-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 participating in 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!
+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 participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, 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, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you" 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_.
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+(In general, an honest "sucks to be you" from someone whose political incentives lead them to oppose your goals, is _much_ less cruel than the opponent distorting your position to make you look bad to their followers.)
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+All this having been said, Yudkowsky _is_ indeed correct to note that "when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments [...] we can't make them all be protocol". It's possible for observers to disagree about what sex category they see someone as belonging to, and it would be awkward at best for different speakers in a conversation to use different pronouns to refer to the same subject.
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+As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something belongs to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, one strategy is for everyone to defer to the judgement of some trusted authority.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) For example, in a tight-knit community with hierarchical leadership, the community leaders would be positioned to be such an authority: you could imagine living in a _shtetl_ where your gender transition was only recognized by your neighbors after the local rabbi gave his blessing. In recent Western Society, medical and bureaucratic gatekeeping of transition treatments serves or served this function: though the details depend on your local subculture or jurisdiction, it's generally a lot harder to socially transition if you can't find a licensed doctor to affirm that you're geniunely transsexual.
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+As a firm supporter of the transhumanist right to [morphological freedom](https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Morphological_freedom), I think gatekeeping is bad; adults should be able to access body-modification treatments on the basis of informed consent.
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+In the case of a person's social sex category ("gender"), there's no obvious way to break the symmetry among third parties who have an opinion about the matter—
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+I wrote about this argument in an earlier post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
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