You can't have it both ways. "That toy is worthless", says one child to another, "_therefore_, you should give it to me." But if the toy were _actually_ worthless, why is the first child demanding it? The problem here is not particularly subtle or hard to understand! If the second child were to appeal to an adult's authority, and the adult replied, "The toy _is_ worthless, so give it to him," you would suspect the grown-up of not being impartial.
-"Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information, as a politically neutral matter of language design," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of the policy of keeping both _she_ and _he_ but asserting that the difference doesn't mean anything.
+"Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information, as an apolitical matter of language design," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request." Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of the policy of keeping both _she_ and _he_ but asserting that the difference doesn't mean anything.
This may be clearer to some readers if we consider a distinction less emotionally and politically fraught than sex/gender in the current year. [Many languages have two different second person singular pronouns that distinguish the speaker's relationship to the listener as being more familiar/intimate, or more formal/hierarchical.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction) In Spanish, for example, [the familiar pronoun is _tú_ and the formal pronoun is _usted_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_personal_pronouns#T%C3%BA/vos_and_usted): one would address friends, family members, children, or personal servants as _tú_, but strangers or social superiors as _usted_. Using the wrong pronoun can be the cause of offense or awkwardness. A speaker switching from _usted_ to _tú_ for an interlocutor who they're getting along with might ask if it's okay with _¿Te puedo tutear?_ (Can I call you _tú_?) or _Nos tuteamos, ¿verdad?_ (We call each other _tú_, right?); this is somewhat analogous to an English speaker asking if they may address someone by first name, rather than with a courtesy title or honorific (Ms./Mr. Lastname, or ma'am/sir).
"Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
-She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the assault, she is very conscious of having never been to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and they believe her rapist is now a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority who she had no hope of out-arguing?
+She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never been to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and they believe that the man who raped her is a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority who she had no hope of out-arguing?
"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."
[TODO: quote Yudkowsky: not the woke position]
-Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not politically motivated. But in order to _actually_ be neutral in your analysis, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with.
+Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not politically motivated. But in order to _actually_ be neutral in your analysis, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional social fact.
Really, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you _absolutely goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
-[TODO: at this point some readers may be puzzled as to why this is worth making a fuss over, if I'm _not_ objecting to Yudkowsky's pronoun usage. Why do I think having a slightly different _rationale_ for the same policy (don't misgender trans people) is worth the effort of a 10K word bile-filled essay?]
+[TODO: at this point some readers may be puzzled as to why this is worth making a fuss over, if I'm _not_ objecting to Yudkowsky's pronoun usage. Why do I think having a slightly different _rationale_ for the same policy (don't misgender trans people) is worth the effort of a 10K word bile-filled essay?
+
+At this point, some readers may
+
+The post under discussion is basically Yudkowsky explaining why he doesn't misgender trans people. (Because gendered pronouns are dumb, and he doesn't
+
+I _agree_ that not misgendering trans people is a completely reasonable thing to do.
+
+]
I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. [TODO: don't flamebait] Let me explain.
On this view, there's not a pre-existing fact of the matter as to whether someone "is trans" as an atomic identity. Rather, gender-dysphoric people have the option to _become_ trans by means of undergoing the bundle of interventions that constitute transitioning, if they think it will make their life better. But in order for a gender dysphoric person to _decide_ whether transitioning is a good idea with benefits that exceed the costs, they need _factually accurate information_ about the nature of their dysphoria and each of the component interventions.
-If people in a position of intellectual authority provide _inaccurate_ information about transitioning interventions, that's making the lives of gender-dysphoric people worse, because agents with less accurate information make worse decisions (in expectation): if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that would have harmed you.
+If people in a position of intellectual authority provide _inaccurate_ information about transitioning interventions, that's making the lives of gender-dysphoric people worse, because agents with less accurate information make worse decisions (in expectation): if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that harms you.
+
+For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefitted from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), various slight medical risks including to future fertility).
+
+If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, _and I were dumb enough to believe them_, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefitted me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; my life would have been better if I hadn't trusted them to tell me the truth.
+
+In contrast, I think asking everyone in my life to use she/her pronouns for me would be an obviously incredibly bad decision. Because everyone in my life knows that I am, _in fact_, male, and (notwithstanding my clean-shavenness and beautiful–beautiful ponytail and slight gynecomastia from that HRT experiment five years ago) my appearance does nothing to disabuse them of this true knowledge. People would comply because they felt obligated to (and apologize profusely when they slipped up), but it wouldn't come naturally, and strangers would always get it wrong without being told. The costs (this tremendous awkwardness and falseness suffusing _all future social interactions involving me_) would exceed the benefits (I actually do feel happier about the word _she_).
-For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefitted from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), various slight medical risks including to future fertility). If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, and I were dumb enough to believe them, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefitted me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; my life would have been better if I hadn't trusted them.
+I used to trust Yudkowsky as an intellectual authority; his [Sequences](https://www.readthesequences.com/) from the late 'aughts were so life-alteringly great that I built up a trust that if Eliezer Yudkowsky said something, that thing was probably so, even if I didn't immediately understand why. But these days, Yudkowsky is telling me that 'she' normatively refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'she', and that those who disagree are engaging in logically rude Shenanigans. If I were _dumb enough to believe him_, I might ask people for new pronouns, which would obviously be an incredibly bad decision. My life is better because I don't trust Eliezer Yudkowsky to tell me the truth.
-[TODO: if I were dumb enough to believe Yudwkowsky about pronouns and acted on it, that would have been worse for me]
+(I guess I [can't say I wasn't warned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wustx45CPL5rZenuo/no-safe-defense-not-even-science).)
-[TODO: as someone who actually does have trans feelings, I need accurate information to make the best decision about whether transitioning is a good idea. The costs of pronoun conventions is relevant information. I might worry, gee what if I don't quite physically pass, such that people don't instinctively use the correct pronouns for me? Won't that be a huge drag on my social life? If everyone I trust says "No, that won't be a problem, because pronouns aren't lies", I might make a worse decision]
[TODO:
* Stalin and "A Rational Argument"
* appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
* don't use "baked in" so many times
* Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/
+ * nearest unblocked strategy and preview of "Hill of Validity in Defense"
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