This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm firmly in the camp of people who doesn't quite understand what a lot of "non-binary" people are doing with gender, despite being somewhat progressive and happy to exercise pronoun hospitality with such people. (I once heard an acquaintance describe their gender by saying, "if man is black, and woman is white, I'm purple - if you see me in monochrome, I'm more masculine, but really I'm not either of them" - and I was more confused than before I heard the analogy.)
I've seen various mottizens bring up the idea of "gender" being the latest subculture like goth or punk, and recently I stumbled across an interesting Tumblr post that accidentally circles around a similar insight. The whole thing is interesting, but I think you can get the gist from the following:
and
Now, I grant that the gender-as-fashion analogy isn't the only possible takeaway from this person's observations. I'm reminded of the "soul-editor" from the SCP Foundation Wiki that had symbols from every major world religion, as well as a few unknown ones. Who's to say that some phenomenological aspects of being human aren't so complex that no one set of vocabulary is capable of describing it all? Perhaps some qualities of human minds/souls/whatever are ineffable, or so unique and subjective that one cannot help but create a new label for oneself in describing one's personality?
But I have my doubts. Mostly, I often feel like people must be mislabeling something that I have in my "mental box" as well. (I've read accounts of genderfluid people who talk about "waking up feeling masc" some days and dressing the part, while suddenly and abruptly "feeling femme" partway through the day and wanting to change outfits - and I couldn't help but speculate if they hadn't attached special significance to what I label "moods" in myself.) I don't discount that there are many real human experiences that aren't in my "mental box." In a very real way, I can't do much more than guess what depression, schizophrenia, OCD or dozens of other seemingly real human experiences are like. If I'm being maximally humble about what a tiny part of the vast terrain of possible human experiences I occupy, I have to concede that I can't know that many people aren't out there experiencing "gender" in ways I never will.
My partner is a binary trans man, and many of my friends and acquaintances are part of the LGBT+ community. I still don't quite understand why someone in that extended friend group suddenly finds it very important to change their name, and let everybody know that their pronouns are "she/they" now - while changing nothing else about their appearance or presentation. I'm happy to use a new name for someone, if they don't make such changes too frequently for me to keep up with, but I often feel baffled by why they find it so important? It's not really a big deal to me, but I would like an explanation. Gender-as-fashion seems so tempting as an explanation, but I worry that it might be a false explanation flattening human experiences into something that's more comfortable to me - the same way, "that person who supposedly has ADHD is just lazy" might flatten a person with ADHD into a form more comfortable for neurotypical people, and not in a way that is very sympathetic to the person with ADHD.
I wish we could all just agree that sex is biological and gender is a social role. So if someone wants to say "Some days I feel masc, but other days I'm more femme," okay, whatever Demi Lovato. I'm even willing to use whatever pronouns you prefer, even if that means changing them from time to time (so long as you let me know what they are today and aren't going to throw a tantrum if I sometimes make a mistake). If attention-seeking teens want to claim they are Ψ-gendered today, you can accommodate them if you wish without agreeing that their physical bodies are in some Ψ state that is neither male nor female.
The real problem is not with teenagers who are trying to carve out special, quirky new identities for themselves, it's with the grown-ass adults who take this shit seriously and then run conflict theory on it.
But this is just begging the question, isn't it? It's like Byzantine Christian monothelitites saying "I wish we could all just agree that Jesus' nature is Man but his hypostasis is Divine". To even get into the hypostasis debate is to concede to your interlocutor's point.
The correct response to the Byzantine Christian monothelitites is "hypostasis is just some term you made up to try and make yourself sound smart and smuggle in a bunch of theological assumptions in by connotation, Jesus was just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be Divine by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
You can probably see where I'm going with this but in the interest of plain speaking, the correct response to the gender theorists is "gender is just some term you made up to try and smuggle in a bunch of ideological assumptions in by connotation, Emerald Treespirit is just a guy in a robe, he was born a Man and he's stuck as a Man only, that's just biology for ya, sorry, he doesn't get to be a woman by any measure even if he and you really really want him to be.'
There is no such thing as gender, the way you act is contingent on the hormones in your brain and the hormones in your brain are contingent on your chromosomes. A man acting weird is a man acting weird, not a man filling the social role of a woman (or being the Messiah).
I feel like no smuggling needs to be done. If we taboo the word "gender", I feel like I can build up more or less the same concept from the concept of an "adoptive sex." By analogy with adoptive parents - normally parenthood is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "parenthood" for adoptive parents. So too - normally sex is biological, but we have carved out a social/legal form of "sex" for adoptive men/women.
I think even if you're just being descriptive, "adoptive sex" is real. The federal government, and most states allow you to legally change your documented sex - so if one wanted to be a translegalist (= a person is validly trans if they have formally, legally transitioned) then I think everything would work fine. I think translegalism avoids many of the issues with the identification-only standards, and works better than other de facto standards like a "passing" standard, or a transmedicalist standard. I've circled around the idea of considering myself a translegalist, who extends pronoun and nickname hospitality to people who haven't legally transitioned, or who have no plans to ever legally transition.
This kinda supports exactly the point I am trying to make. Adoption is explicitly a legal fiction: it exists because you want do do something that you know is physically and/or logically impossible (that is, retroactively change someone's parentage), and adoption is just a way of telling lawyers "pretend you don't see the impossibility". Which is possibly fine for lawyers, but as someone who's trying to cleave reality at the joints (and/or arrange a blood transfusion), the scientifically correct answer is once again "No, I will not play your kayfabe, he's not your dad and no piece of paper can make it so, no matter how much state power you array behind it".
The government of Oceania can pass as many laws as it wants that 2+2=5, but paper ain't worth much.
I agree with your assessment if we're carving reality at the joints, but legal fictions are important in people's lives. If legal fictions are descriptively in favor of translegalism, then it matters a lot to how trans people can live their lives. You don't have to believe adoptive parents are biological parents to believe that the legal regime around adoption has a lot of effect on the lives of all the people involved in adoption.
Essentially, I think there are two separate questions here:
What legal barriers, or legal support is there for changing one's documented sex?
What do trans people believe that makes them want to change their documented sex?
Obviously, the main disanalogy between adoptive sex and adoptive parenthood is in the participants' explanation of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. Adoptive parents understand that they were not "parents" in any sense before adoption, and that the act of the court is the thing granting legitimacy to their claim of "parenthood." Adoptive men/women on the other hand, often claim that they have always been their adoptive sex in some sense, and are merely seeking medical, social and legal recourse to reflect this personal belief.
But I'm not sure if that difference matters in practice. The law can be relatively agnostic to the why of people transitioning - I'm sure a lot of adoptive parents' desire to adopt comes from a religious background, but the state shouldn't have to decide that metaphysical question before allowing them to adopt. Similarly, I think the metaphysical claims of many trans people (that they either have a soul/mind of their adoptive sex, or that they have a brain more in line with their adoptive sex) is kind of a side issue to the first question. I'm okay with considering this almost a religious question (I don't believe in souls, and a lot of the brain evidence is pretty mixed) and moving on with my life. I feel like my translegalism+hospitality approach lets me see reality at its joints just fine, while still allowing people some freedom to live their lives the way they want to.
When I read the italicized bit, I immediately thought of foster parents, who form a sort of intermediate case--they clearly have some of the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, but not to the same permanent extent as adoptive or natural parents. If someone were to ask me, "are foster parents a subset of parents?" I'd say...kind of? For some purposes yes, other purposes no?
Do you think this fits into the adoptive sex metaphor?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If it could be experimentally demonstrated that certain males experiencing gender dysphoria do in fact have unusually high levels of oestrogen in their brains compared to the cis male baseline (e.g. a comparable mechanism to how prenatal endocrine influences sexuality), would this provide a biological underpinning to the transgender paradigm, in your view?
No.
My Popperian falsifyability criteria are as follows:
Levels of neural estrogen equal to or higher than cis females.
Levels of neural testosterone equal to or less than cis females.
Research not performed in The Current Year (given the large ideological incentives for researchers to massage the figures in a pro-trans direction in The Current Year)
With you on points #1 and #2. You lost me on point #3. I don't believe that every neuroscientific study published in 2022 is automatically garbage, even if many (or most) of them are.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Historical precedent is that there is such a thing as gender, in the definition of "social role strongly defined by sex yet not entirely contingent on it". Sure, modern progressives wouldn't want Ancient Greece's gender roles, but once we've established that such a thing exists the rest is just haggling over the price.
There's no historical precedent for the divine.
No, I do not grant your premise. As [another post which I can no longer find] remarks, the wounded octopus is not a septopus; nor is the crossdressing man a demigirl. The determination to define this behaviour as a whole new axis instead of a pathology on one axis is precisely what I object to.
This seems like the worst possible angle of attack given that there is tremendous historical precedent for the divine. "What is the sun and why do those stars move faster than those other stars?" is a question that demands an answer any time anyone looks up, and it's what led all historical human cultures down the divine rabbit hole. "Why do 0.001% of men want to wear skirts?" is not a question which anyone has been required to consider until modernity, an for such rounding errors and answer of "idiopathic madness" seems satisfactory.
