+------
+
+At the end of December 2016, my gatekeeping sessions were finished, and I finally [started HRT](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-13/): Climara® 0.05 mg/day estrogen patches, to be applied to the abdomen once a week. Allegedly, the patch was supposed to stay on the entire week despite showering, _&c_.
+
+(Interestingly, the indications listed in the large fold-out sheet of drug information that came in the box of patches are all for symptoms due to menopause, post-menopause, or "hypogonadism, castration, or primary ovarian failure"; if it had become common to prescribe to intact males with an "internal sense of their own gender", neither the drug company nor the FDA seemed to know about it.)
+
+In an effort to not let my anti–autogynephilia-denialism crusade take over my life, earlier that month, I [promised myself](/ancillary/a-broken-promise/) (and [published the SHA256 hash of the promise](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154596054540199) to signal that I was Serious) not to comment on gender issues under my real name through June 2017—_that_ was what my new secret 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, 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 2017. "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 whom I'll call "Rebecca", 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.
+
+------
+
+As a mere heretic, it was also nice to have an outright _apostate_ as a friend. I had kept in touch with "Thomas", who provided a refreshing contrary perspective to the things I was hearing from everyone else. For example, when the rationalists were anxious that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 portended an increased risk of nuclear war, "Thomas" pointed out that Clinton was actually much more hawkish towards Russia.
+
+I shared an early draft of ["Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes"](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) with him, which fleshed out his idea from back in March 2016 about political forces incentivizing people to adopt an identity as a persecuted trans person.
+
+He identified the "talking like like an AI" phenomenon that I mentioned in the post as possession by an egregore, a group-mind that held sway over the beliefs of the humans comprising it. The function of traditional power arrangements with kings and priests was to put an individual human with judgement in the position of being able to tame, control, or at least negotiate with egregores. Individualism was flawed because [individual humans couldn't be rational on their own](http://web.archive.org/web/20160319033509/http://sett.com/aesop/memes-are-people-humans-arent). Being an individualist in an environment full of egregores was like being an attractive woman alone at a bar yelling, "I'm single!"—practically calling out for unaligned entities to wear down your psychological defenses and subvert your will.
+
+Rationalists implicitly seek [Aumann-like agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann's_agreement_theorem) with perceived peers, he explained: when the other person is visibly unmoved by one's argument, there's a tendency to think, "huh, they must know something I don't" and update towards the other's position. Without an understanding of egregoric possession, this is disastrous: the possessed person never budges on anything significant, and the rationalist slowly gets eaten by their egregore.
+
+I was nonplussed: I had heard of [patterns of refactored agency](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/), but this was ridiculous. This "egregore" framing was an interesting alternative way of looking at things, but it seemed kind of—nonlocal. There were inhuman patterns in human agency that we wanted to build models of, but it seemed like he was attributing too much agency to the patterns. In contrast, "This idea creates incentives to propogate itself" was [a mechanism I understood](https://devinhelton.com/meme-theory.html). (Or was I being like one of those dumb critics of [Richard Dawkins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene) who protest that genes aren't _actually_ selfish? We know that, but the anthropomorphic language is convenient.)
+
+I supposed I was modeling "Thomas" as being possessed by the neoreaction egregore, and myself as experiencing a lower (but still far from zero) net egregoric force by listening to both him and the mainstream rationalist egregore.
+
+He was a useful sounding board when I was frustrated with my so-far-mostly-private trans discussions.
+
+"If people with fragile identities weren't useful as a proxy weapon for certain political coalitions, then they would have no incentive to try to play language police and twist people's arms into accepting their identities," he said once.
+
+"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_](https://thingofthings.substack.com/)) 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.[^ozy-authority] I remarked to "Thomas" that this implied that my goal should be to overthrow Ozy (who I otherwise liked) as _de facto_ rationalist gender czar.
+
+[^ozy-authority]: Although the fact that Ozy had [commented](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/07/13/on-autogynephilia/) [on](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/thoughts-on-the-blanchardbailey-distinction/) the theory at all—which was plausibly causally downstream from me yelling at everyone in private—was probably net-positive for the cause; there's no bad publicity for new ("new") ideas. I got a couple of [reply](/2016/Oct/reply-to-ozy-on-agp/) [pieces](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/) out of their engagement in the early months of this blog.
+
+"Thomas" 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[^ozy-pronouns] wasn't power-seeking; she just happened to fulfill preexisting demand for a feminist manic pixie dream girl intellectual slut confessor.
+
+[^ozy-pronouns]: The feminine pronoun in this paragraph reflects the fact that "Thomas" and I felt free to use natal-sex pronouns for nonbinary people in our private conversations. I don't misgender people _in public!_ But I do argue that public summaries of private conversations are not, technically, the same thing.
+
+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 a bit 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 neoreactionary (_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.
+
+"Thomas" summarized the neoreactionary 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 women contributing to the community's shared endeavor; even if biology had something to do with their rarity, not giving them a chance was way worse than any problem solved by excluding them. (Worse with respect to my historically aberrant pro-androgyny utility function that I would defend to the death.)
+
+"Thomas" 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 be busybodies, cause drama, and test males for mates. This wasn't something "Thomas" 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", "Thomas" 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 traditional (_i.e._, 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 woman 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 now having with "Thomas", 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 January 2017 Facebook thread about the mystery of why so many rationalists were trans, "Helen" posited the metacognition needed to identify the strange, subtle unpleasantness of gender dysphoria as a potential explanatory factor.
+
+I messaged her, ostensibly to ask for my spare key back out of security fastidiousness, but really (I quickly let slip) because I was angry about the pompous and deceptive 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 a set of pliers, which had presumably done the snapping), sent me $8 (presumably to pay for the key), and told me to go away.
+
+On my next bank statement, her deadname appeared in the memo line for the $8 transaction.
+
+------
+
+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 cute 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/), although the vignette was inspired by my experience with 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??
+
+In a 4 February 2017 email confirming the plans with Sophia (Subject: "Re: February??"), I thanked her for her ealier promise not to be offended by things that I might say, which I was interpreting literally, and without which I wouldn't _dare_ meet her. Unfortunately, I was feeling somewhat motivated to generally avoid trans women now. Better to quietly (except for pseudonymous internet yelling) stay out of everyone's way rather than risk the temptation to say the wrong thing and cause a drama explosion.
+
+------
+
+... the pretense of "quietly stay[ing] out of everyone's way" lasted about three days.
+
+In a 7 February 2017 comment thread on the Facebook wall of MIRI Communications Director Rob Bensinger, someone 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.