227B. Gender and Dysmorphia

Gender has become one of the most controversial words in the English language. Since it is a key factor in Demographic Collapse, it's time to look at it objectively.

I was born in California (a very progressive American state) just over 60 years ago. Back then, for over 99% of the world, there were only 2 (binary) genders. Homosexuality was the ultimate parental boogie man that would afflict only the most cursed of families. Of course times have changed, but if you are anywhere near my age, I understand if you aren’t thrilled with that change. I’m not here to disrespect or minimize your feelings, I totally get it. But, with your permission (consent), I’m going to explain a few things that you need to know as I attempt to explain why we have pulled the emergency brakes on the making of new children.

If any of my brothers and sisters feel triggered and need to stop reading at any time, I totally get it. I operate inside a Large Tribe Worldview, so I embrace everyone as part of my tribe, even the really annoying people. That doesn’t mean I agree with everyone, but diversity (including thought diversity) is perhaps the ultimate super power of the human race.

Some Gender Language/Definitions

Cis: A term borrowed from chemistry, “Cis” means that if you were born a “boy” and grew up to be a Man, you are “Cis”. The same applies if you were born a “girl” and grew up to be a Woman. 98 to 99% of people are “Cis”.

Gender and Birth Sex: If you were not born intersexed (see below), you were either born male (XY chromosome) or female (XX chromosome). We call this Assigned Male at Birth (AMAB) or Assigned Female at Birth (AFAB). Some people feel that they were born on the wrong team or aren’t strictly on one team. In such cases, their Gender does not match their Birth Sex.

Trans: Another term borrowed from chemistry (Trans-fats, etc), it means the person identifies as “the other gender” from what their assigned sex at birth is.

Non-Binary (NB): An NB person just isn’t on either team. They may consider themselves non-gendered, or a mix of genders. We’ve always had “Tomboys” and “Sensitive Guys”, and it’s always been understood that there are people in the middle. NB’s are 26+% likely to also be on the asexuality spectrum. I would recommend you assume they are until they have a reason to tell you otherwise, though that’s pretty good advice with all genders.

Intersex: Some people are born with genetic variations that alter or block the normal expression of key sex hormones. Some of these affect receptors creating intolerance, such as how Diabetes Type 2 affects intolerance to insulin. There is no agreed upon threshold for what counts and Intersex, but a safe estimate is that 0.5% of Americans have this. The result is that they might grow up looking one gender but have sex organs associated with the other gender. This isn’t the result of “transition”, they are born this way. This may or may not result in Gender Dysmorphia, but social stygma usually causes doctors to advise parents to keep their intersex child’s condition a secret. Sports competition can be controversial.

Neurodivergent (ND): This is the broader category of atypical cognitive patterns/systems that includes “Autism”. 6 to 20% of those identified as “Autistic” are Trans or NB, which is about 6 times more likely than cis people experience.

Cis Hetero (Straight): The person links their gender to their birth sex, and is attracted to the other sex. Someone who identifies as “asexual” can still feel attraction, but it’s typically more conditional. So you can be both Straight and Asexual.

Cis Homo (Gay/Lesbian): Just saying “Homo” is derogatory, so I recommend you don’t say that to people, especially if you are Straight. You identify as your birth sex, and you are attracted to people who match your birth sex.

Note About Sexuality: Sexuality is an even more complex subject than Gender, so I’m not going to get further into that here. As you can imagine, if someone is non-cis, this can get very complicated. If you get close enough to a non-cis person that they move you from the “None of your Business” category to the “Friend+” category, then it becomes okay to ask them to explain how they feel on the subject. They still might decline, especially if they don’t feel that way about you.

Dysmorphia

“Dysmorphia is a mental health condition characterized by an intense, obsessive preoccupation with one or more perceived flaws in physical appearance that are minor or invisible to others.”

There are two primary forms of Dysmorphia, and someone can have both. Dysmorphia can be very intense. It is estimated that 18% of people have some form of it. Extreme cases can be fatal. Generally Gender Dysmorphia is considered intrinsic and not something that can be “cured”. Body Dysmorphia can theoretically be cured, but outcomes are low and from my experience therapists without it don’t understand it well enough to treat it effectively.

