+In that context, it's revealing that in this post attempting to explain why the original thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky ... doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological of sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size."
+
+But ... I've never _measured_ how big someone's gametes are, have you? We can only _infer_ whether strangers' bodies are configured to produce small or large gametes by observing [a variety of correlated characteristics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_sex_characteristic). Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to, one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.
+
+Thus, Yudkowsky's "default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" clause _can't be taken literally_. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a way to point at the prevailing reality that people are good at noticing what sex other people are, but that we want to be kind to people who are trying to appear to be the other sex, without having to admit to it.
+
+One could argue that this is hostile nitpicking on my part: that the use of "gamete size" as a metonym for sex here is either an attempt to provide an unambiguous definition (because if you said _female_ or _male sex_, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision that can be usefully critiqued.
+
+But the claim that Yudkowsky is only trying to provide an unambiguous definition isn't consistent with the text's claim that "[i]t would still be logically rude to demand that other people use only your language system and interpretation convention in order to communicate, in advance of them having agreed with you about the clustering thing". And the post also seems to suggest that the motive isn't to avoid ambiguity. Yudkowsky writes:
+
+> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
+>
+> And I'm not happy that the very language I use, would try to force me to take a position on that; not a complicated nuanced position, but a binarized position, _simply in order to talk grammatically about people at all_.
+
+What does the "tossed into a bucket" metaphor refer to, though? I can think of many different things that might be summarized that way, and my sympathy for the one who does not like to be tossed into a bucket depends on a lot on exactly what real-world situation is being mapped to the bucket.
+
+If we're talking about overt _gender role enforcement attempts_—things like, "You're a girl, therefore you need to learn to keep house for your future husband", or "You're a man, therefore you need to toughen up"—then indeed, I strongly support people who don't want to be tossed into that kind of bucket.
+
+(There are [historical reasons for the buckets to exist](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/), but I'm eager to bet on modern Society being rich enough and smart enough to either forgo the buckets, or at least let people opt-out of the default buckets, without causing too much trouble.)
+
+But importantly, my support for people not wanting to be tossed into gender role buckets is predicated on their reasons for not wanting that _having genuine merit_—things like "The fact that I'm a juvenile female human doesn't mean I'll have a husband; I'm actually planning to become a nun", or "The sex difference in Big Five Neuroticism is only _d_ ≈ 0.5; your expectation that I be able to toughen up is not reasonable given the information you have about me in particular, even if most adult human males are tougher than me". I _don't_ think people have a _general_ right to prevent others from using sex categories to make inferences or decisions about them, _because that would be crazy_. If a doctor were to recommend I get a prostate cancer screening on account of my being male and therefore at risk for prostate cancer, it would be _bonkers_ for me to reply that I don't like being tossed into a Male Bucket like that.
+
+While piously appealing to the feelings of people describing reasons they do not want to be tossed into a Male Bucket or a Female Bucket, Yudkowsky does not seem to be distinguishing between reasons that have merit, and reasons that do not have merit. The post continues (bolding mine):
+
+> In a wide variety of cases, sure, ["he" and "she"] can clearly communicate the unambiguous sex and gender of something that has an unambiguous sex and gender, much as a different language might have pronouns that sometimes clearly communicated hair color to the extent that hair color often fell into unambiguous clusters.
+>
+> But if somebody's hair color is halfway between two central points? If their civilization has developed stereotypes about hair color they're not comfortable with, such that they feel that the pronoun corresponding to their outward hair color is something they're not comfortable with because they don't fit key aspects of the rest of the stereotype and they feel strongly about that? If they have dyed their hair because of that, or **plan to get hair surgery, or would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so?** Then it's stupid to try to force people to take complicated positions about those social topics _before they are allowed to utter grammatical sentences_.
+
+So, I agree that a language convention in which pronouns map to hair color doesn't seem great, and that the people in this world should probably coordinate on switching to a better convention, if they can figure out how.
+
+But taking as given the existence of a convention in which pronouns refer to hair color, a demand to be refered to as having a hair color _that one does not in fact have_ seems pretty outrageous to me!
+
+It makes sense to object to the convention forcing a binary choice in the "halfway between two central points" case. That's an example of _genuine_ nuance brought on by a _genuine_ challenge to a system that _falsely_ assumes discrete hair colors.
+
+But ... "plan to get hair surgery"? "Would get hair surgery if it were safer but for now are afraid to do so"? In what sense do these cases present a challenge to the discrete system and therefore call for complication and nuance? There's nothing ambiguous about these cases: if you haven't, in fact, changed your hair color, then your hair is, in fact, its original color. The decision to get hair surgery does not _propagate backwards in time_. The decision to get hair surgery cannot be _imported from a counterfactual universe in which it is safer_. People who, today, do not have the hair color that they would prefer, are, today, going to have to deal with that fact _as a fact_.
