Similarly, when second-wave feminists objected to the convention of _Miss_ or _Mrs._ forcing speakers to identify a woman's marital status, the response was [to popularize the marriage-agnostic alternative _Ms._](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms.#Historical_development_and_revival_of_the_term), not to circularly redefine _Miss_ and _Mrs._
-Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of _she_ and _he_ as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to them, wrote a satirical piece, ["A Person Paper on Purity in Language"](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html), in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular _they_), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent [anthologization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining _he_ and _she_ (or _whe_ and _ble_) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference. It's worth asking: why not? If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in 2021 that self-identification is the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983?
+Or consider how previous generations of public intellectuals considered this exact problem. In 1983, Douglas R. Hofstadter also expressed disapproval of _she_ and _he_ as a matter of language design, and to illustrate the point about how alien and unnecessary gendered language would seem if you weren't already used to it, wrote a satirical piece, ["A Person Paper on Purity in Language"](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html), in the persona of a conservative author in a society with race-based (!) language conventions, including the pronouns whe/wis for whites and ble/bler for blacks. In neither the piece itself (during which Hofstadter's alter-ego brings up and rejects a couple of reform suggestions from the liberals of whis Society, including singular _they_), nor the Post-Scriptum in its subsequent [anthologization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), does Hofstadter entertain the idea of redefining _he_ and _she_ (or _whe_ and _ble_) to refer to the subject's pronoun preference.
+
+It's worth asking: why not? The statement of the objective language-design flaw (pronouns shouldn't denote sex, that's dumb; why would you define a language that way) was _the same_ in 1983 as it is in 2021. If it's so clear to Yudkowsky in 2021 that self-identification is just the "simplest and best protocol" to repair the objective flaw in English's design, why didn't that simplest and best solution occur to Hofstadter in 1983? Could it, perhaps, be the case that public intellectuals in the current year might have some _other_ motivation to conclude that "_he_ refers to the set of people who have asked us to use _he_", that was not present for their analogues in 1983? But if so, they'd be transparent and _tell_ us that ... right?
Really, the circular definition shouldn't satisfy _anyone_: people who want someone to call them _usted_ (or _tú_), do so _because_ of the difference in meaning and implied familiarity/respect, in the _existing_ (pre-reform) language. (Where else could such a preference possibly come from?) From an AI design standpoint, the circular redefinition can be seen as a form of ["wireheading"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aMXhaj6zZBgbTrfqA/a-definition-of-wireheading). You want people to respect you as a superior, and if they respected you as a superior, they'd call you _usted_. That could make a policy of coercing people into calling you _usted_ seem superficially appealing. But the appeal solely rests on confusing the pre-reform meaning (under which the choice of _usted_ implies respect and is therefore desirable) and the post-reform meaning (under which the choice implies nothing). Whether or not the proponent of the change consciously _notices_ the problem, the redefinition is _functionally_ "hypocritical": it's only desirable insofar as people aren't _actually_ using it internally.
I take pains to emphasize this because Yudkowsky [misrepresents what his political opponents are typically claiming](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/), 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"! (It seems fair to regard Kerr's article as representative of gender-critical ("TERF") concerns; I've seen the post linked in those circles more than once, and it's cited in [embattled former University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Stock#Views_on_gender_self-identification)'s book _Material Girls_.)
-(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. "Lying" isn't the issue on anyone's mind.)
+(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.)
Anyway, given these reasons why the _existing_ meanings of _she_ and _he_ are relevant to the question of pronoun reform, what is Yudkowsky's response?
...
-I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously_ lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. (When speaking or writing quickly without taking the time to scrupulously check, [it's common for little untruths and distortions to slip into one's speech](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth). Everyone does it, and if you think you don't, then you're lying.)
+I'm sorry, but I can't take this self-report literally. I certainly [don't think Yudkowsky was _consciously_ lying](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bSmgPNS6MTJsunTzS/maybe-lying-doesn-t-exist) when he wrote that. (When speaking or writing quickly without taking the time to [scrupulously check every sentence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xdwbX9pFEr7Pomaxv/meta-honesty-firming-up-honesty-around-its-edge-cases#2__The_law_of_no_literal_falsehood_), it's [common for little untruths and distortions to slip into one's speech](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pZSpbxPrftSndTdSf/honesty-beyond-internal-truth). Everyone does it, and if you think you don't, then you're lying.)
