As I understand it, there is a phenomenon among transgender people where no matter what they do they can't help but ask themselves the question, "Am I really an [insert self-reported gender category here]?" In the past, a few people have called for a LessWrong-style dissolution of this question. This is how I approach the problem.

There are two caveats which I must address in the beginning.

The first caveat has to do with hypotheses about the etiology of the transgender condition. There are many possible causes of gender identity self-reports, but I don't think it's too controversial to propose that at least some of the transgender self-reports might result from the same mechanism as cisgender self-reports. Again, the idea is that there is some 'self-reporting algorithm', that takes some input that we don't yet know about, and outputs a gender category, and that both cisgender people and transgender people have this. It's not hard to come up with just-so stories about why having such an algorithm and caring about its output might have been adaptive. This is, however, an assumption. In theory, the self-reports from transgender people could have a cause separate from the self-reports of cisgender people, but it's not what I expect.

The second caveat has to do with essentialism. In the past calls for an article like this one, I saw people point out that we reason about gender as if it is an essence, and that any dissolution would have to avoid this mistake. But there's a difference between describing an algorithm that produces a category which feels like an essence, and providing an essentialist explanation. My dissolution will talk about essences because the human mind reasons with them, but my dissolution itself will not be essentialist in nature.

Humans universally make inferences about their typicality with respect to their self-reported gender. Check Google Scholar for 'self-perceived gender typicality' for further reading. So when I refer to a transman, by my model, I mean, "A human whose self-reporting algorithm returns the gender category 'male', but whose self-perceived gender typicality checker returns 'Highly atypical!'"

And the word 'human' at the beginning of that sentence is important. I do not mean "A human that is secretly, essentially a girl," or "A human that is secretly, essentially a boy,"; I just mean a human. I postulate that there ar...

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