+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.