5. Who I am and why

A microautobiography

This was originally intended to be my first post on this platform, but I decided against publishing it because it seemed too personal and I wanted to focus on ideas. However, warmer heads have prevailed.

This blog is intended to be my vehicle for disseminating the information I believe is most crucial to having an accurate and useful worldview, because I believe a world with more well-informed people tends to be a better world. In this first post, I will introduce myself and set the stage for what will come next. Though the topics I cover will likely seem unrelated at times, I hope that with the aid of this introduction, the reader may see the connections between them. Subsequent posts are likely to be more descriptive or argumentative rather than narrative, but I feel it is important to understand the path I took to the positions for which I will advocate.

My name is Alice Fields. Or rather, that is the latest name I have chosen to adopt. And more than anything else in the world, I want to know true things.

I have always been different in ways that other people have noticed. Sometimes this has benefitted me. In most cases, it has been detrimental. I have distinct memories from my first birthday party, that I have confirmed decades later. I remember being weaned. And I remember what my father did to me between the ages of two and four. It stopped at four because he died. He noticed that I was different, and had conflicting feelings about it. He hated my differences, but also desired me. This caused him to make dishonest statements to justify his behaviors. I saw how he would feign anger and disapproval, even when I had done my best to follow the rules, so that he would be able to rationalize his actions to himself. These experiences cemented in me a fear of men, a sense of shame towards my own peculiarities, and a passionate hatred of dishonesty and obfuscation.

I had similar experiences with some regularity until I reached puberty. The stress caused me to feign illness in order to skip all of the 8th grade. I was withdrawn and morose, and had difficulty relating to, or even tolerating, other children my age, even those who did not actively abuse me. But I always loved my schoolwork, and some of my teachers. I preferred the company of adults, who were generally much less feral than my peers. And I loved books.

As testosterone did its work on me, the abuse subsided and my self-hatred grew. I did not connect my discomfort to my sex, because I had no language with which to do so. The changes wrought by puberty felt horrifying, but I assumed that everyone felt this way to some degree, and also that I was hideously ugly, which in hindsight seems unlikely. I was still generally perceived as gay, creepy, and a teacher’s pet, but I had managed to craft strategies for avoiding and dissuading bullying by that point and was mostly left alone. When I entered high school, my mother and stepfather told me that their policy towards regulating my behavior was this: if I maintained straight A’s and avoided impregnating any girls or getting arrested, they would be lax about discipline. So I did, and they were. Though I was awkward, nerdy, and unmasculine, I got attention from women. I went to parties, drank, smoked cigarettes and weed. I developed flowery language to describe the constant sucking pain inside me. And, thanks to one truly exceptional math teacher, I discovered a love of physics, and of scientific and mathematical thinking generally. I went to college on scholarship, met people who truly intellectually stimulated me for the first time, went to Occupy Wall Street in 2011, graduated with enough hours that they gave me two degrees, impressed my professors, and secured admission to five of the six graduate programs to which I applied. But always, the pain. By my senior year, I was on borrowed time. I smoked a pack and drank two bottles of wine every day. I took experimental psychedelics frequently, or sometimes just chugged bottles of cough syrup (don’t try this at home, y’all). I managed to crash inelegantly across the finish line, headed almost straight down. I shambled along in a zombielike state through one semester at Stanford, before realizing that I could not continue. 

I took time off of school, traveled, saw family, tried going back to school, left again, lived in a van with the woman who would end up becoming my first wife, went to a different school to study a different subject, left again. None of it made the pain stop. None of it made me able to function at a high level again. I felt like a constant disappointment, both to others and to myself. By chance, I saw a post on social media describing a deep sense of discomfort with one’s body, and recognized something in it. I had vaguely heard of transgender people by this time, but knew almost nothing about them and considered them a strange abnormality akin to conjoined twins. Quickly, I learned terms like “HRT”, “SRS”, “FFS”, etc. I knew almost immediately that this was at least part of the answer to my persistent dysfunction. In 2019, at age 26, I began my social and medical transition. 

