As an apostate, I see in this line of thought the issues I saw with rationalism as religion value system and metanarrative in general. As, additionally, a sometime heretic, I sympathize with this description of the experience of heresy; while the unpleasant experience of having to navigate the stifling and occasionally totally wrong norms of the overworld is (I now believe) to some extent a natural and inevitable part of the human condition, awakening to this is deeply unpleasant for those who made it to adulthood without realizing it. Even more so, perhaps, when it’s a heresy for reasons orthogonal to those of right and wrong. Mencius Moldbug, who you mentioned, produced hundreds of thousands of words about the decline of San Francisco, where, last I heard, his overworld-sona still lives—but if it’s that bad, why is he still there? Most people seek out quality and avoid its absence.
My experience of mania was that it was the result of an exceptionally energetic collision between this drive to seek good things and avoid bad things and a mental brick wall. Repression, you could say. (If it’s that bad, why is he still there? How many words—perhaps not the most sober words, but then, he was once in cDc—did this contradiction produce?) Producing tens of thousands of words about how transition is incompatible with rationality is… also sympathetic, in this sense. It’s hard to produce tens of thousands of words about anything! This may not be anyone else’s experience of mania, though; I’ve never been clinically diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But then, I don’t believe in psychology, or in science.
Is it bad not to believe in science? Is it apostasy from rationalism? I mean, maybe, but not even science believes in science: it doesn’t produce truth-claims, but theories, which in principle may be overturned at any moment, and in practice often have. Everyone’s heard this in high school, and yet, people still make the basic error of assuming that science is in the business of truth-claims. An internal combustion engine is a truth claim, and if somebody says internal combustion engines can’t possibly work, they’re just wrong; Newtonian physics is a model, which man can disprove but only God could prove. An “underlying truth condition for that ‘probably’ to point to” is a type of brick wall known as a type error: observations do not need models. “Truth” in the scientific or analytic sense (“analytic” as in both philosophy—the school that Less Wrong takes after—and in chemistry, where it originated, and whose development was one of the great success stories of what we now know as “science”: the separation of a complex thing into its smaller and identifiable components) isn’t allowed to disagree with reality, but reality can, and often does, disagree with analysis and science. Every scientist and analyst is in some sense a historian, telling a story about events which have already taken place.
We see the same progression in music: a composer will break the rules of theory, and theorists will construct new rules post facto to explain the world that contains this break. The composer who breaks theory is operating outside theory, may not even be talking to theory: how much theory were the early jazz musicians talking to? Theory is still useful, as a way to compress the research into what works and what doesn’t that the body of past musicians (including those who broke past theories) and past audiences (including those receptive to those breaks) has done, but at some point you have to give up and talk to God, or what Pirsig called Quality, or whatever, and leave future theorists to sort it out. To expect theory to be upstream of music, or science or analysis to be upstream of reality, is to lose the ability to talk to God. Which Ben Hoffman said Malcolm X said white people do all the time—”I had to stop fighting myself first”—and which nerds, those predisposed to such topics as rationalism and computer programming, totally do all the time.
When I was eight years old, I was brought along to a cousin’s college graduation, the dinner of which was held in the rented event space of a bar. The bar, being a bar, had a sign that said it wouldn’t allow anyone under 21; despite the reassurance of everyone present that this obviously wouldn’t apply to the events room, I insisted, and my poor father had to stand outside with me for two hours. This is the kind of story I see in nerd spaces, which don’t have many musicians. Once, long before my apostasy, I nearly failed a guitar class: I had no idea how to improvise, and felt it somehow improper to practice. The ways of God are not the laws of man.
...And my dorm’s walls were practically made of cardboard and I didn’t want anyone else to hear. Social space is for displays, showing off, performance of that which one is already sure in; the process of becoming sure, and of experimentation to find that in which one could see oneself becoming sure, is naturally private. Subjecting other people to musical ineptitude would be embarrassing. (Although, to break the analogy, in the case of music you do at some point have to get over it.) So I wouldn’t read too much into it if ideation begins in a markedly private space. The Blanchardian line relies on the implicit assertion that fetishism is an unmoved mover of human psychology—that the gender identity follows the sexual interest, rather than the sexual interest being a natural consequence of the gender identity—but it has to be implicit because if you state it outright it’s obviously wrong. As is “A precedes B, therefore A caused B”: how common is it for people to have private spaces that are about gender but entirely not about sex?
There are other flaws in your model, such as “cis women don’t experience AGP”, and it may be an edifying exercise to imagine alternate models. (You could, for instance, cite the thriving subculture of trans guys with forcefem kinks to argue that AGP is a natural part of the male experience: you might be able to get a shitpost out of that, but the line between shitposting and Anton-Wilsonian guerrilla ontology is pretty blurry nowadays. Hence one logic textbook’s extended digression about Mencius Moldbug, the greatest of the cDc trolls.)
I don’t think “non-straightforward or dishonest language” enters into it very much, but I don’t have the clusters you have. I know cis women with “male-pattern” personalities and interests and trans women with “female-pattern” personalities and interests. (Not really any cis men with “female-pattern” personalities and interests, but society does its best to ensure that doesn’t happen.) In some online spaces where I don’t share demographic information, people sometimes take me for a member of the opposite sex. “Male-pattern” and “female-pattern” are culture- and class-bound anyway—there are many different types of guy. I don’t get much use out of categorizing people by biological sex.
In repeated interpersonal interactions, of course, you just construct a model of the person, and then you don’t need the categories so much. You still have to figure out who uses which bathroom, but the “you” here unpacks to “the state”, which sees in its own way—a low-resolution way that can’t be said to track truth.
Unless you’re prepared to reject the entire analytic tradition, categories aren’t even real—they’re abstractions over entities. Maybe some are more useful than others, but if you recognize “trans woman” as a third gender (surely a more useful categorization than “trans women are men”[1]), how many genders are there? Are “nerd” and “jock” genders? “Butch” and “femme”?
[1] If this seems surprising to you, remember that LW and the social strata it recruits from contain highly atypical men! For example: what percentage of the male LW userbase knows the basic rules of a major spectator sport?