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LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

"Why I Transitioned: A Response" by marisa

24 Jan 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What claims does Marisa make about transgender identity?

0.031 - 2.785 Marisa

Why I Transitioned. A Response.

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Chapter 2: How do twin studies support the biological basis for trans identity?

3.89 - 19.704 Marisa

By Marissa. Published on January 19th, 2026. Fura Sunshine's post, Why I Transitioned. A case study, the OP, articulates a valuable theory for why some MTFs transition.

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Chapter 3: What is the Trans Double Bind and its implications?

20.785 - 32.015 Marisa

If you are MTF and feel the post describes you, I believe you. However, many statements from the post are wrong or overly broad. Subheading. My Claims.

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Chapter 4: What motivations lead individuals to transition?

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Chapter 5: How does introspective clarity affect understanding of transition?

33.557 - 40.483 Marisa

There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity. Twin studies are a good way to see this.

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Chapter 6: What is the significance of Marisa's personal experience with transition?

40.463 - 58.848 Marisa

2. Führer claims that trans people's apparent lack of introspective clarity may be evidence of deception. But trans people are incentivized not to attempt to share accurate answers to why do you really want to transition? This is the trans double bind. 3. I am a counterexample to Führer's theory.

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Chapter 7: What controversies exist around motivations for transitioning?

59.809 - 76.274 Marisa

I was an adolescent social outcast weeb but did not transition. I spent 14 years actualizing as a man, then transitioned at 31 only after becoming crippled by dysphoria. My example shows that Führer's phenotype can co-occur with or mask medically significant dysphoria.

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Chapter 8: What conclusions does Marisa draw about the nature of trans identity?

78.017 - 92.762 Marisa

Heading. A. Biologically Transgender. In the OP, Führer presents the body map theories under the umbrella of arcane neuropsychological phenomena, and then dismisses medical theories because the body map theory doesn't fit her friend group.

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93.367 - 114.16 Marisa

The body map theory is a straw man for biological causation because there are significant sex differences between men and women that are a. are not learned and b. not reducible to subconscious expectations about one's anatomy. The easiest way to see this is CAH. To quote from Berenbaum and Beltz, 2021. Quote

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115.49 - 135 Marisa

Studies of females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, CAH, show how prenatal androgens affect behavior across the lifespan, with large effects on gendered activity interests and engagement, moderate effects on spatial abilities, and relatively small, or no, effects on gender identity. End quote.

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135.021 - 159.468 Marisa

The sex difference in people versus things interests, hobbies, occupations, has been discussed extensively in our community. CAH shifts females towards male patent interests with small effects on gender identity without changes in anatomy. This finding is also notable because it shows male patent interests and female gender identity can coexist, at least in natal females. Subheading.

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160.449 - 185.669 Marisa

Twin studies a la LLM. I'm trans so I have a motive to search for evidence that suggests I am roughly biologically valid roughly and not subject to some kind of psychosocial delusion. It would be easy for me to cherry-pick individual papers to support that view. I'm trying to not do that. I'm also not going to attempt a full literature review here. Luckily it is 2026 and we have a better option.

186.73 - 213.093 Marisa

The ACE model from psychiatric genetics is a standard framework for decomposing the variants in a trait into three components. A equals additive genetics. Cumulative effect of individual alleles. C equals common environment. Parents, schooling, SES, etc. E equals non-shared environment, plus error. Randomness, idiosyncratic life events.

214.195 - 234.259 Marisa

There are at least nine primary twin studies on transgender identity or gender dysphoria. I created an LLM prompt asking for a literature review with the goal of extracting signal, not just from the trans twin literature, but from other research that could help give us some plausible bounds on the strength of biological and social causation. Here are the results.

234.931 - 261.107 Marisa

The format is point underscore estimate, range. There's a table here in the text. The heading row contains four columns which read model A C E. See the original text for the table content. I'm moderately confident my prompt was not biased because the A values here are lower than what I've gotten from Claude when asking for heritability estimates from twin studies only.

261.34 - 281.779 Marisa

Also, all the models included some discussion of the rapid rise in adolescent cases in the 2010s, often mentioning social contagion and ROGD theories explicitly. All the models also pointed out that the ACE model is a simplification and that gene-environment interaction may be significant. These are pretty wide error bars.

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