+—my _favorite_—and basically only—masturbation fantasy has always been some variation on me getting magically transformed into a woman. I ... want to write more about the phenomenology of this, some time. I don't think the details are important here.
+
+So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at least, at first), and _of course_ never told a single soul. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to tell my Diary about it, in the addendum to entry number 53 on 8 March 2005.)
+
+But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, where I was also having a lot of thoughts about being a girl. Just—little day-to-day thoughts. Like when I would write in my pocket notebook as my female analogue. Or when I would practice swirling the descenders on all the lowercase letters that had descenders [(_g_, _j_, _p_, _z_)](TODO: linky "jazzy puppy" demo image) because I thought my handwriting look more feminine. [TODO: another anecdote]
+
+Now, of course I had _heard of_ there being such a thing as transsexualism.
+
+[...]
+
+(I'm avoiding naming anyone in this post even when linking to their public writings, in order to try to keep the _rhetorical emphasis_ on "true tale of personal heartbreak, coupled with sober analysis of the sociopolitical factors leading thereto" even while I'm ... ah, expressing disappointment with people's performance. This isn't supposed to be character/reputation attack on my friends and intellectual heroes—I just _need to tell the story_ about why I've been crazy all year so that I can stop grieving and _move on_.)
+
+[...]
+
+So, I think this is a bad argument. But specifically, it's a bad argument for _completely general reasons that have nothing to do with gender_. And more specifically, completely general reasons that have been explained in exhaustive, _exhaustive_ detail in _our own foundational texts_.
+
+In 2008, the Great Teacher had this really amazing series of posts explaining the hidden probability-theoretic structure of language and cognition. Essentially, explaining _natural language as an AI capability_. What your brain is doing when you [see a tiger and say, "Yikes! A tiger!"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dMCFk2n2ur8n62hqB/feel-the-meaning) is governed the [simple math](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnPEpu5eQWkbyAJCT/the-simple-math-of-everything) by which intelligent systems make observations, use those observations to assign category-membership, and use category-membership to make predictions about properties which have not yet been observed. _Words_, language, are an information-theoretically efficient _code_ for such systems to share cognitive content.
+
+And these posts hammered home the point over and over and over and _over_ again—culminating in [the 37-part grand moral](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong)—that word and category definitions are _not_ arbitrary, because there are optimality criteria that make some definitions _perform better_ than others as "cognitive technology"—
+
+> ["It is a common misconception that you can define a word any way you like. [...] If you believe that you can 'define a word any way you like', without realizing that your brain goes on categorizing without your conscious oversight, then you won't take the effort to choose your definitions wisely."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences)
+
+> ["So that's another reason you can't 'define a word any way you like': You can't directly program concepts into someone else's brain."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions)