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+Let me tell you about the moment I stopped wanting to be sensitive—the moment of liberating clarity when I resolved the tension between being a good person and the attendant requirement to pretend to be stupid by deciding not to be a good person anymore.
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+I was arguing over instant messaging about all this with a (cis, male) acquaintance I'll call "Kevin," who had no obvious personal stake in the matter.
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+Understand the underlying psychological phenomenon _first_, I said, _then_ decide on quality-of-life interventions based on the facts.
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+He said that the quality-of-life interventions available from that seem small relative to the harm caused by insisting that late-transition trans women aren't real women, that the right time to consider confronting this would be after the culture war over trans rights is safely out of the Overton window, probably in 25 to 30 years. He said that I would have a generally better model of the world if I assumed that autogynephilia is not a real thing that has tangible effects.
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+But then how am I supposed to explain the last 14 years of my life? I asked. Am I supposed to believe I was secretly a girl this entire time and didn't notice? Even though I didn't know, _and_ no one else knew, _and_ I had a male body _and_ the vast majority of my psychological traits were in the male normal range?