+Okay, so Yudkowsky never thought sex-based pronouns were a good idea in the first place. But the _important thing_, he says, is that some people ("who are people", Yudkowsky pleonastically clarifies, as if anyone had doubted this) don't want other people to use language that refers to what sex they are.
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+Personally, I have a _lot_ of sympathy for this, because in an earlier stage of my ideological evolution, I _was_ one of those people. (I [tried to use an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and byline for a while in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials), and while I never asked for new pronouns, this is probably a matter of Overton window placement rather than any underlying difference in sentiments; it seems pretty obvious that my analogue growing up in the current year's ideological environment would be a trans woman.)
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+But it's important to not use sympathy as an excuse to blur together different rationales, or obfuscate our analysis of the costs and benefits of different policies. "Systematically de-gender English because that's a superior language design" and "Don't misgender because trans people are sympathetic" are _different_ political projects with different victory conditions.
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+Perhaps it might make sense for adherents of a "degender English" movement to stategically _ally_ with the trans rights movement: to latch on to gender-dysphoric people's pain as a political weapon to destabilize what the English-degenderers think of as a bad pronoun system for _other reasons_. Fine.
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+But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
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+There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to tell people like Barra Kerr, "Sorry, my political coalition believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question," rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.