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-[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more concise to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's sex in order to talk about [her or](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) him putting a book on the shelf.
+[In a February 2021 Facebook post, Eliezer Yudkowsky inveighs against English's system of singular third-person pronouns](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228). As a matter of clean language design, English's lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun is a serious flaw. The function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more concise to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's sex in order to talk about [her or](/2020/Apr/the-reverse-murray-rule/) him putting a book on the shelf.
This affects, for example, science-fiction authors writing about AIs or hermaphroditic aliens (which don't have a sex), or mystery authors writing about a crime suspect whose identity (and therefore, sex) is unknown. In these cases, _she_ or _he_ are inappropriate, but the English language offers no alternative lacking its own downsides: _it_ is understood to refer to non-persons, _they_ gets conjugated as a plural, and neopronouns like [_ey/em/eir_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun)—or [_ve/ver/vis_](http://www.urticator.net/essay/0/30.html), as used in some of [Yudkowsky's juvenilia](https://intelligence.org/files/CFAI.pdf)—are hard to rally adoption for because pronouns are a [closed class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Part_of_speech#Open_and_closed_classes)—not something people are used to new members of being coined, in the way that people are used to seeing unfamiliar nouns, adjectives, or verbs.
If you _actually_ believed it was Shenanigans to bake a stance on how clustered things are into a pronoun system and insist that everyone else use it, then it should be _equally_ Shenanigans independently of whether the insisted-on clusters are those of sex or those of gender identity—if you're going to be consistent, you should condemn them _both_. And yet _somehow_, people who insist on sex-based pronouns are the target of Yudkowsky's condescension, whereas people who insist on gender-identity-based pronouns get both a free pass, _and_ endorsement of their preferred convention (albeit for a different stated reason)? The one-sidedness here is pretty shameless!
-Perhaps more important than the speaker-freedom _vs._ subject-freedom issue, however, is that in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
+Perhaps more important than the speaker-freedom _vs._ subject-freedom issue, however, is that in discussing how to reform English, we're not actually in the position of defining a language from scratch. Even if you think the [cultural evolution](/2020/Jan/book-review-the-origins-of-unfairness/) of English involved Shenanigans, it's not fair to attribute the Shenanigans to native speakers accurately describing their native language. Certainly, language can evolve; words can change meaning over time; if you can get the people in some community to start using language differently, then you have _ipso facto_ changed their language. But when we consider language as an information-processing system, we see that in order to change the meaning associated with a word, you actually _do_ have to somehow get people to change their usage. You can _advocate_ for your new meaning and use it in your own speech, but you can't just _declare_ your preferred new meaning and claim that it applies to the language as actually spoken, without speakers actually changing their behavior. As a result, Yudkowsky's proposal "to say that this just _is_ the normative definition" doesn't work.
To be clear, when I say that the proposal doesn't work, I'm not even saying I disagree with it. I mean that it literally, _factually_ doesn't work! Let me explain.
There are some striking parallels between CLIP's behavior, and phenomena observed in neuroscience. Neurons in the human brain have been observed to respond to the same concept represented in different modalities; for example, [Quiroga _et al._](/papers/quiroga_et_al-invariant_visual_representation_by_single_neurons.pdf) observed a neuron in one patient that responded to photos and sketches of actress Halle Berry, as well as the text string "Halle Berry". It turns out that CLIP neurons also exhibit this multi-modal responsiveness. Furthermore, CLIP is vulnerable to a Stroop-like effect where its image-classification capabilities can be fooled by "typographic attacks"—a dog with instances of the text "$$$" superimposed over it gets classified as a piggy bank, an apple with a handwritten sign saying "LIBRARY" gets classified as a library. The network knows perfectly what dogs and apples look like, and yet still reacts differently if adjacent text calls them something else.
-I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies _precisely_ in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ had no difference in meaning, _there would be no reason to care_.) [Pronoun badges](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are, quite literally, a typographic attack against English speakers' brains.
+I conjecture that the appeal of subject-chosen pronouns lies _precisely_ in how they exert Stroop-like effects on speakers' and listeners' cognition. (Once again, if it were _actually true_ that _she_ and _he_ had no difference in meaning, _there would be no reason to care_.) [Pronoun badges](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/) are, quite literally, a typographic attack against English speakers' brains.
Note, I mean this as a value-free description of how the convention _actually functions_ in the real world, [not a condemnation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N9oKuQKuf7yvCCtfq/can-crimes-be-discussed-literally). One could consistently hold that these "attacks" are morally good. (Analogously, [supernormal stimuli](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Jq73GozjsuhdwMLEG/superstimuli-and-the-collapse-of-western-civilization) like chocolate or pornography are "attacks" against the brain's evolved nutrition and reproductive-opportunity detectors, but most people are fine with this, because our goals are not evolution's.)
