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mlsu

I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words:

https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.

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Incredible

"The fact that I started a new career all over again, at the bottom of the ladder, after being fired by IBM and rejected by family and friends . . . may also give hope to others trapped in similar situations."

Thanks for calling that out, I'd like to read more about how that went. I'm considering what the best move for me is now, obviously with the terrible market and obscene competition, whether to try and leverage the amalgamation of skills I've built up and just push harder as a contractor, or pivot entirely down the meme path of trying trades. Being in her situation would perhaps be more wildly more difficult, but for different reasons and in different circumstances.

What also struck me about that snippet of the story, is that the context for what a career meant might have been a bit different than now. A career at one single company seems like quite a rarity these days, and we wouldn't necessarily consider it to be a career restart if you're just going to another company, unless you're perhaps of a certain generation.

If you’re changing your name and identity, don’t have a network, and can’t put any previous experience on your CV, I think that would absolutely qualify as a career restart today, even if you’re in the same broad industry and using many of the same skills.

Speaking of changing name and identity, Wikipedia doesn't have any information about her original name. It's strange that this information is missing, from a purely encyclopedic point of view. In fact, I cannot even find this information on the web.

Adressed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40650380

and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gend...

Thanks! To be honest I don't agree with that rule, but maybe HN is not the place to discuss Wikipedia's policies on sensitive subjects.

It's really tough. I have worked in an industry where I got credits for a decade in some higher quality productions as well. I had to start at 0, because credits are set in stone, and it would be dangerous to connect these two lifes for me.

I appreciate her making the effort to tell her story. I struggle sometimes to understand what it means when people say they feel born in the wrong gender. They way she describes it - not just about wanting to do 'girl' things but wanting to be soft and round and feminine - is eye-opening for me.

I read around reddit of experiences of people who wore VR headsets and played a character of the other gender. The NPCs treated them as such, but they themselves experienced gender incongruence. Their internal identity was at mismatch with how the NPCs treated them, and that helped them understand what gender dysphoria means.

if the NPCs can do this in a non trivial way it could be a really powerful experience.

Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented. I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body. Yes the new body is strange and interesting in some ways, but on an emotional level it’s like driving a different car.

It's not about the body itself but about how the universe treated the player.

Unfortunately I don't think VR will ever have enough bandwidth to provide an experience equivalent to Sword Art Online, ie full body immersion.

I will see if I can find them again.

> Can you link to the post about that? Because I’m guessing there’s a selection effect where only those who had profound experiences commented.

They didn't say everyone experienced it.

> I’ve done similar things in VR and found it wasn’t any different than when I had a robot body or a cartoon carrot body.

Did characters treat you as not man and not woman? And not in the way most English is gender neutral? It seems not similar otherwise.

As much as "trapped in the wrong body" is a cliché, the physical aspect of gender dysphoria is profound, and often overlooked. I don't care about competing in women's sports, or what locker room I had to use. I cared about my body becoming grotesque and alien to me, and became overwhelmed with how profoundly wrong it felt. It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a girl, regardless of how I'm treated. My dysphoria is actually worse when I'm alone, because I can't distract myself with socializing. It's hard to empathize with physical dysphoria if you've never felt it, but I appreciate your struggle.

> It's not that I want to look like a girl so I can be treated like one - I want to look like a girl, regardless of how I'm treated.

Same, I figured if I was on a desert island with nobody around and a machine that magically dispensed estrogen, it would actually be easier to transition, since I wouldn't have to justify my decision to anyone. That was part of how I convinced myself to start, way back before COVID.

I think that many struggle to understand because they think something like "how would it feel to want to be a woman", rather than flip it to their gender. So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc.

It's always hard to truly understand how another person views the world, but I've heard that approach work for others in the past.

> So if you're a cis man, try to imagine you were a trans man; born female, raised a girl, expected to conform to your local female beauty norms, be expected to bear children, less body hair and muscle mass, curves in places unfamiliar to you, flirted with by men, etc.

Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me, and the experience of having more body hair and muscle mass would be entirely foreign to me. If men flirting with me was off-putting I'd probably just assume I was gay, and I'm lucky enough to live in an environment where I don't have to buy into or perform traditional gender roles any more than I want to. It's probably easy for me to say, having never a experienced a mismatch, but any intrinsic sense of inner maleness that wasn't 'nurtured' into me ranks pretty low on the list of things that comprise my self-identity.

You have to understand that until extremely recently- and still, not everywhere, as politics is any indication- people very seriously and genuinely believe that being gay or trans is tantamount to being a pedophile in terms of wrongness. It isn't so much about how you feel, but how others are making you feel.

Imagine if you felt fine in your body... but people around you stared and turned up their nose at you wherever you went because there was some kind of rumour that said you were a pedo. Imagine how incredibly harmful that would be, day in and day out, to your psyche, to your mental health, unable to escape it. Imagine if everyone avoided you because- even if they didn't believe you were one- they didn't want to be seen associating with someone everyone thought was one. Imagine if your family believed that. Imagine, no matter how much you tried to say you weren't and prove you weren't, they still believed it, because that's what the culture you're in says it's equal a crime to.

