+I gave someone else a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. She didn't like it—which I would have respected, if her complaint had just been that Lawrence was overconfident and overgeneralizing, as a factual matter of science and probability. But my acquaintance seemed more preoccupied with how the book was (in her words) "seemingly deliberately hurtful and disrespectful", using "inherently invalidating language that is very often used in people's dismissal, abuse, and violence towards trans folk", such as calling MtF people "men", referring to straight trans women as "homosexual"—or using "transgendered" (with an _-ed_) instead of "transgender". (I would have hoped that the fact that Lawrence is trans and (thinks she) is describing herself would have been enough to make it credible that she didn't mean any harm by saying "men" instead of "a.m.a.b."—and that it should have been obvious that if you reject authors out of hand for not speaking in your own ideology's shibboleths, you lose an important chance to discover if your ideology is getting something wrong.)
+
+The privately-sane responses were more interesting. "People are crazy about metaphysics," one trans woman told me. "That's not new. Compare with transubstantiation and how much scholarly work went in to trying to square it with natural materialism. As for causality, I think it's likely that the true explanation will not take the shape of an easily understood narrative."
+
+Later, she told me, "It's kind of funny how the part where you're being annoying isn't where you're being all [TERFy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism) and socially unacceptable, but where you make very strong assumptions about truth due to being a total nerd and positivist—mind you, the vast majority of times people deviate from this the consequences are terrible."
+
+Someone else I talked to was less philosophical. "I'm an AGP trans girl who really likes anime, 4chan memes, and the like, and who hangs around a lot with ... AGP trans girls who like anime, 4chan memes, and the like," she said. "It doesn't matter to me all that much if some specific group doesn't take me seriously. As long as trans women are pretty OK at respectability politics and cis people in general don't hate us, then it's probably not something I have to worry about."
+
+-------
+
+I made friends with a trans woman whom I'll call "Helen." My flatmate and I let her crash at our apartment for a few weeks while she was looking for more permanent housing. (We bought a couch for the occasion.)
+
+There's a certain—dynamic, that can exist between self-aware autogynephilic men, and trans women who are very obviously in the same taxon (even if they don't necessarily self-identify as "autogynephilic"). From the man's end, a mixture of jealousy and brotherly love and a blackmailer's smugness, twisted together in the unspoken assertion, "Everyone else is supposed to politely pretend you're a woman born in the wrong body, but _I know the secret_."
+
+And from the trans woman's end—I'm not sure. Maybe pity. Maybe the blackmail victim's fear.
+
+One day, "Helen" mentioned having executive-dysfunction troubles about making a necessary telephone call to the doctor's office. The next morning, I messaged her:
+
+> I asked my counterfactual friend Zelda how/whether I should remind you to call the doctor in light of our conversation yesterday. "If she was brave enough to self-actualize in the first place rather than cowardly resign herself to a lifetime of dreary servitude to the cistem," she said counterfactually, "—unlike _some_ people I could name—", she added, counterfactually glaring at me, "then she's definitely brave enough to call the doctor at some specific, predetermined time today, perhaps 1:03 p.m."
+>
+> "The 'vow to call at a specific time' thing never works for me when I'm nervous about making a telephone call," I said. The expression of contempt on her counterfactual face was withering. "Obviously the technique doesn't work for _boys_!"
+
+I followed up at 1:39 _p.m._ (while I was at my dayjob):
+
+> "And then at one-thirty or so, you message her saying, 'There, that wasn't so bad, was it?' And if the call had already been made, it's an affirming comment, but if the call hadn't been made, it functions as a social incentive to actually call in order to be able to truthfully reply 'yeah' rather than admit to still being paralyzed by telephone anxiety."
+>
+> "You always know what to do," I said. "Nothing like me. It's too bad you're only—" I began to say, just as she counterfactually said, "It's a good thing you're only a figment of my imagination."
+
+"Helen" replied:
+
+> i'm in the middle of things. i'll handle it before they close at 5 though, definitely.
+
+I wrote back:
+
+> "I don't know," I murmured, "a lot of times in the past when I told myself that I'd make a phone call later, before some place closed, it later turned out that I was lying to myself." "Yeah, but that's because you're a _guy_. Males are basically _composed_ of lies, as a consequence of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bateman%27s_principle). Don't worry about ["Helen"].
