+]
+
+(It was also around this time that I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into the [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/) office library, which was sometimes possible for community members to visit. It seemed like something Harry Potter-Evans-Verres would do—and ominously, I noticed, not like something Hermione Granger would do.)
+
+Gatekeeping sessions finished, I finally started HRT at the end of December 2016. In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I promised myself (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199)) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new pseudonymous blog was for.
+
+... the promise didn't take. There was just too much gender-identity nonsense on my Facebook feed; I _had_ to push back on some of it.
+
+"Folks, I'm not sure it's feasible to have an intellectually-honest real-name public conversation about the etiology of MtF," I wrote in one thread. "If no one is willing to mention some of the key relevant facts, maybe it's less misleading to just say nothing."
+
+As a result of that, I got a PM from a woman whose marriage had fallen apart after (among other things) her husband transitioned. She told me about the parts of her husband's story that had never quite made sense to her (but which sounded like a textbook case from my reading). In her telling, the husband was always more emotionally tentative and less comfortable with the standard gender role and status stuff, but in the way of like, a geeky nerd guy, not in the way of someone feminine. He was into crossdressing sometimes, but she had thought that was just a weird and insignificant kink, not that he didn't like being a man—until they moved to the Bay Area and he fell in with a social-justicey crowd. When I linked her to Kay Brown's article on ["Advice for Wives and Girlfriends of Autogynephiles"](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/advice-for-wivesgirlfriends-of-autogynephiles/), her response was, "Holy shit, this is _exactly_ what happened with me."
+
+[TODO: the story of my Facebook crusade, going off the rails, getting hospitalized]
+
+A striking pattern from my attempts to argue with people about the two-type taxonomy was the tendency for the conversation to get derailed on some variation of "Well, the word _woman_ doesn't necessarily mean that," often with a link to ["The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), a 2014 post by Scott Alexander arguing that because categories exist in our model of the world rather than the world itself, there's nothing wrong with simply _defining_ trans people to be their preferred gender, in order to alleviate their dysphoria.
+
+This ... really wasn't what I was trying to talk about. _I_ thought I was trying to talk about autogynephilia as an _empirical_ theory of psychology, the truth or falsity of which obviously cannot be altered by changing the meanings of words.
+
+Psychology is a complicated empirical science: no matter how "obvious" I might think something is, I have to admit that I could be wrong—[not just as an obligatory profession of humility, but _actually_ wrong in the real world](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GrDqnMjhqoxiqpQPw/the-proper-use-of-humility). If my fellow rationalists weren't sold on the autogynephilia and transgender thing, I might be a bit disappointed, but it's definitely not grounds to denounce the entire community as a failure or a fraud.
+
+But this "I can define the word _woman_ any way I want" mind game? _That_ part was _absolutely_ clear-cut. That part of the argument, I knew I could win.
+
+To be clear, it's _true_ that categories exist in our model of the world, rather than the world itself—the "map", not the "territory"—and it's true that trans women might be women _with respect to_ some genuinely useful definition of the word "woman." However, the Scott Alexander piece that people kept linking to me goes further, claiming that we can redefine gender categories _in order to make trans people feel better_: