+If you grew up speaking English, gendered pronouns feel "normal" while gendered [noun classes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class) in many other languages (where, _e.g._, in French, a dog, _le chien_, is "masculine", but potatoes, _la pommes de terre_, are "feminine") seem strange and unnecessary, but someone who grew up with neither would regard both as strange. If you spoke a language that didn't _already_ have gendered pronouns, you probably wouldn't be spontaneously eager to add them.
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+All this seems correct as a critique of the existing English pronoun system! However, I argue that Yudkowsky's prescriptions for English speakers going forward goes badly wrong. First, Yudkowsky argues that it's bad for stances on complicated empirical issues to be baked into the language grammar itself: since people might disagree on who fits into the empirical clusters of "female" and "male", you don't want people to be forced to make a call on that just in order to be able to use a pronoun.
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+Fair enough. Sounds like an argument for universal singular _they_: if you don't think pronouns should convey sex-category information, then don't use pronouns that convey sex-category information. But then, in an unexplained leap, Yudkowsky proclaims:
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+> So it seems to me 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. Because it is *logically* rude, not just socially rude, to try to bake any other more complicated and controversial definition *into the very language protocol we are using to communicate*.