+> So it seems to me that the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he', with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size" and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition. Because it is _logically_ rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition _into the very language protocol we are using to communicate_.
+
+The problem with this is that [the alleged rationale for the proposal _very obviously and blatantly_ does not support the proposal](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i6fKszWY6gLZSX2Ey/fake-optimization-criteria). If your default pronoun for those-who-haven't-asked goes by perceived sex (which one presumes is what Yudkowsky means by "gamete size"—we don't typically observe people's gametes!), then you're still baking sex-category information into the language protocol in the form of the default! Moreover, this is clearly an "intended" rather than an accidental effect of the proposal, in the sense that a policy that _actually_ avoided baking sex-category information into the language (like universal singular _they_, or name-initial- or hair-color-based pronouns) would not have the same appeal to many of those who support self-chosen pronouns: _why_ is it that some people would want to opt-out of the sex-based default?
+
+Well, it would seem that the motivating example—the historical–causal explanation for why we're having this conversation about pronoun reform in the first place—is that trans men (female-to-male transsexuals) prefer to be called _he_, and trans women (male-to-female transsexuals) prefer to be called _she_. (Transsexuals seem much more common than people who just have principled opinions about pronoun reform without any accompanying desire to change what sex other people perceive them as.)
+
+But the _reason_ transsexuals want this is _because_ they're trying to change their socially-perceived sex category and actually-existing English speakers interpret _she_ and _he_ as conveying sex-category information. People who request _he/him_ pronouns aren't doing it because they want their subject pronoun to be a two-letter word rather than a three-letter word, or because they hate the [voiceless postalveolar fricative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_fricative). They're doing it _because_, in English, those are the pronouns for _males_. If it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ were just two alternative third-person pronouns that could be used interchangeably with no difference in meaning, then _there would be no reason to care_ which one someone used, as long as the referent was clear. But this doesn't match people's behavior: using gender pronouns other than those preferred by the subject is typically responded to as a social attack (as would be predicted by the theory that _she _ and _he_ convey sex-category information and transsexuals don't want to be perceived as their natal sex), not with, "Oh, it took me an extra second to parse your sentence because you used a pronoun different from the one the subject prefers, but now I understand what you meant" (as would be predicted by the theory that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_ [...] and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition").
+
+You can't have it both ways. "That toy is worthless", says one child to another, "_therefore_, you should give it to me." But if the toy were _actually_ worthless, why is the first child demanding it? "Pronouns shouldn't convey sex-category information," is a fine [motte](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/), but it's not consistent with the bailey of, "_Therefore_, when people request that you alter your pronoun usage in order to change the sex-category information being conveyed, you should obey the request."
+
+Even if the situation is an artifact of bad language design, as Yudkowsky argues—that in a saner world, this conflict would have never come up—that doesn't automatically favor resolving the conflict in favor of self-chosen pronouns. Perhaps in a saner world, all children would have their own toys, but that doesn't tell us what to do when children are fighting over a toy in our own world. [TODO: weak analogy, cut]
+
+[TODO: transition sentence]
+
+> It is Shenanigans to try to bake your stance on how clustered things are and how appropriate it is to discretely cluster them using various criteria, _into the pronoun system of a language and interpretation convention that you insist everybody use!