This explains why the trans-rights fight ends up focusing on language, rather than any particular policy where "gender" is used to make a decision. "What's the harm in calling people what they really want to be called?" goes the argument. "You can still say _cis woman_ when you want to be more specific."
-It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were already using that category/word for (which no one has catalogued in advance).
+It doesn't work like that. When you [change the category associated with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes) a [short codeword](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/soQX8yXLbKy7cFvy8/entropy-and-short-codes), you're imposing on all the downstream predictions and decisions people were already using that category/word for—nor have people catalogued all those decisions in advance; they just expect to be able to think using [top-20 nouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English#Nouns) (coordination signals) that came with their native tongue, much as how they expect to be able to think using clock time without needing to compute Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars.
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