It's no doubt that the people who persist because they know their personal truth are unfathomably strong people. And for those who don't make it, you can understand why. Once you realize this injustice, it's hard not to be on their side and be incensed against that prejudice, seeing the laws being passed in the US specifically to harm them, as ludicrous.

>Is it weird if I suspect that it wouldn't bother me? I'd have been raised from birth to expect those things so they wouldn't be surprising to girl-me

I guess you're making the assumption that "being raised from birth to expect" things is a stronger force than your own innate personality, desires, etc.

You might compare it to people who are "raised from birth to expect" to be attracted to the opposite sex, but that just isn't who they are.

I've heard the phrase "cis by default" used to describe this experience (which I mostly share). Essentially, the intensity of feelings regarding gender can vary widely from person into person and so a lot of people are fine with the gender they were born as not because they strongly feel like a woman/man, but precisely because they don't have strong feelings about it. (And therefore being transgender is the intersection of both "having a strong internal feeling about gender" and "the feelings you have about gender not matching what society categorizes your body as".)

That said, I suspect that at least some "cis by default" people would indeed experience feelings of a brain-body mismatch if they had different parts, it just happens to be something you can't test for.

> And therefore being transgender is the intersection of both "having a strong internal feeling about gender" and "the feelings you have about gender not matching what society categorizes your body as"

I am another cis man who suspects I would have been just as comfortable had I been born a cis woman, and I have independently come to a similar conclusion. I feel no need to emphasise my social or physical "masculinity", but neither do I make any effort towards being non-gender-conforming — I am perfectly happy having a beard, being hairy and wearing "men's" clothes. Conversely, if I had been born a woman with my same congenital personality, I think I wouldn't have made a particular effort to present my "femininity", but I would have been perfectly comfortable being less hairy, having boobs, and dressing and behaving as do some of my female friends (who are cis and hetero, homo, and bisexual) who, without being GNC, are not necessarily super-feminine.

What I would really like to know is whether I'm right in my intuition that certain cis-male and cis-female individuals feel the opposite. I imagine that cis men who enjoy "feeling like a man" or showing manliness (within the non-toxic and healthy range) are pretty sure they would have hated being born a woman. The same goes for cis women who love displaying their femininity; they probably feel they would hate having been born a man if they were to be asked.

That sounds like my experience. I didn't really begin questioning what I really "was" until I got beyond thinking that my desire to dress in women's clothing was more than just a "fetish," and I decided to see what I'd look like with a full feminine presentation. The answer was: I looked like me. And I turned out to be far more "passable" than I thought.

(There's always going to be people that recognize me for what I am. But, for the most part, they don't insult me about it to my face, or even mention it at all.)

Exactly. As a cis man the closest I have experienced was being mistaken for a girl (both as a kid and later when I had long hair) and getting cat-called or receiving unwanted sexual comments from strangers.

Those situations were rapidly defused when the people in question realized I was male (although as an adult I was genuinely worried it might result in violence if I didn't also ensure they understood I was straight) but I can't imagine what it would be like when most people wouldn't and would insist I'm a gender I'm not. Especially if my body also unhelpfully changed through hormone washes in ways that contradict my gender identity.

Thank you for sharing!! Fascinating and really helpful to those of us who are undergoing our own gender transitions!

Same link without SSL errors: https://archive.is/zVIWu

Interestingly the cert expired just a few days ago.

a fitting epitath?

Here lies xyz; their cert expired without renewal

https://web.archive.org/web/20240309142149/https://ai.eecs.u...

Better to share the non-ssl link: http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

Thanks for sharing!

In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!

Save as HTML with images and run through Calibre:

  $ ebook-convert index.html book.epub

Here are the files if you trust a rando on the internet. Since they're just ZIP archives, you can unpack and inspect both to make sure there's no JS there. .mobi looks fine on my Kindle.

https://0x0.st/Xc8M.epub

https://0x0.st/Xc8B.mobi

> if you trust a rando on the internet

Why did you say that, now I have to check the files :)

Thank you

A comment when an upvote would do - this is the kind of small act of generosity that I wish to acknowledge and praise in prose - thank you for taking the couple of minutes to do this. I've been feeling a little bleak about the internet lately as the SNR plummets in the tidal wave of AI seo search results, AI comments, etc. Thank you for taking the trouble. I went to EMFCamp in the UK a couple of weeks ago and had a similar resurgence in enthusiasm about simple things like asking a question of someone and getting an above-and-beyond, going-out-of-their-way response to share their enthusiasm and knowledge about something with you. We must defend these pockets of human interaction. [brought to you after a boozy work lunch but the sentiment is genuine].

A bit meta, but your response is part of boosting that SNR, in the best way possible.

We already saw the front-page discussion about "slop", but we don't have to let it wash over all of us, all of the time. Thank you (and GP) for doing your part!

MediaWiki2Latex can convert to ePub.

https://mediawiki2latex.wmflabs.org/

If you've got a Kobo, Pocket seems to recognize it as an article (it often doesn't) and renders it well enough.

EDIT: Nevermind, Pocket only captures the preface (first four minutes, basically).

Thank you so, so much for this link. Her creativity and bravery, and the way they're intertwined, is so incredibly inspiring.

(FYI: Readers should note that content warnings for self-harm apply in Part II.)

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