+
+Is the idea that we want to use the same pronouns for the same person over time, so that if we know someone is going to get hair surgery—they have an appointment with the hair surgeon at this-and-such date—we can go ahead and switch their pronouns in advance? Okay, I can buy that.
+
+But extending that to the "would get hair surgery if it were safer" case is _absurd_. No one treats _conditional plans assuming speculative future advances in medical technology_ the same as actual plans. I don't think this case calls for any complicated nuanced position, and I don't see why Eliezer Yudkowsky would suggest that it would, unless the real motive for insisting on complication and nuance is as an obfuscation tactic—unless, at some level, Eliezer Yudkowsky doesn't expect his followers to deal with facts?
+
+Maybe the problem is easier to see in the context of a non-gender example. [My previous hopeless ideological war—before this one—was against the conflation of _schooling_ and _education_](/2022/Apr/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war/): I _hated_ being tossed into the Student Bucket, as it would be assigned by my school course transcript, or perhaps at all.
+
+I sometimes describe myself as "gender dysphoric", because our culture doesn't have better widely-understood vocabulary for my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, but if we're talking about suffering and emotional distress, my "student dysphoria" was _vastly_ worse than any "gender dysphoria" I've ever felt.
+
+But crucially, my tirades against the Student Bucket described reasons not just that _I didn't like it_, but reasons that the bucket was _actually wrong on the empirical merits_: people can and do learn important things by studying and practicing out of their own curiosity and ambition; the system was _actually in the wrong_ for assuming that nothing you do matters unless you do it on the command of a designated "teacher" while enrolled in a designated "course".
+
+And _because_ my war footing was founded on the empirical merits, I knew that I had to _update_ to the extent that the empirical merits showed that I was in the wrong. In 2010, I took a differential equations class "for fun" at the local community college, expecting to do well and thereby prove that my previous couple years of math self-study had been the equal of any schoolstudent's.
+
+In fact, I did very poorly and scraped by with a _C_. (Subjectively, I felt like I "understood the concepts", and kept getting surprised when that understanding somehow didn't convert into passing quiz scores.) That hurt. That hurt a lot.
+
+_It was supposed to hurt_. One could imagine a Jane Austen character in this situation doubling down on his antagonism to everything school-related, in order to protect himself from being hurt—to protest that the teacher hated him, that the quizzes were unfair, that the answer key must have had a printing error—in short, that he had been right in every detail all along, and that any suggestion otherwise was credentialist propaganda.
+
+I knew better than to behave like that—and to the extent that I was tempted, I retained my ability to notice and snap out of it. My failure _didn't_ mean I had been wrong about everything, that I should humbly resign myself to the Student Bucket forever and never dare to question it again—but it _did_ mean that I had been wrong about _something_. I could [update myself incrementally](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu/update-yourself-incrementally)—but I _did_ need to update. (Probably, that "math" encompasses different subskills, and that my glorious self-study had unevenly trained some skills and not others: there was nothing contradictory about my [successfully generalizing one of the methods in the textbook to arbitrary numbers of variables](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15143/does-the-method-for-solving-exact-des-generalize-like-this), while _also_ [struggling with the class's assigned problem sets](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/7984/automatizing-computational-skills).)
+
+Someone who uncritically validated my not liking to be tossed into the Student Bucket, instead of assessing my _reasons_ for not liking to be tossed into the Bucket and whether those reasons had merit, would be hurting me, not helping me—because in order to navigate the real world, I need a map that reflects the territory, rather than my narcissistic fantasies. I'm a better person for straightforwardly facing the shame of getting a _C_ in community college differential equations, rather than trying to deny it or run away from it or claim that it didn't mean anything. Part of updating myself incrementally was that I would get _other_ chances to prove that my autodidacticism _could_ match the standard set by schools. (My professional and open-source programming career obviously does not owe itself to the two Java courses I took at community college. When I audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley "for fun" in 2017, I did fine on the midterm. When applying for a new dayjob in 2018, the interviewer, noting my lack of a degree, said he was going to give a version of the interview without a computer science theory question. I insisted on being given the "college" version of the interview, solved a dynamic programming problem, and got the job. And so on.)
+
+If you can see why uncritically affirming people's current self-image isn't the right solution to "student dysphoria", it _should_ be obvious why the same is true of gender dysphoria. There's a very general underlying principle, that it matters whether someone's current self-image is actually true.
