+Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
+
+However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever than means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with hearts; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) that emerged shortly after puberty ...
+
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effiminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. [I don't think it's the same thing](TODO: linky autogenderphilia reply?), and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
+
+Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my [break with progressive morality](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/late-onset/). I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](TODO linky Reason Hit & Run) [libertarian](TODO linky Roderick Long) [blogosphere](TODO linky ... Cafe Hayek?).) But there was still an embedded cultural assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
+
+(I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
+
+Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Waton affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment.
+
+With some prompting from a right-wing friend (a self-aware autogynephile who I had gone crossdressing in public once with back in the early 'tens, who had gone trad and started lifting weights in the intervening few years and felt good about his AGP starting to abate), I was questioning it now.
+
+Among many works which I had previously skimmed in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet was Mencius Moldbug's anti-democratic (!) political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), which caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+
+In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
+
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
+
+Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
+
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
+
+This is the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without really putting any serious weight on it.
+
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
+
+Until suddenly, in the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wish they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/). When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies.
+
+The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dimiss as prejudice, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the trevails of blacks and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembers the world of 2006, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that they were, in fact, straight boys, and didn't think the world owed them deference for their perversion. And this experience _did_ raise further questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I couldn't help but notice that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)
+
+While I was in this flurry of excitement about my recent updates and the insanity around me, I thought back to that "at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women" Yudkowsky post from back in March that had been my wake-up call to all this. What _was_ going on there?
+
+Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn't have dared bother Eliezer Yudkowsky (who I considered to be the most important person in the world) on _any_ topic, let alone this weird personal obsession of mine. But ... Yudkowsky _had_ posted about how he was willing to accept money to do things he otherwise wouldn't in exchange for enough money to feel happy abou the trade—a Happy Price, or [Cheerful Price, as the custom was later termed](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MzKKi7niyEqkBPnyu/your-cheerful-price)—and his [schedule of happy prices](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10153956696609228) listed $1,000 as the price for a 2 hour conversation. Cheap, right?!
+
+I had his email address from previous contract work I had done for MIRI back in '12, so I wrote him offering $1K to talk about sometime between [January 2009](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and [March of the current year](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228) what kind of _massive_ update he made on the topics of human psychological sex differences and MtF transsexuality, mentioning that I had been "feeling baffled and disappointed (although I shouldn't be) that the rationality community is getting this _really easy_ scientific question wrong."
+
+[TODO: I can't actually confirm or deny whether he accepted the happy price offer because if we did talk, it would have been a private conversation]