[TODO: based on the timing, the Feb. 2021 pronouns post was likely causally downstream of me being temporarily more salient to EY because of my highly-Liked response to his "anyone at this point that anybody who openly hates on this community generally or me personally is probably also a bad person inside" from 17 February; it wasn't gratuitously out of the blue]
-If Yudkowsky is obviously playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what's _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
+
+If Yudkowsky was playing dumb (consciously or not) and his comments can't be taken seriously, what was _actually_ going on here? When smart people act dumb, [it's usually wisest to assume that their behavior represents _optimized_ stupidity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sXHQ9R5tahiaXEZhR/algorithmic-intent-a-hansonian-generalized-anti-zombie)—apparent "stupidity" that achieves a goal through some other channel than their words straightforwardly reflecting the truth. Someone who was _actually_ stupid wouldn't be able to generate text with a specific balance of insight and selective stupidity fine-tuned to reach a gender-politically convenient conclusion without explicitly invoking any controversial gender-political reasoning.
Fortunately, Yudkowsky graciously grants us a clue in the form of [a disclaimer comment](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228):
-> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only Zack M. Davis would have said anything where you could hear it.
+> It unfortunately occurs to me that I must, in cases like these, disclaim that—to the extent there existed sensible opposing arguments against what I have just said—people might be reluctant to speak them in public, in the present social atmosphere. That is, in the logical counterfactual universe where I knew of very strong arguments against freedom of pronouns, I would have probably stayed silent on the issue, as would many other high-profile community members, and only [the present author —M.T.S.-W.] would have said anything where you could hear it.
>
> This is a filter affecting your evidence; it has not to my own knowledge filtered out a giant valid counterargument that invalidates this whole post. I would have kept silent in that case, for to speak then would have been dishonest.
>
Really, it would be _less_ embarassing for Yudkowsky if he were outright lying about having tried to think of counterarguments. The original post isn't _that_ bad if you assume that Yudkowsky was writing off the cuff, that he clearly just _didn't put any effort whatsoever_ into thinking about why someone might disagree. If he _did_ put in the effort—enough that he felt comfortable bragging about his ability to see the other side of the argument—and _still_ ended up proclaiming his "simplest and best protocol" without even so much as _mentioning_ any of its incredibly obvious costs ... that's just _pathetic_. If Yudkowsky's ability to explore the space of arguments is _that_ bad, why would you trust his opinion about _anything_?
-[TODO: as Yudkowsky put it
-> Admitting something when being pushed a little, but never thinking it spontaneously and hence having those thoughts absent from your own thought processes, remains not sane.
-https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1501218503990431745
-]
-
-But perhaps it's premature to judge Yudkowsky without appreciating what tight constraints he labors under. The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, exactly, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
+The disclaimer comment mentions "speakable and unspeakable arguments"—but what, one wonders, is the boundary of the "speakable"? In response to a commenter mentioning the cost of having to remember pronouns as a potential counterargument, Yudkowsky [offers us another clue](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421833274228&reply_comment_id=10159421871809228):
> People might be able to speak that. A clearer example of a forbidden counterargument would be something like e.g. imagine if there was a pair of experimental studies somehow proving that (a) everybody claiming to experience gender dysphoria was lying, and that (b) they then got more favorable treatment from the rest of society. We wouldn't be able to talk about that. No such study exists to the best of my own knowledge, and in this case we might well hear about it from the other side to whom this is the exact opposite of unspeakable; but that would be an example.
(As an aside, the wording of "we might well hear about it from _the other side_" (emphasis mine) is _very_ interesting, suggesting that the so-called "rationalist" community, is, effectively, a partisan institution, despite its claims to be about advancing the generically human art of systematically correct reasoning.)
-
+
I think (a) and (b) _as stated_ are clearly false, so "we" (who?) fortunately aren't losing much by allegedly not being able to speak them. But what about some _similar_ hypotheses, that might be similarly unspeakable for similar reasons?