It is only slightly less modern than trans ideology to consistently think of men and women as something that is immutable from birth. The expression "a real man" would not exist if a penised-and-testiculed fertile male's manhood could not be in question.
DOES the expression exist in any language other than English? That mongrel tongue cobbled together from the detritus of four other languages and thus should not be particularly expected as being first for purpose?
Anyway, even if it does, this is a tremendous stretch. You're taking as literal that which is figurative. That the phrase "a real man" exists does not imply that the insulters really believe that the object of their mockery might be "an egg", or whatever the term is for an undiscovered trans-woman; or even that they believe such a thing is even logically possible. When I call my little brother "a stinky booger" this doesn't mean I believe that it is genuinely possible that a 50kg pile of dried mucous could be perambulatory.
Yes.
I'm taking statements about one's social role and status as something that was apparently really fucking important back in the day.
No, they probably didn't believe that specific thing, I already said the gender role climate wasn't what it's like today. It did exist, though. I'm confident that when someone said "man" in the era I'm talking about (hell, such societies still exist), they meant not "adult human male" but "human male who met all the social criteria to be called a man, optionally past puberty". The rest is haggling over the price.
People have accept your premise, for the rest to be haggling over the price.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's a pretty strong claim. So you believe that all gendered behavior is 100% in our chromosomes, and 0% socialized?
I am sure you can see the difficulty in asking a person who has just staked out the position "there is no such thing as gender" a question "So you believe that all gendered behaviour..."
Is this a question can be coherently rephrased with the g-word under taboo?
Okay, let me rephrase: do you believe that all behavioral differences between men and women are 100% determined by our chromosomes?
We're not on reddit anymore, we don't have taboo words. You're going to have to explain the relevance to me, though.
Re: taboo - I think they were referring to this old rationalist chestnut.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your last paragraph implies that once someone is on hormone replacement therapy we should consider them transitioned, is that your intent?
There is no such thing as hormone replacement therapy.
There is a thing that is called hormone replacement therapy, but it's a misnomer, because it is actually hormone supplementation therapy.
Swimming in biogenic testosterone + supplemental estrogen is not the same as swimming in just biogenic estrogen.
Also:
There is much uncertainty about the degree to which injected supplemental hormones can cross the blood-brain barrier, so they may well not be great at influencing behaviour
Hormones have a profound developmental effect on the brain as well as an acute effect at the time of injection. Therefore unless you've been taking them... in utero since conception, your ship has already sailed.
Yes transwoman on HRT do have somewhat different hormone profiles than ciswomen but they also certainly have different hormone profiles than cismen So if we use the framework that hormone profile determines gender, cismen, ciswomen, transmen and transwoman should all be 4 distinct gender clusters and in fact you can add a 5th for bodybuilders on AAS. You can call us super-males.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
What massively bothers me is that this gender as social and sex as physical is completely thrown out of the window when talking about transgender people's need to physically mimic the opposite sex. Both of these narratives can't be true at the same time. And that isn't the only issue that is solvable but I never see people grapple with. If we're going to start taking seriously that womanhood has certain gender characteristics and throw out the "women can be and do anything" framework that implies some female people who think they are women are wrong. Otherwise the category is meaningless.
There are some frameworks of gender ideology that actually make sense, and as I care very little about gender itself I'd be willing to adopt but what mainstream gender advocates are offering is not one of those frameworks. It's all of them at once carefully switching from one to another in order to dodge the uncomfortable implications.
The problem is that - many 'trans people' do, even though the cause is some weird simulacra desire alienation thing, really strongly want to be seen like women. And, for a progressive, this plus the whole 'being oppressed by gender roles' thing means we really need to protect, amplify, and ensure they can express themselves. And that entirely beats out anything about 'gender is a social role'.
you'd be willing to "adopt" something that's wrong, just from caring little about it?
I know this is a meme but it's important. What you do mean by "women"? do you mean female? Because if you say women then the category is self referential in really strange way. There is some tension in it and activists are resistant to efforts to switch to using "female" in many categories where it's thought that might better capture the original intent(most flamingly hot example being sexuality, the 'Super Straight' phenomenon). What the actual ask seems to be is that we need to hold two categories in or heads at once when talking about women so that trans people can identify as a category that would otherwise inherently excludes them and lie about doing so.
