-Ben thought I was wrong to think of this 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._
+For example, in an argument on Discord in January 2019, I said, "I need the phrase 'actual women' in my expressive vocabulary to talk about the phenomenon where, if transition technology were to improve, then the people we call 'trans women' would want to make use of that technology; I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes between the original thing that already exists without having to try, and the artificial thing that's trying to imitate it to the limits of available technology".
+
+Kelsey Piper replied, "[T]he people getting surgery to have bodies that do 'women' more the way they want are mostly cis women [...] I don't think 'people who'd get surgery to have the ideal female body' cuts anything at the joints."
+
+Another woman said, "'the original thing that already exists without having to try' sounds fake to me" (to the acclaim of 4 "+1" emoji reactions).
+
+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, which is ubiquitous in human life. 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. ([The elephant in the brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) knows it wouldn't be able to get away with _that_.) But if everyone correlatedly plays dumb whenever someone tries to _talk_ about sex in clear language in a context where that could conceivably hurt some trans person's feelings, I think what you have is a culture of _de facto_ biological sex denialism.