Note the wording: "That's a personal choice", "_I_ refuse". Kerr knows perfectly well that people who use gender-identity-based pronouns aren't making a false claim that trans men produce sperm, _&c._! Rather, she's saying that a pronoun convention that groups together females, and a minority of males who wish they were female, affects our cognition about that minority of males in a way that's disadvantageous to Kerr's interests (because she wants to be especially alert to threats posed by males), such that Kerr refuses to comply with that convention in her own speech. (Compare to how a Spanish speaker might refuse to address someone they disrespected as _usted_ because of its connotations, without thereby claiming that using _usted_ would make the sentence literally false.)
-Relatedly, [critics of this blog](http://unremediatedgender.space/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) sometimes refer to me as _she_, reflecting their belief that I'm a trans woman in denial, even though I think of myself of a man ([adult human male](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) not trying to appear otherwise). I never correct them—not just because [it's kind of flattering](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/interlude-xxi/), and not just because I don't think of myself as having the right to dictate how other people talk about me—but because "she" _is_ the correct pronoun to convey the meaning _they're_ trying to express, whether or not _I_ agree with it.
+Relatedly, [critics of this blog](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) sometimes refer to me as _she_, reflecting their belief that I'm a trans woman in denial, even though I think of myself of a man ([adult human male](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/) not trying to appear otherwise). I never correct them—not just because [it's kind of flattering](/2021/May/interlude-xxi/), and not just because I don't think of myself as having the right to dictate how other people talk about me—but because "she" _is_ the correct pronoun to convey the meaning _they're_ trying to express, whether or not _I_ agree with it.
I take pains to emphasize that pronouns can have meaningful semantics without being denotative statements that can be straightforwardly "false", because Yudkowsky misrepresents what his political opponents are typically claiming, repeatedly trying to frame the matter of dispute as to whether pronouns can be "lies" (to which Yudkowsky says, No, that would be ontologically confused)—whereas if you _actually read_ what the people on the other side of the policy debate are saying, they're largely _not claiming_ that "pronouns are lies"!
Okay, so Yudkowsky never thought sex-based pronouns were a good idea in the first place. But the _important thing_, he says, is that some people ("who are people", Yudkowsky pleonastically clarifies, as if anyone had doubted this) don't want other people to use language that refers to what sex they are.
-Personally, I have a _lot_ of sympathy for this, because in an earlier stage of my ideological evolution, I _was_ one of those people. (I [tried to use an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and byline for a while in the late 'aughts](http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials), and while I never asked for new pronouns, this is probably a matter of Overton window placement rather than any underlying difference in sentiments; it seems pretty likely that my analogue growing up in the current year's ideological environment would be a trans woman.)
+Personally, I have a _lot_ of sympathy for this, because in an earlier stage of my ideological evolution, I _was_ one of those people. (I [tried to use an ostensibly gender-neutral nickname and byline for a while in the late 'aughts](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#literary-initials), and while I never asked for new pronouns, this is probably a matter of Overton window placement rather than any underlying difference in sentiments; it seems pretty likely that my analogue growing up in the current year's ideological environment would be a trans woman.)
But it's important to not use sympathy as an excuse to blur together different rationales, or obfuscate our analysis of the costs and benefits to different parties of different policies. "Systematically de-gender English because that's a superior language design" and "Don't misgender trans people because trans people are sympathetic" are _different_ political projects with different victory conditions: victory for the de-genderers would mean singular _they_ or similar for everyone (as a matter of language design, no idiosyncratic personal exceptions), which is very different from the [ask-and-share-pronouns norms](https://www.mypronouns.org/asking) championed by contemporary trans rights activists.
All this having been said, Yudkowsky _is_ indeed correct to note that "when different people with firm attachments have _different_ firm attachments [...] we can't make them all be protocol". It's possible for observers to disagree about what sex category they see someone as belonging to, and it would be awkward at best for different speakers in a conversation to use different pronouns to refer to the same subject.
-As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category, in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgments (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
+As it happens, I think this _is_ an important consideration in favor of self-identity pronouns! [When different parties disagree about what category something should belong to, but want to coordinate to use the _same_ category, they tend to find some mutually-salient Schelling point to settle the matter.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) In the case of disagreements about a person's social sex category, in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgments (like a priest or rabbi in a tight-knit religious community, or a medical bureaucracy with the social power to diagnose who is "legitimately" transsexual), the most obvious Schelling point is to defer to the person themselves. I wrote about this argument in a previous post, ["Self-Identity Is a Schelling Point"](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/).
But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, _doesn't_ mean we have a [one-sided policy debate](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided) where it's in everyone's interests to support this "simplest and best protocol", with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where _she_ and _he_ (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to actually-existing English speakers is still true! The Schelling point argument just means that the setup of the social-choice problem that we face happens to grant a structural advantage to those who favor the self-identity convention.
-Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would _also_ be a Schelling point. (Trans people's [developmental sex](http://unremediatedgender.space/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) is not really in dispute.) It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!
+Although they're not the only ones with an structural advantage: a social order whose gender convention was "Biological sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing; sucks to be you if you want people to believe that you're the sex that you aren't" would _also_ be a Schelling point. (Trans people's [developmental sex](/2019/Sep/terminology-proposal-developmental-sex/) is not really in dispute.) It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!
Still, I think most people reading this post _are_ "moderates" in this sense. Schelling points are powerful. If we're _not_ culturally-genocidal extremists who want to exclude transsexuals from Society (and therefore reject the "pronouns = sex, no exceptions" Schelling point), isn't it reasonable that we end up at the self-identity Schelling point—at least as far as the trivial courtesy of pronouns is concerned, even if some of the moderates want to bargain for the right to use natal-sex categories in some contexts?
This debate looks very different depending on whether you're coming into it as someone being _told_ that you need to change your pronoun usage for the sake of someone who will be very hurt if you don't—or whether you're in the position of wondering whether it makes sense to _make_ such a request of others.
-As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](http://unremediatedgender.space/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it being worse than death for it to not be recognized by others. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
+As a good cis ally, you're told that trans people know who they are and you need to respect that [on pain of being responsible for someone's suicide](/2018/Jan/dont-negotiate-with-terrorist-memeplexes/). While politically convenient for people who have _already_ transitioned and don't want anyone second-guessing their identity, I think this view is actually false. Humans don't have an atomic "gender identity" that they just _know_, which has no particular properties other than it being worse than death for it to not be recognized by others. Rather, there are a variety of reasons why someone might feel sad about being the sex that they are, and wish they could be the other sex instead, which is called "gender dysphoria."
-Fortunately, our Society has interventions available to approximate changing sex as best we can with existing technology: you can get hormone replacement therapy (HRT), genital surgery, ask people to call you by a different name, ask people to refer to you with different pronouns, get new clothes, get other relevant cosmetic surgeries, _&c._ In principle, it's possible to pick and choose some of these interventions piecemeal—[I actually tried just HRT for five months in 2017](http://unremediatedgender.space/tag/hrt-diary/)—but it's more common for people to "transition", to undergo a correlated _bundle_ of these interventions to approximate a sex change.
+Fortunately, our Society has interventions available to approximate changing sex as best we can with existing technology: you can get hormone replacement therapy (HRT), genital surgery, ask people to call you by a different name, ask people to refer to you with different pronouns, get new clothes, get other relevant cosmetic surgeries, _&c._ In principle, it's possible to pick and choose some of these interventions piecemeal—[I actually tried just HRT for five months in 2017](/tag/hrt-diary/)—but it's more common for people to "transition", to undergo a correlated _bundle_ of these interventions to approximate a sex change.
On this view, there's not a pre-existing fact of the matter as to whether someone "is trans" as an atomic identity. Rather, gender-dysphoric people have [the option to _become_ trans](https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1327/) by means of undergoing the bundle of interventions that constitute transitioning, if they think it will make their life better. But in order for a gender-dysphoric person to _decide_ whether transitioning is a good idea with benefits that exceed the costs, they need _factually accurate information_ about the nature of their dysphoria and each of the component interventions.
If people in a position of intellectual authority provide _inaccurate_ information about transitioning interventions, that's making the lives of gender-dysphoric people worse, because agents with less accurate information make worse decisions (in expectation): if you have the facts wrong, you might wrongly avoid an intervention that would have benefited you, or wrongly undergo an intervention that harms you.
-For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefited from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](http://unremediatedgender.space/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), [various slight medical risks including to future fertility](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html)).
+For example, I think my five-month HRT experiment was a _good_ decision—I benefited from the experience and I'm very glad I did it, even though I didn't end up staying on HRT long term. The benefits (satisfied curiosity about the experience, breast tissue) exceeded the costs (a small insurance co-pay, sitting through some gatekeeping sessions, the inconvenience of [wearing a patch](/2017/Jan/hormones-day-33/) or [taking a pill](/2017/Jul/whats-my-motivation-or-hormones-day-89/), [various slight medical risks including to future fertility](https://srconstantin.github.io/2016/10/06/cross-sex-hormone-therapy.html)).
If someone I trusted as an intellectual authority had falsely told me that HRT makes you go blind and lose the ability to hear music, _and I were dumb enough to believe them_, then I wouldn't have done it, and I would have missed out on something that benefited me. Such an authority figure would be harming me by means of giving me bad information; I'd be better off if I hadn't trusted them to tell the truth.
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