-
-... 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, at least a little, at least subtly.
-
-"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 in mid-January. "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 who I'll call "Chaya", 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." It was nice to make a friend over shared heresy.
-
------
-
-"Helen" had rebuffed my last few requests to chat or hang out. "I don't fully endorse the silence," she said, "just find talking vaguely aversive." In a Facebook thread in January 2017 about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, she said something about the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria.
-
-I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I soon let slip) because I was angry about the deceptively pompous Facebook comment: _maybe_ it wouldn't take so much _metacognition_ if someone would just mention the _other_ diagnostic criterion!
-
-She sent me a photo of the key with half of the blade snapped off, next to set of pliers (which had presumably done the snapping), and told me to go away.
-
-------
-
-I made plans to visit Portland for the weekend of 18 February 2017, for the purpose of meeting Sophia, and two other excuses. There was [a fandom convention](https://web.archive.org/web/20170126112449/http://wizardworld.com/comiccon/portland) in town, and I wanted to try [playing Pearl from _Steven Universe_ again](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)—but this time with makeup and breastforms and a [realistic gem](https://web.archive.org/web/20190407185943/https://www.etsy.com/listing/236067567/pearl-gem-cosplay). Also, I had been thinking of obfuscating my location as being part of the thing to do for keeping my secret blog secret, and had correspondingly adopted the conceit of setting my little [fictional](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) [vignettes](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) in the Portland metropolitan area, as if I lived there.[^portland-vignettes] I thought it would be nice to get some original photographs of local landmarks (like TriMet trains, or one of the bridges over the Willamette River[^river-fka]) to lend versimilitude to the charade.
-
-[^portland-vignettes]: Beaverton, referenced in ["The Counter"](/2017/Jan/the-counter/) is a suburb of Portland; the Q Center referenced in ["Title Sequence"](/2017/Jan/title-sequence/) [does exist in Portland](https://www.pdxqcenter.org/) and [did have a Gender Queery support group](https://web.archive.org/web/20160507101938/http://www.pdxqcenter.org/gender-queery/), but the vignette was inspired by my attendance of a similar group at the [Pacific Center](https://www.pacificcenter.org/) in Berkeley.
-
- I would later get to attend a support group at the Q Center on a future visit to Portland (and got photos, although I never ended up using them on the blog). I snuck a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies_ into their library.
-
-[^river-fka]: Formerly known as William River??
-
-At the close of a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I wrote:
-
-> (Thanks very much for your promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I am interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet you; unfortunately, I kind of feel motivated to generally avoid trans women now, because the conjunction of validate-everyone's-identity social norms and my continuing obsession with last year's shocking mega-update make me feel like I'm made out of social antimatter: better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing, mutually annihilating me and my interlocutor and killing everyone in the room in a shower of gamma rays.)
-
-------
-
-... the "quietly stay out of everyone's way" policy lasted about 3 days.
-
-In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Director of Communications Rob Bensinger, someone named Amelia[^amelia-rip] said something about closeted trans women (linking to the ["I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out"](https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42) piece).
-
-[^amelia-rip]: Clicking on Amelia's profile years later, it's a memorial page, which is ominous.
-
-I objected that surely closeted trans women _are_ cis: "To say that someone _already_ is a woman simply by virtue of having the same underlying psychological condition that motivates people to actually take the steps of transitioning (and thereby _become_ a trans woman) kind of makes it hard to have a balanced discussion of the costs and benefits of transitioning."
-
-(That is, I was assuming "cis" meant "not transitioned", whereas Amelia seemed to be assuming a gender-identity model, such that guys like me aren't cis.)
-
-Bensinger [replied](/images/bensinger-doesnt_unambiguously_refer_to_the_thing.png):
-
-> Zack, "woman" doesn't unambiguously refer to the thing you're trying to point at, even if no one were socially punishing you for using the term that way, and even if we were ignoring any psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage, there'd be the problem regardless that these terms are already used in lots of different ways by different groups. The most common existing gender terms are a semantic minefield at the same time they're a dysphoric and political minefield, and everyone adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all.
-
-Bensinger followed up with another comment offering constructive suggestions: XX-cluster for when you want to talk about things that correlate with XX chromosomes, _&c._
-
-So, this definitely wasn't the _worst_ obfuscation attempt I'd face during this Whole Dumb Story; I of course agree that words can be used in many ways, and are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—given the context of my comments to Amelia, I think it should have already been clear that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to Amelia's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (Amelia, to her credit, did.)
