+The thread on the "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends" post continued. Someone who I'll call "Kevin" (whom I had never interacted with before or since; my post visibility settings were set to Public) said that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. Correlations with gender were weak enough to be irrelevant after talking with someone for half an hour.
+
+I replied, but this was circular, right?—that the concept of modeling someone based on their gender seemed weird. If gender didn't have any (probabilistic!) implications, why did getting gendered correctly matter so much to people?
+
+"Kevin" said that the distinction was between modeling someone as their gender, and addressing people in a way that respects their agency and identity, and it seemed reasonable to care much more about the second thing.
+
+I said I didn't know what the second thing meant. I liked the words "agency" and "identity", too! But the reason I liked the words, is because they were associated with agentic and identificatory things that people do in the world, that my brain could make predictions about. Regarding the predictive value of gender, human psychology was a very high-dimensional vector space! If you'd bought into an ideology that says everyone is equal and that sex differences must therefore be small-to-nonexistent, then you can choose to selectively ignore the dimensions along which sex differences are relatively large, and when you're locked into that worldview, it does indeed genuinely look to you like individual personality differences swamp sex differences! And when you're locked into that worldview, looking at the dimensions along which the differences are relatively large is genuinely painful! Once you notice this, maybe you can think of clever strategies to better serve the moral ideal that makes psychological-sex-differences denialism so appealing, while making use of the additional power you gain by letting yourself look at the whole configuration space!
+
+"Kevin" asked for some examples where gender-category membership was really important. He wasn't saying that sex differences didn't exist (for example, when doing statistical research), just that they were irrelevant in direct interpersonal situations.
+
+I replied, "Really important" was part of the map, not the territory! From the standpoint of someone who had never bought into the everyone-is-equal ideology in the first place, my desperate search for clever strategies to serve the androgyny-as-moral-ideal religion probably looked crazy and immoral. If my ancestors could see me, they'd probably be like, "Why are you making so many goddamned paperclips?! This wasn't supposed to be about paperclips!" And I was like, "But I want _moar paperclips._"
+
+After one more back-and-forth between me and "Kevin", "Noreen" expressed frustration with some apparent inconsistencies in my excited presentation. I saw what she was getting at, and expressed my sympathies, tagging Michael Vassar (who was then using "Arc" as a married name):
+
+> I'm sorry that I'm being confusing! I know I'm being confusing and it must be really frustrating to understand what I'm trying to say because I'm trying to explore this conceptspace that we don't already have standard language for! You probably want to slap me and say, "What the hell is wrong with you? Talk like a goddamned normal person!" But I forgot hoooooooow!
+>
+> **Michael Arc** is this how you feel all the time??
+>
+> help
+
+-----
+
+In another post, I collected links to Bailey, Lawrence, Vitale, and Brown's separate explanations of the two-type taxonomy:
+
+> The truthful and mean version: _The Man Who Would Be Queen_, Ch. 9
+> The truthful and nice version: "Becoming What We Love" [http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf](http://annelawrence.com/becoming_what_we_love.pdf)
+> The technically-not-lying version: [http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm](http://www.avitale.com/developmentalreview.htm)
+> The long version: [https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/](https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/)
+
+I got some nice emails from Michael Vassar. "I think that you are doing VERY good work right now!!!" he wrote. "The sort that shifts history! Only the personal is political" (Subject: "Talk like a normal person").
+
+I aptly summed up my mental state with a post that evening:
+
+> She had a delusional mental breakdown; you're a little bit manic; I'm in the Avatar state.[^avatar-state]
+
+[^avatar-state]: A reference to _Avatar: The Last Airbender_/_The Legend of Korra_, in which our hero can enter the ["Avatar state"](https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Avatar#Avatar_State) to become much more powerful—and also much more vulnerable (not being reincarnated if killed in the Avatar state).
