reactions were a result of the same thing, she knows that she is a girl. She would relentlessly argue with me because she knows she is a girl, or, if she’s a more timid or sensitive child, she would just break down and cry, because she sees me as a cruel person trying to make her believe something that isn’t true.

Here, again, we have the same thing. The little girl’s knowledge that she is a little girl is not something that she can be reasoned out of, because it exists independent of any process of reasoning.

Mothers Shopping for Books

I thought of how you can search for books, on websites like amazon.com, about all of the different developmental and other challenges that a child might have. Though I had never searched for them myself, I was sure you could find a wide selection of books that covered potty training. You might find books on how to handle a strong-willed toddler’s temper. You could find books on the developmental challenges of children who have certain handicaps. You could find books that detail, step by step, the first several years of a child’s life and how a parent can navigate each of the challenges that those years present. In short, there would be a wide selection of books, on a wide variety of topics, that a parent who is frustrated, concerned, or confused about her child’s behavior could buy.

For the mothers who were especially diligent, there would be plenty of books competing for their attention that they could read as pre-work, before the child is even born. There are plenty of mothers like that, who want to be prepared to do everything right ahead of time.

The Missing Book in Their Collections Completes the Picture

Such diligent mothers, reading book after book as their bellies got bigger and bigger, would have quite the collection 7 or 9 months later, when their little ones have arrived, but all of their collections would be missing books on a certain subject. Not one of them would have a single book about “how to make sure your baby boy knows that he’s a boy.”

None of the people in the classes they attended, or in the neighborhood where they lived, or in their church, or anywhere else would have advised them to make sure to pick up a copy of a book on that subject. If they had been advised, a search on “earth's biggest bookstore” would have yielded zero results. For a baby boy, knowing that he is a boy is a *nonexistent* developmental challenge. The picture was perfectly complete.

I Had Never Really Thought About It Before

I had personally known of two transsexual women in my entire life before I got in this discussion on Twitter. One was a transsexual woman who had come in my store when I worked at a very busy gas station in my early twenties. At that time, all I had was a vague idea of people who are born in the wrong body, and I would have pictured such people as having a gradual realization, over time, that they have a “female brain”, and that they must dress, appear, and live as women. The other one was a cashier at a Walmart, about 10 years later, who appeared to be making some sort of transition. There was also a person in the area I used to live who wished to present as a female sometimes, but I didn’t know much about them.

I didn’t think much about any of these. It was not something that particularly piqued my curiosity at those times, and the main thing that I perceived about the situation is that these people have very deep pain and face hell in life.

Types of Learning Processes

When I started on this thought experiment, or series of thought experiments, I was aware of a handful of different types of learning processes. The thing that distinguishes one from the next, in my mind, is to what degree are we naturally suited for it. I had a concept of two primary types of learning. I thought of our generalized intellectual learning capacities as one type. The other type was learning processes for which we have specialized brain structures. The first type could be broken down into many subtypes, but for my thought process, all I needed was the high-level division of the two main types.

Learning processes for which we have specialized brain structures will stick out like a sore thumb among other learning processes. The primary ones I am aware of are language development and moral reasoning.

Learning Portuguese Adam Sandler Style

If I, as a grown man, play a game of any type with a small child, I am going to be the winner. If I have regular matches with the child from ages 2 to 4, the gap will not narrow in any meaningful way. It would be an intellectual version of Adam Sandler playing dodgeball.

What though, if I went to a community college and took a 2-years long, on the weekends, course for learning to speak Portuguese, and my neighbors were immigrants from Brazil who have a 2-year-old child? All of the sudden I am not such a bully, if I enter a competition to see who is going to speak better Portuguese in 2 years. The tiny child is in the race and may well win. My brain is bigger than his, but his brain appears to be on steroids, with the way the limitations of his tiny brain are not such a handicap anymore.

That’s what I mean when I say that learning processes for which we have specialized brain structures stick out like a sore thumb. We excel in such learning processes in a way that is outside of our normal capacity for learning. As I understand it, there are specialized, extremely plastic brain structures that develop in toddlerhood for the purpose of learning to speak.

This One Is Different—It's Entirely in Our Brains

In doing my thought experiment, or series of thought experiments, it was instantly apparent that I am dealing with a different type of knowledge with the core gender identity. It was not that the brains of tiny children are on steroids, as is the case with language. It is not that their capacities are somehow enhanced, such that they can lift cognitive weight that is far out of the bounds of their typical abilities. Tiny children lift the core gender identity with complete and effortless ease because it is weightless. It is produced by the brain, not acquired in any way.

What this means is that this knowledge emerges as a consequence of the physical development of the brain. As the brains of tiny children develop, they will have a sense of being male or of being female that gets increasingly crisp, at a 1:1 ratio, with the development of the brain structures that produce this knowledge. It is not a calibration, in which the brain zeroes in on “am I a male or a female;” it is a steady, straight line, progression in one direction or the other.