Instead of (a), consider the claim that (a′) self-reports about gender dysphoria are substantially distorted by [socially-desirable responding tendencies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias)—as a notable and common example, heterosexual males with [sexual fantasies about being female](http://www.annelawrence.com/autogynephilia_&_MtF_typology.html) [often falsely deny or minimize the erotic dimension of their desire to change sex](/papers/blanchard-clemmensen-steiner-social_desirability_response_set_and_systematic_distortion.pdf) (The idea that self-reports can be motivatedly inaccurate without the subject consciously "lying" should not be novel to someone who co-blogged with [Robin Hanson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_in_the_Brain) for years!)
And instead of (b), consider the claim that (b′) transitioning is socially rewarded within particular _subcultures_ (although not Society as a whole), such that many of the same people wouldn't think of themselves as trans or even gender-dysphoric if they lived in a different subculture.
-I claim that (a′) and (b′) are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not?
-
-We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on my experiences with the so-called "rationalist" community over the past coming-up-on-six years—I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that.
+I claim that (a′) and (b′) are _overwhelmingly likely to be true_. Can "we" talk about _that_? Are (a′) and (b′) "speakable", or not? We're unlikely to get clarification from Yudkowsky, but based on the Whole Dumb Story I've been telling you about how I wasted the last six years of my life on this, I'm going to _guess_ that the answer is broadly No: no, "we" can't talk about that. (_I_ can say it, and people can debate me in a private Discord server where the general public isn't looking, but it's not something someone of Yudkowsky's stature can afford to acknowledge.)
-But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named in [a November 2018 Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521) that was the precursor to the present discussion—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
+But if I'm right that (a′) and (b′) should be live hypotheses and that Yudkowsky would consider them "unspeakable", that means "we" can't talk about what's _actually going on_ with gender dysphoria and transsexuality, which puts the whole discussion in a different light. In another comment, Yudkowsky lists some gender-transition interventions he named the [November 2018 "hill of meaning in defense of validity" Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1067183500216811521)—using a different bathroom, changing one's name, asking for new pronouns, and getting sex reassignment surgery—and notes that none of these are calling oneself a "woman". [He continues](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228?comment_id=10159421986539228&reply_comment_id=10159424960909228):
> [Calling someone a "woman"] _is_ closer to the right sort of thing _ontologically_ to be true or false. More relevant to the current thread, now that we have a truth-bearing sentence, we can admit of the possibility of using our human superpower of language to _debate_ whether this sentence is indeed true or false, and have people express their nuanced opinions by uttering this sentence, or perhaps a more complicated sentence using a bunch of caveats, or maybe using the original sentence uncaveated to express their belief that this is a bad place for caveats. Policies about who uses what bathroom also have consequences and we can debate the goodness or badness (not truth or falsity) of those policies, and utter sentences to declare our nuanced or non-nuanced position before or after that debate.
>
> Trying to pack all of that into the pronouns you'd have to use in step 1 is the wrong place to pack it.
-Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is a contested social construct, rather than their sex an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
+Sure, _if we were in the position of designing a constructed language from scratch_ under current social conditions in which a person's "gender" is understood as a contested social construct, rather than their sex being an objective and undisputed fact, then yeah: in that situation _which we are not in_, you definitely wouldn't want to pack sex or gender into pronouns. But it's a disingenuous derailing tactic to grandstand about how people need to alter the semantics of their _already existing_ native language so that we can discuss the real issues under an allegedly superior pronoun convention when, _by your own admission_, you have _no intention whatsoever of discussing the real issues!_
(Lest the "by your own admission" clause seem too accusatory, I should note that given constant behavior, admitting it is _much_ better than not-admitting it; so, huge thanks to Yudkowsky for the transparency on this point!)
> I don't see what the alternative is besides getting shot, or utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including "2 + 2 = 4" because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion.
-The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your presented conclusion, after the fact.
+The problem with trying to "exhibit generally rationalist principles" in an line of argument that you're constructing in order to be prudent and not community-harmful, is that you're thereby necessarily _not_ exhibiting the central rationalist principle that what matters is the process that _determines_ your conclusion, not the reasoning you present to _reach_ your conclusion, after the fact.
The best explanation of this I know was authored by Yudkowsky himself in 2007, in a post titled ["A Rational Argument"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9f5EXt8KNNxTAihtZ/a-rational-argument). It's worth quoting at length. The Yudkowsky of 2007 invites us to consider the plight of a political campaign manager:
>
> Indeed, **you crossed the line at the point where you considered whether the questionnaire was favorable or unfavorable to your candidate, before deciding whether to publish it.** "What!" you cry. "A campaign should publish facts unfavorable to their candidate?" But put yourself in the shoes of a voter, still trying to select a candidate—why would you censor useful information? You wouldn't, if you were genuinely curious. If you were flowing _forward_ from the evidence to an unknown choice of candidate, rather than flowing _backward_ from a fixed candidate to determine the arguments.
-The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though the both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
+The post then briefly discusses the idea of a "logical" argument, one whose conclusions follow from its premises. "All rectangles are quadrilaterals; all squares are quadrilaterals; therefore, all squares are rectangles" is given as an example of _illogical_ argument, even though both premises are true (all rectangles and squares are in fact quadrilaterals) _and_ the conclusion is true (all squares are in fact rectangles). The problem is that the conclusion doesn't _follow_ from the premises; the _reason_ all squares are rectangles isn't _because_ they're both quadrilaterals. If we accepted arguments of the general _form_ "all A are C; all B are C; therefore all A are B", we would end up believing nonsense.
Yudkowsky's conception of a "rational" argument—at least, Yudkowsky's conception in 2007, which the Yudkowsky of the current year seems to disagree with—has a similar flavor: the stated reasons should be the actual reasons. The post concludes:
For example, an [insurance company employee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claims_adjuster) who goes through the motions of investigating your claim while privately intending to deny it might never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but is definitely acting in bad faith: they're asking you questions, demanding evidence, _&c._ in order to _make it look like_ you'll get paid if you prove the loss occurred—whereas in reality, you're just not going to be paid. Your responses to the claim inspector aren't completely casually _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that the loss occurred as you say, then the claim inspector might need to put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse to deny your claim in ways that exhibit general claim-inspection principles. But at the end of the day, the inspector is going to say what they need to say in order to protect the company's loss ratio, as is personally prudent.
-With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will never consciously tell an explicit "lie", but he'll go through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
+With this understanding of bad faith, we can read Yudkowsky's "it is sometimes personally prudent [...]" comment as admitting that his behavior on politically-charged topics is in bad faith—where "bad faith" isn't a meaningless insult, but [literally refers](http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally/) to the pretending-to-have-one-set-of-motivations-while-acting-according-to-another behavior, such that accusations of bad faith can be true or false. Yudkowsky will take care not to consciously tell an explicit "lie", while going through the motions to _make it look like_ he's genuinely engaging with questions where I need the right answers in order to make extremely impactful social and medical decisions—whereas in reality, he's only going to address a selected subset of the relevant evidence and arguments that won't get him in trouble with progressives.
To his credit, he _will_ admit that he's only willing to address a selected subset of arguments—but while doing so, he claims an absurd "confidence in [his] own ability to independently invent everything important that would be on the other side of the filter and check it [himself] before speaking" while _simultaneously_ blatantly mischaracterizing his opponents' beliefs! ("Gendered Pronouns For Everyone and Asking To Leave The System Is Lying" doesn't pass anyone's [ideological Turing test](https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.html).)
Counterarguments aren't completely causally _inert_: if you can make an extremely strong case that Biological Sex Is Sometimes More Relevant Than Self-Declared Gender Identity, Yudkowsky will put some effort into coming up with some ingenious excuse for why he _technically_ never said otherwise, in ways that exhibit generally rationalist principles. But at the end of the day, Yudkowsky is going to say what he needs to say in order to protect his reputation, as is personally prudent.
-Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I engage in a bit of what is sometimes called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
+Even if one were to agree with this description of Yudkowsky's behavior, it doesn't immediately follow that Yudkowsky is making the wrong decision. Again, "bad faith" is meant as a literal description that makes predictions about behavior, not a contentless attack—maybe there are some circumstances in which engaging some amount of bad faith is the right thing to do, given the constraints one faces! For example, when talking to people on Twitter with a very different ideological background from me, I sometimes anticipate that if my interlocutor knew what I was actually thinking, they wouldn't want to talk to me, so I engage in a bit of what could be called ["concern trolling"](https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Concern_troll): I take care to word my replies in a way that makes it look like I'm more ideologically aligned with them than I actually am. (For example, I [never say "assigned female/male at birth" in my own voice on my own platform](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/), but I'll do it in an effort to speak my interlocutor's language.) I think of this as the _minimal_ amount of strategic bad faith needed to keep the conversation going, to get my interlocutor to evaluate my argument on its own merits, rather than rejecting it for coming from an ideological enemy. In cases such as these, I'm willing to defend my behavior as acceptable—there _is_ a sense in which I'm being deceptive by optimizing my language choice to make my interlocutor make bad guesses about my ideological alignment, but I'm comfortable with that amount and scope of deception in the service of correcting the distortion where I don't think my interlocutor _should_ be paying attention to my personal alignment.
That is, my bad faith concern-trolling gambit of deceiving people about my ideological alignment in the hopes of improving the discussion seems like something that makes our collective beliefs about the topic-being-argued-about _more_ accurate. (And the topic-being-argued-about is presumably of greater collective interest than which "side" I personally happen to be on.)
Yudkowsky names the alleged fact that "people do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment" as a mitigating factor. But the _reason_ censorship is such an effective tool in the hands of dictators like Stalin is because it ensures that many people _don't_ know—and that those who know (or suspect) don't have [game-theoretic common knowledge](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9QxnfMYccz9QRgZ5z/the-costly-coordination-mechanism-of-common-knowledge#Dictators_and_freedom_of_speech) that others do too.
-Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the reasoning goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
+Zvi Mowshowitz has [written about how the false assertion that "everybody knows" something](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/07/02/everybody-knows/) is typically used justify deception: if "everybody knows" that we can't talk about biological sex (the rationalization goes), then no one is being deceived when our allegedly truthseeking discussion carefully steers clear of any reference to the reality of biological sex when it would otherwise be extremely relevant.
But if it were _actually_ the case that everybody knew (and everybody knew that everybody knew), then what would be the point of the censorship? It's not coherent to claim that no one is being harmed by censorship because everyone knows about it, because the entire appeal and purpose of censorship is precisely that _not_ everybody knows and that someone with power wants to _keep_ it that way.
Policy debates should not appear one-sided. Faced with this kind of dilemma, I can't say that defying Power is necessarily the right choice: if there really _were_ no other options between deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance, and incurring Power's wrath, and Power's wrath would be too terrible to bear, then maybe deceiving your readers with a bad faith performance is the right thing to do.
-But if you actually _cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: if he _wanted_ to, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail).
+But if you _actually cared_ about not deceiving your readers, you would want to be _really sure_ that those _really were_ the only two options. You'd [spend five minutes by the clock looking for third alternatives](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/erGipespbbzdG5zYb/the-third-alternative)—including, possibly, not issuing proclamations on your honor as leader of the so-called "rationalist" community on topics where you _explicitly intend to ignore counteraguments on grounds of their being politically unfavorable_. Yudkowsky rejects this alternative on the grounds that it allegedly implies "utter silence about everything Stalin has expressed an opinion on including '2 + 2 = 4' because if that logically counterfactually were wrong you would not be able to express an opposing opinion", but this seems like yet another instance of Yudkowsky motivatedly playing dumb: _if he wanted to_, I'm sure Eliezer Yudkowsky could think of _some relevant differences_ between "2 + 2 = 4" (a trivial fact of arithmetic) and "the simplest and best protocol is, "'He' refers to the set of people who have asked us to use 'he'" (a complex policy proposal whose numerous flaws I have analyzed in detail).
