Comment by oregonsun on A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning · 2023-07-15T21:02:33.173Z · LW · GW

Scott took this to mean that what convention to use is a pragmatic choice we can make on utilitarian grounds, and that being nice to trans people was worth a little bit of clunkiness—that the mental health benefits to trans people were obviously enough to tip the first-order utilitarian calculus.

I didn't think anything about "mental health benefits to trans people" was obvious.

There's a scottpost that seems relevant called Be Nice, At Least Until You Can Coordinate Meanness. It's not a perfect fit because the thing we are coordinating here isn't meanness. But maybe there are attractor states of mental health, and a mental health local maxima for a trans person is for their pronouns to be respected, but there's also a global maxima where we decide to define "man" and "women" on biological terms like we define "male" and "female" and treat gender dysphoria in some way other than gender affirmation. Perhaps it could be true that if we could coordinate this new paradigm, the mental health of trans people would in the long term be better, because they can live with treated gender dysphoria without transitioning; but in the current paradigm, where [let's say] a woman is someone who identifies as a woman, it's incredibly distressing for someone on the Internet to try--and fail--to unilaterally move you to the new paradigm.

In the current paradigm, perhaps the best local maxima is to find a way to affirm AGP individuals whose gender identity corresponds to their biological sex, while also affirming the gender identity of individuals who have a gender identity not corresponding to their biological sex.