-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.
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-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."
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-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.
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-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.
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-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.
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-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.
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-[TODO: if I were dumb enough to believe Yudwkowsky about pronouns and acted on it, that would have been worse for me]
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-[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]
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-[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
-]
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-How dumb do you think we are?!
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-Fit in somewhere—
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- * singular they for named individuals undermined indefinite singular 'they'
- * parenthetical about where "Oliver" came from
- * some people have complained that my writing is too long, but when your interlocutors will go to the absurd length of _denying that the association of "she" with females_
- * people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues
- * 4 levels of intellectual conversation
- * appeal to inner privacy conversation-halter https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wqmmv6NraYv4Xoeyj/conversation-halters
- * don't use "baked in" so many times
- * Aella https://knowingless.com/2019/06/06/side-effects-of-preferred-pronouns/