+
+Or I remember one night we were talking in the living room. I think she was sad about something, and I said—
+
+(I'm not saying I was _right_ to say it; I'm admitting that I _did_ say it)
+
+—I said, "Can I touch your breasts?" and she said, "No," and nothing happened.
+
+I would have _never_ said that to an actual ("cis") woman in a similar context—definitely not one who was _staying at my house_. I have ethics—and Comment 171 syndrome, which I hope is not the same thing. This was different, I felt. I had reason to believe that "Helen" was _like me_, and the reason it felt ethically okay to ask was because I was less afraid of hurting her on that account—that whatever evolutionary-psychological brain adaptation women have to be especially afraid of males probably _wasn't there_.
+
+-------
+
+<a id="explaining-agp"></a>I talked about my autogynephilia to a (cis) female friend over Messenger. It took some back-and-forth to explain the concept.
+
+I had mentioned "misdirected heterosexuality"; she said, "Hm, so, like, you could date girls better if you were a girl?"
+
+No, I said, it's weirder than that; the idea of having female anatomy oneself and being able to appreciate it from the first person is intrinsically more exciting than the mere third-person appreciation that you can do in real life as a man.
+
+"[S]o, like, literal autogynephilia is a thing?" she said (as if she had heard the term before, but only as a slur or fringe theory, not as [the obvious word for an obviously existing thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)).
+
+She mentioned that as a data point, _her_ only effective sex fantasy was her as a hot girl. I said that I expected that to be a qualitatively different phenomenon, based on priors, and—um, _details_ that it would [probably be creepy to talk about](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#secret-fantasy-frame-stories).
+
+So, she asked, I believed that AGP was a real thing, and in my case, I didn't have lots of desires to be seen as a girl, have a girl name, _&c._?
+
+No, I said, I did; it just seemed like it couldn't have been a coincidence that my [beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) (the class of things including the hope that my beautiful–beautiful ponytail successfully sets me apart from all the guys who are proud of being guys, or feeling happy about getting _ma'am_'ed over the phone) didn't develop until _after_ puberty.
+
+She said, "hm. so male puberty was a thing you did not like."
+
+No, I said, puberty was fine—it seemed like she was rounding off my self-report to something closer to the standard narrative, but what I was trying to say was that the standard was-always-a-girl-in-some-metaphysical-sense narrative was _not true_ (at least for me, and I suspected for many others).
+
+"The thing is, I don't think it's actually that uncommon!" I said, linking to ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) (the post from Yudkowsky's Sequences that had explained why this not-uncommon male fantasy would be technically difficult to fulfill). "It's just that there's no script for it and no one wants to talk about it!"
+
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:23 PM
+> ok, _very_ weird
+> yeah, I just don't have a built-in empathic handle for "wants to be a woman."
+> **Zack M. Davis** — 09/02/2016 1:24 PM
+> it even has a TVTrope! [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManIFeelLikeAWoman)
+> **[redacted]** — 09/02/2016 1:27 PM
+> ok, yeah. wow. it's really just easier for my brain to go "ok, that's a girl" than to understand why anyone would want boobs
+
+I took this as confirmation of my expectation that alleged "autogynephilia" in women is mostly not a thing—that normal women appreciating their own bodies is a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from my thing, even if you can make it look similar if you squint and are motivated to believe that trans women are women (so that "But cis women are autogynephilic, too" sounds to you like a reasonable objection to Blanchard _et al._). _When she didn't know what I was talking about_, my friend mentioned that she also fantasized about being a hot girl. After I went into more detail (and linked the TVTropes page), she said she _didn't understand why anyone would want boobs_. Well, why would she? But I think a lot of a.m.a.b. people understand.
+
+-------
+
+As the tension continued to mount through mid-2016 between what I was seeing and hearing, and the socially-acceptable public narrative, [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/concerns/) [frustration](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/identity/) [started](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/apostasy/) [to](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/07/wicked-transcendence/) [subtly](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/ineffective-deconversion-pitch/) [or](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/falself/) [not-so-much](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/08/prescription/) [leak](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-world-by-gaslight/) [out](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/the-roark-quirrell-effect/) [into](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/book-recommendations-i/) [my](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/wicked-transcendence-ii/) [existing](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/09/concerns-ii/) [blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-thing/), but I wanted to write more directly about what I thought was going on.