I'd be able to adopt some coherent way to think/talk about gender as a real phenomenon so long as it's consistent. If I can talk about it in a consistent way I could find the truth in that framework and dispel the obviously silly elements. If the framework is not internally consistent then I can't use it to describe/compare to reality. If asked what my gender is should I say man because that's the role I actually play out in real life or should I say nonbinary because of the aforementioned indifference to gender as a general concept? what relation, if any, does my answer have to do with my sex/sexuality? There's half a dozen contradictory ways within the gender sphere to interpret my answer and come to opposite results. I don't want the delta between my understanding of the world and my interlocutors understanding of the world to be obscured by incomprehensible language games.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is there a term that combines motte-and-bailey with the sort of three-card-monte shuffle you're talking about?
If there is I don't know what it's called beyond the rather loose 'incoherent' or 'cognitive dissonance'. When both the frameworks are invoked at once I think it's rightfully called cognitive dissonance, like famous struggle over the phrase "what is a woman" where the nonbinary friendly framework butts up against the transgender friendly framework.
More options
Context Copy link
Monte-bailey?
That sounds like a castle with 3 baileys one that contains goats, and another that contains cars, and a third with no gate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not, unless they're willing to do the same for me, in which case mine are Sir/His Lordship.
If we're allowed to semi-arbitrarily declare pronouns and we agree to recognize them because it validates the other person's choice of identity, then this should be a small ask, and I would find it massively validating, thank you kindly.
Or we draw some bright lines around which ones people are 'allowed' to use and have an actual discussion around why some are allowed and some aren't, rather than the unilateral declaration that every identity is valid.
Hell, we've had the concept of "nicknames" for fucking ever. If you want to be identified as something other than your biological sex then come up with a nickname that you like that captures this and most people will go along with it, right?
If someone were to genuinely ask me "what are your pronouns" my response is "go ahead and use your best judgment and I promise not to be offended either way."
It is a hassle to be 'made to care' about this game in the first place, so I would shift the burden back to the person who wants to play.
Sir/His Lordship is just douchey.
But there are far more triggering pronouns than those. It’s the identities Meloni claims. Christian, American, Father, son, husband.
You think on zoom that the wokes want to identify someone as Christian every time they speak.
The most triggering of all might be Mother.
As long as we're claiming the ability to give ourselves titles which confer some level of privilege, I'm going all the way.
If the cutoff is whatever is 'too douchey' I'd love to have that conversation at length!
I'm placing the cutoff at whatever is an actual honorific, or implies actual deeds (such as "mother"). You may think "he" or "she" confers privilege all you want.
Of course, there are ways to persuade me to call someone "Mommy" without them having birthed anyone.
Or 'Mister' and 'Mrs.'
I dunno, there's a workable framework for this sort of thing already in existence. I still place most of the burden of proving why we should upset this in favor of the new pronoun system on those proposing it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why is sir/lordship douchey? Plenty of people refer to prince William as his highness, and to whatever rank of nobility is signified by that(barons? I'm going with that) as sir/lordship. If a person with a penis can arbitrarily declare that he/him is now she/her with no possibility of being wrong, why can a commoner not claim to be a baron with no possibility of being wrong? It is, after all, far less reality defying.
I have never met an IRL British peer, although I did briefly meet the heir to the pretender to some European country or other who preferred his/your highness, which I abided by because it seemed reasonable. After all, the title might be meaningless, but no one seemed to dispute it was his. That doesn't mean that my idiot cousin calling himself king of the neighborhood gets to be called your highness. I would ask why the same principles don't apply to gender, something that we can probably all agree is far more fundamental to human nature, and less changeable, than being a king.
The concept of nobility has a baked-in assumption that they're better than you in some way. No such thing with the concept of being a different gender.
I'm fine calling people a different pronoun than what I would've assumed, because I do not believe they're asking for it to literally lord it over me.
More options
Context Copy link
Because we all know the people using the pronouns are doing it to mock the other people using pronouns and not because it’s a sincere identity.
They're still more likely to be a duke/baron/prince than a transwoman is to be a real woman.
More options
Context Copy link
What if it is sincere? For example: if we live in a world where no one gets to customize their pronouns, then I accept he/him as a matter of necessity, but if you concede that pronouns are customizable based on what feels validating to one's internal identity, then I would sincerely prefer and feel validated by your use of pronouns that imply that I am nobility.
You might argue that any given person doesn't actually believe the above sincerely, but if you assume a hypothetical where your interlocutor does, will you actually start calling him "sir" and "his lordship," not just to his lordship's face but also in conversations where his lordship isn't a participant?
