-> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
+But the reason he got a bit [("a bit")](/2023/Jul/a-hill-of-validity-in-defense-of-meaning/) of private pushback was because the original "hill of meaning" thread was so blatantly optimized to intimidate and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about biological sex. The pushback wasn't about using trans people's preferred pronouns (I do that, too), or about not wanting pronouns to imply sex (sounds fine, if we were defining a conlang from scratch); the problem is using an argument that's ostensibly about pronouns to sneak in an implicature (["Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question [ ] that I personally find very humorous"](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096)) that it's dumb and wrong to want to talk about the sense in which trans women are male and trans men are female, as a fact about reality that continues to be true even if it hurts someone's feelings, and even if policy decisions made on the basis of that fact are not themselves facts (as if anyone had doubted this).
+
+In that context, it's revealing that in this February 2021 post attempting to explain why the November 2018 thread seemed like a reasonable thing to say, Yudkowsky doubles down on going out of his way to avoid acknowledging the reality of biological sex. He learned nothing! We're told that the default pronoun for those who haven't asked goes by "gamete size", on the grounds that it's "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."
+
+But I've never measured how big someone's gametes are, have you? We 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). Thus, the complaint that sex-based pronoun conventions rudely demand that people "agree[ ] [...] about the clustering thing" is hypocritical, because Yudkowsky's proposal also expects people to agree about the clustering thing. Furthermore, for trans people who don't pass but are visibly trying to (without having explicitly asked for pronouns), one presumes that we're supposed to use the pronouns corresponding to their gender presentation, not their natal sex.
+
+Thus, Yudkowsky's "gamete-size default" proposal can't be taken literally. The only way I can make sense of it is to interpret it as a flail 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.
+
+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 _sex_, _female_, or _male_, someone could ask what you meant by that), or that it's at worst a clunky choice of words, not an intellectually substantive decision.
+
+But the post seems to suggest that the motive isn't simply 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.