+She breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seems true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"
+
+"You're in contempt," says the judge. "Baliff! Take her away!"
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+Not a sympathetic character? Not even a little bit?
+
+I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair or unrealistic. But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it?
+
+Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? [TODO: cite that this is real]
+
+Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance?
+
+[TODO: cite examples of this happening; as liberal intellectuals, we want to debate the optimal communication policy and expect to govern by assent; we're not so bloodthirsty as to want to throw dissenters in jail—but that is potentially what's at stake]
+
+[TODO: quote Yudkowsky: not the woke position]
+
+Right. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the policy that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. But in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional fact that doesn't need to be "earned" in any way.
+
+You might think the cost of making the victim say _she_ is worth it, because you want to make it easy for gender-dysphoric people to socially transition, and because you think it's dumb that pronouns imply sex in the actually-existing English language and you see the self-identity convention as an incremental step towards degendering the language.