Cracking the Code of Gender Dysphoria: How I Developed My Model, Part 2 – Vetting My Initial Model

Looking to Vet My Model and Seeking Out Gender Dysphoria Patients

I Knew That I Was Right - But That I Could Be Wrong

With my initial model having been developed, my next step was to go to Twitter and vet it. I needed to find some people who have gender dysphoria and run my intuitions past them. I had a strange dual state of mind, in which I was both certain that I was right and open to the possibility that I was wrong. I felt that the probability that people would vet my intuitions was 100%, but if they did not, I would accept this seemingly impossible outcome.

Images of My Post Model Development Twitter/X Interactions

Below are images of me speaking about gender dysphoria with a woman named Julia. She and I were in a debate over her claim that me saying "biological woman" is transphobic. She seemed like a dedicated ally of trans people, and so I thought I'd see what she may know.

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Seeing Everything in Terms of Gender Dysphoria Brought Order Into Chaos

It would take me some time, to find people who suffer gender dysphoria. I began to follow more and more people, and as I was on the lookout for some gender dysphoria patients, I had a new set of eyes with which to view the chaotic scene in front of me. I looked at all transgender people, current and former, using people who have gender dysphoria as the baseline. By gender dysphoria, I mean the type of gender dysphoria that my model was based on.

Chauvinism for My Model and Imitation Gender Dysphoria Brands That Shouldn't Even Be on The Shelf

I started to notice, very fast, that there were people speaking of “dysphoria” who didn’t have anything like what I had conceived. I eventually found out that the diagnostic criteria were very broad, and that medicine was letting a much broader crowd through the gates.

In my discourse on Twitter, I would account for these factors by adding qualifications like “true” or “genuine,” as in true gender dysphoria or genuine gender dysphoria. I would say “for people who have genuine gender dysphoria…” when I explained how the condition worked. I considered the type of gender dysphoria my model is based on to be true or genuine gender dysphoria, and everything else was kind of a made up or poorly defined malady, that had little to do with gender dysphoria.

Ok - Your Gender Dysphoria Is Legit & Mine Is a Neurological Condition

I would sometimes also use the phrasing “as it has been historically understood.,” as in “gender dysphoria as it has been historically understood,” to distinguish what I was speaking of, in a given thread, from everything else. I knew that the phenomenon that I had happened upon understanding had been recognized for a long time, due to Drew Pinsky referring to it on his website, and also from vague comments a psychiatrist had made on a documentary. I eventually termed the type of gender dysphoria my model is based on neurological gender dysphoria or early onset gender dysphoria.

X Platform Is My University, My Lab, and Where All My Friends Live

My journey to vet and eventually flesh out my model started by participating in debates and discussions, and asking people questions on Twitter, now known as X Platform. I would also listen to podcasts. In the beginning, I did basically no reading of research papers, as I recall. I don’t recall reading a single one until someone challenged me on a point that I made.

I was very confident about my model and all of its implications, but there were times when I’d hedge my bets and say things like “I am very convinced that this condition emerges very early in life.” This is as opposed to saying “someone’s belief that they are the opposite sex will onset very early in life, if they have genuine gender dysphoria.” I would speak with more consistent and definitive confidence once I had vetted my model with some gender dysphoria patients in threads and in DMs.

What the Hell Are These People Doing

As I started to really participate in the discussion, and follow more and more people, it became apparent to me that there is a potentially really big problem in medicine. The problem stemmed from people who do not fit my model being given the same treatment protocol as the ones who do. Remember that I had determined that medical transition was the only option for the people who fit my model, and it seemed to me to be an unquestionable fact that transitioning people who do not fit it is going to be an absolute disaster.