More options
Context Copy link
So if someone sincerely wanted to be called "your lordship" you'd do it?
What do you think of otherkin? They sincerely want to be considered animals. Would you refer to someone as a cat if they sincerely wanted it?
More options
Context Copy link
Of course the irony in this statement is that many, myself included, consider that the people using xim/xer are ALSO doing it to mock other people ("squares", "my dad", the laws of God and nature) and not because it's a sincere identity. Because play-acting as a girl when you have a penis is the very definition of insincere.
But apparently because they got there first and have the left-memeplex stamp of approval, we're not allowed to call them out for it.
I am incapable of even understand the mental model of people using pronouns.
I do understand the mental models of people trying to mock them.
Basically I can’t call them out for being dishonesty because I can’t even understand them but I can call out “your highness” because I understand it’s mockery.
But you're not being clear on why mockery shouldn't be allowed.
The pronoun people haven't set up a ruleset that would exclude it. So they in fact imply that any pronoun you want to use SHOULD be allowed until proven insincere.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think there is any kind of good faith equivalency there, but as I said, my tolerance doesn't extend to semi-arbitrarily declared pronouns (especially made-up ones), only to people who I think are being sincere and not trolling or mentally ill. (Leaving aside the question of whether one considers trans or non-binary identification as de facto mental illness.)
IOW, if you want me to call you "she," I will. If you want me to call you "they," I will grit my teeth but try to remember. If you want me to call you "Your Lordship" or "Θ", I will disregard this request because you're either trolling or crazy.
I'm not sure there's much 'good faith' to be had anywhere in the pronoun debate.
There's very little way to tell the difference between sincere/trolling/mentally ill if we already grant that a person's pronouns are based solely on their mental experience of their own identity, not any externally verifiable signal. You can't tell if someone is 'making it up' or not because you can't really get a peep into their true thoughts unless, perhaps, you get to know them extremely well.
Privileging a persons' inner 'reality' over the actual observable reality that we can confirm with our own eyes is a recipe for conflict. I can never be fully certain if the 'facts' someone is trying to assert are honest beliefs or an attempt to fool me into taking some course of action, when the facts are dependent solely on what's in their head. This also goes for people who claim particular emotional responses to a particular stimuli! Trust CAN be built, mind you.
As I indicated my problem isn't so much with an individual wanting to be called something other than the obvious (hence, nicknames!) but with being expected to buy into the larger game this represents. A game that, I remind you, doesn't have any prescribed rules and whatever rules do exist, haven't been discussed or agreed to, and yet violation of which can be punished via social means.
You want to be polite and assume that you won't be pilloried for rejecting 'made up' pronouns, but there's literally nothing that makes your boundaries the ones that matter. They're already inserting stuff like "Xe/Xim/Xir" into the lexicon.
So I'll object to the game itself every time someone tries to get me to play it, unless and until we have the discussion regarding the rules.
But end of the day I anticipate that they want the rules to remain fluid and convoluted, since being able to hold them to any standard would diminish their ability to use this game to push for social outcomes that they want and to punish defectors, which is the nature of the true meta-game being played. Or so I believe.
Much simpler for me to engineer my personal social group to avoid people who make a big deal of pronouns than to openly accept and appease every person I encounter, including on the internet, for no personal benefit.
I believe most trans people genuinely do identify as and perceive themselves to be the gender they say they are. I consider their request to be made in good faith whether or not I believe their object-level claims about what gender they are. So yes, I'll be polite as far as using the pronouns they prefer. If you meet a trans woman who's introduced to you as a woman, do you make a practice of saying "Bullshit, you're a dude"?
Well, yes, in some cases.
I know people who genuinely and sincerely claim to have heard God talking to them - not in a delusional "God spoke words to me and told me I was the Chosen One" kind of way, but in a "I absolutely know for a fact that God is real because I have Experienced Him" kind of way. And people who've had like religious and/or allegedly supernatural experiences which I consider as delusional or non-real as any trans identification.
I don't think they're crazy or trolling, and while I won't pretend I believe that their experiences are real, nor will I start a fight with them. I don't feel obligated to sneer and say "You're just experiencing things you've convinced yourself are real."
I'm sure I could find myself being pilloried for rejecting made up pronouns, but since I don't hang out on Twitter and I'm not in the public eye or in a profession where I have to worry about woke shit-testers, it's not a significant concern to me.
