+**Almost everything I do is at least one meta level up from any actual decisions.** I'm _not_ trying to tell other people how to live their lives, because _that would be crazy_. I am obviously _not smart enough_ to tell other people what they should do _and get the right answer_. True, I am skeptical of currently-popular _theories_ of how gender works and how gender dysphoria works,[^concepts] because I think they are _false_ in certain knowable aspects and that I have a more accurate view in certain knowable aspects. That is _not the same thing_ as telling people to detransition! Maybe lots _more_ people should transition! But in order to _figure out_ what the correct decisions are—or what the best decisions are conditional on your axiomatic subjective values—we need to **get the theory right**. That's what I'm _trying_ to do. It would be nice to have some help!
+
+[^concepts]: And indeed, whether "gender" and "gender dysphoria" are exactly the right concepts.
+
+Men who wish they were women do not particularly resemble actual women! We just—don't? This seems kind of obvious, really? Telling the difference between fantasy and reality is kind of an important life skill?
+
+Okay, I understand that in Berkeley 2020, that probably sounds like some kind of reactionary political statement, probably intended to provoke. But try interpreting it _literally_, as a _factual claim_ about the world. Adult human males who _fantasize about_ being adult human females, are still neverless drawn from the _male_ multivariate trait distribution, not the female distribution.
+
+It seems useful to be able to _express this claim in natural language_. I can phrase the claim in more or fewer words, using a greater or lesser amount of caveats, qualifications, or polysyllabic obfuscations, depending on my audience's sensibilities and what aspects of my model I want to call attention to. But I need to be able to talk about the model _somehow_, and talking about the model becomes _more expensive_ if I'm not occasionally allowed to use the phrase "actual woman" in a context where [_you know goddamned well_ what I mean by it](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/).
+
+I mean it just as I might say "actual meat" to distinguish such from [plant-based imitations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_analogue), or "actual wood" to distinguish such from [composite materials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-plastic_composite), without anyone raising an eyebrow. The general concept here is that of _mimickry_. The point is not to denigrate the mimic—one might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ meat substitutes or composite wood to the real thing. (Nonhuman animal welfare! Termite-proof-ness!) One might have any number of reasons to _prefer_ trans women to the real thing. (Though I still feel uncomfortable trying to think of any in particular.) The _point_ is that I need language that _asymmetrically_ distinguishes the _original_ thing, from the artificial thing that's trying to mimic its form while not being exactly the same thing, either by design or due to technological limitations.
+
+Why not just say "cis" women? I do, often, depending on the audience and the context of what I'm trying to say. I can [code-switch](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2016/10/code-switching-i/); I can entertain multiple frames—different maps that reflect different aspects of the same territory. I can even be polite, when being polite is _cheap_. But it's important to at least _acknowledge_ that "cis" and "actual" do not _convey the same meaning_. (Sufficiently advanced neuroscience would be able to confirm this by examining patterns of brain activity on hearing each word.) The _fact_ that they don't convey the same meaning is _why_ the latter is offensive—the source of controversy isn't that people love words that start with _c_ and hate words that that start with a vowel sound. Not being allowed to use the word "actual" in this context makes it harder to encode the _empirical hypothesis_ I'm trying to communicate, that "trans" isn't just pointing to a subcluster within the "woman" cluster (like "young woman" or "Japanese woman"), it's actually denoting a subcluster within the _male_ cluster in the subspace of dimensions corresponding to [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/)-related traits that—unfortunately, heartbreakingly—we don't know how to change with current technology.
+
+The fact that I can't _talk about the world I see_ in the simple language that comes naturally to me without it inevitably being construed as a reactionary political statement is a _problem_. And it's a _rationality_ problem insofar as the world I see is potentially a more accurate model of the real world, than the world I'm allowed to talk about in Berkeley 2020.
+
+I can be polite in most circumstances, as the price of keeping the peace in Society. But it is a price, a cost—and it's a _cognitive_ cost, the cost of _destroying information_ that would make people uncomfortable. Systematically correct reasoners needn't _mention_ the cost in most circumstances (that would not be polite), but we should at least be able to refrain from indulging in clever [not-technically-lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PrXR66hQcaJXsgWsa/not-technically-lying) sophistry that tries to _make it look like there's no cost_.