I came across numerous girls who as minors, or at barely over age eighteen, had their breasts removed. These were girls who decided they want to be boys, or that they might really be boys, all of the sudden at age 11, 12, 13, or 15. I came across one young woman who had been given testosterone during her early teens, as a recommended treatment for the therapist’s assessment that she was “gender fluid.” I thought to myself, “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe nutcases like this exist and are allowed to work in healthcare.” There was another young woman whose doctor tried to allay her trauma over having her breasts removed by speculating that this woman may, in fact, be “nonbinary,” instead of a “trans man.” It’s like “oh god, we’ve got another whack job in our midst.”

This "Gender" Stuff Ain't Gonna Cut It

These “gender” people started to seem like a problem really fast, due to things like this. Remember that in my model, the only people who have gender dysphoria, of the type that requires medical transition, are people who believe they are males or females, i.e. they identify as boy, girl, man, or woman. I have long understood just what serious business it is, to practice medicine.

When I was the age that these young women were when they received these hormones, my school would have classified the drugs they were given as anabolic steroids. These are the drugs that can do all sorts of damage, and they are giving them to emotionally volatile teenage girls over what honestly sounded to me like crackpot nonsense.

How in the hell do you diagnose someone as, or assess them for being, “gender fluid.” I would tell people I talked to online to watch out for any medical person who brings up “any of this gender bullshit.” I would tell them “When your therapist suggests that you may be ‘nonbinary’ that’s your cue to exit stage left immediately and never go back.”

Do They Really Do This

I wasn’t sure just how much this was happening, at first, this thing where teenage girls and other people who don’t fit my model were being given hormones and surgery. I had pulled the DSM-5 guidelines, and I had seen how the criteria included people who “wished” they were another gender. This was kind of baffling, as to why medicine would be fulfilling such “wishes.”

I could not think of a conceivable model in which such a protocol for such a person could predictably get good outcomes. It also had me thinking back to Drew Pinsky’s page of info, where one of his main points was “for these people, their identification is not expressed in terms of ‘I wish,’ it is a definitive ‘I am.’” We seemed to have guidelines that were designed to approve all of the wrong people for treatment.

I Wanted to Help Them

The things like this, that I saw, started to cause me to have bad feelings about this section of the medical profession. These bad feelings, that included occasional extreme anger and frustration, would become more intense over time. They would eventually be accompanied by a desire to reach out to these people and explain to them the mistakes that they are making. I wanted to explain my model to them, once I had vetted it, so that they could see the crucial difference between the people who fit my model and those who do not.

Images From My Walk Around Twitter

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Four Pivotal Developments in Vetting My Model

Pivotal Development #1 - Running Into Gender Dysphoria Patients

There were a handful of pivotal developments, in my journey of vetting my model. The first one was running into several people, on Twitter, who had the type of gender dysphoria my model was based on. I would ask these people questions on public threads.

Pivotal Development #2 - Someone's Calling Bulls**t on My Model - Bring It On

The second one was someone challenging one of the features of my model. In my model, it seemed to me that there is no such thing as someone who desists, who has that type of gender dysphoria. Someone on a thread challenged a point I had made by saying “most gender dysphoria is relieved by going through puberty.”

Images From Pivotal Development #2

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Pivotal Development #3 - Cash for Q & A - Just What The Doctor Ordered

The third pivotal development was when I got my first interview client. A young trans man I came across had responded to my offer to do a paid Q & A session. I sent him a DM with an offer of $25 an hour to answer my questions, and he agreed. This was about September 5th, 2023. It was an opportunity to speak in great depth with someone who had gender dysphoria. I had recognized this trans man as a case of gender dysphoria from several posts he had made about his experiences.

Pivotal Development #4 - An Expert and Transitioned Dysphoric Who Saw Things Just Like I Did

The fourth pivotal development was coming across a Twitter user who was a transmedicalist, or “trans med” for short. I didn’t know what a transmedicalist was at the time, but this person had a huge volume of posts and other material published online about gender dysphoria. She was a lifelong suffer of gender dysphoria, who had found relief by medically transitioning. She was a super well-versed expert. That was made immediately apparent, and what also stuck out was how essentially everything this person said resonated with my view of gender dysphoria and my model.