-
-To be fair to Bensinger, it's certainly possible that he was criticizing me specifically because I was the "aggressor" objecting to someone else's word usage, and that he would have stuck up for me just the same if someone had "aggressed" against me using the word _woman_ in a sense that excluded non-socially-transitioned gender-dysphoric males, for the same reason ("adopting the policy of objecting when anyone uses man/woman/male/female/etc. in any way other than the way they prefer is not going to solve the problem at all").
-
-But ... in the social context of Berkeley 2016, I think I was perhaps justified in my suspicions that that wasn't actually his algorithm? If socially-liberal people in the current year selectively drag out the "It's pointless to object to someone else's terminology" argument _specifically_ when someone wants to talk about biological sex (or even socially perceived sex!) rather than self-identified gender identity—but objecting on the grounds of "psychological harm to people whose dysphoria is triggered by that word usage" (!!) is implied to be potentially kosher, that seems like a pretty stark distortionary effect on our discussions.
-
-Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about put a Like on my comments. I messaged him to say hi. "I guess I didn't really have a compelling reason to message you except that having a messaging app creates an affordance to say hi to ppl", I explained, then elaborated, "well, maybe part of me wants to say, thanks for the Like in Robby/Amelia's thread, but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
-
-Having already started to argue with people in my community under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep"/"may as well be hung for a pound as a penny" started to kick in. On the evening of Saturday 11 February 2019, I posted to my own wall:
-
-> Some of you may have noticed that I've recently decided to wage a suicidally aggressive one-person culture war campaign with the aim of liberating mindshare from the delusional victimhood identity politics mind-virus and bringing it under the control of our familiar "compete for status by signaling cynical self-awareness" egregore! The latter is actually probably not as Friendly as we like to think, as some unknown fraction of its output is counterfeit utility in the form of seemingly cynically self-aware insights that are, in fact, not true. Even if the fraction of counterfeit insights is near unity, the competition to generate seemingly cynically self-aware insights is so obviously much healthier than the competition for designated victimhood status, that I feel good about this campaign being morally correct, even the amount of mindshare liberated is small and I personally don't survive.
-
-I followed it up the next morning with a post addressed to "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends", pointing out that [...
-
-[TODO: brief summary of "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"; don't want to spend wordcount quoting the whole thing]
-
-It got 170 comments, a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman who I'll call "Noreen."
-
-[TODO: summarize comments on "Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"]
-
-Somewhat awkwardly, I had a date scheduled with "Noreen" that evening. The way that happened was, elsewhere on Facebook on 7 Feburary, I had said that [...]
-
-[TODO public meltdown—
-
- * I ended up escalating into a full-on public meltdown on my own Facebook wall. First posts, 11 Feb "some of you may have noticed" and 12 Feb "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends; summarize discussion
-
- * My terrible, terrible date with "Noreen" was on Sunday 12 February (comment exchange was on 7 February, initial planning PM was 9 February) We saw _West Side Story_ at the Castro Theater. We walked around the Castro and debated the gender thing beforehand. I was so distracted!!
-
- * Elsewhere on Facebook, "Noreen" complained about the difficulty of dating, I used the opportunity to ask her for a date. (I later commented to "Chaya", "I wouldn't have asked her out at all, except that I'm going through a "well, maybe it's not morally wrong to do male-typical things like try to spin a complaint ("As if only guys have trouble getting dates") into a date")
-
- * more discussion on "nice, mean versions" 13 February
-
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I really *was* getting to the point that I hated transwomen
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:26 AM
-> I hate them, too!
-> Fuck those guys!