Nevertheless, I am _incredibly_ skeptical that Yudkowsky _actually_ doesn't know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to sex categories more firmly than a given name is attached to someone's appearance.
Posed that way, one would imagine not—but if Yudkowsky _does_ get the joke, then I don't think he can simultaneously _honestly_ claim to "not know what it feels like from the inside to feel like a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." In order to get the joke in real time, your brain has to quickly make a multi-step logical inference that depends on the idea that pronouns imply sex. (The turtle is a "her" [iff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if) female, not-female implies not-pregnant, so if the turtle is pregnant, it must be a "her".) This would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be a sense in which "a pronoun is attached to something in your head much more firmly than 'doesn't look like an Oliver' is attached to something in your head." I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
-Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? But some potential _counter_-evidence appears in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
+Perhaps it's not justified to question Yudkowsky's "I do not know what it feels like [...]" self-report based on generalizations about English speakers in general? Maybe his mind works differently, but dint of unusual neurodiversity or training in LambdaMOO? But if so, one would perhaps expect some evidence of this in his publicly observable writing? But some potential _counter_-evidence appears in Yudkowsky's 2001 _Creating Friendly AI: The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures_, where the text "If a human really hates someone, she" is followed by [footnote 16](https://web.archive.org/web/20070615130139/http://singinst.org/upload/CFAI.html#foot-15): "I flip a coin to determine whether a given human is male or female." Note, "_is_ male or female", not "which pronoun to use." The text would seem to reflect the common understanding that _she_ and _he_ do imply sex specifically (and not some other thing, like being named Oliver), even if flipping a coin (and drawing attention to having done so) reflects annoyance that English requires a choice.
In the Facebook comments, Yudkowsky continues:
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](/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 obvious 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.
+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 exceptions), which is very different from the [ask-and-share-pronouns norms](https://www.mypronouns.org/asking) championed by contemporary trans rights activists.
Perhaps it might make sense for adherents of a "degender English" movement to stategically _ally_ with the trans rights movement: to latch on to gender-dysphoric people's pain as a political weapon to destabilize what the English-degenderers think of as a bad pronoun system for _other reasons_. Fine.
-But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
+But if that's the play you want to make, you forfeit the right to _honestly_ claim that your stance is that "feelings don't get to control everybody's language protocol". If you piously proclaim that the "important thing" is trans people's feelings of "not lik[ing] to be tossed into a Male Bucket or Female Bucket, as it would be assigned by their birth certificate", that would seem, pretty straightforwardly, to be participating in an attempt to let someone's feelings control everybody's language protocol! Again, I'm really not sure how else I'm supposed to interpret those words!
There's nothing _inconsistent_ about believing that trans people's feelings matter, and that the feelings of people who resent the Stroop-like effect of having to speak in a way that contradicts their own sex-category perceptions, don't matter. (Or don't matter _as much_, quantitatively, under the utilitarian calculus.) But if that were your position, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to tell people like Barra Kerr, "Sorry, I'm participating in a political coalition that believes that trans people's feelings are more important than yours with respect to this policy question; sucks to be you" rather than haughtily implying that people like Kerr are making an elementary philosophy mistake that they are _clearly not making_ if you _actually read what they write_.
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 ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority (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) to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements, the most natural 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/).
+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 ("gender"), in the absence of a trusted central authority to break the symmetry among third parties' judgements (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 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 English-speaking brains 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 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_ extremists who want to ban 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?
-But crucially, the fact that the self-identity convention is a Schelling point, doesn't mean we have a one-sided policy debate where it's in everyone's interests to support this convention, with no downsides or trade-offs for anyone. The thing where English singular pronouns (which we don't know how to coordinate a jump away from) imply sex category inferences to English-speaking brains 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.
+[...]
-(A social order whose gender convention was "Biological/natal sex only; transsexualism isn't a thing" would _also_ be a Schelling point. It's the _moderates_ who want to be nice to trans people _without_ destroying the public concept of sex who are in trouble!)
+I guess for me, the issue is that this is a question where _I need the correct answer in order to decide whether or not to cut my dick off_. Let me explain.
[TODO: people have an incentive to fight over pronouns insofar as it's a "wedge" for more substantive issues]
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