This transmedicalist, who had read so much of the literature going back to the 1950s and possibly even earlier, thought about gender dysphoria in the exact same terms that I did, on almost every line item. She would be a very useful reference point, when I got some info from someone else that conflicted with my model.

Images From Pivotal Development #4

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Kids These Days Call Everything Dysphoria

Some of the younger people I was questioning did a good bit of mingling with the people who had other types of dysphoria, and they didn’t seem to realize that they are apples and oranges with these other people. They would tell me things along the lines of “dysphoria doesn’t affect everyone the same way. Some people are fine with…”

Such statements didn’t jive with my model, as in my model, all sensory input that conflicts with what the person’s brain “thinks” or “knows” that they are is going to trigger distress. I had to iron out that picture, and I eventually figured out that the ultimate source of the info I got was sometimes someone who didn’t have genuine gender dysphoria.

Another thing that stood out about this transmedicalist was that she shared my feeling of being kind of perturbed by the issues created by the behaviors of broader crowd of trans people and the “gender” people. I would eventually learn that transmedicalists are people who think that the only “real” trans people are people who have the type of gender dysphoria that my model is based on, which most of them call transsexualism. Many of them resent being placed under an umbrella with what they call "transgenderism."

If They Don’t Fit My Model, Kick ’Em Out—You’re Screwing Up the Numbers

It was around the time that I first met the transmedicalist that I zeroed in on DSM-III transsexualism as having criteria that would be very effective at capturing people who have the type of gender dysphoria my model is based on and would also be effective at kicking everyone else out. I subsequently began to use the DSM-III’s estimate of 1/50,000 people as my estimated base rate for neurological gender dysphoria, though I think that I had first obtained this estimate from a study in the Netherlands.

A Mystery Remains and Playing With Numbers In My Head

As I was vetting and further fleshing out my model for neurological gender dysphoria, I had some side projects that can be called 1) figure out what is going on with all of these other trans people; and 2) figure out what is going on in this section of the medical profession, especially that involves minors.

Particularly for the second one, I was to a large extent left to play around with numbers and speculate. I could take my base rate of 1/50,000 people and add a buffer to get a range. Then I could look at stats about what percentage of < 18s are getting treated by gender clinics. If that number was reasonably within my estimated range, that would be an indicator that the majority of adolescents being treated are adolescents with neurological gender dysphoria. I was and still am very concerned about the way that these people in medicine do not understand things the way that I do. It seems they are possibly operating in the dark and possibly causing terrible harm in the process.

Outcome of Pivotal Development #1

I Was (Pretty Much) Dead On

The outcome of my first pivotal development of meeting and questioning a few people who have gender dysphoria was very positive. My model was vetted very consistently, with only a few slight nuances.

I asked a trans man who was roughly in my age category about the quality of dysphoria being automatic, thinking that he *was* a boy at a very young age, and the dysphoria onsetting early in life.

Sometime after that, I came across a younger trans man on a thread and asked him about his dysphoria. He told me that he would go mute for extended periods of time, before he was prescribed testosterone, because of how it tortured him to hear his female sounding voice.

The first, older, trans man said that yes, the dysphoria is automatic, that yes, he thought he *was* a boy from his earliest memories, and that his dysphoria only got “real” at puberty. He also told me that he had a psychological expectation, as a child, that he would grow a penis. He spoke as if he was just waiting for that to happen, in his childhood.

It Doesn't Get Real Until...? That Actually Makes Sense

This was overall a major vetting of my model. I validated my intuition that the dysphoria was automatic, that there was an early onset, and that he thought in terms of “I am.” There was a slight tweak, in his description that his dysphoria didn’t “get real” until puberty. This was not what I expected, to the extent that he was suggesting that he didn’t have any dysphoria before puberty, but it also seemed perfectly compatible with my model.