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:27 AM
-> I hated what happened to my husband, I hate the insistence that I use the right pronouns and ignore my senses, I hate the takeover of women's spaces, I hate the presumption that they know what a woman's life is like, I was _getting_ to the point that I deeply hated them, and saw them as the enemy
-> But you're actually changing that for me
-> You're reconnecting me with my natural compassion
-> To people who are struggling and have things that are hard
-> It's just that, the way they think things is hard is not the way I actually think it is anymore
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> the "suffering" is mostly game-theoretic victimhood-culture
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> You've made me hate transwomen _less_ now
-> Because I have a model
-> I understand the problem
-> **Zack M. Davis** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> [http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Feb/if-other-fantasies-were-treated-like-crossdreaming/)
-> **"Chaya"** — 02/14/2016 3:28 AM
-> I understand why it's hard
-> I feel like I can forgive it, to the extent that forgiveness is mine to give
-> This is a better thing for me
-> I did not _want_ to be a hateful person
-> I did not want to take seeming good people as an enemy in my head, while trying to be friends with them in public
-> I think now I can do it more honestly
-> They might not want _me_ as a friend
-> But now I feel less threatened and confused and insulted
-> And that has dissolved the hatred that was starting to take root
-> I'm very grateful for that
-
-]
-
-[email Yudkowsky "the spirit of intervention" at 0418 a.m. (I don't even want to read it now) 14 February]
-
-[email to Michael "I'm scared and I can't sleep but I need to sleep to avoid being institutionalized and I want to be a girl but I am not literally a girl obviously you delusional bastards (eom)" 0632]
-
-Michael's reply—
-> I'm happy to help in any way you wish. Call any time. How were Anna and Divia? I think that you are right enough that it actually calls for the creation of something with the authority to purge/splinter the rationalist community. There is no point in having a rationalist community where you get ignored and silenced if you talk politely and condemned for not using the principle of charity by people who literally endorse trying to control your thoughts and bully you into traumatic surgery by destroying meaning in language. We should interpret Tchetchetkine and Larch, in particular, as violent criminals armed with technology we created and act accordingly.
-
- * "Chaya" 14 Feb 10:52:04: So my theory is ["Noreen"] would not be reacting as vehemently had you not recently asked her out / And that she is trying to play a signaling game to salvage her status in the community by distancing herself from you" / "See? See everyone? I rejected him! Don't burn me at the stake too!
-
- * total meltdown encompassed 31 posts between Saturday 11 February and promising to leave Facebook for a week 0844 15 February
-
-[according to emails, I hung out with Ben in the day of 14 Feb, but I have no memory of this]
-
-[I messaged Ben "I just woke up" at Tue Feb 14 16:09:41 PST 2017, so apparently I did sleep a little that day?!]
-
-email Michael and Anna "Can SOMEONE HELP ME I REALLY NEED TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO SLEEP THIS IS DANGEROUS" 15 Feb 0017
-
-15 Feb 0803
-> I'm taking the week off work; today I'm trying to stay grounded and then I'm going to Portland later; I wanna talk to you but not now
-
-16 Feb 0042
-"I feel like I'm perceiving social reality for the first time", I told "Chaya."
-"[N]ow that I no longer believe self-reports are true, I can see people plotting against each other and telling themselves stories about why they're right"
-"I mean, I knew that that was a thing verbally"
-"but now I'm actually seeing it"
-
-Thu Feb 16 0102
-in the thread where I said "it seemed thematically appropriate while replying to
-Brent", at the time I thought I saw a beautiful aesthetic reason, but maybe a better description of my behavior would be that I was beating up on low-status Brent / I said it seemed thematically appropriate in order to get a date with Anna
-"Chaya": But you were really calling out Brent as low status
-me: yeah
-
-"questions" to Anna and Michael 16 Feburary
-> Do humans actually need sleep, or sleep just a coping mechanism for dealing with civilization? Don't tell me if you don't think I'm ready to hear it.
-in this thread, I claimed that, "I did in fact get sleep, but only by means of lying down in the dark with my eyes closed; I didn't actually want to."
-
-[a couple of delusional emails to Yudkowsky at 11XX on 16 Feb]
-
-[16 February, I ask to meet Orion to talk about taking a sabbatical "Can I come to the city and meet with you?" at 1317 p.m.]
-
-Cooperate messages—
-Jonah 4x, Jack, Ziz 6x, "Wilhelm" 2x, Katie 6x, Anna T. 6x, Jenna 8x, Linda 5x, Ben 5x, Brent 4x, Boyd
-
-That I was on a trip and don't want it to be a bad trip
-
-Thu Feb 16 15:15:53 I message Ziz with "humans aren't smart enough to be Kirutsugu; that's why I've chosen the confessor route" / then "I need positive reinforcement" / "Cooperate" / "Cooperate"
-Ziz: Vassar was talking about you recently approvingly, having read your facebook wall. Something about a war between being able to think and gaslighting.
