+Sure. Yes. And indeed, I don't misgender people! (In public. Only rarely in private, when someone's transition doesn't seem legitimate or serious to me, or when talking to my politically reactionary friends.) I'm not arguing that Yudkowsky should misgender people! The purpose of this post is not to argue with Yudkowsky's pronoun usage, but rather to argue with the offered usage _rationale_ that "the simplest and best protocol is, '"He" refers to the set of people who have asked us to use "he", with a default for those-who-haven't-asked that goes by gamete size' and to say that this just _is_ the normative definition."
+
+As I have explained at length, this _rationale_ doesn't work and isn't true (even if better rationales, like sincere belief in gender identity, or the Schelling point argument, can end up recommending the same behavior). _No one_ actually believes (as contrasted to [believing that they believe](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)) that _she_ and _he_ aren't attached to gender in people's heads, despite Yudkowsky's sneering claim in the comments that he ["would not know how to write a different viewpoint as a sympathetic character."](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159423713134228)
+
+Again, without attributing to Yudkowsky any _conscious, deliberative_ intent to deceive (because of the tragic human tendency to unconsciously introduce distortions in the heat of a rapid argument), the _pants-on-fire audacity_ of this _ludicrous_ claim to ignorance still beggars belief. As the author of [one of the world's most popular _Harry Potter_ fanfictions](http://www.hpmor.com/), Yudkowsky clearly knows something about about how to simulate alternative perspectives (includes ones he disagrees with) and portray them sympathetically. And he claims to be _unable_ to do this for ... the idea that pronouns imply sex, and that using the pronouns that imply someone is the sex that they are not feels analogous to lying? Really?!
+
+Well, I'm not a popular fiction author with thousands of obsessive fans who pour over my every word, but if Yudkowsky claims not to be up to this writing challenge, I'm happy to give him a hand and show him how it might be done—
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+A cis woman is testifying in court about a brutal rape that horrifically traumatized her. The rapist has since transitioned.
+
+"And then—" says the victim, reliving those awful moments, "and then, he took his erect penis—"
+
+"Objection!" says the defense lawyer. "The witness misgendering my client is prejudicial."
+
+"Sustained," says the judge. Then, to the victim: "_Her_ erect penis."
+
+"Wh—what?" says the victim.
+
+"You will refer to the defendant with the correct pronoun, or I'll hold you in contempt of court."
+
+"Oh. O–okay. And then she took her—" The victim breaks down crying. "I'm sorry, Your Honor; I can't do it. I'm under oath; I have to tell the story the way it happened to me. In my memories, the person who did those things to me was a man. A—"
+
+She hesistates, sobs a few more times. In this moment, almost more than the memories of the rape, she is very conscious of having never gone to college. The judge and the defense lawyer are smarter and more educated than her, and _they_ believe that the man who raped her is now (or perhaps, always had been) a woman. It had never made any sense to her—but how could she explain to an authority figure who she had no hope of out-arguing, if she was even allowed to argue?
+
+"And by 'man', I mean—a male. The way I was raised, men—males—get called _he_ and _him_. If I say _she_, it doesn't feel true to the memory in my head. It—it feels like lying, Your Honor."
+
+The judge scoffs. "You are _ontologically_ confused," he sneers. "At age 13 I was programming on LambdaMOO where people had their choice of exotic pronouns and nobody thought anything of it," says the judge. "Denied."
+
+"O-okay," says the victim. She doesn't know what _ontologically_ means, or what a LambdaMOO is. "So then—then sh-she took her erect penis and she—"
+
+She breaks down crying again. "Your Honor, I can't! I can't do it! It's not true! It's not—" She senses that the judge will imply she's stupid for saying it's not true. She gropes for some way of explaining. "I mean—the Court allows people to testify in Spanish or Chinese with the help of a translator, right? Can't you treat my testimony like that? Let me say what happened to me in the words that seems true to me, even if the court does its business using words in a different way?"
+
+"You're in contempt," says the judge. "Baliff! Take her away!"
+
+<p class="flower-break">⁕ ⁕ ⁕</p>
+
+Not a sympathetic character? Not even a little bit?
+
+I suspect some readers will have an intuition that my choice of scenario is loaded, unfair, or unrealistic. To be sure, I chose it an unusually clear-cut case for why someone might have a need to use pronouns to imply sex in their _own_ speech. (If the scenario was just talking about someone borrowing a vacuum cleaner, fewer readers would have any sympathy for someone not wanting to concede the trivial courtesy of preferred pronouns.)
+
+But what, specifically, is unrealistic about it? Is it the idea that a trans woman could have raped someone before transitioning? Of course _most_ trans women are not sex offenders—just as _most_ non-transsexual males are not sex offenders—but instances of trans women committing the kinds of sex crimes that overwhelmingly the provenance of men [are a documented thing](https://fairplayforwomen.com/transgender-male-criminality-sex-offences/).