My model was based on sensory input, that conflicts with (in this case) the person being a male. If you picture a female child dressed up as a typical male, sort of like a tomboy appearance, as what he seemed to describe, you will see that the person is very androgynous and could pass for a male child. Young children are much more physically androgynous, than are older children, so they will pass better both to themselves and to others. The sensory input such a child takes in would not be in stark contrast or starkly conflict with a reality that he is a male. The report of lesser or even just barely existent dysphoria seemed to add up.

Vetting and Tweaking

The net result of the discussion with this trans man was that my model was vetted and also slightly tweaked, and that I had a new detail to add to the picture- for some reason, at least some female dysphoric children will have a psychological expectation that they will grow a penis one day. Another element I picked up from him was a sense of your body “betraying” you, that was an element of his experience when female puberty onset.

I Missed It - But I Have It Now

When the young trans man responded that his voice tortured him so badly that he wouldn’t speak, he instantly stuck out as an obvious case of neurological gender dysphoria. He also caused me to have a new insight. In my thought process, I had never thought of a person’s own voice causing dysphoria. My mind primarily went to what they see, how others react to them, how others address them, and sensations of touch, though I was certain that all of their senses are involved.

It was part of my intuition, in which I conceived an idea “this male person’s brain thinks that he is a female, and so his brain needs to see a female when he looks at himself.” The same phenomenon would apply to their other senses. For instance, I thought that a person addressing a trans man as they would address a typical woman (“ma’am, do you need help,” “has she been checked in,” etc.) would be auditory input that would trigger dysphoria.

The thought of someone’s own voice causing dysphoria was such an obvious thing, and yet I missed it until this trans man told me. I immediately took a mental note of that, and incorporated dysphoria triggered by the person’s voice into my model. I would eventually find that this is very common among people who suffer from dysphoria.

The young trans man seemed to also vet my description of the dysphoria being automatic, and he seemed to also confirm a related idea that I had, that dysphoric people would occasionally obtain momentary relief through distractions, though he was somewhat subtle or passive in doing both.

"Flow" States And Gender Dysphoria

In my conception of this never ceasing torment, I partly thought of it in terms of what has been called a “Flow” state. Flow, in a book with that title, is described as a pleasant condition of immersion or absorption that arises from one’s cognitive resources being completely and perfectly consumed by some activity. The activity might be a game, or a sport, or playing a musical instrument.

The idea is that your brain has so much capacity to handle any given challenge; if the challenge in front of you is too difficult, you will become overwhelmed and this will cause you unease; if the challenge is not difficult enough, you will have excess cognitive resources, and that excess capacity will have your mind drifting to all of the worries of your life. You will have unease over the exam next Wednesday, or the house payment coming up, or how you’re not going to be able to retire until age 70, or whatever it happens to be. The way to escape both sides of this otherwise perpetual vulnerability to feelings of unease is to give your mind exactly what it can handle, not one drop more and not one drop less.

As this applies to people who experience dysphoria, as long as they are on the lower end of their capacities, they will have a potential to experience dysphoria, and that potential will be actualized ceaselessly. Their only way out, other than to use drugs, is to starve their minds of any excess capacity for conscious awareness.

A Directive for Maintaining Peace of Mind

My concept, here, can be understood if expressed as a directive: be perpetually occupied; have your mind totally consumed, such that your brain has no bandwidth to register the feminine appearance of your hands or of the skin just below your right wrist, out of the corner of your eye, as it often does when you’re sitting in a recliner watching TV. These are the terms I think in, about this medical condition, and my conception has been proven to be very accurate. I am, as of the present, not fully sure how much dysphoria someone’s hands or the appearance of the skin on their wrists can cause. My various descriptions of how the ceaseless unease works have been vetted by numerous people, however.

Selective Dysphoria?

There was a tiny snag introduced in my conversation with the younger trans man. He told me that dysphoria is different for everyone, and that not everyone has dysphoria over the same things. This was something that I would have to iron out. It also factored into me having an uncertainty about what I witnessed in what was posted on Twitter. I could not tell who didn’t fit my model with perfect accuracy, not without reading some of their posts or listening to them talk about their experiences. A lot of people seemed awfully suspect, just based on how they present themselves.

