Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
-Date: 2020-01-01
+Date: 2017-12-02 05:00
Category: other
-Tags: personal
+Tags: anecdotal, personal, two-type taxonomy
Status: draft
I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party/meetup at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, perhaps in honor of Robin being in town. This was a little less than nine years ago, back during the golden age when the Sequences were still being written, when the _M_ and _R_ in _MIRI_ were still an _S_ and an _A_, respectively—before the Eternal September, before everyone was poly, and _long_ before everyone was trans.
(I still have the "radical notion" pin, but it's no longer proudly pinned to my backpack. Ideology—in the general case—is not my style anymore.)
-The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it should have gone
+The party was amazing, as always, but there's one exchange that haunts me to this day, a moment when I was caught off guard by having been _seen through_ in a way that, at the time, I couldn't permit myself to anticipate or understand. I wish I had an actual transcript of it, so I could pencil in "corrections" of how it _should_ have gone. (Narrative optimization should be a _deliberate_ process: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather rather than letting them get blurred together in the murky, unauditable process of reconstructing the scene from an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after.)
+A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks. I struck up a conversation with her. (It turned out that we had previously had a tense exchange on the blog in which I had protested that gender-stereotypical behavior shouldn't be conflated with the fact of one's sex, but I didn't know that was her at the time.)
-Narrative optimization should be deliberate: you should keep separate track of what actually happened and what _should_ have happened, rather than blurring them together.
+At some point (to my eternal regret, I cannot recall the exact context), she casually said something about my desire for social dominance. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she were commenting on something as innocuous and indisputable as my height or hair color.
-(rather than the narratively-convenient reconstruction of an eight-and-change-year-old memory and a Diary entry from the Monday after), so that I could pencil in corrections of
-
-[...]
-
-A blonde woman wearing a red dress and black high heels stuck out among the predominantly male throng of geeks.
-
-casually referred to my desire for social dominance.
-
-
-I stammered out a shocked and perhaps unconvincing denial.
+I stammered out a shocked and probably unconvincing denial.
She regarded me skeptically. "You _look_ male," she said.
-"But that doesn't mean I'm _happy_ about it!" I burst out defensively, to the apparent surprise of
+"But that doesn't mean I'm _happy_ about it!" I burst out defensively, to the apparent surprise of the other Robin, who was listening nearby.
The woman's skepticism was unmoved. "I'm not getting a tranny vibe from you," she said.
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