+It was me, once. I had a couple [psychotic](/2017/Mar/fresh-princess/) [episodes](/2017/Jun/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words/) last year, including some delusions of grandeur. At various points, I thought that I had been appointed Gender Czar of this equivalence class of instances of Earth across the multiverse, that I was objectively one of the seven most important people in the world with a key role to play in the [intelligence explosion](TODO: linky),
+
+[...]
+
+I want you to imagine yourself as a resident of 1870s San Francisco, someone who Emperor Norton trusts as one of his chief imperial advisors.
+
+[...]
+
+"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say. "An alternative categorization system is not an error, and category boundaries are drawn in specific ways to to capture trade-offs that we care about, not something that can be objectively _true_ or _false_. If we care about your identification as the Emperor—"
+
+"_What?_" he exclaims. He looks at you like you're crazy. And in that moment, caught in the old man's earnest, pleading gaze, you realize that you don't believe your own bullshit.
+
+"No, you're right," you say. "You're not actually Emperor. People around here have just been humoring you for the last decade because we thought it was funny. Um, sorry."
+
+He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry. He emits long, shuddering sobs for his lost empire. Worse that lost, an empire that never existed, except in the charitable facade of people who valued him as a local in-joke, but not as a man.
+
+You wait many minutes for him to calm down.
+
+"It's not wrong, is it?" he eventually says. "To _want_ to rule, to _want_ to be Emperor?"