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-After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.
+After being released from psych prison, arrangements were made for me to attend the Intensive Outpatient Program at Kaiser Walnut Creek—more school-like group sessions where they talk about feelings and coping strategies. That was also anti-helpful, but it was much less of a problem. The outpatient psych authorities are of course just as stupid and overbearingly paternalistic as the inpatient psych prison authorities, with the crucial difference that they don't have any power. In psych prison, the doors are locked; you physically can't leave.
The outpatient program has a few social-pressure sales tactics meant to persuade you that you have some underlying condition that requires their "care". They were unpersuaded by my cause-and-effect reasoning that I had gone crazy due to stress-induced sleep deprivation, and was now fine after having gotten sleep, that getting sleep _fixed the problem_.
I could see a picture where the underlying bug in male sexual psychology that leads to AGP would be far less likely to progress to "gender dysphoria" (actually doing something about it) in a world where it was socially-acceptable for highly-verbal 13-year-old boys to seek out sex, instead of internalizing socially-desirable admonitions against trying (which were adapted to the norm of reaction of a largely dumber population), resulting in Comment 171 syndrome. Blanchard [had posited "developmental competition"](/papers/blanchard-nonmonotonic_relation_of_agp_and_heterosexual_attraction.pdf) between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psychosexual development. Maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion?
-It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has some autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
+It's notable that some of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction has autogynephlic themes,[^heinlein-agp] but I'm not aware of any evidence that he actually did anything about it real life, whereas I, growing up 80 years later, was—and I felt like it was the right choice for me, even though it probably looked like ideologically-driven self-harm from the perspective of normal men who hadn't followed by historically-anomalous developmental trajectory.
-[^heinlein-agp]: [TODO] Some of this is circumstantial [...] The scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Michael Valentine Smith uses his telepathic powers [...] sex change in "All You Zombies" [...] _an entire book_, [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read _I Will Fear No Evil_ as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: Most tellingly, in [_I Will Fear No Evil_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Fear_No_Evil), an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. (I read it as a teenager, and described it then as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.) This is inherently an AGP wish-fulfillment plot and it's hard to imagine a non-AGP man writing a book about it.
+
+ More circumstantially, the sex change in "All You Zombies", and the scenes in chapter XXIX of _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where Mike uses his telepathy powers to share the "male gaze" experience with Jill, seem like the kind of plot details an AGP male author is more likely to come up with (having more reason than an ordinary man to have a lingering fascination with the idea of sex changes and cross-sex experience-sharing).
So if the forces of political correctness won and "trans" became an entrenched cultural practice, that could be seen as genociding future generations of Robert Heinlein analogues—and at the same time, from inside the trans-rights social-reality bubble, the efforts of people opposing gender identity ideology look like trying to genocide future generations of Julia Serano analogues. And from inside the bubble of my own eclectic ideology, I wanted to [rescue](https://arbital.com/p/rescue_utility/) a Julia Serano-like æsthetic in a way that's compatible with knowledge of science and history. (Heinlein was scientifically- and historically-literate, and Serano is an ignorant ideologue, but Heinlein was a manly man who was OK with being a manly man as his social identity—and that's just _not my style_.)
More information came in an email that night from Lex Gendel[^lex-name] to me, Michael, and a few other people. The person in distress was a trans woman of my acquaintance whom I'll call "Roberta". Apparently, "Roberta" had had a psychotic episode. Her parents bought her a plane ticket back to Europe, but when she attempted to board the plane, she was committed to an unknown psych ward in Pittsburgh. As far as Lex knew, "Roberta" was currently too psychotic to play nice with the authorities. Our contact point with the family was her brother, who wasn't that cooperative and was also in Europe. (I'm imagining he was the source of this information—that the authorities at least called the family?)
-[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked on 4 April 2017 which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
+[^lex-name]: The "From" header was still using Lex's deadname (he's transmasculine), but when I asked which name was preferred, he said that he strongly preferred Alexander or variants thereof except where that would out him to his family.
Our mission was to find out where "Roberta" was and how to contact her. "Stacy" (also on the email) was local to Pittsburgh. "Kyle" and I started looking up Pittsburgh-area psych wards on Google Maps and calling them.
So, that was good news. (Good news about "Roberta"'s welfare, which was more important than my grudge against psych hospitals.) I conceded my bet with Scott and PayPal'd him $500. Scott pointed out that I had offered the bet while I was really angry and traumatized from my own recent psych ward experience; if I thought it wasn't representative of my best cognitive processes, he was happy to call it off and send back the money.
-I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the psych prison staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
+I _absolutely_ insisted that he keep the money: whether it was my best cognition or not was for reality to judge, not me, and on the specific question of whether the Western Psychiatric staff relayed telephone messages, reality had judged.
-(At least, as far as I knew at the time! Keep reading!)
+(At least, as far as I knew at the time—keep reading for a surprising reversal!)
We didn't want to hold people accountable for false confessions under duress or contracts to sell oneself into slavery, but surely we could handle a measly $500 bet!
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-[TODO: starting to overheat
- * 1 April: "Study re: two-types hypothesis" (Bailey replies on the 10th)
- * meanwhile, I had made arrangements with my dayjob to a 2 day/wk contracting on Portal (I had originally said 60/hr, Orion pointed out that was low and went to 75!!); I signed a contract!
- * on 2 April, I had sent the wire transfer reciept to AllDayChemist, on 5 April they said, "Please send us the transfer receipt as we are missing that information from your email."
- * I pick implicitly pick a fight with James, bring up the idea of hiring him as my music teacher
- * I said that I don't want Michael and Anna to be fighting (Subject: "Anna-Michael realignment project"); I send "cooperate with James Cook (eom)" messages to Michael and Anna
- * (14 April 2017 was a Friday, the 7th was also a Friday)
- * I had a Friday–Sunday (14-16) hotel room for BABSCon
- * Anna: "we are doing a thing I would normally call "fighting" (I can detail what I mean if desired; it has various asymmetries and non-typicalities in it, but nevertheless I would normally use that word)"
- * 9 April: Alice–Anna realignment project
- * care coordination thread started 11 April
- * 12 April: NRx/LW peace treaty talks
- * 12 April: Anna writes to me on "Staying Safe"
-]
+This is the part where I started to go crazy a second time.
+
+I worry that some readers will take this as vindication of the authorities' position: that I should have submitted to "treatment" in February, that I was wrong to have thought that my only problems were stress and sleep deprivation.
+
+The reader is entitled to their opinion, but I still think my theory stands up after you take into account that the "Roberta" crisis was a _new stressor_ (and that I _ended up_ being fine despite this April relapse).
[TODO: staying at Volterra, Hamilton purchase]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff