Rather, psych wards make sense as being for the welfare of friends or family who are _sick of putting up with living with a crazy person_. It's a form of responsibility laundering: if there's a designated institution for taking care of crazy people, you can dump your loved ones there to be _someone else's problem_ (at least for a few days), with a clean conscience, because anything bad that happens inside of an officially sanctioned institution, isn't anyone fault.
-It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness—not ones that are held in high regard these days, anyway.
+It's important not to be misled by the name, psychiatric "hospital". The word _hospital_ gives the impression of a place where medical procedures are performed, like how real hospitals do surgeries and set broken bones. We don't really have _procedures_ to treat mental illness.
It's a jail—a place where you lock up undesirable people where they can't impose costs on anyone who isn't being paid to deal with them. And precisely _because_ I was modeling it as a jail, my social performance was a lot better this time around than in 2013.
This was _not at all_ obvious from the inside. I'm reminded of an article I once read in the racist[^racist-magazine] magazine _American Renaissance_, [by a public defender complaining about the behavior of his predominantly black clients](https://archive.is/HUkzY):
-[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say _racialist_? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
+[^racist]: I think they would prefer that I say [_racialist_](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racialism&oldid=968287916)? But I also think that, when pressed, they would concede that _you know what I mean_.
> If you tell a black man that the evidence is very harmful to his case, he will blame _you_. "You ain't workin' fo' me." "It like you workin' with da State." Every public defender hears this. The more you try to explain the evidence to a black man, the angrier he gets.
...
-I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had the mononymic aura of "Einstein" _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
+I remember pacing the tiled halls of a the first facility where they took me—probably [Contra Costa Regional Medical Center](https://cchealth.org/medicalcenter/psychiatric.php) in Martínez.[^ccrmc] I was exhausted, but also feeling a sort of manic euphoria, pacing around, tapping demonstratively at the signs on the walls, thinking it was my duty to teach the other inmates how to read. Ziz's report of Vassar's comment about "Zack Davis _vs._ the world" stuck with me; I had of vision of myself as one of the seven most important people in the world in the lead-up to the intelligence explosion, as reckoned by future historians. Being a world–historically important genius wouldn't have _felt like_ being a genius at the time, most of the time. It must have felt like being pretty smart, and the rest of the world seeming dumb and crazy. (A young Albert Einstein working in the Swiss patent office wouldn't have had [the mononymic aura of "Einstein"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5o4EZJyqmHY4XgRCY/einstein-s-superpowers) _to his contemporaries_.) Notwithstanding that I was having psychotic delusions of grandeur at the time, I do think it was legitimate for me to feel that I was pretty smart, and that the rest of the world was dumb and crazy.
[^ccrmc]: I only know this because, when consulting the doctor's notes available to me while writing this up more than six years after the fact, one of the notes mentions "CCRMC PES". "PES" is probably "Psychiatric Emergency Services".
...
-I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with sluggish schizophrenia as a pretext for persecuting them; how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)
+I remember having Anna on the phone, and asking if I was a political prisoner. (The Soviet Union had declared its dissidents sick with [sluggish schizophrenia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sluggish_schizophrenia) as [a pretext for persecuting them](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union); how could I be sure things worked all that differently here?) She answered in the negative. "Really?" I said. (If I _was_ a political prisoner, she might not be able to say so over a telephone line controlled by the authorities.)
...
...
-I was a very genre-savvy psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.
+I was a very [genre-savvy](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy) psych prisoner. I was distrustful of the other inmates, and distrustful of the authorities, but in different ways; the optimal strategy to protect myself against each was different.
-I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by the Christianity memeplex to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period, but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
+I feared violence from the other inmates. I thought I could subtly leave clues that (as a Jewish male with long hair), I was an incarnation of Jesus, which would discourage them from attacking me (because many of them would have already been programmed by the Christianity memeplex to believe that killing Jesus was the worst sin). I told people that [my father was coming to pick me up at the end of my three-day evaluation period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_of_Jesus), but that it wasn't fair that I couldn't rescue everyone. (I'm proud of this one, even though I no longer agree with the threat model.) My father actually did pick me up in three days.
]
I agreed that ridiculing a named individual in a public speech is _mean_, and it's preferable to avoid mean things if there's any way to make the same point with the same force and quality; it would be better if we could just directly renegotiate social norms without being mean. In that sense, I was not pro-Milo. But if we couldn't peacefully coordinate and were doomed to do politics, the victimhood identity-politics mind-virus's strategy of gerrymandering categories seemed like a strategy of [asymmetrical warfare](http://devinhelton.com/afghanistan-fractally-stupid-war), less of a fair fight than just trading insults. I could respect Yiannopoulos as an ordinary soldier.
-Michael said that the issue that ultimately took down Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump got away with being open about sexual assault.
+Michael said that [the issue that ultimately took down](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Yiannopoulos#Remarks_on_paedophilia_and_child_sexual_abuse) Yiannopoulos was actually as obvious as my issue, and that it was striking that it did so even while Trump [got away with being open about sexual assault](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/locker-room-talk/).
He wasn't specific about the obvious issue, but I filled in the blanks: young teen boys who have just hit puberty want sex, and wouldn't obviously be harmed by getting it from adults if it weren't for the social consensus that this would somehow harm them? Yes, that _did_ seem more obvious to a far larger population than autogynephilia motivating transgenderism. (Obligate-AGP sexuality is probably hard to empathize with if you haven't experienced it—I didn't feel like Michael understood it when we had talked in Berkeley a few months before—but the vast majority of men remember what it was like to be a horny teenager.)
No, Michael clarified, selfish people are almost never a problem. The problem was with mobs, not individual bad people. In the absence of taboos against racism, mobs would form and coerce people to demand blood from the most convenient Schelling point: in practice, Jews or blacks.
-What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos). But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.
+What made the ACLU important was that it credibly [made a reliable committment to defend people like Yiannopoulos](http://www.npr.org/2017/02/12/514785623/the-aclu-explains-why-theyre-supporting-the-rights-of-milo-yiannopoulos).[^aclu] But Michael didn't think that many of them understood how bad I saw the situation as being. The ACLU needed to address how plausible the arguments for censorship are. People accepting censorship needed to address arguments about how real the harms are. As far as he can tell, I was the maximally concrete and articulate case of a person harmed by political correctness in a context where an impartial summary would call it attempted genocide.
+
+[^aclu]: Remember, this was 2017. The reliability of the committment [seems to have frayed in the intervening few years](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html) as the [Great Awokening](https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020) continued.
I asked him to be more specific about the class of people he thought were being genocided (nerdy men?) and by what (the political-correctness memeplex that evolved as a social-control mechanism to prevent the United States from descending into racialized violence like Yugoslavia?).
-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" between AGP and normal heterosexual attraction, the balance between the two being set early in psycho-sexual development: maybe pre-autogynephilic boys who chase girls develop mostly normally, while those deprived of that outlet double down on their perversion.
+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 Heinlein's fiction has very strong 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]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also an entire book, _I Will Fear No Evil_, where an aging plutocrat's brain gets transplanted into the body of his late secretary. I read it as a teenager, and described it to one of my notebooks as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
+[^heinlein-agp]: There was that scene in _Stranger in a Strange Land_ where a man watching a woman perform on stage uses a telepathic link to share her experiences—but there was also 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 it as a teenager, and described it to one of my notebooks as having the dubious distinction of being simultaneously skillfully written, sexist, and _boring_.
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 aesthetic 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_.)
------
-As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy located in some other country (India?) with fewer laws about this sort of thing.
+As part of being less submissive to authorities in general and the medical establishment in particular, it felt appropriate to get some gray-market HRT, so I ordered a pack of Progynova 1mg (estradiol) and a pack of Aldactone 25mg (spironolactone) from AllDayChemist, an online pharmacy based out of India, which presumably has fewer laws about this sort of thing.
I didn't need it (and didn't end up using it); my regular health care provider got me equipped to [re-start my HRT experiment](/2017/Mar/hormones-reboot-spironotacular/) (including the spiro this time). It was the principle: that I could just buy drugs of my own choice using money, without the pretense of an authority diagnosing me with "gender dysphoria".
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