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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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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.

A journalist reporting on a mass murderer probably doesn't owe them the same level of social nicety.

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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