There were a lot of people who seemed to not have much distress over their primary sex characteristics, and this element of only having selective dysphoria sounded like it might explain that. The selective dysphoria, on the other hand, just made no sense to me. Everything about my model was adding up with everything that I had gotten in my discussions on Twitter, except this one thing. My hunch was that there was actually something to be explained about this info, rather than a deficiency in my model, but this posed a question that I would need to answer. I still felt very confident in my overall sense of how this worked. I expected that my intuitions would be vetted more and more as time went on.

The Timeline and My Question Answered

This was in early August 2023, that I talked to the older trans man, and in late August 2023, that I talked to the younger trans man. I came across the transmedicalist account about a week or so later, by my best recollection. I soon found out that the trans med’s collection of Twitter posts had the answer to the question I had about what it indicates if someone has no discomfort with their primary sex characteristics. Such a person is not compatible with having the type of gender dysphoria that my model was based on, which is the same thing the trans med has and is such an expert on.

The trans med also confirmed some things for me about what was happening in medicine. Those watered down criteria were not just there for show; there were people being approved for treatment based on them. The trans med saw a big problem with this, and legitimately dysphoric people who felt that something is not right, with how things are currently being done, would become somewhat common to come across as I went along. These people are pretty hard to come by, even on the internet, but they can recognize people who are not like them really fast, as a rule, and they understand very well that the care that so helps them is something that can devastate someone else’s life.

Images from Pivotal Development #1

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Outcome of Pivotal Development #2

Some Things Just Can't Be True

The second pivotal event wasn’t really pivotal, as nothing changed as a result, but it sticks out in my mind because this was one of the first times that someone directly challenged one of the assumptions of my model with evidence.

The idea of someone who had neurological gender dysphoria and was cured or “relieved” by puberty was totally from another universe. If such a person actually existed, I would be totally without an explanation, and it would seem like the gears of the universe going in reverse or something.

For sure, if they did exist, I would be all over it, trying to find out everything I can about the person. There was no way that my picture was that incomplete. I had to have missed some element, in that instance, but I wasn’t even going to consider it for more than 3 seconds it until I saw it in real life. Still yet, I had not yet even talked to more than one gender dysphoria patient, and my lack of exposure to a broad range of examples, to vet my model, had me in a mood to hedge my bets to some degree.

Responding to the Challenge

Being conservative, I responded to this woman’s claim that, not just a few, but *most*, as in a majority, of cases of gender dysphoria are relieved by puberty with this:

“There are extremely few cases of gender dysphoria where the person is relieved by going through puberty. This is at least for the condition as it has been historically understood. I’d have to look up the percentages, but my best estimate is dead zero and I’d be surprised to find hard evidence of anything above that.”

I truthfully had never checked to see how the condition had been historically understood, but I assumed that it was consistent with my model. My model felt, to me, like the “right” way to do things. It is how you are supposed to identify cases of gender dysphoria, and I assumed that the people in the past had used something similar. This seemed consistent with the affirmation model Drew Pinsky described, which lined up with my model very well.

Now We've Got Two of ’Em...Actually Make That Three

Another Twitter user replied to me that 80% of gender dysphoria cases are resolved by puberty, according to studies. I asked that Twitter user for a source for her claim.

In response to that request, a third Twitter user jumped into the conversation, and linked a research article that he said substantiated the claim that 80% of gender dysphoria cases are relieved by going through puberty. I was very eager to fact check this claim. I had a certainty that when you unpack the research and the data it is based on, it will not contradict my model at all.

I've Done This One Before

I am familiar with the experience in which someone makes a claim contrary to what I have said, supports it with “evidence,” and then when I unpack the evidence, I am shown to be right. When you have statistics, you have the numbers; then you have the story behind the numbers, and most people do not bother with the story. I was extremely confident that I would be vetted as right.

His link was bookmarked to a quote, within that research article, that stated the following:

“Evidence from the 10 available prospective follow-up studies from childhood to adolescence (reviewed in the study by Ristori and Steensma28) indicates that for ~80% of children who meet the criteria for GDC, the GD recedes with puberty.”

Finding The Story Behind The Numbers

My first task was to track down the study being referenced in item 28, that reviewed 10 studies, and I believe that I may have also googled this claim about 80% desistance. I ended up on a study from 2018, in which one of the authors of the studies the 80% desistance rate was based on had clarified that their study could not be used to measure desistance rates. Then I also looked at the study referenced in item 28, which was from 2016, and a related study from 2013, both of which covered desistance and persistence, and there was nothing to be found in them that contradicted my model.

These "Dysphoric" Adolescents Aren't The Matter at Hand

These were not groups of children who had been selected on criteria that included a naturally occurring, early onset conviction of being the sex opposite their body, in which the person thinks in terms of “I am,” that is accompanied by evidence an automatic, unconscious process that causes a conscious experience of torturing dysphoria. It was a mixture of all sorts of kids, that were not selected based on any one of the above. Most of the boys knew they were boys; most of the girls knew they were girls. Their “dysphoria” was over a variety of things, none of which directly addressed the type of ceaseless, unconscious process that I look for.

Naysayers Find Themselves Hoisted Upon Their Own Petard (in other words, telling me that I'm wrong proved that I am right)

The researchers *did*, however, have one very significant discovery. They found that children who believed that they *are* the “other” sex persisted, while the children who *wished* to be the other sex desisted. The way it was worded made it sound like persisting was a universal feature of the kids who believed that they *are* the other sex. The research he linked, and the research that it was based on, did not discredit my model, they confirmed it. The evidence against my claims was evidence for my claims.

The Researchers Need to Catch Up

I typed up a set of responses to the person who had posted the research, and I was also struck by how these researchers didn’t seem to understand this condition as well as I do. They seemed to have discovered that the children who persist will be the ones who think in terms of “I am,” rather than to have anticipated it. They also didn’t seem to understand how this key piece of the puzzle fits in with a broader biological phenomenon. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these were researchers at the famed Amsterdam clinic, the clinic that had developed the Dutch Protocol.

Images from Pivotal Development #2

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Outcome of Pivotal Development #3

Now We're Getting Somewhere

In the third pivotal development, my Q & A session with a young trans man, I made tremendous progress in vetting my model. I was able to ask detailed questions about every aspect of it that someone could verify. Obviously, no one is going to be able to verify if their core gender identity is housed in their most primitive brain structures, but things like early onset, thinking in terms of “I am,” and a detailed inquiry about the nature of how the dysphoria works were doable. Here was a chance for me to know if I’ve got it right, and I also wanted to ask some new questions that I had.

Interlude - A Strangely Credible Account of Being Cured

I had come across a young woman who described an unmistakable account of having the type of gender dysphoria that my model is based on, and who claimed to have been cured. The account she gave of her cure was extremely interesting, but there was something else that caught my attention.

She described having a sensation of a phantom male pubic region, from the time she was a very small child. By phantom, I mean that she felt like she had this body part, but it obviously was not there. I thought to myself that this sounded like her brain had a sense of the body that was supposed to be there, and being a female with gender dysphoria, her brain “thinks” that her body should be a male body. This was very intriguing, and I mentally filed this idea for later use.

To this day, I wonder if her account of gender dysphoria was somehow influenced by someone in the know. That would be the only way an otherwise layperson woman could describe such a credible account. Her claim to have been cured is a radical claim, as if this therapy modality that she received is a cure, it would have the potential to revolutionize a niche in medicine.

No One but a Real Expert Could Make This Up

The modality she described was not talk therapy; it involved a photographer who had her do exercises with artistic photographs he made of her. It also came across as extremely credible. It had the same quality, of being impossible to fake without the aid or influence of someone who has a lot of technical expertise. It also made a lot of sense in terms of my model. I put it on my todo list, to get some money to pay this woman for a detailed interview. I hoped her therapist would also be reachable in some way.

