+"Sustained," says the judge. Then, to the victim: "_Her_ erect penis."
+
+"Wh—what?" says the victim.
+
+"You will refer to the defendant with the correct pronoun, or I'll hold you in contempt of court."
+
+"Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
+
+She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more painful than the memories of the assault, she is very conscious of having never been to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and they believe her rapist is now a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority who she had no hope of out-arguing?
+
+"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."
+
+The judge scoffs. "You are _ontologically_ confused," he sneers. "At age 13 I was programming on LambdaMOO where people had their choice of exotic pronouns and nobody thought anything of it," says the judge. "Denied."
+
+"O-okay," says the victim. She doesn't know what _ontologically_ means, or what a LambdaMOO is. "So then—then sh-she took her erect penis and she—"
+
+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: /o/ThisNeverHappens]
+
+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 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.
+
+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 social fact.
+
+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.
+
+Fine. That's a perfectly coherent position. But if that's your position and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to _acknowledge_ that your position exerts costs on some actually-existing English speakers who have a use-case for using pronouns to imply sex. You need to be able to look that rape victim in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you."
+
+And of course—it _should_ be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If you think speakers _should_ be able to misgender according to their judgement and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to be able to look a trans person in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes the freedom of speech of speakers is more important than your gender being recognized; sucks to be you."
+
+Or if you have more important things to worry about and don't want to take a position on controversial social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
+
+Really, "I do not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you _absolutely goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
+
+[TODO: at this point some readers may be puzzled as to why this is worth making a fuss over, if I'm _not_ objecting to Yudkowsky's pronoun usage. Why do I think having a slightly different _rationale_ for the same policy (don't misgender trans people) is worth the effort of a 10K word bile-filled essay?]
+
+I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. [TODO: don't flamebait] Let me explain.
+
+As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it not being recognized by others being worse than death. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
+
+Fortunately, our Society has interventions available to approximate changing sex as best we can with existing technology: you can get hormone replacement therapy (HRT), genital surgery, ask people to call you by a different name, ask people to refer to you with different pronouns, get new clothes, get other relevant cosmetic surgeries, _&c._ In principle, it's possible to pick and choose some of these interventions piecemeal—[I actually tried just HRT for five months in 2017](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/)—but it's more common for people to "transition", to undergo a correlated _bundle_ of these interventions to approximate a sex change.
+
+On this view, there's not a pre-existing fact of the matter as to whether someone "is trans" as an atomic identity. Rather, gender-dysphoric people have the option to _become_ trans by means of undergoing the bundle of interventions that constitute transitioning, if they think it will make their life better. But in order for a gender dysphoric person to _decide_ whether transitioning is a good idea with benefits that exceed the costs, they need _factually accurate information_ about the nature of their dysphoria and each of the component interventions.
+
+If people in a position of intellectual authority provide _inaccurate_ information about transitioning interventions, that's making the lives of gender-dysphoric people worse, because agents with less accurate information make worse decisions (in expectation): if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefitted you, or wrongly undergo an intevention that would have harmed you.
+
+For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefitted from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), various slight medical risks including to future fertility). If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, and I were dumb enough to believe them, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefitted me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; my life would have been better if I hadn't trusted them.
+
+[TODO: if I were dumb enough to believe Yudwkowsky about pronouns and acted on it, that would have been worse for me]
+
+[TODO: as someone who actually does have trans feelings, I need accurate information to make the best decision about whether transitioning is a good idea. The costs of pronoun conventions is relevant information. I might worry, gee what if I don't quite physically pass, such that people don't instinctively use the correct pronouns for me? Won't that be a huge drag on my social life? If everyone I trust says "No, that won't be a problem, because pronouns aren't lies", I might make a worse decision]
+
+[TODO:
+ * Stalin and "A Rational Argument"
+ * "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 (If any professional alignment researchers wasting time reading this instead of figuring out how to save the world, get back to work!!), but one would have thought that the _general_ skills of correct argument would matter for saving the world.
+a rationality community that can't think about _practical_ issues that affect our day to day lives, but can get existential risk stuff right, is like asking for self-driving car software that can drive red cars but not blue cars
+It's a _problem_ if public intellectuals in the current year need to pretend to be dumber than seven-year-olds in 2016