+
+In an article titled ["Actually, I Was Just Crazy the Whole Time"](https://somenuanceplease.substack.com/p/actually-i-was-just-crazy-the-whole), FtMtF detransitioner Michelle Alleva contrasts her beliefs at the time of deciding to transition, with her current beliefs. While transitioning, she accounted for many pieces of evidence about herself ("dislike attention as a female", "obsessive thinking about gender", "didn't fit in with the girls", _&c_.) in terms of the theory "It's because I'm trans." But now, Alleva writes, she thinks she has a variety of better explanations that, all together, cover everything on the original list: "It's because I'm autistic", "It's because I have unresolved trauma", "It's because women are often treated poorly" ... including "That wasn't entirely true" (!!).
+
+This is a _rationality_ skill. Alleva had a theory about herself, and then she _revised her theory upon further consideration of the evidence_. Beliefs about one's self aren't special and can—must—be updated using the _same_ methods that you would use to reason about anything else—[just as a recursively self-improving AI would reason the same about transistors "inside" the AI and transitors in "the environment."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TynBiYt6zg42StRbb/my-kind-of-reflection)
+
+(Note, I'm specifically praising the _form_ of the inference, not necessarily the conclusion to detransition. If someone else in different circumstances weighed up the evidence about _them_-self, and concluded that they _are_ trans in some _specific_ objective sense on the empirical merits, that would _also_ be exhibiting the skill. For extremely sex-role-nonconforming same-natal-sex-attracted transsexuals, you can at least see why the "born in the wrong body" story makes some sense as a handwavy [first approximation](/2022/Jul/the-two-type-taxonomy-is-a-useful-approximation-for-a-more-detailed-causal-model/). It's just that for males like me, and separately for females like Michaell Alleva, the story doesn't add up.)
+
+This also isn't a particularly _advanced_ rationality skill. This is very basic—something novices should grasp during their early steps along the Way.
+
+Back in 'aught-nine, in the early days of _Less Wrong_, when I still hadn't grown out of [my teenage religion of psychological sex differences denialism](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#antisexism), there was an exchange in the comment section between me and Yudkowsky that still sticks with me. Yudkowsky had claimed that he had ["never known a man with a true female side, and [...] never known a woman with a true male side, either as authors or in real life."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/K8YXbJEhyDwSusoY2) Offended at our leader's sexism, I passive-aggressively [asked him to elaborate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way?commentId=AEZaakdcqySmKMJYj), and as part of [his response](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/W4TAp4LuW3Ev6QWSF), he mentioned that he "sometimes wish[ed] that certain women would appreciate that being a man is at least as complicated and hard to grasp and a lifetime's work to integrate, as the corresponding fact of feminity [_sic_]."
+
+[I replied](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way/comment/7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) (bolding added):
+
+> I sometimes wish that certain men would appreciate that not all men are like them—**or at least, that not all men _want_ to be like them—that the fact of masculinity is [not _necessarily_ something to integrate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me).**
+
+_I knew_. Even then, _I knew_ I had to qualify my not liking to be tossed into a Male Bucket. I could object to Yudkowsky speaking as if men were a collective with shared normative ideals ("a lifetime's work to integrate"), but I couldn't claim to somehow not be male, or _even_ that people couldn't make probabilistic predictions about me given the fact that I'm male ("the fact of masculinity"), _because that would be crazy_. The culture of early _Less Wrong_ wouldn't have let me get away with that.
+
+It would seem that in the current year, that culture is dead—or at least, if it does have any remaining practitioners, they do not include Eliezer Yudkowsky.
+
+At this point, some people would argue that I'm being too uncharitable in my interpretation of the "not liking to be tossed into a [...] Bucket" paragraph. The same post does also explicitly say that "[i]t's not that no truth-bearing propositions about these issues can possibly exist." I agree that there are some interpretations of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket" that make sense, even though biological sex denialism does not make sense. Given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky, should I not assume that he "really meant" to communicate the reading that does make sense, rather than the one that doesn't make sense?
+
+I reply: _given that the author is Eliezer Yudkowsky_, no, obviously not. Yudkowsky is just _too talented of a writer_ for me to excuse his words as an artifact of unclear writing. Where the text is ambiguous about whether biological sex is a real thing that people should be able to talk about, I think it's _deliberately_ ambiguous. Or at least—_optimizedly_ ambiguous. The point of the post is to pander to the biological sex denialists in his robot cult, without technically saying anything unambiguously false that someone could point out as a "lie."