+[section: started a pseudonymous secret blog; one of the things I focused on was the philosophy-of-language thing, because that seemed _really_ nailed down: "...To Make Predictions", "Reply on Adult Human Females". And that was going OK ...]
+
+[section: hill of meaning in defense of validity, and I _flipped the fuck out_]
+
+[...]
+
+A friend tells me that I'm delusional to expect so much from "the community", that the original vision _never_ included tackling politically sensitive subjects. (I remember this friend recommending Paul Graham's ["What You Can't Say"](http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) back in 'aught-nine, with the suggestion to take Graham's advice to figure out what you can't say, and then _don't say it_.)
+
+Perhaps so. But back in 2009, we did not _anticipate_ that _whether or not I should cut my dick off_ would _become_ a politicized issue.
+
+To be fair, it's not obvious that I _shouldn't_ cut my dick off! A lot of people seem to be doing it nowadays, and a lot of them seem pretty happy! But in order to _decide_ whether to join them, I need _accurate information_. I need an _honest_ accounting of the costs and benefits of transition, so that I can cut my dick off in the possible worlds where that's a good idea, and not cut my dick off in the possible worlds where it's not a good idea.
+
+And if the community whose marketing literature says they're all about systematically correct reasoning, is not only not going to be helpful at producing accurate information, but is furthermore going _actively manufacture fake rationality lessons_ that have been optimized to _confuse me into cutting my dick off_ independently of the empirical facts that determine whether or not we live in one of the possible worlds where cutting my dick off is a good idea, then that community is _fraudulent_. It needs to either _rebrand_—or failing that, _disband_—or failing that, _be destroyed_.
+
+I don't think I'm setting [my price for joining](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining) particularly high here? That's a reference to a post by the Great Teacher about how people [(especially nonconformist nerds like us)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7FzD7pNm9X68Gp5ZC/why-our-kind-can-t-cooperate) tend to impose far too many demands before being willing to contribute their efforts to a collective endeavor. That post [concludes](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q8evewZW5SeidLdbA/your-price-for-joining)—
+
+> If the issue isn't worth your personally fixing by however much effort it takes, and it doesn't arise from outright bad faith, it's not worth refusing to contribute your efforts to a cause you deem worthwhile.
+
+I think I've _more than_ met this standard. I _tried_ personally fixing the issue no matter how much effort it took! Also, the issue _does_, in fact, arise from outright bad faith. (We had [an entire Sequence](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb) about this! You lying motherfuckers!)
+
+That ended up being quite a lot of effort!—but at this point I've _exhausted every possible avenue of appeal_. Arguing [publicly on the object level](/2018/Feb/the-categories-were-made-for-man-to-make-predictions/) didn't work. Arguing [publicly on the meta level](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/esRZaPXSHgWzyB2NL/where-to-draw-the-boundaries) didn't work. Arguing privately didn't work. There is _nothing left for me to do_ but lick my wounds, wait for my broken heart to heal, and—probably—somehow—try to still be friends with (in some sense of "friends") with people I believe to be in a state of epistemic sin because _I don't have anywhere else to go_.
+
+
+
+[section: the community is politically constrained]