Maybe at some point I will encounter one of these hypothetical "Please call me Ravendarkhart (Xe/Xir)" people in the wild, and I'll have to figure out if I can navigate that without either acquiescing to that bullshit or starting a fight. But while I won't say trans women aren't on that slippery slope, I don't personally feel like I am sliding dangerously down it by not striking a contrarian posture every time I meet a trans person.
deleted
That's not surprising, but the comparison isn't meant to say I think believing you're trans and believing in God is an exact analog. Use any example you like of people believing things, based on their personal experience, which are completely internal to them and thus unverifiable to anyone outside their own head. Hence I used the example of people who believe they have experienced God directly and not, for example, people who believe they saw a UFO (something that in theory could be verified by anyone else who was there to see it).
The rest of your objection is basically "You can brush off someone's religious beliefs with impunity, but you can't do that with trans people," which is true today, in our society, but is not true in every society (trying telling an authority figure in Iran that their religious beliefs are nonsense) and has not been true historically in ours.
I am obviously against the current regime which so heavily punishes anyone who questions trans orthodoxy (see: J.K. Rowling and anyone else labeled "gender critical"), for the same reason I'm against religion having that much power. Even in the absence of such a regime, I wouldn't insist on calling a transwoman a man to his face, for the same reason that as an atheist I won't be rude to you just because you're talking about beliefs I don't share.
Also, in most workplaces (including mine), being disrespectful of someone's religious beliefs would get very similar treatment from HR as disrespecting someone's gender identity.
deleted
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That raises the question of otherkin.
Aside from that, the reason it's even vaguely plausible that they're sincere is that your allies have created an environment where sincerity may be assumed. It's with circular reasoning where people wouldn't use unusual pronouns if society didn't accept them first, but society decides whether to accept them based on the fact that people use them sincerely.
If this was 1970 and someone wanted to be called xe/xim, or even if a man wanted to be called "she", you'd know that they're trolling because it's so frowned upon that nobody would want to do that for real. Even if closeted trans people exist in 1970, they would know that society frowns upon the request so they wouldn't ask--anyone who does ask you in 1970 is probably trolling. Trans or custom gendered pronouns in 1970 are in the same position as "your lordship" is in right now.
Imagine that there was a social movement about people's right to be called "your lordship", and because of that movement, there were people who sincerely requested to be called "your lordship", so you could no longer assume that such a request is trolling. Also imagine that even then, the connotation of "your lordship" is still what it is now. If someone asked to be called "your lordship", would you do so? Or would you say "even if you're sincere, by making that request, you are trying to claim the conventional connotations of 'your lordship', and they don't apply to you, so I wouldn't call you that"?
Sure, yeah, we assume sincerity now because they made it sincere. Just as we assume sincerity about claims such as "maybe people from other countries are real people too" or "there shouldn't be an unelected king".
Are the connotations of "he" and "she" now what they were before? Anyway, sure, if we assume that society developed in a way that changed my mind about "your lordship", then my mind about "your lordship" is changed. So?..
More options
Context Copy link
"My allies," forsooth!
You're mixing up several different things here. Some otherkin probably are sincere (which doesn't make them less deluded). I do believe most trans people are sincere, and trans people, by which I mean actual people who believed they were a different sex than the one they were born as, not just gender nonconforming people that trans activists try to retroactively label trans, certainly existed before the 70s. As for the newer genderspecials, probably they are about as sincere as otherkin, which is to say some of them are sincere and deluded and some are just adopting the cool fashionable new hairstyle and will abandon it when it's no longer cool.
The argument isn't "someone can sincerely be trans", it's "someone can sincerely demand trans pronouns". In 1970, most trans people would not demand pronouns, and any person who does demand one is probably a troll, not a trans person. This is the situation today for "your lordship"; anyone who would (in a more permissive society) want to demand it sincerely probably stays silent, so any demands you hear come from trolls.
I edited it into the previous post so you might not have seen it, but if society changed, so you couldn't assume that people who wanted to be called "your lordship" were insincere, would you call people that upon request?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's not nice, but ... it is true, and what would've happened if voltaire, jesus, moldbug, etc took this approach? Even if it makes the person 'mad' or 'sad', surely it benefits them to understand the situation better? They're making significant decisions based on these claims, and .. what else is there to their belief in god, besides the way they understand things, and decisions they make resulting from it? (no, not saying moldbug is jesus, they are varying examples of the same point)
More options
Context Copy link
Did the person who'd heard the voice of God insist you call them prophet?
Is there evidence you can argue someone out of mental illness? I'm not arguing with the phophet, dementia patients or the girl at the party who's convinced the universe is sending her message either.
