draft "Amulet"

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+Title: Amulet
+Date: 2021-03-15 05:00
+Category: commentary
+Tags: ideology
+Status: draft
+
+After some recent Twitter and Discord discussions, I'm still amazed at how well my "only Nixon could go to China" effect continues to hold up: everyone is respectfully sympathetic to the poor self-hating trans woman even when her _whole bit_ is specifically about explaining why that frame is delusional. (When anyone else making the same points would have been dismissed as hateful.)
+
+Is it my nuance, originality, and nonpartisanship? I can play the philosophy-of-language mind games with the best of them—better, I think—and am clearly doing _more work_ than copying the standard appeals to fourth-grade biology from the TERF cache. (And _showing your work_ matters even if postgraduate biology and artificial intelligence eventually concludes that fourth-grade biology basically had the right idea.) If it's the nuance, that _bodes well_ for broadening the topic scope of the blog.
+
+But I don't think that's all of it; somehow I doubt whether anti-feminist women and black Republicans have it this easy. (Or even non-feminist women and black libertarians, if nonpartisanship is a factor.) Some would say it's my white male privilege—but I have another theory.
+
+Maybe people _still think they can crack my egg_. Phyllis Schlafly and Hermain Cain's eligibility markers were immutable—having already left the coalition of the marginalized, there was nothing that could be changed to induce them to come back. Whereas my pre-eligibility status gives me the _option_ to be marked, which would change my incentives. If I have to _keep_ [putting the "cis" in "decision"](/2017/Sep/hormones-day-156-developments-doubts-and-pulling-the-plug-or-putting-the-cis-in-decision/) every day, the coalition can still hope to [offer me a better deal](/2019/Dec/the-strategy-of-stigmatization/) should my alignment falter.