+I didn't think it was fair, I continued, for Yudkowsky to pull his everyone-but-me-is-retarded shtick while simultaneously pretending that Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying was the crux of trans rights debates.
+
+Lintamande said they didn't read Yudkowsky as having made any claims about the the crux of trans rights debates, just the narrow claim about pronouns.
+
+I said that when he knocks down bad arguments for sex-based pronouns without addressing the good ones, I read him as (not necessarily consciously) playing a ["Weak Men Are Superweapons"](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/) political strategy: carefully choosing what arguments to respond to in order to mood-affiliate with the winning team, without technically saying anything false. A lot of TERFs would be overjoyed to compromise on pronouns if pronouns weren't a wedge or proxy for the other issues that anyone cared about.
+
+Lintamande pointed out that other people thought about this topic less often than I did. Maybe they didn't carefully select which arguments to respond to in order to cleverly mood-affiliate, so much as get prompted by the surrounding Society to think about pronouns, do so, and come up with an answer. They thought it was plausible that Yudkowsky would have given the same verdict on pronoun conventions if someone had posed the question to him as a hypothetical in 2004. Just because pronouns had become a political proxy debate, didn't mean that it was disingenuous to just talk about pronouns without reference to the proxy debate.
+
+I didn't think that was what was actually going on.
+