Some months after I came across this, I met a dysphoric person who was looking for an alternative treatment for dysphoria. She had made friends with some gender critical people who had encouraged her to detransition. I told her that the treatment this woman received, which had such extreme credibility, would be like me taking a walk into the wilderness and happening upon a unicorn. I hoped to do an interview with this woman and then possibly work with a therapist to design a protocol to test it. I would need a dysphoric person to be a test subject. I have still not done any of the items on my agenda for this “dysphoria cure,” as of the present.

Down a Sideroad About Neural Maps

Sometime subsequent to seeing this cured dysphoric female’s web article, I was listening to a podcast by a Twitter/YouTube account with the username The Thinking Atheist. It was about the issues surrounding trans people, and it had some trans people as participants in the discussion. One of the trans people, while speaking about the controversy over bathrooms, said “we just want to pee” and, as she was talking about this said that “people don’t understand neural maps.”

I didn’t fully understand what this trans person was saying. What could a “neural map” have to do with being a dysphoric person? The idea wasn’t absurd, that a dysphoric person would have a “neural map,” though I wasn’t completely sure what was meant by this. It was just that this trans person made reference to this neural map as if it were the central and defining feature of being a dysphoric person.

To me, it didn’t sound central, but more like some kind of related feature. I would have expected a well-versed person to say something like “people don’t understand what it’s like to have a neurologically based sex identity, that is the opposite of your phenotypical sex.” I didn’t expect it in exactly those words, as that was my proprietary way of describing it, but I expected that basic idea to be the centerpiece for any expert.

It All Seems to Fit Together - Let Me Ask Someone

That aside, I made a connection between this cured dysphoric female seeming to have a sense of the body that was supposed to be there and this concept of a neural map. All of this also seemed connected to this thing the older trans man had told me, that he expected to grow a penis when he was a child. I would eventually read, in the medical literature, that this expectation was common among dysphoric people born with female physiology. I could run this idea by my new trans man interview subject.

Another thing, that I wasn’t fully sure of, is what effect hormones have on dysphoria. I knew that they reduced dysphoria, but I didn’t fully understand how. It was obvious to me that feminizing or masculinizing the person’s body and voice will reduce dysphoria, but it seemed possible that some biochemical phenomenon was involved. I would waver back and forth on this when I thought about it. I mostly fell on the side that there was most likely no biochemical phenomenon involved, but I never had a certainty about this. To make a final verdict, I would need more information. My interview with my new trans man would also be an opportunity to find out more about this.

My Q & A Session With a Trans Man

The outcome of interview with my new trans man was that my model was vetted on every major line item. He confirmed the aspects of early onset, thinking in terms of “I am,” the dysphoria being ceaseless and automatic, the dysphoria being an experience of torture, and being a prisoner of the dysphoria. He also said that my description of what dysphoria felt like resonated with him, particularly the aspect that resembled a set of fingernails screeching down a chalkboard.

He said that he did believe there was some biochemical phenomenon involved in cross sex hormone therapy. He also said that when he had to take same sex hormones as a child, for PCOS, his dysphoria immediately became extremely intense and persistent. In reference to his brain having a sense of the body that should be there, he said that this was so acute in his case, that he would often forget that he doesn’t actually have a penis.

Behold - Another Piece of The Puzzle

Then he gave me another element of gender dysphoria. He said that when he looked in the mirror, he felt as if he was looking at a stranger. This was before he began taking testosterone. Following taking testosterone, he says he began to feel a sense of familiarity with the person in the mirror.

The new elements he gave about same sex hormones and the lack of familiarity with the person he saw in the mirror gave me something to work on. This is raw material that I could use to flesh out my model. That he had PCOS caused a lightbulb to light up in my mind. This is a disorder that causes female bodied people to produce testosterone. I had a hunch that there would be a correlation between this condition and gender dysphoria.

Belief, Unbelief, and a Potential Causal Mechanism

Shortly after developing my model, I had seriously questioned the idea on Drew Pinsky’s website, that gender identity is established during the sexual differentiation of the brain. I had seen trans women who displayed stereotypical aggressive male behavior. These trans women seemed to have masculinized brains, not feminized brains. It didn’t exactly add up, how a female gender identity could be established in a masculinized brain.

After some thought, I did think it had something to do with the sexual differentiation of the brain; I just thought that it must be some separate or independent part, that somehow had a different process. The sexual differentiation of the brain is all about hormone exposure or the lack thereof, and the question to be answered is “how did this person come to have an atypical hormonal environment, at some critical juncture prenatally.”

Fact Checking My New Hypothesis With ChatGPT

A genetic female fetus that produces testosterone seemed like a very likely answer, that would account for a lot of gender dysphoria cases. I asked ChatGPT about this, and ChatGPT confirmed that many genetic females who have gender dysphoria also have PCOS. I later hypothesized that the person having PCOS would be a pretty good indication that his or her mother had it, and this would also explain how androgens get into the prenatal environment.

Images from Pivotal Development #2

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The Main Outcomes of My Initial Model Vetting Process

There were five main outcomes of my initial model vetting process, following these four pivotal developments and the three or four months that followed.

I Was Right

The first was that my model was vetted on every line item. My original conception of this condition and its underlying biology was shown to be dead on.

No One Else Sees What I See

The second was that I had a very clear sense that the majority of people in this field, whether they be gender clinicians, researchers, or both, did not see this condition in the same terms that I did. It actually seemed that literally no one did. My conception of this condition seemed to be mine and mine alone. The clinicians and researchers understanding wasn’t as accurate, and they missed distinctions that were obvious to me.

These "Gender" People Aren't So Bad, New Friends, and More Research Material

The third was that I had created some opportunities to learn about and understand the atypical gender dysphoria patients, the ones who did not fit my model. This included some of the “gender” people who had sort of perturbed me in the beginning. I met a nonbinary woman who was more than happy to “teach” me about being nonbinary. I also met some people in the “wishes they were” category, which I had felt so perplexed about. I would eventually do detailed interviews with some of these people. I also found people who had posted a lot of their experiences online, who I could study.

New Questions To Be Answered

The fourth was that I had some new questions to find answers to, which provided a path that I could use to flesh out my model. I never really had a goal of building “the best model,” and I certainly didn’t develop or vet my model as a consequence of some predetermined goal to “develop the best model,” “be the first to (insert any goal here),” “show people I’m the best,” or anything along those lines.

My entire process, from the beginning, has been driven by curiosity, a drive to crack whatever puzzle is in front of me, and the deep satisfaction I get out of solving problems (solving problems = cracking puzzles, in how I personally think). For that reason. It may be more accurate to say: “gave me more questions to be answered” than to say: “gave me a way to flesh out my model,” even though the outcome and natural consequence of this process was fleshing out my model.

The way it works is I will continue asking questions, discovering new things, and refining my understanding until my understanding is complete, out of a natural drive that I have no interest in suppressing, and that I probably could not suppress if I tried. I am motivated on a minute-by-minute basis by this natural inclination. I have never made any sort of long-term plan as to how I will go about vetting my model.

More New Friends

The fifth outcome was that I made friends with several people who have neurological gender dysphoria. People would see my posts about my model, and it would resonate very strongly with them. One transsexual woman said that she might want to use one of my posts as a new introduction to the book she authored. I had people sending me DMs to thank me for posting such accurate information that helped others understand them.

My friendship with these people would give me an opportunity to ask questions and vet new ideas that I had, as I went along. It was also a human experience of allowing people to feel understood. This is not something such people have everyday, as they are chronically misunderstood. It was and continues to be a rewarding part of my research.