More options
Context Copy link
No, I would never make any extra effort to intentionally 'misgender' or otherwise antagonize someone by repeatedly getting their pronouns wrong. Because as I have noted twice now, individually I have no problem with the concept of referring to someone as they prefer to be referred. Nicknames, initials, whatever. There's ample precedent for letting some pick their own name and having it be accepted socially.
The game I don't play is "EVERYONE must now make their pronouns explicit and everyone must accept those at face value."
And using the 'wrong' pronouns intentionally would also be caring waaaaaaaaaay to much about this game too.
But by the same token, if you get viscerally upset and attempt to shame or otherwise directly influence my behavior because I slipped up once or twice, I'm also less inclined to think you're acting in good faith, and using it more as a bid for status or control.
Like, there are people who still mispronounce my actual birth name even after knowing me for a while. I may or may not correct them but it just never even occurs to me to take offense or pretend to take offense.
So it's not clear to me why the pronoun thing is even worth stressing over.
Right, but I wouldn't accommodate someone who said "GOD HIMSELF told me that you have to give me $20" either. Because no matter how emphatically they believe it, there's no external signal I can use to verify it, and I'm not buying into this game when there's a personal cost attached.
Likewise, I won't exchange pronouns with every single person I meet or police my own language merely because someone may be within earshot and care about this stuff.
If I'm dealing with someone at a professional level who wants to be called 'he' or 'she' and makes a point of stating this I might do it just to grease the wheels of the interaction, since its not worth interrogating someone's mental state when you're just trying to have a professional conversation and complete a transaction.
But again, the game is "everyone must accept every other person's pronouns."
Right. And I've got my social environment arranged such that I am vanishingly unlikely to encounter someone who would make a big deal out of this particular issue.
And hell, I know some trans people who I have some rapport with and I refer to them as their preferred gender because that's easy. But I'm also reasonably sure they wouldn't have a conniption or try to publicly condemn me if I got it wrong, if I thought they'd do that, I'd minimize contact with them.
The reason I care on a meta-level is that the world seems to be shifting towards the situation where you will be made to care about this stuff and punished for not doing so.
More options
Context Copy link
But this isn't anything like a trans person. If a person sincerely (or trollishly) says they've experienced god, nothing changes for you. You need not call him "Holy One". This god experiencer doesn't then start undergoing sterilizing medical procedures. There is nothing to start a fight over.
Sure it is. In both cases, someone is making a claim based on what they experience inside their head, and you can choose to believe them, disbelieve them quietly and be polite, or disbelieve them aggressively.
If someone says they're a woman, nothing changes for me either.
You're just arguing that accepting someone's gender identification has real world political (and physical) implications, which is true, but so do religious beliefs. I have certainly seen more conflict over the latter than the former.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a level of permissiveness that I cannot fathom. If someone asked you to address them differently depending on their mood, would you? Like if they were in a good mood they want to be called Jonathan Sunshine, but if they're feeling a bit down it's Gloomraven, Lord of all Sorrows? Because I don't really see how it's any different.
He and She are words already in my lexicon, as is they - they're not particularly loaded down with baggage in the same way that Gloomraven is.
In that case do you also refuse to memorise the name of anyone you meet whose name is unusual, uncommon or otherwise unheard of to you?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's different for the reason that switching from "he" to "she" does not discommode me much, while switching from "Jonathan Sunshine" to "Gloomraven, Lord of All Sorrows" would be ridiculous and asinine and is fortunately something that only happens in ridiculous and asinine straw man what ifs.
I'll note that even the first example is hypothetical, since I don't actually know any people who change their pronouns on a recurring basis.
Obviously there is a limit to my tolerance. I don't respect neo-pronouns like "xe" or "xir," and I have yet to be forced to use "they" as a singular third-person pronoun in person. (That one offends me more on grammatical grounds than any feelings I have about gender identities.)
If someone were actually changing their pronouns on a daily basis, I would stop trying to keep track and tell them they're being unreasonable to expect me to.
Is it though? There's certainly someone on discord or twitter whose moniker is 'Gloomraven', and people have no trouble calling them by that.
More options
Context Copy link
Changing pronouns has been ridiculous and asinine in practically all cultures through all of time. It is still ridiculously asinine in most places in the world today.
We are already down that slope, down so far that "Gloomraven Lord of the Sorrows" is closer to whay we have now than not having that.
This battle was lost the moment changing pronouns more than once was "normalized". It should have been something that you choose and have to commit to else pay a great price to your credibility.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't want to comment on the neo-pronouns, but I have a question about this bit:
The singular they goes back to at least the 1300s, at least according to Merriam-Webster. What kind of pedigree are you looking for in your english words above and beyond a word usage that literally predates modern english? Is it just that the same word can refer to singular and plural? Does the word "deer" bother you in the same way?
