+Okay, so the public narrative about transness is obviously, _obviously_ false. That's a problem, because almost no matter what you want, true beliefs are more useful than false beliefs for making decisions that get you what you want.
+
+Fortunately, Yudkowsky's writing had brought together a whole community of brilliant people dedicated to refining the art of human rationality—the methods of acquiring true beliefs and using them to make decisions that get you what you want. So now that I _know_ the public narrative is obviously false, and that I have the outlines of a better theory (even though I could use a lot of help pinning down the details, and I don't know what the social policy implications are, because the optimal policy computation is a complicated value trade-off), all I _should_ have to do is carefully explain why the public narrative is delusional, and then because my arguments are so much better, all the smart serious rational people will either agree with me, or at least be eager to _clarify_ exactly where they disagree and what their alternative theory is, so that we can move the state of public knowledge forward together, in order to help the great common task of optimizing the universe in accordance with humane values.
+
+Of course, this is kind of a niche topic—if you're not a male with this psychological condition, or a woman who doesn't want to share all female-only spaces with them, you probably have no reason to care—but there are a _lot_ of males with this psychological condition around here! If this whole "rationality" subculture isn't completely fake, then we should be interested in getting the correct answer in public _for ourselves_.
+
+Men who fantasize about being 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?! Notwithstanding that some males might want to make use of medical interventions like surgery and hormone replacement therapy to become facsimiles of women as far as our existing technology can manage, and that a free and enlightened transhumanist Society should support that—and notwithstanding that _she_ is obviously the correct pronoun for people who _look_ like women—it's probably going to be harder for people to figure out what the optimal decisions are if no one is allowed to use language like "actual women" that clearly distinguishes the original thing from imperfect facsimiles?!
+
+[TODO: make the dark-side-epistemology/Category-War case ...]
+[TODO: contempt and political posioning]
+
+The "discourse algorithm" (the collective generalization of "cognitive algorithm") that can't just _get this shit right_ in 2020 (because being out of step with the reigning Bay Area ideological fashion is deemed too expensive by a consequentialism that counts unpopularity as a cost), also can't get heliocentrism right in 1632 _for the same reason_—and I really doubt it can get AI alignment theory right in 2039.
+
+Someone asked me: "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the community solved Friendly AI and went down in history as the people who created Utopia forever, and you had rejected it because of gender stuff?"
+
+But the _reason_ it seemed _at all_ remotely plausible that our little robot cult could be pivotal in creating Utopia forever was _not_ "[Because we're us](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-recommending/), the world-saving good guys", but rather _because_ we were going to discover and refine the methods of _systematically correct reasoning_.
+
+If you're doing systematically correct reasoning, you should be able to get the right answer even when the question _doesn't matter_. Obviously, the safety of the world does not _directly_ depend on being able to think clearly about trans issues. Similarly, the safety of a coal mine for humans does not _directly_ depend on [whether it's safe for canaries](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canary_in_a_coal_mine): the dead canaries are just _evidence about_ properties of the mine relevant to human health. (The causal graph is the fork "canary-death ← mine-gas → human-danger" rather than the direct link "canary-death → human-danger".)
+
+If the people _marketing themselves_ as the good guys who are going to save the world using systematically correct reasoning are _not actually interested in doing systematically correct reasoning_ (because systematically correct reasoning leads to two or three conclusions that are politically "impossible" to state clearly in public, and no one has the guts to [_not_ shut up and thereby do the politically impossible](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nCvvhFBaayaXyuBiD/shut-up-and-do-the-impossible)), that's arguably _worse_ than the situation where "the community" _qua_ community doesn't exist at all.
+
+Someone asked me: "If we randomized half the people at [OpenAI](https://openai.com/) to use trans pronouns one way, and the other half to use it the other way, do you think they would end up with significantly different productivity?"
+
+But the thing I'm objecting to is a lot more fundamental than the specific choice of pronoun convention, which obviously isn't going to be uniquely determined. Turkish doesn't have gender pronouns, and that's fine. Naval ships traditionally take feminine pronouns in English, and it doesn't confuse anyone into thinking boats have a womb. [Many other languages are much more gendered than English](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender#Distribution_of_gender_in_the_world's_languages) (where pretty much only third-person singular pronouns are at issue). The conventions used in one's native language probably _does_ [color one's thinking to some extent](TODO: "Crossing the Line" link), but
+
+The thing I'm objecting to is this _culture of narcissistic Orwellian mind games_ that thinks people have the right to _dictate other people's model of reality_.
+
+[TODO: We want words that map onto the structure of things in the word: if everyone were a hermaphrodite]
+
+In a world where sexual dimorphism didn't exist, where everyone was a hermaphrodite, then "gender" wouldn't exist, either.
+
+In a world where we _actually had_ magical perfect sex-change technology of the kind described in "Changing Emotions", then people who wanted to change sex would do so, and everyone else would use the corresponding language (pronouns and more), _not_ as a courtesy, _not_ to maximize social welfare, but because it _straightforwardly described reality_.
+
+In a world where
+
+[TODO: Anton on "be a lesbian by behavior alone"; contrast to coining "transbian" as a new word: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/where-have-all-the-lesbians-gone-0a7 ]
+
+[TODO: it was a complement! I don't _want_ people to have to doublethink around their perceptions of me, pretend not to notice]
+
+I think looking at [our standard punching bag of theism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLL6yzZ3WKn8KaSC3/the-uniquely-awful-example-of-theism) is a very fair comparison. Religious people aren't _stupid_. You can prove theorems about the properties of [Q-learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning) or [Kalman filters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter) at a world-class level without encountering anything that forces you to question whether Jesus Christ died for our sins.