+
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions", no one would even be _tempted_ to invent these clever category-gerrymandering mind games! People who wanted to change sex would just _do it_, and everyone would use corresponding language (pronouns and more) because it straightforwardly _described reality_—not as a political favor, or because of some exceedingly clever philosophy argument, but using the _same_ ordinary word-choice algorithms that they used for everything else. The fact that people keep inventing these clever category-gerrymandering mind games and refuse to engage when one of their peers or students spends thousands of words explaining why this is not how we do philosophy, is an indication that _something has gone very wrong_.[^motherfuckers]
+
+[^motherfuckers]: We had an entire Sequence about this! You lying motherfuckers!
+
+If we _actually had_ the magical perfect sex change technology described in "Changing Emotions"—if it cost $200,000, I would take out a bank loan and _do it_, and live happily ever after.
+
+(Though I'd call myself a transwoman—one word, for the same reason the _verthandi_ in "Failed Utopia #4-2" got their own word. I currently write "trans woman", two words, as a strategic concession to the shibboleth-detectors of my target audience:[^two-words] I don't want to to _prematurely_ scare off progressive-socialized readers on account of mere orthography, when what I actually have to say is already disturbing enough.)
+
+[^two-words]: For the unfamiliar: the [doctrine here](https://medium.com/@cassiebrighter/please-write-trans-women-as-two-words-487f153444fb) is that "transwoman" is cissexist, because "trans" is properly an adjective indicating a type of woman.
+
+I definitely don't want to call (say) my friend "Irene" a man. That would be crazy! Because **her transition _actually worked_.** Because it actually worked _on the merits_. _Not_ because I'm _redefining concepts in order to be nice to her_. When I look at her, whatever algorithm my brain _ordinarily_ uses to sort people into "woman"/"man"/"not sure" buckets, returns "woman."
+
+**If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, and you can model it as a duck without making any grevious prediction errors, then it makes sense to call it a "duck" in the range of circumstances that your model continues to be useful**, even if a pedant might point out that it's really ("really") an [Anatid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatidae)-[oid](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-oid#Suffix) robot, or that that species is technically a goose.
+
+_Literally_ all I'm asking for is for the branded systematically-correct-reasoning community to be able to perform _modus ponens_—
+
+ (1) For all nouns _N_, you can't define _N_ any way you want without cognitive consequences [(for at least 37 reasons)](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FaJaCgqBKphrDzDSj/37-ways-that-words-can-be-wrong).
+ (2) "Woman" is a noun.
+ (3) _Therefore_, you can't define "woman" any way you want without cognitive consequences.
+
+Note, **(3) is _entirely compatible_ with trans women being women**. The point is that if you want to claim that trans women are women, you need some sort of _argument_ for why that categorization makes sense in the context you want to use the word—why that map usefully reflects some relevant aspect of the territory. **If you want to _argue_ that trans women are women** _because_ hormone replacement therapy constitutes an effective sex change, or that trans is a brain-intersex condition and the brain is the true referent of "gender", or that [coordination constraints on _shared_ categories](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) [support the self-identification criterion](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), that's fine, because **those are _arguments_ that someone who initially disagreed with your choice of categorization could _engage with on the merits_.** In contrast, **"I can define a word any way I want" can't be engaged with in the same way because it's a denial of the possibility of merits.**
+
+[...]
+
+An aside: being famous must _suck_. I haven't experienced this myself, but I'm sure it's true.
+
+Oh, sure, it's nice to see your work get read and appreciated by people—I've experienced that much. (Shout-out to my loyal fans—all four of you![^fans]) But when you're _famous_, everybody wants a piece of you. The fact that your work influences _so many_ people, makes you a _target_ for anyone who wants to indirectly wield your power for their own ends. Every new author wants you to review their book; every ideologue wants you on their side ...
+
+And when a crazy person in your robot cult thinks you've made a philosophy mistake that impinges on their interests, they might spend an _unreasonable_ amount of effort obsessively trying to argue with you about it.
+
+[^fans]: I'm specifically thinking of W.E., R.S., S.V., and [Sophia](http://unremediatedgender.space/author/sophia/).
+
+[section: email campaign that we spent a ridiculous amount of effort on]