Nature Did it for a Reason

I had a very complete model, at the conclusion of my thought experiment, of both the innate core gender identity and how this type of gender dysphoria works. In seeing that the core gender identity is entirely innate, I immediately recognized its obvious evolutionary function. This is something that evolved, as it is crucial for creatures of all types to know their sex.

Naming My Concept

I had never heard the term core gender identity at this time, and the term I used for my model was a neurologically based sex identity. I used that term to reference this phenomenon in which people’s brains “think” or “know” that they are one sex or the other, with the result being a conscious conviction, or certain knowledge, of being male or female.

My term was a literal, straightforward description of what I am referencing. In participating in this discussion, I had come across the debate about sex vs gender and idea that there are many genders or gradations of gender. I had encountered people who describe going on a “gender identity development journey.” The only part I agreed with out of all of this was the identity part.

I used the words neurologically based because this identity is embedded in your brain. If you have to go on a “journey” to find it, you are not looking for it; you are looking for something completely different. I used sex instead of gender because this identity is all about the binary of sex. It has an evolved biological underpinning, i.e., it is a product of nature, and in nature’s language there are only two sexes. Nature has no use for creatures who think they are “neither or something else altogether.”

A Complete Picture

The model that I had, at the end of my short thought experiment, reconciled everything that I had read on Drew Pinsky’s website and put it in a very complete, and internally consistent, picture with my own personal experiences and what I had seen. This trans woman from his website, who had this conviction of being 100% female, that could not be reasoned with- her conviction would have onset very early in life. This is how it works for everyone no matter what sex they are, and there will be occasional occurrences in which some people’s brains develop atypically.

We Know Early – Just Like My Baby Sister

I knew that I was a boy at least by the time that I was 2, and I pictured that these people would develop their conviction at right around the same general time, though I was sure that there would be some variation. I put it at a range of ages 2 to 4. It was a consequence of my model, that the conviction of such people would emerge very early in their lives, but this was also based on my own experiences.

I knew my sex at a very early age. My baby sister, who was born when I was 9 years old, knew her sex at a very young age. Every tiny child I can remember knowing, who was past the age at which they frequently say things that pass as complete sentences, knew their sex.

We All Think in Terms of "I am"

The trans woman’s sense of a “definitive I am” is something that would have emerged early and persisted throughout her life. I would have been no more able to reason with her when she was 4 years old, than I would have been when she was an adult starring in a media production with Drew Pinsky. She was just like me at 4 years old, and just like the tiny child in my thought experiment, who I imagined might cry if I told her she is not what she is.

The way that this knowledge is exempt from reasoning was no longer the least bit of a mystery. The people who get the “wrong” answer think in terms of “I am,” just like people like me who get the “right” answer. It is the same underlying biology at work in both cases.

My Initial Model in Bullet Points

As for this specific type of gender dysphoria, my model had some very straightforward implications, many that could function as predictions.

1. The conviction will onset early in life.

2. Someone with an incongruent core gender identity will think in terms of “I am.”

3. Someone with an incongruent core gender identity will always have dysphoria.

4. No Desistance

There is no such thing as a person with this symptom profile who desists. This one is very intuitive. What are the chances that, one day, I wake up and decide I’m really a female? That’s just not how it works. That someone’s brain has developed atypically, such as to make some people think they have got the “wrong” answer, doesn’t change a thing. These people are affected by an immutable condition of being.

5. The dysphoria will be automatic.

It is not a distress that emerges as a consequence of a male person reflecting at night, in his bed, about how he would be better off as a woman, and how he can’t go on being a man. It is rather an unease that goes on its own and does not need to be provoked by anything.

6. The dysphoria will be ceaseless.

On most days it will not relent for even for a second. The reason for this is that the dysphoria is the result of the person’s brain unconsciously recognizing sensory input that conflicts with what their brain “thinks” they are.

If you are a person who has obvious female physiology, and your brain “thinks” you’re a male, it is going to be nearly impossible to rid your environment of signs that you are not a male. Even if you’re not consciously focusing on some such piece of information, there will be some in your peripheral unconscious awareness every second of every day.

This means that the person’s dysphoria will be like a constant unease that intermittently spikes. The spikes will occur when the sensory information becomes blatant in opposing what the person’s brain “knows” that they are.

7. The person will be a prisoner of their dysphoria.

There is no escaping it. If they wake up in the middle of the night, at 3:13 am, it is right there waiting for them as soon as they open their eyes. The dysphoria is a conscious experience produced by an unconscious brain process, and unconscious brain processes run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.

8. The dysphoria will be an experience of torture.

If you ask someone who has this condition, they will confirm this aspect of it. It may not be their typical way of speaking of it. They may be used to telling people “I hate waking up to dysphoria every day.” How ever they normally talk about it, ask them if it is torturing and they will answer with a resounding yes.