The relief was almost instant, and intoxicating. I am sure I was extremely cringey in those early days, but for the first time in years I felt some sense of optimism. And the health contraindications between feminizing hormone therapy and my bad habits made me moderate my drinking and eventually quit nicotine. I lost weight. I even occasionally liked how I looked. On a good day, from the right angle. And I got positive attention. I was already vaguely progressive before my transition, but the culture war surrounding “transgender” people solidified my identity as a leftist, and I was not quiet about this. I started work as an actuary, but interpersonal difficulties combined with a bleakly persistent self-hatred sent me back to the mental hospital, across the country, and into the arms of the second woman I would marry. With her, I retreated almost entirely into myself. I did not work for two years, and avoided leaving the house whenever possible. The process of truly healing myself was ultimately fruitful, but frequently excruciating. I will always feel indebted to her for seeing me through this time, even though subsequent events gave us both cause for resentment. I underwent facial feminization surgery and breast augmentation, meticulously tuned my hormone dosage and then cycled my weight to feminize my body, got better at makeup, and worked on my voice. I started passing as female more and more consistently. And, strangely enough, this more than anything else started to put pressure on my progressive assumptions. I started taking walks for exercise around my neighborhood, but had to bring my wife’s pit bull along after the first one, due to how unsafe the sexual harassment made me feel. I usually carry a knife. 

And I noticed patterns in my harassers. The specter of male violence, abated for a time, returned, and now I had my full adult faculties with which to perceive it. I noticed other trends that were ill at ease alongside my progressive commitments. But more than anything else, it became sharply clear to me that men are inherently more dangerous to women (and those of us who look like women) than women are.

All of these thoughts were bubbling under the surface, but I was still resisting them. Then I took an exceptionally strong dose of psilocybin mushrooms. I sat in a dark room by myself for 6 hours, typing a note into my phone and crying. Though I was still struggling to find language for my thoughts, the core insight is this: there is inherent structure to reality. There are inherently, objectively better and worse ways of doing things, and when we ignore this, people suffer needlessly. But the truth hurts people’s feelings sometimes, so we are all committing slow societal suicide in order to avoid that awkwardness and guilt. This is a disaster, and stopping it is the only thing that matters.

Knowing how progressives thought, I expected pushback and I certainly got it. This was the final straw that ended my second marriage. I, a male person, tried to persuade a female person that males pose an inherent danger to females, and that this is worth accounting for rather than ignoring. She bitterly resisted this patently true position. And because of her refusal to acknowledge these concerns, her refusal to acknowledge difference, a man kicked in my door for the first time since I was four years old. This occurred on January 16, 2023.

She didn’t let him touch me at least, but I lost my home almost in an instant. I scrambled to find a way to sustain myself. I had sex for money, I leaned on people and then burned bridges, I behaved in a generally chaotic manner. And all the while, I studied. My statistical training was sufficient to allow me to interrogate methodology, rather than trusting the summaries provided by authors. I read articles and papers on the economic history of colonialism, on the unity and heritability of intelligence, on the true causes of transsexuality as best we understand them scientifically, on crime, on evolutionary psychology, physics, philosophy, and more. Now that I had shed the foundational false belief in the “blank slate” view of human nature, all the knowledge I had gained over the course of my life was finally able to cohere. And that was the last ingredient I needed to finally be able to thrive: cognitive consonance. I am someone who cares deeply about believing true things, and shedding my progressive dogmas and tribal political identity finally allowed the process of worldview refinement to cross some critical threshold of coherence and accuracy. The walls that I had felt closing in for as long as I could remember were finally opening up again. And after a lifetime of dedicated, vocal atheism and anti-theism, I began to dimly perceive what could only be called God. And He looked nothing at all like the gods others worship. Horrifying, mad, merciless, beautiful, impersonal. Irresistible. Not a mind like ours, but a principle. The First Asymmetry. The fact of difference. The inherent structure of reality. And reality is brutal. We cannot make it less so by lying about it. We may submit to it with skill and grace, or perish. He does not care.

Though many people who perceive the same looming catastrophe I do have concocted various schemes for arresting our cultural decay, I have come to believe that this effort is largely doomed. The forces involved are too vast, the changes needed too drastic, the hands committed to the project too few, the crucial truths too uncomfortable for most. But luckily, we have an escape rope in our inventory called artificial general intelligence. If we can achieve this, it will represent a phase transition in the nature of life, and would render irrelevant the various crises plaguing us. I am confident it can be achieved with resources that are negligible at the scales in question, and those resources are disproportionately controlled by people who tend to be comfortable with hard truths and open to reasoned argument. 

-Alice

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