+
+Is it the idea that the legal system would penalize someone for pronoun non-compliance? But this is also an occasionally documented thing, as in [one case where a Canadian father was jailed](https://www.city-journal.org/canadian-father-jailed-for-speaking-out-about-trans-identifying-child) for violating [a court order](https://www.bccourts.ca/jdb-txt/sc/19/06/2019BCSC0604.htm) not to refer to his natal-female child with she/her pronouns. As liberal intellectuals debating optimal communication policies, we usually hope to govern by consensus: we want people to use preferred pronouns _voluntarily_, rather than being forced. But maintaining a collective norm in the face of those who have their own reasons to object to it, does ultimately require some sort of threat. In the vignette above, given the defense lawyer's objection; the judge does face a forced choice to Sustain or Overrule, and that choice has consequences either way.
+
+In the comments, Yudkowsky continues:
+
+> This is _not_ the woke position. The woke position is that when you call somebody "she" because she requested "she", you're validating her gender preference. I may SEPARATELY be happy to validate somebody's gender preference by using the more complex language feature of NOUN PHRASES to construct an actual SENTENCE that refers to her ON PURPOSE as a "woman", but when it comes to PRONOUNS I am not even validating anyone.
+
+Right, it's not the woke position. It's an _incoherent_ position that's optimized to concede to the woke the behavior that they want for a _different stated reason_ in order to make the concession appear "neutral" and not "politically" motivated. She requested "she" _because_ acceding to the request validates her gender preference in the minds of all native English speakers who are listening, even if Eliezer Yudkowsky has some clever casuistry for why it magically doesn't mean that when _he_ says it.
+
+I'm _not_ saying that Yudkowsky should have a different pronoun policy. (I agree that misgendering all trans people "on principle" seems very wrong and unappealing.) Rather, I'm saying that in order to _actually_ be politically neutral in your analysis of _why_ someone might choose one pronoun policy over another, you need to _acknowledge_ the costs and benefits of a policy to different parties, and face the unhappy fact that sometimes there are cases where there _is_ no "neutral" policy, because all available policies impose costs on _someone_ and there's no solution that everyone is happy with. (Rational agents can hope to reach _some_ point on the Pareto frontier, but non-identical agents are necessarily going to fight about _which_ point, even if most of the fighting takes place in non-realized counterfactual possible worlds rather than exerting costs in reality.)
+
+Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Exerting social pressure on (for example) a native-English-speaking rape victim to refer to her male rapist with _she_/_her_ pronouns is a _cost_ to her. And, simultaneously, _not_ exerting that pressure is a _cost_ to many trans people, by making recognition of their social gender _conditional_ on some standard of good behavior, rather than an unconditional fact that doesn't need to be "earned" or justified in any way.
+
+You might think the cost of making the rape victim say _she_ is worth it, because you want to make it easy for gender-dysphoric people to socially transition, and because you think it's dumb that pronouns imply sex in the actually-existing English language and you see the self-identity convention as an incremental step towards degendering the language.
+
+Fine. That's a perfectly coherent position. But if that's your position and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to _acknowledge_ that your position exerts costs on some actually-existing English speakers who have a use-case for using pronouns to imply sex. You need to be able to look that rape victim in the eye and say, "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."
+
+And of course—it _should_ be needless to say—this applies symmetrically. If you think speakers _should_ be able to misgender according to their judgement and you care about being intellectually honest, you need to be able to look a trans person in the eye and say, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes the freedom of speech of speakers is more important than your gender being recognized; sucks to be you."
+
+Or if you have more important things to worry about (like the fate of a hundred thousand galaxies depending on the exact preferences built into the first artificial superintelligence) and don't want the distraction of taking a position on controversial contemporary social issues, fine: use whatever pronoun convention happens to be dominant in your local social environment, and, if questioned, say, "I'm using the pronoun convention that happens to be dominant in my local social environment." You don't have to invent _absurd lies_ to make it look like the convention that happens to be dominant in your local social environment has no costs.
+
+Really, "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'"? Any seven-year-old in 2016 could have told you that that's just _factually not true_; if you grew up speaking English in the late 20th century, you _absolutely goddamned well do_ know what it feels like. Did [the elephant in Yudkowsky's brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) really expect to get away with that? How dumb does he think we are?!
+
+-----
+
+At this point, some readers may be puzzled as to the _mood_ of the present post. I _agree_ with Yudkowsky's analysis of the design flaw in English's pronoun system. I _also_ agree that not misgendering trans people is a completely reasonable thing to do, which I also do. I'm _only_ disputing the part where Yudkowsky jumps to declaring his proposed "simplest and best protocol" without acknowledging the ways in which it's _not_ simple and not _unambiguously_ the best.
+
+Many observers would consider this a very minor disagreement, not something anyone would want to spend 12,000 words prosecuting with as much vitriolic rhetoric as the target audience is likely to tolerate. If I agree with the problem statement (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way), and I don't disagree with the proposed policy solution (don't misgender trans people in public), why get so hung up on the exact arguments?