This part has to do with my intuition and my understanding of how the mind-body system responds with distress when it senses that something is wrong. Not all things going wrong will produce distress of the same intensity.

It is when things are wrong at a basic level, that we will get hit with distress so intense that we couldn’t have imagined it before. To give an example, I had nearly had a heart attack or failure of some sort in 2021, and as this happened to me, I was overtaken by an incredibly powerful instinctual terror. It was something I had never experienced before.

Years before that, I had had kidney stones. Tiny pieces of something had gotten into the tubes that carry fluid to or from my kidneys, and those tiny pieces of whatever they are might as well been a chainsaw that had been buried into one side of me; that’s how bad they hurt. Those tubes are *not* supposed to have anything in them, and my mind-body system is going to let me know it. They are essential for my survival, and so I am designed to hurt so bad that I put fixing that problem ahead of any and all other priorities.

It would be the same for these people. Their mind-body system senses that something is wrong at a basic level. It is as if they are a robot that is malfunctioning every second of every day, as the person’s brain is configured for a different reality than what he or she actually embodies. When a human is malfunctioning in this way, his or her mind-body system is going to be sounding the alarms all day long. I sometimes call these biological events, in which a person’s mind-body system makes them feel like hell, “biological alarm bells.”

9. There is no such thing as a nonbinary person who has this condition.

I did see the obvious possibility that someone with this condition could self-declare a nonbinary identity. Even as this was an obvious possibility, I saw no reason that such a person would do so.

10. An extremely likely connection with autism.

This was due to the way that a person’s neurologically based sex identity is tied to the development of brain structures. What I had seen on Drew Pinsky’s YouTube video about the connection between being transgender and autism lined up with this perfectly. That made perfect sense.

11. Medical transition is the only way out.

I saw the medical necessity of transitioning for such people, that is due to the nonnegotiable nature of the brain structures involved.

And so, these 11 items are the model that I had for gender dysphoria at the end of my thought experiment. They were supplementary to my model for the core gender identity, which I determined was innate knowledge that is produced by some primitive brain structure, or set of primitive brain structures, or distributed area within the brain. It is innate knowledge that is the product of an evolved biological underpinning. It has an obvious evolutionary function; that being that it is crucial for creatures to know what sex they are.

Addon - Intuition About How Dysphoria Feels

On the same day that I did these thought experiments, I also had an intuitive sense of what the dysphoria might feel like. In putting myself in such a person’s brain and seeing the world through their eyes, I pictured it having a visceral feeling, that is kind of like a reality bending sensation that resembles a set of fingernails screeching down a chalk board.

Subsequent Development of My Understanding

My mind is little fuzzy about the exact timeline, but I remember thinking about this again at around 3 days to 7 days after my initial thought experiments. I was dwelling on the question of why nature hardwired this knowledge as opposed to using some sort of learning process.

I only thought in terms of simple learning processes, in considering a learning process-based sex identity. I tried to come up with something that was within the capacity of simple creatures. I thought about a process in which there may be some single indicator, that the creature could home in on.

Such an approach, even if it is theoretically possible, seemed to be inferior to a hardwired sex identity. One possible consequence that immediately jumped into my mind was the eventual coevolution of malicious methods of confusion that the members of a species would attempt on one another. For example, a male could neutralize the threat of competing males, if he could trick their minds into thinking that they are females. There would seem to be a lot of ways that such a vulnerability could be exploited, potentially even by other species.

Two Types but Only One Is a Winner

I thought of the two types of identity development processes, side by side, thinking of which would have the higher error rate. The hardwired option would have the best rate by a good margin; it seemed to me. In a group of creatures, it seemed easy for a learning process to go awry 30% of the time, leaving only a 70% “success” rate.

If the learning process were ongoing, you would have creatures that start to think they are the other sex midway through their lives, and the survival value of knowing their sex would be lost. A hardwired identity would bypass this problem, with no loss of utility, given that sex is an immutable trait in the type of sexually reproducing species that my model is based on.

A 70% success rate also seemed easy to outperform, and the more I thought of it, the more it became clear that a learning process just wasn’t feasible. The survival value in knowing one’s sex would have emerged so early in the evolutionary chain of complexity, that nature would have no other option but to hardwire this knowledge. The first creatures with a knowledge of their own sex were certainly just the biological equivalent of simple automations.

The Core Gender Identity is Housed Deep in Our Brains

These ancient structures would be buried deep in the brains of modern creatures, with all of our subsequently evolved neural hardware being built on top of them.

Image 4 - I give my conclusions (in a kind of odd way)

Stay tuned for the next installment called "Vetting My Model" in part 2. I will take you on an illustrated journey of my process of vetting my initial model of gender dysphoria. It was almost all done on X Platform.