+To _actually_ de-gender English while keeping _she_ and _he_ (as contrasted to coordinating a jump to universal singular _they_, or _ve_), you'd need to _actually_ shatter the correlation between pronouns and sex/gender, such that a person's pronouns _were_ just an arbitrary extra piece of data that you couldn't deduce from their appearance and just needed to remember in the same way you have to remember people's names and can't deduce them from their appearances. But as far as I can tell, _no one_ wants this. When's the last time you heard someone request pronouns for _non_-gender-related reasons? ("My pronouns are she/her—but note, that's _just_ because I prefer the aesthetics of how the pronouns sound; I'm _not_ in any way claiming that you should believe that I'm in any sense female, which isn't true.") Me neither.
+
+But given that pronouns _do_ convey sex-category information, as a _fact_ about how the brains of actually-existing English speakers _in fact_ process language (whether or not this means that English is terribly designed), some actually-existing English speakers might have reason to object when pressured to use pronouns in a way that contradicts their perception of what sex people are.
+
+In an article titled ["Pronouns are Rohypnol"](https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/), Barra Kerr compares preferred pronouns to the famous [Stroop effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect). When color words are printed in text of a different color (_e.g._, <span style="color:blue;">red</span>, <span style="color:green">orange</span>, <span style="color:red">yellow</span>, <span style="color:purple">green</span>, <span style="color:orange">blue</span>, _&c._) and people are asked to name the color of the text, they're slow to respond: the meaning of the word interferes with their ability to name the color in front of our eyes.
+
+Kerr suggests that preferred pronouns have a similar effect, that "a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us." As an exercise, she suggests (privately!) translating sentences about transgender people to use natal-sex-based pronouns.
+
+Unfortunately, I don't have a study with objective measurements on hand (let me know in the comments if you do!), but I think most native English speakers who try this exercise and introspect—especially using examples where the trans person exhibits features or behavior typical of their natal sex—will agree with Kerr's assessment: "You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them _she_ instead of _he_."
+
+[TODO: let's related this to Yudkowsky's specialty multimodal neurons— both CLIP and biological neurons respond to text/images; typographic attacks are the same thing as pronoun badges; you would expect the people aligning language models to be able to think these thoughts]
+
+Importantly, Kerr is _explicitly_ appealing to psychological effects of different pronoun conventions. She is absolutely _not_ claiming that the use of preferred pronouns is itself a "lie" about some testable proposition. She writes:
+
+> I've heard many people tell me they don't mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That's a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.
+
+> I've also heard many people declaring that anyone who won't comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. 'Misgendering' is hate speech. They say.
+
+> But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.
+
+Note the wording: "That's a personal choice", "_I_ refuse". She knows perfectly well that people who use gender-identity-based pronouns aren't making a false claim that trans men produce sperm, _&c._! Rather, she's saying that a pronoun convention that groups together females, and a minority of males who wish they were female, affects our cognition about that minority of males in a way that's disadvantageous to Kerr's interests (because she wants to be especially alert to threats posed by males), such that Kerr refuses to comply with that convention in her own speech.
+
+I take pains to emphasize this because Yudkowsky repeatedly evinces ignorance about what his political opponents are claiming, repeatedly trying to frame the matter of dispute as to whether pronouns can be "lies" (to which Yudkowsky says, No, that would be ontologically confused)—whereas if you _actually read_ what the people on the other side of the policy debate are saying, they're largely _not claiming_ that "pronouns are lies"! (It seems fair to regard Kerr's article as representative of gender-critical ("TERF") concerns; I've seen the post linked in gender-critical circles more than once, and it's cited in [embattled former University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock#Views_on_gender_self-identification)'s book _Material Girls_.)
+
+Anyway, given these reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
+
+Apparently, to play dumb. In the comments of the Facebook post, Yudkowsky claims:
+
+> 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" is attached to something in your head.
+
+...
+
+I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously_ lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. Nevertheless, I am _incredibly_ skeptical that Yudkowsky _actually_ doesn't know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to sex more firmly than a proper name is attached to someone's appearance.
+
+[TODO: how could you possibly know that?]