+But if you _actually cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: _if he wanted to_, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail).
+
+"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is it the right thing to do? Depending on the details, maybe! But you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I'm telling you this 50,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
+
+In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
+
+> [...] the author has made zero attempt to even try to depict Earthlings as having reflection, self-observation, a fire of inner life; most characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ bear the same relationship to human minds as a stick figure bears to a photograph. People, among other things, have the property of trying to be people; the characters in Pride and Prejudice have no visible such aspiration. Real people have concepts of their own minds, and contemplate their prior ideas of themselves in relation to a continually observed flow of their actual thoughts, and try to improve both their self-models and their selves. It's impossible to imagine any of these people, even Elizabeth, as doing that thing Thellim did a few hours ago, where she noticed she was behaving like Verrez and snapped out of it. Just like any particular Verrez always learns to notice he is being Verrez and snap out of it, by the end of any of his alts' novels.
+
+When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
+
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into a gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
+
+The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
+
+The _problem_ is that people who are trying to be people, people who are trying to acheive their goals _in reality_, do so in a way involves having concepts of their own minds, and trying to improve both their self-models and their selves—and that's _not possible_ in a culture that tries to ban, as heresy, the idea that it's possible for someone's self-model to be wrong.
+
+A trans woman I follow on Twitter complained that a receptionist at her workplace said she looked like a male celebrity. "I'm so mad," she fumed. "I look like this right now"—there was a photo attached to the Tweet—"how could anyone ever think that was an okay thing to say?"
+
+It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
+
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt.
+
+The author should have graciously accepted the compliment, and _done something to pass better next time_. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—of noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's hostile stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting MtT and snapping out of it.
+
+I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
+
+In a world where surgery is expensive, but some people desperately want to change sex and other people want to be nice to them, there's an incentive gradient in the direction of re-binding our shared concept of "gender" onto things like [ornamental clothing](http://thetranswidow.com/2021/02/18/womens-clothing-is-always-drag-even-on-women/) that are easier to change than secondary sex characteristics.
+
+But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution, [whatever that turns out to be](/2021/Sep/i-dont-do-policy/)?
+
+And if that's too much to expect of the general public—
+
+And it's too much to expect garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
+
+Then I would have at least expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
+
+I would have expected Eliezer Yudkowsky to not _actively try to transform me into a Jane Austen character_.
+
+
+[TODO section: rats from the Scott Alexander era will protest that I'm being uncharitable—failure of perspective taking; but I'm not complaining about Yudkowsky's subjective experience; I'm talking about a very clear pattern of behavior that's gone on for _years_]
+
+
+[TODO: let's recap]
+
+
+[TODO: the important thing is not being put in a box
+
+
+student dysphoria—I hated being put in the box as student;
+
+ Scott Alexander chose feelings, but I don't hold that against him; self-aggrandizement]
+
+
+
+
+[TODO section stakes, cooperation
+
+> [_Perhaps_, replied the cold logic](https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-good). _If the world were at stake._
+>
+> _Perhaps_, echoed the other part of himself, _but that is not what was actually happening._
+
+I could forgive him for taking a shit on d4 of my chessboard (["at least 20% of the ones with penises are actually women"](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154078468809228)). I could even forgive him for subsequently taking a shit on e4 of my chessboard (["you're not standing in defense of truth if you insist on a word [...]"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067198993485058048)) as long as he wiped most of the shit off afterwards, even though, really, I would have expected someone so smart to take a hint after the incident on d4.
+
+But if he's _then_ going to take a shit on c3 of my chessboard ("the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he" [...]'")
+
+the turd on c3 is a pretty big likelihood ratio
+
+]
+
+
+
+[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like
+
+[Dawkins can see it.](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) [Jerry Coyne can see it.](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/)]
+
+
+
+[TODO:
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404697716689489921
+> I have never in my own life tried to persuade anyone to go trans (or not go trans)—I don't imagine myself to understand others that much.
+
+If you think it "sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful" to strategically say positive things about Republican candidates, and make sure to never, ever say negative things about Democratic candidates (because you "don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot"), you can see why people might regard you as a _Republican shill_—even if all the things you said were true, and even if you never told any specific individual, "You should vote Republican."
+
+https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10154110278349228
+> Just checked my filtered messages on Facebook and saw, "Your post last night was kind of the final thing I needed to realize that I'm a girl."
+> ==DOES ALL OF THE HAPPY DANCE FOREVER==
+
+https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1404821285276774403
+> It is not trans-specific. When people tell me I helped them, I mostly believe them and am happy.
+]