+As it happens, in our world, the defensive cover-up consists of _throwing me under the bus_. Facing censure from the egregore for being insufficiently progressive, we can't defend ourselves ideologically. (_We_ think we're egalitarians, but progressives won't buy that because we like markets too much.) We can't point to our racial diversity. (Mostly white if not Jewish, with a scattering of Asians.) The sex balance is doing a little better after hybridizing with Tumblr and Effective Alruism (as [contrasted with the _Overcoming Bias_ days](/2017/Dec/a-common-misunderstanding-or-the-spirit-of-the-staircase-24-january-2009/)), but still isn't great.
+
+But _trans!_ We do have plenty of trans people to trot out as a shield! [Jacob Falkovich noted](https://twitter.com/yashkaf/status/1275524303430262790) (on 23 June 2020, just after _Slate Star Codex_ went down), "The two demographics most over-represented in the SlateStarCodex readership according to the surveys are transgender people and Ph.D. holders." Scott Aaronson [noted (in commentary on the _Times_ article) that](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=5310) "the rationalist community's legendary openness to alternative gender identities and sexualities" as something that would have "complicated the picture" of our portrayal as anti-feminist.
+
+Even the _haters_ grudgingly give Alexander credit for "... Not Man for the Categories": ["I strongly disagree that one good article about accepting transness means you get to walk away from writing that is somewhat white supremacist and quite fascist without at least awknowledging you were wrong"](https://archive.is/SlJo1), wrote one.
+
+Under these circumstances, dethroning the supremacy of gender identity ideology is politically impossible. All our Overton margin is already being spent somewhere else; sanity on this topic is our [dump stat](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DumpStat). But this being the case, _I have no remaining reason to participate in the cover-up_. What's in it for me?
+
+On 17 February 2021, Topher Brennan [claimed on Twitter that](https://web.archive.org/web/20210217195335/https://twitter.com/tophertbrennan/status/1362108632070905857) Scott Alexander "isn't being honest about his history with the far-right", and published [an email he had received from Scott in 2014](https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/02/backstabber-brennan-knifes-scott-alexander-with-2014-email/), on what Scott thought some neoreactionaries were getting importantly right.
+
+I think to people who have actually read _and understood_ Scott's work, there is nothing particularly surprising or scandalous about the contents of the email. Scott says that biologically-mediated group differences are probably real, that neoreactionaries are the only people discussing the object-level hypotheses _or_ the meta-level question of why our Society's collective epistemology is falling down on this. He says that reactionaries as a whole generate a lot of garbage, but that he trusts himself to sift through the noise and extract the novel insights. (In contrast, RationalWiki didn't generate garbage, but by hewing so closely to the mainstream, it also didn't say much that Scott doesn't already know.)
+
+The email contains details that Scott hadn't already blog about—most notably the section on "My behavior is the most appropriate response to these facts", explaining his social strategizing—but none of it is really _surprising_ if you actually know Scott from his writing.
+
+I think the main reason someone _would_ consider the email a scandalous revelation is if they hadn't read _Slate Star Codex_ that deeply—if their picture of Scott Alexander as a political writer was, "that guy who's _so_ committed to charity and discourse that he [wrote up an explanation of what _reactionaries_ (of all people) believe](https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/)—and then, of course, turned around and wrote up the definitive explanation of why they're wrong and you shouldn't pay them any attention." As a first approximation, it's not a bad picture. But what it misses—what _Scott_ knows—is that charity isn't about putting on a show of superficially respecting your ideological opponent, before concluding that they were wrong and you were right all along in every detail. Charity is about seeing what the other guy is getting _right_.
+
+The same day, Yudkowsky published a Facebook post, which said
+
+> I feel like it should have been obvious to anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside and has no ethics and will hurt you if you trust them and will break rules to do so; but in case it wasn't obvious, consider the point made explicitly. (Subtext: Topher Brennan. Do not provide any link in comments to Topher's publication of private emails, explicitly marked as private, from Scott Alexander.)
+
+In response to comments, Yudkowsky edited the post several times to clarify that he perceived an obvious distinction between hate and heated criticism. The next day, frustrated at how the discussion seemed to ignoring the obvious political angle.
+
+[TODO Brennan leak discussion cont'd ...]