• Gender Dysmorphia: The person feels that they have a body with the wrong gender. They often describe being a woman trapped in a man’s body, or a man trapped in a woman’s body. This is, of course, very stressful. As with Body Dysmorphia (below), untreated the risk of self deletion is high. The technology to literally change a person’s body sufficiently to satisfy the person has only been around in the last 50 years as neuroscience and surgical options have advanced. Outcomes with today’s tech are much better than they were 40 or even 20 years ago. Prices and availability have also improved a lot. This can be a very expensive compulsion. There are always risks involved, anyone willing to “transition” is not having a “fad”. Changes are often irreversible.

• Body Dysmorphia: The person feels like there is something unacceptable about their body. The most common and dangerous compulsion is that they feel they are too fat. This can cause any of a variety of Eating Disorders (EDs). Anorexia Nervosa leads to death within 4 years in 5% of cases. I have Body Dysmorphia (undiagnosed) but have never had an ED. I deal with it by running and being vegan.

Warnings

Gender and Body perceptions are typically very intense and personal. People who try to “fix” people with these traits can do a lot of harm in the process. This is especially true if they aren’t qualified to do so, which is almost always the case. A trained person wouldn’t approach these conditions as “curable”, but as something that can be managed.

My Personal Traits

I will share my experience here as an aid to others. I realize that sharing this information puts me at risk of harm from some people. I’ve never felt any attraction to men, so I’m “Straight” in the traditional sense. I’m a gay magnet because of my training so it’s not like I just haven’t figured that out yet. That’s probably good because my violent Turkish father would have deleted me for sure if I was.

I didn’t have any positive male role models growing up, until Olympic and World Record holder Tommie Smith began coaching me when I was 17 (and homeless). That emotional support was critical to my surviving that difficult period. I did have a strong female role model in my grandmother Marjorie, who was a rockstar. I didn’t see her very often, but she gave me her Barbie collection when I was ~6.

This was clearly Marjorie’s passion as her collection was immense. It came with a catalog and I did the math and realized that her collection was the most expensive thing our family had, worth even more than my mother’s poorly maintained Toyota. My family couldn’t afford clothes for me, so I could imagine what it would be like to have fancy clothes when I was playing with those dolls.

Of course when my father got custody of me when I was 10, they didn’t travel with me to his house. I was always “sensitive” (but “straight”). I was also always on the asexuality spectrum (specifically: Romantic Demisexual), probably due to the unkind introduction to sexual activity from the age of 7. By that age everyone, even my teachers, treated me as a full adult. I did everything except pay taxes. Well, when I moved to the North side of Santa Monica when my father got custody of me, the Santa Monica Malibu Unified school district didn’t disclose my cognitive status to the new schools, which started treating me as a child. This caused some friction, especially when I started modifying the national political landscape at age 14.

In 2001 the Los Angeles Times “outed” me in the article Boy You Fight Like a Girl. The LGBTQ community started making a big deal about me, but I just told them I’m a normal person. But I’ve been considering myself NB for at least the last 10 years. That would have been covered by the “Q” in LGBTQ, but I’ve never felt Queer. I feel normal. I have a mix of male and female gender traits and “more mirror” whichever is more useful in any situation I am in. As with other NDs, I mirror a lot in order to pass as neurotypical, so that’s something I’d have to do anyway. That adaptability means I have a fairly wide range of compatibility in my relationships.

Pronouns

I seem to view pronouns differently than everyone else, so I may annoy the LGBTQ community with my views. Since I don’t experience jealousy or entitlement, I don’t feel that I’m entitled to make people use pronouns of my choice. People can call me she, he, or even “it”. I don’t care as long as they know how to use pronouns in a grammatically correct way. Trying to force behavior on the people around you without their consent is a sure fire way to cause conflict and resentment.

I think a lot of people in the LGBTQ (and no I’m not going to type 20+ letters) community do themselves a disservice by acting entitled around cis hetero people. That’s the express route to getting Small Tribe Worldview people to put you in the “Not my tribe” category.

Gender “Traits”

It’s generally accepted that men are more physical, more sexually assertive, less emotional, and less empathic. Of course none of these traits are binaries, and people can have wide ranges of these traits regardless of their Gender.

Talking to Trans people who are in the process of transitioning has taught me a lot. When they start taking hormones to alter their physiology and gender, it literally changes their Gender mentally also.

Men who start taking Estrogen find that their empathy expands tremendously, with relationships previously invisible to them becoming visible. They also tend to have a drop in sex drive, but certainly so if they take androgen blockers.

Women who start taking Testosterone (“T”) to transition to male have even more profoun experiences. Their emotions start to “fog” and they become less perceptive. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s a thing. One explained that they turned into a “capacitor” that just filled up until they exploded when full. I’m talking emotionally here, not sexually. They also experience a huge increase in sex drive, which most likely find positive. Slow released gel patches gave them a strong “push”. But if they tried to use injectable T, then that was like strapping a rocket to their ass.

I found that interesting, since I started reading all the major sex research books when I was 10, but didn’t really understand what the big deal was until I was almost 13. When puberty kicked in, I was like “oh crap, now I know why people get so crazy.” Taking T causes permanent irreversible changes in women, so that’s a very serious decision. But a woman will never truly understand what it’s like to have a male body unless they do something like that. There are very serious physiological differences that normally a person will never appreciate unless they gender transition. Of course that’s less than 1% of the population.

Gender Empathy

I’ve always seemed to have extraordinary empathy, even compared to the neurotypical women around me. But from listening to transitioning people, there seems to be more than just a quantitative difference between the genders. They process information from their environments differently.

A man is wired to protect the women and children around them. Of course our dystopian society produces exceptions like my father, but in his case he was tortured for 6 months in Iran before being exiled to the USA, so I don’t consider him a “normal” man. The “bad men” are a small minority of the population, but it is human nature to prioritize threats so their imprint on their victims can create an exaggerated impression of gender threat applied to the entire gender.

Men understand that any conflict with another man can be fatal. We don’t generally panic over this, it’s our biological role to navigate these situations. So they usually develop the “Bro Code” skill which allows them to show the proper respect to other men and de-escalate conflicts. The best solution to a conflict is to not have a fight, so men take this VERY seriously.

As men walk through life, they are much more focused on “kinetic events”, living things moving around them that could present threats. De-escalating with wild animals is also a thing, something I got very good at as I grew up feral during most of my childhood. That’s a skill, and not a binary.

Women, by contrast, are like living air traffic controllers. Not of kinetic objects like men, but of feelings, thoughts, objectives. If you look at this as the female equivalent of the “Bro Code” (sometimes called “The Sisterhood”), women are very good at respecting each other’s “airspace” and complying with requests to change speed or altitude. Men typically are not aware of “airspace” at this level and often fail to comply. Women will often check the man and insist he comes into compliance.

How Technology Has Affected Gender

Men cost more calories to keep alive every day than women, so they are inefficient in roles that women can do equally well. Until about 200 years ago men’s strength and speed more than made up for this and male babies were preferred. Industrialization changed all this, so that even children could run machines as well as men. That’s why early industrialists like Henry Ford preferred to hire young children in their factories.

As automation increased and women began entering the workplace en mass post WW2, men and women were increasingly being asked to do similar tasks with no gender advantage to men. That puts them at a biological and economic disadvantage. Laws to advantage women in education rapidly made up the education gap and now there is a huge education gap that favors women. That makes sense because women are advantaged naturally in roles that require communication skills but not strength, like most corporate jobs.

A lot of those college degrees that women were getting were in programs that relied heavily on communication, like Human Resources and Psychology. Women vastly dominate those roles in the economy now. Not only are those “Gatekeeper” roles that determine who gets hired, promoted, and fired, but they are also “Adder” (not Multiplier) roles as I described in my Moneyball 2.0 paper.

If women that don’t like men get into Gatekeeper roles, they can eliminate men from the workforce, so the rise in “man hate” is of particular interest here. Perhaps of even more importance is that AI can now communicate, at equal or even better levels than women can. AI is extremely adept at replacing both “Adder” and communication roles in the workforce. The result is that women are firing men, and AI is firing women. Men often blame this on women/DEI, and women blame this on “Patriarchy”. I explained in my Gender Economics paper that for 99%ers (people who actually have jobs) we don’t actually live in a Patriarchy anymore. The 1%ers don’t care about Patriarchy since they are Small Tribers (like almost everyone) and consider all the 1%ers as being “in-tribe” regardless of their gender.

Thus I would argue that this misframing is one (of many) components fueling misandry, and that as AI fires more women that’s only going to get worse.

Institutional and Security Concerns of Gender

We used to live in tribes and our biological gender roles complimented each other. As we adopted technology and “advanced” (unequal) social systems, that was increasingly disrupted. Unequal social systems become increasingly unequal over time, and technology has only accelerated this process. Soon we will have Trillionaires, who are more powerful than any King of old.

“Security” has always been a concern for humans over the last 250,000 years. It’s a concern for every animal on Earth. But Security/Safety has never been a “right”. It was a daily fight, with winners and losers. Tribal cohesion was critical, and any lapse in the vigilance of the men would lead to loss of life of women and children. There was always a predator waiting in the bushes for the adults to have an argument so they could drag off a child. For that 99+% of the time we have existed as Tribals, we all had Large Tribe Worldviews. Everyone in our Tribe was part of our Tribe, and deserved protection.

With advanced social systems, only the people at the top were truly “protected”. Those people were in their own Tribe with their own rules/laws and that’s especially true now. Today we’ve all been programmed with Small Tribe Worldviews, and our Tribes often just include our very immediate family. Everyone else is at best secondary.

I often hear women say “I don’t need a man”. Let’s assume that’s true. Then you also have to admit “I don’t need anyone to protect me.” That might also be true, depending on where you live. If you live in a warzone or in an American city (essentially constant warzones) then you probably do. But you may assume you don’t until you do.

Men used to step in to protect women they didn’t know, if they saw them being threatened or attacked. That’s their biological gender role, it is instinctual. But in a Small Tribe Worldview, this instinct is muted for those outside the Tribe. With misandry rates approaching 30% in the West, men will get shamed on a daily basis by women. This factors large when a man is doing the math trying to decide if he should risk his life to protect a woman he doesn’t know.

Those that society most often considers “Not in Tribe” are the most often subject to attack by strangers. That includes trans, NB, ND, LGBTQ, racial minorities, and the homeless. Men are 11.5 times more likely to be killed by a stranger than a woman is. White cis hetero women are the least likely women to be attacked in the West by strangers. Nonetheless, that’s the specific demographic that self-reports the highest rates of misandry.

In gaming we’ve always understood that protection had a cost. If you had a caravan that you needed to get from City A to Village B, you had to pay to hire mercenaries to provide protection. This had a cost, and mercenaries were risking their lives so that wouldn’t be cheap. In WW1 and WW2 we had to protect our merchant ships with warships in convoys or risk losing them to submarines and surface raiders. This was very expensive. Now in the Strait of Hormuz, no one is safe, not even aircraft carriers. The bill, just for the USA, is apparently $400,000,000,000 for the next few months.

If you are a 1%er, you understand this and always have bodyguards. If you saw the movie Michael that just came out (very good movie btw) you can see that the first thing his father did once they had money was to hire a bodyguard for Michael. It didn’t matter that Michael was male, he needed a man with advanced protection skills looking out for him at all times. That person became perhaps the only person in Michael’s life that he could depend on.

When I was 9 I got tired of being bullied at school, so I organised all the “misfits” in my school into our own gang under my leadership. The next time 3 bullies came for one of us, I let loose with our “secret call sign” and 40 (mostly smaller) kids surrounded the bullies. We never had any problems after that. Why be a victim if you have other options? Because I understood the Bro and Feral Codes, no punches were thrown and everyone went their own way peacefully.

In the next paper, I’m going to dedicate the entire discussion to Real Space Threats because this is the most often cited reason that I hear misandrists cite for their misandry when I survey them on LinkedIn. It’s always some form of “you deserve to be bashed because you threaten us, and thus are morally inferior.” This is Gender Supremacy language which I recently explained how to identify at length. In order to unpack whether this is really the source of the sudden rise in misandry, it deserves a rigorous analysis. We can’t just wave our arms and assume it is true or false.