+
+At first I was imagining a post on [my existing blog](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/), but a couple of my very smart and cowardly friends recommended a pseudonym, which I reluctantly agreed was probably a good idea. I came up with "M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake" as a pen name and [started this blog](/2016/Sep/apophenia/) (with [loving attention to technology choices, rather than just using WordPress](/2020/Apr/dont-read-the-comments/)). I'm not entirely without misgivings about the exact naming choices I made, although I don't actively regret it the way I regret [my attempted nickname switch in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials).[^naming-choices]
+
+[^naming-choices]: For the pen name: a hyphenated last name (a feminist tradition), abbreviated-first-initial + gender-neutral middle name (as if suggesting a male ineffectually trying to avoid having an identifiably male byline), "Saotome" from [a thematically-relevant Japanese graphic novel series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranma_%C2%BD), "West" (+ an extra syllable) after a character in Scott Alexander's serial novel _Unsong_ whose catchphrase is ["Somebody has to and no one else will"](https://unsongbook.com/chapter-6-till-we-have-built-jerusalem/).
+
+ For the blog name: I had already imagined that if I ever did stoop to the depravity of starting one of my own one of those [transformation/bodyswap captioned-photo erotica blogs](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), I would call it _The Titillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_, and in fact had already claimed _ultimatelyuntruethought@gmail.com_ in 2014, to participate in [a captioning contest](http://celebbodyswap.blogspot.com/2014/02/magic-remote-caption-contest.html), but since this was to be a serious autogynephilia _science_ blog, rather than tawdry _object-level_ autogynephilia blogging, I picked "Scintillating" as a more wholesome adjective. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to choose a URL different from the blog's title—people seem to remember the URL (`unremediatedgender.space`) more than the title, and as far as the URL goes, to be led by the dot before the TLD to interpret "space" as a separate word (a space for unremediated gender), rather than my intent of "genderspace" being a compound term analogous to "configuration space" (["you're going to have to bootstrap from _today's_, unremediated, genderspace"](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/)). But it doesn't bother me that much.
+
+... the pseudonymity quickly became a joke—or rather, a mere differential-visibility market-segmentation pen name and not an Actually Secret pen name, like how everyone knows that Robert Galbraith is actually J. K. Rowling. It turned out that my need for openness and a unified social identity was far stronger than my grasp of what my very smart and cowardly friends think is prudence, such that I ended up frequently linking to and claiming ownership of the blog from my real name, _and_ otherwise [leaking](/2019/Apr/link-where-to-draw-the-boundaries/) [entropy](/2021/Jan/link-unnatural-categories-are-optimized-for-deception/) [through](/2021/Sep/link-blood-is-thicker-than-water/) a sieve on this side.
+
+I kept the Saotome-Westlake byline because, given the world of the current year (such that this blog was even _necessary_), I figured it was _probably_ a smarter play (re: future employment searches) if the _first_ page of my real-name Google search results wasn't my gender [and worse](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/) heterodoxy blog. Plus, after having made the mistake (?) of listening to my very smart and cowardly friends at the start, I'd face a backwards-compatibility problem if I wanted to unwind the pseudonym: there were _already_ a lot of references to this blog being written by Saotome-Westlake, and I didn't want to throw away or rewrite that history. (The backwards-compatibility problem is also one of several reasons I'm not transitioning.)
+
+It's only now, just before publishing the first parts of this memoir telling my Whole Dumb Story, that I've decided to drop the pseudonym—partially because this Whole Dumb Story is tied up in enough real-world drama that it would be absurd and dishonorable to keep up the charade of hiding my own True Name while speaking so frankly about other people, and partially because my financial situation has improved (and my timelines to transformative AI have deteriorated) to the extent that the risk of missing out on future job opportunities due to open heterodoxy seems comparatively unimportant.
+
+(As it happens, Andrea James's Transgender Map website [mis-doxxed me as someone else](https://archive.is/Vg8CK), so I guess the charade worked?)
