+And among those hundreds of millions of speakers, there is _already_ a very firmly entrenched convention that _she_ refers to females and _he_ refers to males, such that if you say, "I met a stranger in the park; she was nice", the listener is going to assume the the stranger was female, even if you didn't say "The stranger was female" as a separate sentence. If the listener later gets the chance to meet the stranger and the stranger turns out to be male, the listener is going to be _surprised_.
+
+Bad language design? I mean, maybe! You could argue that! You could probably get a lot of Likes on Facebook arguing that! But if 370 million native English speakers _including you and virtually everyone who Liked your post_ are going to _continue_ automatically noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it, then the criticism seems kind of idle!
+
+The "default for those-who-haven't-asked [going] by gamete size" part of Yudkowsky's proposal is _trying_ to deal with the backwards-compatibility problem.
+
+[OUTLINE of remainder—
+ * The attempted backwards compatibility measure doesn't work; if people's behavior is still the same, then sex-category information is still being transfered; and, again, that was the motivation for the reform effort all along; in order to _actually_ de-gender language, you have to break the correlation: either go all-in on singular _they_, or somehow get people to establish and declare pronoun preferences that aren't about gender (which isn't what's going on in our world)
+ * Given that sex-category information _is_ being transfered, the "Pronouns are Ryphnol" lady has a point
+ * And preferred pronouns have the same function as the typographic attacks in the multimodal-neurons paper
+ * Yudkowsky's response to all this?—apparently, to play dumb!!
+ * "I don't know what it's like in you head for a pronoun to map onto more than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"—lies
+ * Gumball example
+ * CFAI footnote 16 example
+ * "It can't be based on feelings"—hypocrisy, the only reason we're talking about this at all is because of genderspecial people's feelings, as explicitly acknowledged in the OP!!!
+ * "Can't imagine a sympathetic protagonist"—lies, imagine a rape victim
+ * "If there were unspeakable arguments against, we couldn't talk about them"—okay, then you and your rationalists are frauds
+ * I know none of this matters, but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world ... right? / brief recap of my Whole Dumb Story, need the correct answer in order to decide
+
+somewhere—
+* Douglas Hofstader also made fun of gendered pronouns with his "Person Paper"—but notice that he didn't even consider the self-chosen criterion!!
+* singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
+]