+
+I made plans to visit a friend's house that evening, but before I left the office, I spent some time drafting an email to Eliezer Yudkowsky. I remarked via PM to the person whose house I was to visit, "oh, maybe I shouldn't send this email to someone as important as Eliezer". Then, "oh, I guess that means the manic state is fading". Then: "I guess that feeling is the exact thing I'm supposed to be fighting". (Avoiding "crazy" actions like emailing a high-status person _wasn't safe_ in a world where all the high-status people where committed to believing that _men could be women by means of saying so_.) I did eventually decide to hold off on the email, and make my way to the friend's house. "Not good at navigation right now", I remarked.
+
+------
+
+I stayed up late that night of 13–14 February 2017, continuing to post, comment, message, _&c._. I'm proud of this post from 12:48 _a.m._:
+
+> Of course, Lawrence couldn't assume Korzybski as a prerequisite. The reality is (wait for it ...) even worse! We're actually men who love their model of what we wish women were, and want to become that.[^model-of]
+
+[^model-of]: Although Ben Hoffman pointed out that the words "their model of" don't belong here; it's one too many layers of indirection.
+
+That is, realistically, the AGP fantasy _about_ "being a woman" wouldn't—[_couldn't_ actually be fulfilled by magically being transformed to match the female distribution](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). (At a minimum, because women aren't autogynephilic! The _male_ sex fantasy of, "Ooh, what if I inhabited a female body with my own breasts, vagina, _&c._", has no reason to match anything in the experience of women who always have just been female.)
+
+In ["Interpersonal Entanglement"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Py3uGnncqXuEfPtQp/interpersonal-entanglement) (in the Fun Theory Sequence back in 'aught-nine), Yudkowsky had speculated that gay couples might have better relationships than straights, since gays don't have to deal with the mismatch in desires across sexes.
+
+The noted real-life tendency for AGP trans women to pair up with each other was probably partially due to this effect[^transcel]: the appeal of getting along with someone _like you_, of having an appropriately-sexed romantic partner who behaved like a same-sex friend. The [T4T phenomenon](https://sexuality.fandom.com/wiki/T4T) is a real-life analogue of ["Failed Utopia #4-2"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ctpkTaqTKbmm6uRgC/failed-utopia-4-2).
+
+[^transcel]: Of course, a lot of the effect is going to be due to the paucity of cis women who are willing to date trans women.
+
+The comment thread under the "nice/mean versions" post would eventually end up with 180 comments, a large fraction of which were, again, a thread mostly of me arguing with "Noreen." At the top of the thread (at 1:14 _a.m._), she asked if there was something that concisely explained why I believed what I believed, and what consequences it had for people.
+
+I replied (at 1:25 _a.m._):
+
+>> why you believe what you believe
+>
+> The OP has four cites. What else do you want?
+>
+>> what consequences you think this has for people
+>
+> Consequences for me: [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/)
+>
+> Consequences for other people: I don't know! That's for those other people to decide, not me! But whatever they decide, they'll probably get more of what they want if they have more accurate beliefs! Rationality, motherfuckers! Do you speak it!
+
+(Looking back on the thread six years later, I'm surprised by the timestamps. What were we all _doing_, having a heated political discussion past midnight? We should have all been asleep! I guess I didn't yet fully appreciate the importance of sleep at this point in my life.)
+
+"Chaya" explained why she was holding "Noreen" to a different standard of discourse than me: I was walking into this after years of personal, excruciating suffering, and was willing to sacrifice social connections to present a model. My brash tone should have been more forgivable in light of that—that I was ultimately coming from a place of compassion and hope for people, not hate.
+
+I messaged "Chaya": "I wouldn't call it 'personal, excruciating suffering', but way to play the victim card on my behalf". She offered to edit it. I declined: "if she can play politics, we can play politics??"
+
+"Chaya" speculated that "Noreen" might not be reacting as vehemently had I not recently asked her out in public, that she was now distancing herself from me as part of a signaling game—as if to say, "See? See, everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake, too!"
+
+I said that I probably wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I was going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things" phase, like trying to spin a complaint ("again with pretending only guys can ever have difficulties getting dates") into a date.
+
+"Chaya" summed up something she had gotten out of my whole campaign: