--- /dev/null
+Title: A Common Misunderstanding; Or, The Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
+Date: 2020-01-01
+Category: other
+Status: draft
+
+I remember (and the Diary entry helps, too) there was a party at someone's place down in Sunnyvale, 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 worked the 0600 to 1500 bookkeeper/customer-service shift at my supermarket dayjob that day. After work, I dropped off the week's bag of coupons at store #936, bought a woefully-misnamed espresso medicinal from the hegemon's coffee kiösk there, then drove downtown and parked by the library construction site to buy a "FEMINISM IS THE RADICAL NOTION THAT WOMEN ARE PEOPLE" button at Ming Quong to put on my bag as a replacement for the one I had bought in 'aught-six and lost at some point.
+
+[...]
+
+"Right, you're thinking of the good kind," is what I _should_ have said. "I'm the bad kind."
I understand that for people who have _already_ built up a self-image around the idea that they are literally women and always have been, the idea that their female gender identity arose out of a misinterpretation of misdirected male sexuality could be extremely disturbing.
-I'm happy to shut up about, um, enpvny qvssreraprf va VD, but this, _this_ is _personal_
+I'm happy to shut up about, um, rguavp VD qvssreraprf univat n fvmnoyr trargvp pbzcbarag, but this, _this_ is _personal_.
But people dealing with gender dysphoria who haven't already transitioned deserve accurate information! This is _personal_ to me. If being a good person means submitting to social pressure aimed at getting me to _shut up and stop thinking_ about the true nature of the beautiful feeling at the center of my life for _twenty-five fucking years_ (!?), then I have _no interest_ in being a good person.
I'm certainly not _trying_ to say things that will hurt people—_least_ of all people who are mostly just like me but read different books in a different order and are living out a pretty decent approximation of _my wildest fantasy_.
-But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, you end up conceding the entire future history of world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_.
+But if you try _not_ to say things that will hurt people, [you](https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/) [end](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/22/ot9-the-thread-pirate-roberts/#comment-160689) [up](http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k) conceding the entire future history of world to people on the basis of their being colonized by mind-viruses that make them the _easiest to hurt_.
I don't want to live in that world.
(An entry in [the Yudkowskian school](http://lesswrong.com/lw/qi/faster_than_science/) of applied epistemology.)
-It's important to distinguish between the _social_ process of science and the cognitive process of rationality.
+It's important to [distinguish](http://lesswrong.com/lw/qb/science_doesnt_trust_your_rationality/) the _social_ process of science and the cognitive process of rationality.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qi/faster_than_science/
And the God of Marketing said, "What is truth? Cooperate with me, and I will explain to all the peoples of Gend that you are of the same bloodline as Phem, and you will be despised no longer, and all the peoples of Gend will have sympathy for your struggles, and the king himself will favor you."
-And the elders of the tribe of Ageep looked at each other and said, "Cooperate."
-
And the people of the tribe of Ageep looked at each other and said, "Cooperate."
+And the elders of the tribe of Ageep looked at each other and said, "Cooperate."
+
And the chief elder of the tribe of Ageep looked at the God of Marketing and said, "Cooperate."
And so it came to pass that the tribe of Ageep became the tribe of Matof.
Now a lost son of the tribe of Ageep, an honest man, came to the kingdom after having been raised abroad, and he knew not his bloodline, but he bitterly envied the crafts and ways of the tribe of Phem, and in a strange way, that of Matof, who were said to be of the same bloodline as Phem, and whom all the peoples of Gend were beginning to have sympathy for, and whom the king himself had issued a royal proclamation favoring.
-And the honest man happened to meet a tribesman of Matof at an oasis, and complemented his
-
-
-And the tribesman said, "Cooperate," and the honest man said, "Cooperate." And the honest man came to stay with the tribe of Matof for forty days and forty nights, and observe their crafts and ways.
+The honest man happened to meet a tribesman of Matof at an oasis, and complemented him on his finery, which resembled that of envied Phem. And the tribesman said, "Cooperate," and the honest man said, "Cooperate." And the honest man came to stay with the tribe of Matof for forty days and forty nights, and observe their crafts and ways.
+And the honest man saw how hard the tribesmen of Matof worked to resemble those of Phem, whom the tribesmen of Matof would spy on from a distance. And he saw how much he himself resembled the tribesmen of Matof, but not those of Phem. And he began to suspect his bloodline, and the bloodline of the tribe of Phem. And he journeyed to the capital city and fasted in the city's library for three days and three nights, poring over geneological scrolls and praying to the silent God of Truth.
And the honest man stared at the God of Marketing, and the God of Marketing stared back.
-He drew a silver wistle from his pocket. And he raised the whistle to his lips.
+And he drew a silver wistle from his pocket. And he raised the whistle to his lips.
And the God of Marketing said, "You wouldn't."
And the honest man said, "Defect!" And he blew the whistle.
-"I think the consequentialist thing to do is not to tell anyone they're wrong, in the signaling sense, about bloodline understanding."
+And a shepherd of the tribe of Matof came to the honest man and said, "I think the consequentialist thing to do is not to tell anyone they're wrong, in the signaling sense, about bloodline understanding."
And the honest man said, "Defect!"
-"There exists room for geneology outside of war—but if you take up working specifically on the geneological aims of those that oppose you, it can be ... self-destructive—and not just to you, but damaging to the group."
+And a blacksmith of the tribe of Matof came to the honest man and said, "There exists room for geneology outside of war—but if you take up working specifically on the geneological aims of those that oppose you, it can be ... self-destructive—and not just to you, but damaging to the group."
And the honest man said, "Defect!"
Why am I doing this again?
-I'm not trans. I mean—I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it seems a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given my views. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire'".
+I'm not trans. At any rate, I'm not _transitioning_. It _should_ be a trivial corollary of "Don't take other people's medicines": if you're transitioning to live as a woman, get on HRT. If you're not, _don't_. How could anyone get this wrong? Maybe the nonbinary folks would support me, but it seems a bit duplicitous to appeal to their authority given my views. A reader of this blog on 8chan says that my hormones expermient is "five steps beyond 'playing with fire' and more like 'directly throwing yourself on a fire.'"
-But you only live once. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about my emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and in the absence of full-body transplants, I couldn't expect anyone to take that seriously. But this—_obsession_ with gender has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away.
+But you only live once. Transitioning is absolutely out of the question for me: backwards-compatibility of social identity turns out to be really important to me (remind me to tell you later about the emotional trauma from the time I tried to switch to an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and it didn't take), and anyway, in the absence of full-body transplants, I don't think I could expect anyone to take that seriously. (Passing is _hard_! Our doctors do their best, but there's _so much_ sexually-dimorphic _stuff_ that we _don't know_ how to fix. Everyone loves [Janet Hyde's meta-analysis showing that](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16173891) most psychological sex differences are pretty small, often in the range of Cohen's _d_—the difference of the means of the female and male distributions, in standard-deviation units—being around 0.3ish. Vocal pitch [is _d_≈6](https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/880344518251261952). _Six!_)
+But this—_obsession_ with sex differences has been a _thing_ for me for a really long time. It's not going away. If I can't jump the gender chasm—because I don't expect to land successfully on the other side, because I have too much to lose—don't I at least deserve a _taste_ of what my trans sisters who are braver than me are getting?
-legitimacy
+I think—though introspection is difficult—that there's another motive, too, one which I would be remiss to omit, despite my suspicion that some readers (insufficiently appalled by the rest of the blog) may find apalling. Something about legitimacy. If I'm going to have the termerity to blog about trans issues—
-Sufficiently attentive readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with the
+
+
+
+
+Sufficiently attentive readers of _The Scintillating But Ultimately Untrue Thought_ may have noticed that the day number in the title of this post isn't congruent with the date I re-started
(The _starter_ in _starter dose_ is code-switching for _placebo_.)
>
> —J. Michael Bailey, _The Man Who Would Be Queen: the Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism_, Preface
-(Trans Infovism Against Trans Activism)
+(An Infovist's Advisory)
> I said, "The truth is whatever you can get away with."
>
> "No, that's journalism. The truth is whatever you can't escape."
>
> —[_Zoolander_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbKBWtoH93Q) (paraphrased)
-(quote "The Buried Life" re War on Optimization for Generalized Secrecy) http://www.bartleby.com/246/422.html
+> I knew the mass of men conceal'd
+> Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd
+> They would by other men be met
+> With blank indifference, or with blame reprov'd;
+> I knew they liv'd and mov'd
+> Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest
+> Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
+> The same heart beats in every human breast!
+>
+> "The Buried Life" by Matthew Arnold
> I know there's more that's out there
> And I just haven't found it yet
-POST IDEAS QUEUE A—
+QUEUE 0—
+What's My Motivation? Or, Hormones Day 7X
Q Don't Negotiate With Terrorist Memeplexes; Or, Why I Don't Care About Your Feelings
Q Memoirs of My Recent Madness, Part II: Friendship Survived
+
+
+POST IDEAS QUEUE A—
+
Q Time Travel Isn't Real; Or, Yes, the Only Real Trans Woman Is a Transitioned Trans Woman
Q The View From Nowhere
Q As Well for a Sheep as a Lamb: Charity, Objectivity, and the Strategic Landscape
reanalysis of Lawrence data!!!
MINOR POST IDEAS QUEUE B—
-A Common Misunderstanding; Or, the Spirit of the Staircase ()
+A Common Misunderstanding; Or, the Spirit of the Staircase (24 January 2009)
There's a Land That I See; Or, the Spirit of Intervention
-Choir
Grim Trigger; Or, the Parable of the Honest Man and the God of Marketing
Q I Want to See You Be Brave
Faster Than Science (Transgender Edition)
El Goonish Shive (http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=2328 http://www.egscomics.com/index.php?id=1895)
+Choir
+
"The Distance Between Mars and Venus: Measuring Global Sex Differences in Personality" http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0029265
Stop Expecting Social Reality to Make Sense
sorry Dad https://twitter.com/HandOnHilt/status/876880147152072704
http://www.translucidcomic.com/comic/the-pair/
+
+too picky http://pbfcomics.com/comics/matched/
+
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-017-1005-6
+http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0031661
+
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff