+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.
+
+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 the other commenter 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: say "XX-cluster" 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 are used in different ways by different groups. It's just—I think it should have already been clear from my comments that I understood that words can be used in many ways; my objection to the other commenter's usage was backed by a specific _argument_ about the expressive power of language; Bensinger didn't acknowledge my argument. (The other commenter, to her credit, did.)
+
+To be fair to Bensinger, it's entirely 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 was suspicious that that wasn't actually his algorithm. It is a distortion 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.
+
+Someone named Ben Hoffman, who I hadn't previously known or thought much about, put a Like on one of my comments. I messaged him to say hi, and to thank him for the Like, "but maybe it's petty and tribalist to be counting Likes".
+
+-----
+
+Having already started to argue with people under my real name (in violation of my previous intent to save it for the secret blog), the logic of "in for a lamb, in for a sheep" (or "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](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154807871200199):
+
+> 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 hastily-written post addressed, "Dear Totally Excellent Rationalist Friends"](https://www.facebook.com/zmdavis/posts/10154808888680199).[^terf-allusion] As a transhumanist, I believed that people should get what they want, and that we should have social norms designed to help people get what they want. But fantasizing about having a property (in context, being a woman, but I felt motivated to be vague for some reason) without yet having sought out interventions to acquire the property, is not the same thing as somehow already literally having the property in some unspecified metaphysical sense. The process of attempting to acquire the property does not _propagate backwards in time_. I realized that explaining this in clear language had the potential to hurt people's feelings, but as an aspiring epistemic rationalist, I had a _goddamned moral responsibility_ to hurt those people's feelings. I was proud of my autogynephilic fantasy life, and proud of my rationalist community, and I didn't want either of them being taken over by _crazy people who think they can edit the past_.
+
+[^terf-allusion]: The initial letters being a [deliberate allusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics#Gender-critical_feminism_and_trans-exclusionary_radical_feminism).
+
+It got 170 comments (!), a large fraction of which were me arguing with a woman whom I'll call "Margaret" (with whom I had also had an exchange in the thread on Bensinger's wall on 7 February).