Profile
Part 1
My name is Tommy Crow. I’m a 29 year old rationalist transman living in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. It’s September 2025.
I live alone in a beautiful apartment. There is a small spiral staircase with an iron railing leading upstairs to my office. Downstairs is the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen with eating counter, and a nice spacious living room with a high ceiling and a balcony where I have coffee and stretch in the morning. I keep it very minimalist and bright and clean. In strategic places it’s also filled with aesthetically and philosophically beautiful things - love letters from Sebastian, a damaged1 construction cone from my first night as a man in Chicago (a symbol of the greatness of industrialization and hard work, as well as a souvenir from the place I “found myself”), an empty American/Norwegian WWII howitzer shell from Sebastian, Tom of Finland artwork, my favorite coffee table book War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq from David (a great piece of science and a testament to the human will to survive), framed patents of tower cranes and an M4 Sherman tank and tumescent local anesthesia liposuction cannulas (more on that later) gifted to me by Sebastian. For both aesthetic and philosophical reasons I’m drawn to heavy machinery and construction, with a particular interest in cranes and tanks, and I find it beautiful that my home is full of related items but hardly any of them were purchased by me. Probably >90% of them were given to me by those who love me. I have an incredibly rich life. I frequently find myself marveling at the wealth and diversity of love that I get to experience on a daily basis.
David and Sebastian are my two wonderful boyfriends. David I’ve been with for about four and a half years, Sebastian nearly three.
My practical applied ethics as most people would experience it on a day-to-day basis (and most of my policy positions) might be described as classically liberal. I care very much about your right to consensually negotiate for whatever you want and make mutually beneficial trades, even if what you want is strange. I want all conscious creatures to be happier and freer. I support unusual ways of pursuing happiness, as long as they are not interfering with the rights of others. I care about free speech (both legally and culturally), protections for true ideological minorities, expanding our moral circles to often-invisible minority groups (insects, small children, etc.), and enlightenment values broadly.
Some important things I believe, in no particular order:
You should only believe true things.
Lots of true facts are unpleasant. That doesn’t make them less true. (For example: facts about biological sex, facts about the prevalence of severe suffering such as in factory farms and hospitals and poor countries, etc.)
We should try to fix suffering.
Nature is brutal. Most people in developed countries have no concept of how brutal nature is, and they imagine pre-industrialization being more akin to Disney’s Pocahontas than the ugly affair it was. Industrialization is good. (Obviously, you have to do it in a smart way.)
Capitalism is good; it makes people both richer and happier. (Obviously, you have to do it in a smart way.)
Designing good economic policy is hard, and you should not assume that the obvious-looking policy will actually solve the problem you want it to solve. Price ceilings are the obvious example here – they will usually just make people poorer. There are lots of other things like this.
Most important things in the modern world aren’t zero-sum. For example, most rich people aren’t rich because they “took from poor people”; they’re rich because they created value for everyone, expanding the whole pie we eat from. Usually immigrants aren’t “taking jobs” that you would have gotten yourself; they’re creating value for everyone, expanding the whole pie we eat from. Etc.
[Insert a bunch of other Econ 101 and abundance-type principles here.] Painting with a very broad brush, academic economists generally do good work. People should pay attention to what they say and everyone should have a basic understanding of how supply and demand works.
As mentioned earlier, people should generally get to do what they want, unless it interferes with the freedoms of others. But sometimes you will really WANT to interfere with the freedoms of others. In these cases, you should still be honorable and refrain from doing so. For example: You should transition if you want to, but you should not try to force biological females to give up their right to free association so you can play sports with them. You should get gay married if you want to, but you should not try to force a Christian bakery to make your cake. This is part of your responsibility as a member of a free society.
Sex is good. Lots of needless suffering comes from moral panics around sex.
People frequently confuse disgust with morality, which causes them to persecute harmless people. Be careful. When you feel disgusted by someone, don’t automatically backfill rationalizations about why they’re a bad person. Think carefully about whether they are actually causing harm. (Steven Pinker stuff.)
Curiosity is a good thing, and people should be rewarded for posing sincere questions or comments from a place of respect, even if they don’t know the politically correct lingo.
People can be very, very different from one another. A lifestyle that’s good for one person can be catastrophic to another. “Typical mind”-based rules cause lots of needless suffering.
Being able to make sacrifices is an important virtue, but simultaneously, sacrifices are less necessary than people assume. You can often come up with creative ways to have your cake and eat it too – and you should do that, when you can. Joy is good.
Today I got up at 8:00 AM and had coffee and tidied up the house and showered. I started work around 10:15 at the library. Around 3:15 I took a break from working and got a rotisserie chicken from Metro Market. I ate rotisserie chicken and an apple at home. I spend a lot of time on the floor, which is another reason I keep it very clean. For a while in college while I was being a woman, I developed very “adult” movement habits, spending my days walking in straight lines on sidewalks, sitting on chairs, or cuddled on soft couches. Not only is that terrible for your mobility, but I think the lack of physical variety actually dulls your creativity. Now I absent-mindedly roll on the ground and squat in various weird positions and use the entirety of the space while I read or work, like kids do, and dance ugly-ly, and I feel much more human.
I like to open all the windows and turn on the fans so the breezes blow through the whole apartment. The trees surrounding all my windows are a gorgeous bright yellow and I just drink it in throughout September. The color always reminds me of my early transition and it feels so good to look at. When I decided to try becoming a man after, really, a lifetime of dabbling in it and experiencing these weird urges that seemed to stem from a nonverbal part of my brain, my own reaction to it was far beyond what I expected. Frankly, before transitioning, I didn’t think I was that transgender. I thought I was maybe just a little bit transgender, or a tomboy, or butch (at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what you call it), and an autoandrophile, which is a real fetish that I definitely do have. But then I tried transitioning and it was like the doors to Heaven cracked open and everything fell into place like it was “meant to be”, in an experience on par only with things I’ve felt in fundamentalist religion. Every aspect of masculinization both socially and physically felt indescribably “right” on this deep instinctive level in my bones. The last time I experienced a powerful sensation of “meant to be” I was religious and actually BELIEVED that things are meant to be. I no longer believe that everything is orchestrated by a cosmic author, and yet my animal brain has a primal instinct that I was “meant to be male”, which is both a fascinating phenomenon from an academic perspective, and a deliriously joyful thing to experience. At this time, I started seeing the color yellow more vividly. It physically looked brighter and felt amazing to look at, and that never went away. Now I decorate my house in yellow accents (I love the Caterpillar logo so much) and look forward to the leaves in September every year.
I wouldn’t have taken it unless it seemed damaged and apparently abandoned, since that would be stealing from the taxpayers.