-But having done the reduction-to-cognitive-algorithms, it still looks like the person-in-the-street has a point that I shouldn't be allowed to ignore just because I have 30 more IQ points and better philosophy-of-language skills? As it is written: "intelligence, to be useful, must be used for something other than defeating itself."
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-I bring up me and Danielle Muscato as examples because I think those are edge cases that help illustrate the problem I'm trying to point out, much like how people love to bring up complete androgen insensitivity syndrome to illustrate why "But chromosomes!" isn't the correct reduction of sex classification. But to differentiate what I'm saying from mere blind transphobia, let me note that I predict that most people-in-the-street would be comfortable using feminine pronouns for someone like Blaire White (who is also trans). That's evidence about the kind of cognitive work people's brains are doing when they use English language singular third-person pronouns! Certainly, English is not the only language; ours is not the only culture; maybe there is a way to do gender categories that would be more accurate and better for everyone! But to find what that better way is, I think we need to be able to talk about these kinds of details in public. And I think statements like "Calling pronouns lies is not what you do when you know how to use words" hinder that discussion rather than helping it, by functioning as semantic stopsigns.
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-Again, satire is a very weak form of argument, but if it helps at all, I feel like Alice in the following dialogue.
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-Bob (loudly, in the public square): When people say "Now let us bow our heads and praise the Lord our God", they're not lying, because "Now let us bow our heads" is a speech act, not a statement of fact.
-Alice (via private email): I agree that it's a speech act rather than a factual assertion, but isn't that observation pretty misleading in isolation? I don't understand why you would say that and only that, unless you were deliberately trying to get your readers to believe in God without actually having to say "You should believe in God."
-Bob: Calling speech acts "lies" is not what you do when you know how to use words. But mostly, I think this is not very important.
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-As with all satire, you can point out differences between this satirical dialogue and the real-world situation that it's trying to satirize. But are they relevant differences? To be sure, "Does God exist?" is a much more straightforward question than "Are trans women women?" because existence questions in general are easier than parismonious-categorization-that-carves-nature-at-the-joints questions. But I think that "when you take a step back, feel the flow of debate, observe the cognitive traffic signals", the satirical dialogue is exhibiting the same structural problems as the conversation we're actually having.
+If you're _very careful_, I'm sure it's possible to give a truthful answer to that question without misgendering anyone. But if you want to give a _concise_ answer—perhaps not a _maximally rigorous_ answer, but an answer that usefully [points](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) to the true causal-structure-in-the-world while still fitting in a Tweet—I think you _need_ to be able to say something like, "Because trans women are men." (At least as a _live hypothesis_, even if you prefer an intersex-brain etiology for the people we know.)