-"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? I'm asking because I have a long sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
+"[P]eople do _know_ they're living in a half-Stalinist environment," Yudkowsky says. "I think people are better off at the end of that," he says. But who are "people", specifically? One of the problems with utilitarianism is that it doesn't interact well with game theory. If a policy makes most people better off, at the cost of throwing a few others under the bus, is it the right thing to do? Depending on the details, maybe! But you probably shouldn't expect the victims to meekly go under the wheels without a fight. That's why I'm telling you this 50,000-word sob story about how _I_ didn't know, and _I'm_ not better off.
In [one of Yudkowsky's roleplaying fiction threads](https://www.glowfic.com/posts/4508), Thellim, a woman hailing from [a saner alternate version of Earth called dath ilan](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/dath-ilan), [expresses horror and disgust at how shallow and superficial the characters in _Pride and Prejudice_ are, in contrast to what a human being _should_ be](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592898#reply-1592898):
When someone else doesn't see the problem with Jane Austen's characters, Thellim [redoubles her determination to explain the problem](https://www.glowfic.com/replies/1592987#reply-1592987): "_She is not giving up that easily. Not on an entire planet full of people._"
-Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into an gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
+Thellim's horror at the fictional world of Jane Austen is basically how I feel about trans culture. It _actively discourages self-modeling!_ People who have cross-sex fantasies are encouraged to reify them into a gender identity which everyone else is supposed to unquestioningly accept. Obvious critical questions about what's actually going on etiologically, what it means for an identity to be true, _&c._ are strongly discouraged as hateful, hurtful, distressing, _&c._
The problem is _not_ that I think there's anything wrong with having cross-sex fantasies, and wanting the fantasy to be real—just as Thellim's problem with _Pride and Prejudice_ is not there being anything wrong with wanting to marry a suitable bachelor. These are perfectly respectable goals.
It _is_ genuinely sad that the author of those Tweets didn't get perceived the way she would prefer! But the thing I want her to understand, a thing I think any sane adult should understand—
-_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt. [TODO: echo the Verrez self-awareness phrasing]
+_It was a compliment!_ That poor receptionist was almost certainly thinking of [David Bowie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie) or [Eddie Izzard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Izzard), rather than being hateful and trying to hurt.
+
+The author should have graciously accepted the compliment, and done something to pass better next time. The horror of trans culture is that it's impossible to imagine any of these people doing that—of noticing that they're behaving like a TERF's stereotype of a narcissistic, gaslighting MtT and snapping out of it.
I want a shared cultural understanding that the _correct_ way to ameliorate the genuine sadness of people not being perceived the way they prefer is through things like _better and cheaper facial feminization surgery_, not _[emotionally blackmailing](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/) people out of their ability to report what they see_. I don't _want_ to reliniqush [my ability to notice what women's faces look like](/papers/bruce_et_al-sex_discrimination_how_do_we_tell.pdf), even if that means noticing that mine isn't; if I'm sad that it isn't, I can endure the sadness if the alternative is _forcing everyone in my life to doublethink around their perceptions of me_.
But I would have expected people with the barest inkling of self-awareness and honesty to ... notice the incentives, and notice the problems being created by the incentives, and to talk about the problems in public so that we can coordinate on the best solution?
-And if that's too much to accept of the general public—
+And if that's too much to expect of the general public—
And it's too much to expect of garden-variety "rationalists" to figure out on their own without prompting from their betters—
Then I would have at least hoped Eliezer Yudkowsky to be _in favor of_ rather than _against_ his faithful students having these very basic capabilities for reflection, self-observation, and ... _speech_?
-[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like Dawkins (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) and Jerry Coyne (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/) can see it]
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+[TODO: in the context of elite Anglosphere culture in 2016–2022; it should be clear that defenders of reason need to be able to push back and assert that biological sex is real; other science communicators like
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+[Dawkins can see it.](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/richard-dawkins-loses-humanist-of-the-year-trans-comments) [Jerry Coyne can see it.](https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2018/12/11/once-again-why-sex-is-binary/)
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[TODO:
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff