+If Yudkowsky _actually_ possessed (and felt motivated to use) the "ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking", it would be _obvious_ to him that "Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" isn't the crux anyone cares about. A lot of TERF-adjacent folk would be _overjoyed_ to concede the (boring, insubstantial) matter of pronouns as a trivial courtesy if it meant getting to _actually_ address their real concerns of "Biological Sex Actually Exists", and ["Biological Sex Cannot Be Changed With Existing or Foreseeable Technology"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions) and "Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity". The reason so many of them are inclined to stand their ground and not even offer the trivial courtesy is because they suspect that the matter of pronouns is being used as a rhetorical wedge and typographical attack to try to prevent people from talking or thinking about sex.
+
+And I think this suspicion is broadly accurate! _After_ having been challenged on it, Yudkowsky can try to spin his November 2018 Twitter comments as having been a non-partisan matter of language design ("Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns [...] is the wrong place to pack it"), but when you read the text that was actually published at the time, parts of it are hard to read as anything other than an attempt to shame and delegitimize people who want to use language to reason about sex rather than gender identity. [For example](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067490362225156096):
+
+> The more technology advances, the further we can move people towards where they say they want to be in sexspace. Having said this we've said all the facts. Who competes in sports segregated around an Aristotelian binary is a policy question (that I personally find very humorous).
+
+[TODO outlining remainder of coda—]
+
+[You haven't said all the facts, because before the Glorious Transhumanist Future of technological maturity, you still inherit a lot of the pre-technology distribution. The existence of HRT doesn't mean that everyone is the sex that they say they are—it means that instead of two clusters (females and males), you have four clusters (females, males, females-on-masculinizing-HRT, and males-on-feminizing-HRT). There might be situations where you want to use the {female, males-on-feminizing-HRT} category, but there are also situations where you might want to use the developmental sex categories. In the case of sports, the question of "who is the best within the female distribution" is a natural question that people are interested in (even if most of them don't have the vocabulary to say "multivariate trait distribution", the essentialist cognitive algorithm is still performing very well in this domain), given that natal sex continues to be relevant, and was _obviously_ relevant before HRT
+
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1368176581965930501
+https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-020-01389-3
+https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/15/865
+
+https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1466044767561830405
+Lia Thomas and Cece Tefler
+(Thomas and Tefler's records occured after Yudkowsky's 2018 Tweets, but this kind of thing was easily predictable to anyone familiar with sex differences)
+
+Yudkowsky's suggestion that the only reason someone might care about women's sports is because of a comittment to "Aristotelian binary" is pure sneer; this isn't something any scientifically person would write if they had actually thought about the issue at all, rather than having decided to score points against transphobes and using your knowledge of probability in the service of that goal (which gives the lie to Yudkowsky's claim that he was only trying to make a point about pronouns and truth; the sports policy decision is a policy decision rather than a fact, but it's so lopsided, that the "humor" goes in the other direction)]
+
+> it is sometimes personally prudent and not community-harmful to post your agreement with Stalin about things you actually agree with Stalin about, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles, especially because people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment
+
+Ah, _prudence!_
+
+This is what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_faith means
+
+[Summarize "A Rational Argument" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument
+You could imagine the campaign manager saying the same thing—"I don't see what the alternative is".]
+
+["Everybody knows" https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/ ]
+
+> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
+
+[Agreeing with Stalin that 2+2=4 is fine; the problem is a sustained pattern of _selectively_ bring up pro-Party points while ignoring anti-Party facts that would otherwise be relevant to the topic of interest, including stonewalling commenters who try to point out relevance]
+
+[Why does this matter? It would be dishonest for me to claim that this is _directly_ relevant to xrisk, because that's not my real bottom line]