+Natural language faces a similar backwards-compatibility trap. The English language, as "software", is _already_ "deployed" [to 370 million brains as native speakers, and another 980 million second-language speakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers#Top_languages_by_population). 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 (or appeared to be) 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 (or appear to be) male, the listener is going to be _surprised_: your pronoun choice induced them to [mis-anticipate their experiences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences).
+
+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 (or appear to be) and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it (in accordance with the "default for those-who-haven't-asked" clause of your reform proposal), 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 by being backwards-compatible—prescribing the same behavior in the vast majority of cases—but in doing so, it fails to accomplish its stated purpose of de-gendering the language.
+
+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 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
+
+
+[TODO: Kerr suggests misgendering as an exercise]
+
+[TODO: Contrary to Yudkowskys' claims about lies, Kerr _isn't_ claiming that pronouns can be "lies"; the article is _very_ explicit about this; Yudkowsky is obviously completely unfamiliar with his opponents' arguments]
+
+[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]
+
+Given this multitude of 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?]
+
+The thing is, Eliezer Yudkowsky is a native English speaker born in 1979. As a native English speaker born in 1987, I have a _pretty good_ mental model of how native English speakers born in the late 20th century use language.
+
+And one of the things native English speakers born in the late 20th century are _very good_ at doing, is noticing what sex people are and using the corresponding pronouns without consciously thinking about it, because the pronouns are attached to the concept of sex in their heads more firmly than proper names are attached to something in their heads.
+
+
+I would bet at very generous odds at some point in his four decades on Earth, Eliezer Yudkowsky has used _she_ or _he_ on the basis of perceived sex to refer to someone whose name he didn't know. Because _all native English speakers do this_.
+
+
+
+> My current policy stance is that anybody who does feel that way needs to get some perspective about how it can be less firmly attached in other people's heads; and how their feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol or accuse non-protocol users of lying; especially when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments and we can't make them all be protocol.
+
+The sheer _chutzpah_ here is jaw-dropping. Someone's feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol, huh? But—the causal–historical reason we're discussing pronoun reform _at all_ is _precisely_ to let trans people's feelings control everybody's language protocol! The original post is very explicit about this! It says:
+
+> Even _before_ considering all gender issues, there is some sense in which somebody saying "help help pronouns attacking" sounds to me like a sympathetic innocent asking to get out from under a bad system, not like a law-deuniversalizer asking for exceptions from a good system.
+
+> In terms of important things? Those would be all the things I've read—from friends, from strangers on the Internet, above all from human beings who are people—describing reasons someone does not like to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate, or perhaps at all.
+
+Okay, so Yudkowsky
+
+[TODO: self-identity is a Schelling point]