-I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.
+The problem with this kind of exchange is not that anyone is being shouted down, nor that anyone is lying. The _problem_ is that people are motivatedly, [algorithmically](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie) "playing dumb." I wish we had better terminology for this phenomenon. By "playing dumb", I don't mean that to suggest that Kelsey was _consciously_ thinking, "I'm playing dumb in order gain an advantage in this argument". I don't doubt that, _subjectively_, mentioning that cis women also get cosmetic surgery sometimes felt like a relevant reply. It's just that, in context, I was very obviously trying to talk about the "biological sex" thing, and Kelsey could have figured that out _if she had wanted to_.
+
+It's not that anyone explicitly said, "Biological sex isn't real" in those words. But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt someone's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.
+
+Ben thought I was wrong to think of this kind of behavior as non-ostracisizing. The deluge of motivated nitpicking _is_ an implied marginalization threat, he explained: the game people are playing when they do that is to force me to choose between doing arbitarily large amounts of interpretive labor, or being cast as never having answered these construed-as-reasonable objections, and therefore over time losing standing to make the claim, being thought of as unreasonable, not getting invited to events, _&c._
+
+I saw the dynamic he was pointing at, but as a matter of personality, I was more inclined to respond, "Welp, I guess I need to write faster and more clearly", rather than to say, "You're dishonestly demanding arbitrarily large amounts of interpretive labor from me." I thought Ben was far too quick to give up on people who he modeled as trying not to understand, whereas I continued to have faith in the possibility of _making_ them understand if I just never gave up. Not to be _so_ much of a scrub as to play chess with a pigeon (which shits on the board and then struts around like it's won), or wrestle with a pig (which gets you both dirty, and the pig likes it), or dispute what the Tortise said to Achilles—but to hold out hope that people in "the community" could only be _boundedly_ motivatedly dense, and anyway that giving up wouldn't make me a stronger writer.