+"OK, but I still want my own breasts," I said.
+
+"[A]s long as you are resisting the dark linguistic power that the left is offering you," he said, with a smiley emoticon.
+
+In some of my private discussions with others, Ozy Frantz (a.f.a.b. nonbinary author of _Thing of Things_) had been cited as a local authority figure on gender issues—someone asked what Ozy thought about the two-types theory, or wasn't persuaded because they were partially deferring to Ozy. I remarked to "Wilhelm" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked and respected) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+
+"Wilhelm" didn't think this was feasible. The problem, he explained, was that ""hypomasculine men are often broken people who idolize feminists, and worship the first one who throws a few bones of sympathy towards men". (He had been in this category, so he could make fun of them.) Thus, in feminist communities, the female person would win a priestly battle, regardless of quality of arguments. It wasn't Ozy's fault, really. She—"Wilhelm" used feminine pronouns for Ozy, although I always said _they_ in public—wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
+
+I mentioned that there was a woman who had been hanging around the "rationalist"[^scare-quotes] community despite being mildly contemptuous of our disrespect for academic philosophy, who was very trigger-happy with sexism accusations, who I privately thought would be _less_ respected if she were a man making similar-quality arguments—but there was no way to give her feedback on the matter without alienating her. I supposed that in a NRx (_i.e._, evil) space, they would probably say, "who cares if you alienate the bitch". But she was a _woman paying attention to us_.
+
+[^scare-quotes]: I mentioned that these days, I just used scare quotes rather than tacking the word _aspiring_ in front.
+
+"Wilhelm" summarized the NRx response:
+
+> 1. Women should never have been weaponiz[ed] by democracy into being cultural/corporate commissars
+> 2. Why is an unmarried woman making a nuisance of herself in a mostly male community? Where is her family? Why is she not married yet?
+
+I said that #2 still seemed monstrously unfair to the non-nuisance woman contributing to the community's endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than the problem thereby solved (with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death).
+
+"Wilhelm" said that exceptions could be made for intellectually eminent women at the discretion of the authorities, but that the vast majority of young women didn't have the temperment to participate in male communities, instead having incentives to behave like busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Wilhelm" had previously wanted to believe, even in his anti-feminist (but not yet fully reactionary) days. But once you understood how past generations would have seen certain behavior, upon seeing it in the wild, among people who claim to be "above" gender roles—it was hard to unsee.
+
+I said that I was done pretending to be stupid; I didn't want to not see the pattern if the pattern was there, even if I wasn't going to adopt the solutions of our ancestors.
+
+("Restore patriarchy!" "_Never!_ I mean, I see the point you're trying to make, but the real solution is embryo selection for more nerd girls!")
+
+When I mentioned re-reading Moldbug on "ignoble privilege", "Wilhelm" mentioned it as a reason not to feel the need to seek the approval of women, who had not been ennobled by living in an astroturfed world where the evolutionarily stable strategies of relating had been re-labeled as oppression. The chip-on-her-shoulder effect was amplified in androgynous women. (Unfortunately, the sort of women I particularly liked.)
+
+He advised me that if I did find an androgynous women I was into, I shouldn't treat her as a moral authority. Doing what most sensitive men thought of as equality degenerated into female moral superiority, which wrecks the relationship in a feedback loop of testing and resentment. (Women want to win arguments in the moment, but don't actually want to lead the relationship.) Thus, a strange conclusion: to have an egalitarian heterosexual relationship, the man needs to lead the relationship _into_ equality; a small "dab" of patriarchy worked better than none.
+
+(What I really wanted was to have the kind of meta psychological engineering conversation I was having with "Wilhelm", with the woman herself—but I feared that the hyper-reflective nerdy women who could do that were mostly out of my league.)
+
+I wasn't immediately sold on all these heresies—but I was _listening_. Even if I didn't like the theory and didn't trust the theory, I admitted that it was refreshing that someone _actually had a theory_, which was more than you could say for the blank slate.
+
+------
+
+In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.