+
+------
+
+Besides writing to tell everyone else about it, another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment was that I decided to try hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Not to actually socially _transition_, which seemed as impossible (to actually pull off) and dishonest (to try) as ever, but just [to try as a gender-themed drug experiment](/2017/Sep/interlude-ix/). Everyone else was doing it—why should I have to miss out just for being more self-aware?
+
+Sarah Constantin, a friend who once worked for [our local defunct medical research company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetaMed) still offered lit-reviews as a service, so I paid her $5,000 to do [a post about the effects of feminizing hormone replacement therapy on males](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html), in case the depths of the literature had any medical insight to offer that wasn't already on the informed-consent paperwork. Meanwhile, I made the requisite gatekeeping appointments with [my healthcare provider](http://kp.org/) to get approved for HRT, first with a psychologist that I had seen before, then with a couple of licensed clinical social workers (LCSW) before finally getting approved for an HRT prescription.
+
+I was happy to sit through the sessions as standard procedure rather than [going DIY](https://diytrans.wiki/How_to_Begin_HRT), but I was very preoccupied with the thing about how [_everyone had been lying to me about the most important thing in my life for fourteen years_](/2017/Jan/im-sick-of-being-lied-to/) and the professionals were _in on it_, and spent a lot of the sessions ranting about that. I gave the psychologist and one of the LCSWs a copy of _Men Trapped in Men's Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism_. (The psychologist said she wasn't allowed to accept gifts with a monetary value of over $25, so I didn't tell her that it actually cost $40.)
+
+<a id="gender-clinic-notes"></a>I got the sense that the shrinks didn't quite know what to make of me. Years after the fact, I was grateful to discover that the notes from the appointments were later made available to me via the provider's website [(despite this practice introducing questionable incentives for the shrinks going forward)](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/jia4ox/has_scott_written_about_this_im_curious_what_his/ga6vhke/); it's very amusing to read about (for example) one of the LCSWs discussing my case with the department director and "explor[ing] ways in which pt's [patient's] neurodiversity may be impacting his ability to think about desired gender changes and communicate to therapists".
+
+The reality was actually worse than my hostile summary that everyone was lying, and the professionals were in on it. [In some ways, it would be _better_](/2016/new-clothes/) if the professionals secretly agreed with me about the typology and were cynically lying in order to rake in that sweet pharma cash. But they're not—lying. They just, have this whole paradigm of providing ["equitable" and "compassionate" "gender-affirming care"](https://thrive.kaiserpermanente.org/care-near-you/northern-california/eastbay/departments/gender-affirming-care/) which is transparently garbage-tier epistemology ([for a belief that needs to be affirmed is not a belief at all](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/)), but is so pervasive within its adherents' milieu, that they're incapable of seeing someone not buying it, even when you state your objections very clearly.
+
+Before one of my appointments with the LCSW, I wrote to the psychologist expressing frustration about the culture of lying, while noting that I needed to chill out and get to a point of emotional stability before starting the HRT experiment. (It's important to have all of one's ducks in a row before doing biochemistry experiments on the ducks.) She wrote back:
+
+> I agree with you entirely, both about your frustration with people wanting to dictate to you what you are and how you feel, and with the importance of your being emotionally stable prior to starting hormones. Please explain to those who argue with you that it is only YOUR truth that matter when it comes to you, your body and what makes you feel whole. No one else has the right to dictate this.
+
+I replied:
+
+> I'm not sure you do! I know condescending to patients is part of your usual script, but I hope I've shown that I'm smarter than that. This solipsistic culture of "it is only YOUR truth that matters" is _exactly_ what I'm objecting to! People can have false beliefs about themselves! As a psychologist, you shouldn't be encouraging people's delusions; you should be using your decades of study and experience to help people understand the actual psychological facts of the matter so that they can make intelligent choices about their own lives! If you think the Blanchard taxonomy is _false_, you should _tell_ me that I'm wrong and that it's false and why!