Trust me, I am familiar with the linguistic history of "they" and with this argument.
The problem with it is that in the past, "they" has been used (somewhat inconsistently) as an indefinite gender pronoun (such as when the gender of the person being referred to is unknown, or when you are talking about a generic person of either gender). And even in those cases, it sometimes leads to grammatical ambiguity.
The new usage, where it's used to refer to individuals even when their gender is known (see what I did there?) is both awkward and frequently unclear.
"They're waiting for me in the car."
"I called my friend and they were very upset."
"They told me I misgendered them."
It's becoming more common for me to be reading an article where people use a singular "they" and I have to backtrack to figure out if we're talking about one person or multiple people. I would almost prefer that we actually adopt some neopronoun like "xe/xir" just to disambiguate the grammar, but since I don't recognize that "xe/xirs" exist, I just mentally roll my eyes at people who identify as a singular-they.
Could you expand a little on this? I'm not sure how, once you've accepted the singular they for a person of unknown gender or perhaps an abstract person without gender, applying it to different individuals causes more ambiguity.
Or is it just that this previously rage edge-case is becoming more common which is leading to problems?
I thought my examples above gave pretty good examples of the problem. What's still unclear?
I think the issue is that I'm still unsure of your position on the singular they for use with a person of unknown gender (old definition).
Specifically the paragraph that starts with:
"it" here seems to imply the new definition, otherwise contrasting with the past is odd (or I'm just parsing something wrong, always an option). I interpreted this as the old definition was fine (if not ideal), and the new version was a problem.
But later there's talk about ambiguity, and as far as I can tell, both definitions do that to roughly the same degree, so I'm not sure why contrasting the old and new definitions comes up beforehand.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The historical claim to a "singular they" is a central example of a motte and bailey. There was the occasional usage of singular they to refer to a person of unknown or unspecified sex, where "he" would be more grammatically standard--this is the motte. Referring to a known and identified singular person as "they" was not a thing.
Did you think no one would actually click your link? Because Merriam-Webster lays out exactly what I said above, though with more sneering.
It was not immediately clear that the new definition was the point of contention. People railing against the "singular they" is much older than the current gender debate (including my 8th grade english teacher), and the OP specified that it was more on grammatical grounds than gender.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Back in the ancient days of AOL and Ryhddin chatrooms, i once met a teenaged boy IRL who wanted to be called Angel when he was in a good mood and Angelus when he was in a dangerous mood.
I'm honestly not sure how valid the connection is, but it feels easy to intuit a line from the warlocks and druids I played Vampire the Masquerade with 20 years ago to the otherkin and therianopes of the early teens to the gender creatives of the last five years.
I've known my share of Internet crazies too, and people who wanted to adopt new names for various reasons. The degree to which you're willing to humor an edgy teen is up to your own tolerance level. The degree to which you're willing to humor an adult who identifies "differently" is also up to your own tolerance level. I will be polite to trans people and "non-binaries." I'd be polite to an otherkin too, but I wouldn't call him Lupus Bloodmoon Rayvnfang or pretend that I believe he's a wolf.
(I don't pretend I believe transwomen are women either, but unless they want to press me and force a conversation about it, neither do I feel obligated to tell transwomen what I actually think any more than as an atheist I need to go off on someone who says "God bless you" when I sneeze.)
Do you believe in following requests to treat them as women such as being in women's bathrooms or locker rooms, on women's sports teams, in women's prisons, in women's shelters, etc.?
I think transwomen should be allowed to use women's bathrooms, but sports teams, no, and women's prisons, only if they have physically transitioned. Locker rooms and shelters I would say situationally dependent, particularly on whether or not the person has physically transitioned. I know the gotcha you're looking for here is the bad faith actors who just want to go in and flash their girldicks around, and the fact that the trans movement is reluctant to acknowledge the existence of bad actors is the petard they are hoisting themselves on.
But does it count as a petard if it doesn't identify as a petard?
Yes, obvious joke, but there's also a point--what are the consequences of not acknowledging the existence of bad actors, and who can and will enforce the consequences?
There was a bit of earlier discussion about kids pushing boundaries, and how that's normal, but it's the job of adults to set boundaries. I fully agree, but this is yet another case of those with the power to set boundaries refusing to do so. That petard ain't gonna set itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
If a good friend asked this of me in an apologetic way, emphasizing that they wouldn't ask if it wasn't important, sure, I'd call them whatever they want.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link