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I don't know. APnews has a main story that studiously uses she and her. That strikes me as still zealous on the issue given it's a mass shooter.
Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.
I don't know how much a random redditor counts, but I have literally seen a conversation where the person "misgenders" a trans criminal, someone tries to lecture him, and he straight up says (paraphrased), "I use preferred pronouns because I am asked to, but criminals are not owed politeness." Which does square with the argument frequently made (if not necessarily believed) that pronouns are like titles and using them is "just being polite."
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What's weird about that? I'm skeptical of the science behind Trans, but if it convinced me my view would be Trans-Med: there are people with a disorder called "gender dysphoria" and going along with their preferences alleviates their suffering a bit. As long as someone is a functional member of society and in good standing, I can go along with that. It's not that they're allowed to change their pronouns, it's that they're being indulged, the same way I'd indulge an autistic weirdo like Richard Stallman, or Linus Torvalds. Why should I indulge a murderer, though?
You needn't; but the non-murderous trans people you're interested in being nice to understandably perceive misgendering any trans person as an insult to them as a group. Similarly, you may not care about a black murderer's feelings, but you shouldn't call him the N-word in a newspaper article, because it would be hurtful to your non-murderous black readers.
This assumes the Queer Theory worldview to be axiomatically correct, where it's not a disorder, but a valid identity that each individual can put on and off at will, and a refusal to acknowledge could be construed as an attack on the validity of the entire identity.
I reject that view. Like I said, the view I would be endorsing is trans-medicalism. Asking that I pretend a man is a woman is already a tall order, but like I said, if that makes their life somehow more bearable, it's something I can indulge, if the person is otherwise reasonable.
Asking that I pretend that all men, that declare themselves to be women, are women, no matter how they conduct themselves, is deranged behavior, and a request they have no right to make.
"Nigger" is an unambiguous insult. It's seen this way by people who hear it and are insulted by it, as well as by people who say it. Even when black people use it affectionately between themselves, the core meaning is still an insult, they are just adding sarcasm on top of it, to invert the meaning into something positive.
"Man" is a neutral factual term. It's not being used to insult trans people when relating a story about a trans murderer. It's being used the exact same way it would be, if the murderer was a non-trans male.
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It was a thing around one of the earlier trans violence incidents but I don't recall which one specifically. I'm thinking particularly of Blocked and Reported, with Jesse Singal sticking to the "studiously use preferred pronouns" line (of course) and Katie being much lazier (of course) and/or pushing back a bit, that it ultimately is a respect thing and you don't need to respect murderers.
It's not like there's not similar examples, other populations where slurs are 'allowed' or you won't be expect to respect an identity due to other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if you could find people that would use preferred pronouns for murderers but not for nice conservatives.
A presidential candidate tried to change people's race based on their lack of support for himself. Hypocrisy exists and people are weird, news at 11.
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I don't really do it based on morality, but I've generally been a lot more hesitant to swap pronouns (among the legitimate three; I utterly refuse to use singular-they or neopronouns) if someone's obviously acting erratic and crazy (given the likelihood that said person is not, in fact, stably trans).
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While not an intellectually consistent approach, many people are not intellectually consistent. The worldview that 'we should be nice to trans people, but changing your sex isn't really real, so we should humour it for the goodies but not the baddies' doesn't seem terribly uncommon among moderate progressives.
Indeed, the core argument of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ is that using preferred pronouns is something you should to do to "make a little effort to be nice to people," in the same way that you might tell a little white lie to spare your friend's feelings (or, in the example that Scott uses, humor someone who jokingly declares himself Emperor of the United States).
A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.
This is fair, but I don't think that Scott, if asked, would in fact defend ignoring a murderer's pronouns in the press on that basis. Not sure if he'd phrase his objection in terms of "misgendering anybody is hurtful to the sensibilities of the innocent trans people in your readership, so you should she-her the murderer to be nice to them", or in terms of "misgendering people is a mild but indecorous insult, and it's undignified for journalists to hurl indecorous insults at murderers; you shouldn't harp on about a dead murderer's biological sex any more than you should harp on about a dead murderer having had a small penis or an ugly wart, even if the claims are factually true", or something else I can't model.
I do suspect Scott himself leans quite a bit further to the left on this issue (after all, he's managed to survive living in the San Francisco Bay Area), but the post does a good job describing the "bailey" version of the position that's more palatable to moderates.
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Especially not when they're already dead, along with most of their immediate family who might care about such things.
(Incidentally, this xkcd comic is very relevant to your username.)
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I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.
As an intuition pump, would people be more likely to "misgender" a MtF or a FtM mass shooter?
That's conceivable, but I'd hardly describe someone who believed that as non-zealous in their gender activism, they'd just be a very idiosyncratic zealot.
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"Choosing to do something heinous" and "changing their identity and pronouns at will" tend to go hand in hand, so this isn't acceptable to TRAs. Their entire thing is that the community has no right to tell you who you are, no matter what.
Older Boomer women currently wish this was the case so they could go on blaming men [and guns] for mass murder. Having a pet of theirs rack up the highest kill count to date west of the Canadian Shield is incongruous with the "gendercide" narrative.
I think the pronouns will stick in this case; the demand for violence from straightwhitemen might exceed supply, but the reaction to that is an increase in the demand for violence perpetrated by non-straightwhitemen (because the demand for violence comes from the highly passive-aggressive "see, we were right about them, now it's time to make them pay" that characterizes most Western nations, in particular English-settled ones).
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There are definitely a lot of people who use the preferred pronouns of trans people they like and not mass murderers, it's just not a position with intellectual support on either side of the aisle.
People who pass well and are integrated into my community I use chosen pronouns. Bad actors I will truegender all day. The vast majority of unaffiliated trans people I just avoid using any pronouns in front of, and call them their real gender in private.
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