-Like he named you as one of three fronts the war is playing out on. Jack also seemed to agree. \"Sarah vs Ben, Rob vs Ben Todd, Zack Davis vs the world Thu Feb 16 2017 16:06:42 GMT-0800
-
-I remember being afraid that the thing that happened to Eliezer and then Scott was going to happen to me, and that it would be bad; I told Ben, "I don't think I want to be the Avatar yet" Thu Feb 16 2017 15:51:32
-
-"I want to go to my parents' house; do we still own the house? (eom)" 16 February, 1822 (and that was the last email until the 21st because I was in the psych ward)
-
-Thu Feb 16 16:39:06 PST 2017: Ziz says, "Am still here. Brought chocolate, allegedly good against dementors. Believe I can cooperate better if I can see your face."
-Thu Feb 16 18:18:43 PST 2017: Ziz says "Watson returned. Am currently in ur house, using ur wifi. Are you coming here? Am unclear on your intent, but am happy to sit here and work on stupid resume padding stuff for a while if you're coming."
-
-Fri Feb 17 14:19, "I'm so confused I just woke up / I'm so sorry"
-
-previous psych episode, repeating two words, Science and Female; but this time, it was Cooperate and Defect
-
-to Ben: "I'm so sorry; I want to be part of the coalition but I'm so confused; and the fact that I was confused made me say Defect a bunch of time" Fri Feb 17 2017 14:23:53
-
-/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/
-
-[28 February, I email Blanchard/Bailey/Hsu/Lawrence]
-
-[emailed Gunni on 26 Feb (still haven't gotten that inteview, 5 years later?!)]
-
-[another happy price offer to Yudkowsky on 2 March
-> That makes sense. Sorry for being boring; I'm kind of going through a "Having a nervous breakdown, suddenly understanding all the things Michael has been trying to tell me for eight years that I didn't understand at the time, and subsequently panicking and running around yelling at everyone because I'm terrified of the rationalist community degenerating into just another arbitrary Bay Area humanist cult when we were supposed to be the Second Scientific Revolution" phase of my intellectual development. Hopefully this is not too socially-disruptive! Michael said he thinks I'm doing good work??
-]
-
-[Blanchard Tweets my blog "again" on 3 March]
-
-7 March—
-> As I recall, at the time, I was thinking that people may know far less or far more than I might have previously assumed by taking their verbal behavior literally with respect to what I think words mean: people have to gently test each other before really being able to speak the horrible truth that might break someone's self-narrative (thereby destroying their current personality and driving them insane, or provoking violence). I thought that you and Anna might be representatives of the "next level" of scientists guarding the human utility function by trying to produce epistemic technology within our totalitarian-state simulation world, and that I was "waking up" into that level by decoding messages (e.g., from the Mike Judge films that you recommended) and inferring things that most humans couldn't.
-reply—
-> What you were thinking is about right I think. But we still know that animals sleep.
-
-12 March—
-> You can tell that recent life events have made me more worried than I used to be about unFriendly/unaligned possibly-AI-assisted institutions being a threat to humane values long before an actual AI takeoff in however many decades
-
-I met Jessica in March
-
-
-I decided to quit my dayjob. I had more than enough savings to take some months to learn some more math and work on this blog. (Recent experiences had made me more skeptical of earning-to-give as an altruistic intervention. If I didn't trust institutions to do what they claimed to do, there was less reason not to spend my San Francisco software engineering fortune on buying free time for myself.)
-
-At standup meeting on my last day, I told my coworkers that I was taking a sabbatical from my software engineering career to become a leading intellectual figure of the alternative right. That was a joke (ironically using the label "alt-right" to point to my break with liberal orthodoxy), although after the [Charlottesville incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally) later that year, I would look back at that moment with a little bit of [shame](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/guilt-shame-and-depravity/) at how the joke hits differently in retrospect.
-
-/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/
-
-[TODO: ... continue harvesting email to see what happened in April]
-
-[TODO: credit assignment ritual ($18200 credit-assignment ritual): $5K to Michael, $1200 each to trans widow friend, 3 care team members (Alicorn Sarah Anna), Ziz, Olivia, and Sophia, $400 each to Steve, A.M., Watson, "Wilhelm", Jonah, James, Ben, Kevin, Alexei (declined), Andrew, Divia, Lex, Devi]