+
+Similarly, the notes from my first call to the gender department claim that I was "exploring gender identity" and that I was "interested in trying [hormones] for a few months to see if they fit with his gender identity". That's not how I remember that conversation! _I_ distinctly remember asking if the department would help me if I wanted to experiment with HRT _without_ socially transitioning: that is, I was asking if they would provide medical services _not_ on the basis of "gender identity". Apparently my existence is so far out-of-distribution that the nurse on the phone wasn't capable of writing down what I actually said.
+
+However weird I must have seemed, I have trouble imagining what anyone else tells the shrinks, given the pile of compelling evidence summarized earlier that most trans women are, in fact, guys like me. If I _wanted to_, I could cherry-pick pieces of evidence from my life to weave a more congruent narrative about always having been a girl on the inside. (Whatever that means! It still seems kind of sexist for that to mean something!) As a very small child, I remember asking for (and receiving, because I had good '90s liberal parents) [Polly Pocket](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polly_Pocket), and a pink-and-purple girl's scooter with heart decals; I could talk about how [sensitive](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) I am; I could go on about [my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity) ...
+
+But (as I told the LCSW) I would _know_ that I was cherry-picking. HSTS-taxon boys are identified as effeminate _by others_. [You know it when you see it, even when you're ideologically prohibited from _knowing_ that you know.](/2022/May/gaydar-jamming/) That's—not me. I [don't even _want_ that to be me](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#if-i-have-to-choose). I definitely have a gender _thing_, but I have a pretty detailed model of what I think the thing actually is in the real physical universe, and my model doesn't _fit_ in the ever-so-compassionate and -equitable ontology of "gender identity", which presupposes that what's going on when I report _wishing_ I were female is the _same thing_ as what's going on with actual women who (objectively correctly) report being female. I don't think it's the same thing, and I think you'd have to be [crazy or a liar](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/y4bkJTtG3s5d6v36k/stupidity-and-dishonesty-explain-each-other-away) to say it's plausibly the same thing.
+
+--------
+
+Another consequence of my Blanchardian enlightenment is that around this time was my break with progressive morality. I had never _really_ been progressive, as such. (I was registered to vote as a Libertarian, the legacy of a teenage dalliance with Ayn Rand and the [greater](https://web.archive.org/web/20070531085902/http://www.reason.com/blog/) [libertarian](https://praxeology.net/unblog07-06.htm) [blogosphere](https://cafehayek.com/).) But there was still an embedded assumption, reflected in [my antisexist faith](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), that, as far as America's culture wars went, I was unambiguously on the right (_i.e._, left) side of history, [the Blue Team and not the Red Team](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/brand-rust/).
+
+Even after years of devouring heresies on the internet—I remember fascinatedly reading everything I could about race and IQ in the wake of [the James Watson affair back in 'aught-seven](https://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/10/james-watson-tells-inconvenient-truth_296.php)—I had never really questioned my coalitional alignment. With some prompting from "Thomas", I was starting to question it now.
+
+Among many works which I had previously skimmed (in the process of skimming lots of things on the internet) was the anti-democratic political theory blog [_Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/), by Curtis Yarvin, then writing as Mencius Moldbug. The _Unqualified Reservations_ archives caught my renewed interest in light of my recent troubles.
+
+Moldbug paints a picture in which, underneath the fiction of "democracy", the United States is better modeled as an oligarchic theocracy ruled by universities and the press and the civil service. The apparent symmetry between the Democrats and Republicans is fake: the Democrats represent [an alliance of the professional–managerial ruling class and their black and Latino underclass clients](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/castes-of-united-states/); the Republicans, [representing non-elite whites and the last vestiges of the old ruling elite](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/bdh-ov-conflict_07/), can sometimes demagogue their way into high offices, but the left's ownership of the institutions prevents them "conserving" anything for very long.
+
+The reason it ended up this way is because power abhors a vacuum: if you ostensibly put the public mind in charge of the state, that just creates an incentive for power-seeking agents to try to _control the public mind_. If you have a nominal separation of church and state, but all the incentives that lead to the establishment of a state religion in other Societies are still in play, you've just created selection pressure for a _de facto_ state religion that sheds the ideological trappings of "God" in favor of "progress" and "equality", in order to sidestep the [Establishment Clause](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause). People within the system are indoctrinated into a Whig history which holds that people in the past were bad, bad men, but that we're so much more enlightened now in the progress of time—but the progress of time isn't sensitive to what's _better_; it only tracks what _won_.
+
+Moldbug contends that the triumph of progressivism is bad insofar as the oligarchic theocracy, for all its lofty rhetoric, is structurally incapable of good governance: it's not a coincidence that all functional _non_-government organizations are organized as monarchies, with an owner or CEO[^ceo-supervision] who has the joint authority and responsibility to hand down sane decisions, rather than being hamstrung by the insanity of politics (which, as Moldbug frequently notes, is synonymous with _democracy_).
+
+[^ceo-supervision]: Albeit possibly supervised by a board of directors who can fire the leader, but not meddle in day-to-day operations.
+
+(Some of Moldbug's claims about the nature of the American order that seemed outlandish or crazy when _Unqualified Reservations_ was being written in the late 'aughts and early 'tens, now seem much more credible after Trump and [Brexit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit) and [the summer of George Floyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests). I remember that in senior year of high school back in 'aught-five, on [Coming Out Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coming_Out_Day), my physics teacher said that she was coming out as a Republican. Even then, I got the joke, but I didn't realize the implications.)
+
+In one part of his [_Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations_](https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified_22/), Moldbug compares the social and legal status of black people in the contemporary United States to hereditary nobility (!!).
+
+Moldbug asks us to imagine a Society with asymmetric legal and social rules for nobles and commoners: it's socially deviant for commoners to be rude to nobles, but permitted for nobles to be rude to commoners; violence of nobles against commoners is excused on the presumption that the commoners must have done something to provoke it; nobles are officially preferred in employment and education, and are allowed to organize to advance their collective interests, whereas any organization of commoners _qua_ commoners is outlawed or placed under extreme suspicion.
+
+Moldbug claims that the status of non-Asian minorities in contemporary America is analogous to that of the nobles in his parable. But separately from denouncing the system as unfair, Moldbug furthermore claims that the asymmetric rules have deleterious effects _on the beneficiaries themselves_:
+
+> applied to the cream of America's actual WASP–Ashkenazi aristocracy, genuine genetic elites with average IQs of 120, long histories of civic responsibility and productivity, and strong innate predilections for delayed gratification and hard work, I'm confident that this bizarre version of what we can call _ignoble privilege_ would take no more than two generations to produce a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels. Applied to populations with recent hunter-gatherer ancestry and no great reputation for sturdy moral fiber, _noblesse sans oblige_ is a recipe for the production of absolute human garbage.
+
+This was the sort of right-wing heresy that I could read about on the internet (as I read lots of things on the internet without necessarily agreeing), and see the argument abstractly, without putting any serious weight on it.
+
+It wasn't my place. I'm not a woman or a racial minority; I don't have their lived experience; I _don't know what it's like_ to face the challenges they face. So while I could permissibly _read blog posts_ skeptical of the progressive story about redressing wrongs done to designated sympathetic victim groups, I didn't think of myself as having standing to seriously doubt the story.
+
+Until suddenly, in what was then the current year of 2016, it was now seeming that the designated sympathetic victim group of our age was ... _straight boys who wished they were girls_. And suddenly, [_I had standing_](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/).
+
+When a political narrative is being pushed for _your_ alleged benefit, it's much easier to make the call that it's obviously full of lies. The claim that political privileges are inculcating "a culture of worthless, unredeemable scoundrels" in some _other_ group is easy to dismiss as bigotry, but it hits differently when you can see it happening to _people like you_. Notwithstanding whether the progressive story had been right about the travails of Latinos, blacks, and women, I _know_ that straight boys who wish they were girls are not actually as fragile and helpless as we were being portrayed—that we _weren't_ that fragile, if anyone still remembered the world of 'aught-six, when straight boys who wished they were girls knew that the fantasy wasn't real, and didn't think the world owed us deference for our perversion. This _did_ raise additional questions about whether previous iterations of progressive ideology had been entirely honest with me. (If nothing else, I noticed that my update from "Blanchard is probably wrong because trans women's self-reports say it's wrong" to "Self-reports are pretty crazy" probably had implications for "[Red Pill](https://heartiste.org/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/) is probably wrong because women's self-reports say it's wrong".)