All this having been said, Yudkowsky _is_ indeed correct to note that "when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments [...] we can't make them all be protocol". It's possible for observers to disagree about what sex category they see someone as belonging to, and it would be awkward at best for different speakers in a conversation to use different pronouns to refer to the same subject.
-As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something belongs to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, one strategy is for everyone to defer to the judgement of some trusted authority.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) For example, in a tight-knit community with hierarchical leadership, the community leaders would be positioned to be such an authority: you could imagine living in a _shtetl_ where your gender transition was only recognized by your neighbors after the local rabbi gave his blessing. In recent Western Society, medical and bureaucratic gatekeeping of transition treatments serves or served this function: though the details depend on your local subculture or jurisdiction, it's generally a lot harder to socially transition if you can't find a licensed doctor to affirm that you're geniunely transsexual.
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-As a firm supporter of the transhumanist right to [morphological freedom](https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Morphological_freedom), I think gatekeeping is bad; adults should be able to access body-modification treatments on the basis of informed consent.
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-In the case of a person's social sex category ("gender"), there's no obvious way to break the symmetry among third parties who have an opinion about the matter—
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-I wrote about this argument in an earlier post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
+As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual) to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements, the most natural Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
+But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, doesn't mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this convention, with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where English singular pronouns (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to English-speaking brains is still true. The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
+(A social order whose gender convention was "Biological/natal sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing" would _also_ be a Schelling point. It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!)
+[TODO: people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues]
[TODO: "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff