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You can go into just about any 4chan thread to convince yourself of the existence of such people. It's just that once you filter out the LARPing, the incompetent, the cowardly and the ones who rationally decide that the legal consequences are not worth it, not a lot remain.
Either way, I don't think there is much productive discussion to be had from reheating this topic in its direct form for the nth time (it at best devolves into questions of whose feelings it is more important to protect, and more often just involves flag-waving and rallying the for/against troops for messages of support or outrage).
Instead, let me ask a different but related question: In many European cultures, it is common practice that people who hold academic degrees (in particular PhDs) can list them with their name everywhere, replacing the appellation (Mr/Mrs/Ms) where available. So your doorbell, passport, ID etc. would say "Dr. Smith". This conveys not only bragging rights and a culturally reinforced feeling of achievement, but also a lot of practical advantages in everyday life: bureaucrats are nicer to you, postal workers are less likely to break your package, neighbours are less likely to call the police if you barbecue on your balcony at 2AM. Usually, who is allowed to put "Dr." is quite stringently regulated, with steep penalties: it is tied to degree program accreditation for native universities, and for foreign ones there is usually an extremely long list of arcane criteria involving research intensity ratings and what-not, which also sometimes requires you to pay money to some local agency to issue a document certifying that your foreign degree conveys the right to be consider a "Dr." nationally for this purpose.
Now suppose you were a resident of a European country, but had studied at a US university. Let's say you are also reasonably invested in US politics. You learn that your country has recently updated its title carrying accreditation rules, so now only PhDs from US universities that have [sufficiently strong, sufficiently subdued] DEI initiatives are accepted. If you do not have your documents updated and promptly remove the "Dr." from your doorbell, you risk steep administrative fines, or worse. How do you feel about this? Do you think it is fair game or are you going to protest?
To begin with, in what ways do you figure this scenario is similar, and in what ways do you think it is essentially different from the gender ID one?
I'm another who's always made the analogy with titles, but hadn't thought about the Euro Dr. thing. Personally I quite like that they do that - as the saying goes "German cars are better because in Germany an engineer is Herr Doktor, and in England he's a bloody mechanic." (Maybe less applicable today, now that German cars aren't so good and English cars ~don't exist). Probably would have completed my PhD for the vanity instead of going into industry at the first opportunity if I was German.
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It's interesting you mention that because we had a minor local kerfuffle here that made the news because someone dared to refer to a local official by his first name rather than Dr. They had to publicly apologize and everything. To me, people who insist on it come off as petty and pretentious. The US is famously egalitarian in generally eschewing the peerage system and delineating class by using titles. It's far more common to use first names even with your medical doctor. To insist otherwise creates a separation, the old idea of "how you treat your betters." So it's very much a class-based issue, so I don't think it's comparable to what trans people are asking.
Otherwise I will just say I've known one trans person in my life. I do believe the issue caused intense distress. I know there's been a trend of people "jumping" on the trans bandwagon and basically adopting it as if it was a sub-identity like goth or whatever. This person wasn't one of those. They were a full adult, very reserved, Christian and generally conservative, and they didn't tend to really reveal anything private about themselves. So it was quite a shock when they came out. They weren't out to score political points or be trendy or live out a fetish or whatever you might be thinking. They just wanted to live authentically, to heal whatever psychic suffering they struggled under. I don't know how much counseling or whatever they underwent. At the end of the day, if you care for someone as a person, you accept what they tell you about themselves. So I am respectful and kind to them and treat them as the gender they're presenting as.
But you'll notice I haven't actually used a gendered pronoun here to talk about them because, yes, it's not something I'm wholly comfortable with. While personally I'm on the side of compassion and acceptance, I understand that has very little to do with what policies are correct. Sex-segregated spaces are a thing for a reason and I think those should be preserved. Same thing with sports. There need to be much stronger guardrails on medical interventions rather than automatic total affirmation, and I'm glad to see signs of changes there. The drivers license thing I could go either way on. If you're arresting someone, you need to know whether to house them with the women or the men. But if you're just looking to identify someone or circulate their description, you need to know what they're presenting as. Having M on a drivers license seems like it hinders identification if they're walking around presenting as female.
Someone like that, yeah, I have sympathy. Maybe even let's permit them to put female on the driver's licence, though that's a big switch. They're not trying to score points, they want to live as normally as they can.
But the problem is that they are lumped in with, and used by, the types like Mr. Restaurant Misgendered who made a career out of looking to be offended in order to create those videos. Mr. Misgendered gets repudiated by the trans activism groups as a narcissistic grifter, then I have no problem with your acquaintance getting help and support because there's genuine need there. But Mr. Misgendered won't be, that's the trouble.
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Wasn't there something about the insistence on referring to Jill Biden as Dr. Biden? With one side claiming it was horrible disrespect to omit her title and the other claiming it was puncturing pretension?
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Is that the case outside Germany and Austria?
I can't recall having ever seen it anywhere else and quite a few people make fun of Germans for that (eg. Herr Doktor Doktor Professor Someone). Sure, in academic and some professional contexts you would say Dr Someone but not in normal life. Unless you were German, of course.
German here. I have a Dr. rer. nat., but don't really identify as it. In the course of earning one, you typically get disabused of any notion that they signify elite human capital. STEM is full of jokes to the tune of 'Oh, you have a PhD? Don't worry, I will speak slowly then.'
When I was perhaps eight and playing some outside, I corrected a kid referring to my father as 'Herr $lastname' to 'Doktor $lastname'. That did earn me quite the talk.
There is a cliche of lower class people calling their physician 'Herr Doktor' or 'Frau Doktor' (which is especially funny given that what you need for a Dr. med. would not even earn you a Bachelor of Science), but the upper middle class prefers more subtle class signifiers.
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I've long made the comparison between "gender" and titles. I think it was one of my early moderator stances on slatestarcodex.
Butchering someone's title intentionally does seem like a mark of disrespect. But insisting someone else use a title is a form of social domination. "President" is a title as well.
Disrespect: Former reality TV star Donald Trump gave the SOTU address.
Neutral: Donald Trump's SOTU address spoke on these topics...
Domination: Any news agency that does not refer to President Trump as President Trump in their articles will not be invited to the white house press corps briefings.
Of course, the Register did a thing where they did not even refer to him by name. e.g. "Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs". Possibly the only way to report on him without making him stronger.
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From the other side, to take your example of "can you call yourself doctor?", the demand to change identity documents to reflect a fake status is as if someone who didn't go to university, didn't have a PhD, and was not otherwise qualified no matter if it's DEI or not, was sticking up "I am Doctor Smith, address me as such" on their doorbell and letters and the rest of it.
Whatever about driving licences, I do think that "I want to change my birth certificate so it says Mom and Dad had a baby girl on 17th September 1978 in Wenatchee Maternity Hospital at 3:45 a.m. and not a baby boy" is not permissible. A birth certificate is either a statement of fact or not. If we're going to make legal documents like marriage and turn it into "whatever you feel makes you happy, be that two guys can get married, six people are too a real marital unit, or boys will be girls and girls will be boys, sure thing and paperwork is just fiction depending on how you feel at any particular moment in time", then what is even the point of having registers?
I think that in the context of Trump's SAVE act, it popped up that people can -- and might have to -- get a birth certificate with their current legal name on it. I also think that some countries use up-to-date birth certificates to track marriage status.
If birth certificates are updated regularly to reflect changes in the life circumstances of a person, rather than being stored on the blockchain shortly after birth, then it makes sense to also update them to reflect cosmetic changes in things like first name or gender identity.
No you simply need the BC and proof of the name change. Like any married woman has to get. Married women do not generally change their birth certificate to pretend they were born married to their husbands. Changing birth certs is desecration of a historical record and makes no sense. I don't even like it for adopted kids.
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Can you give an example? The typical chud joke is mocking the high suicide rates of the group, not threatening to kill them. I don't go to 4chan, so I might end up surprised, but I'm pretty skeptical your claim can be substantiated by clicking on a random thread there.
Genocidal intent also has to differ between 'If I had a button that would instantly delete Group A, would I press it' and actual committed violence.
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You can just call yourself doctor, nobody cares. You can't suddenly start practicing medicine or teaching at a university, but nobody will stop you from calling yourself that.
Punishable with up to 1 year of jail e.g. in Germany; and yes, if your Karen neighbour figures out you were not technically allowed to, she will absolutely report you.
Yeah, but over there misgendering is also punishable with rather large fines.
It is? Hot damn. Then it would actually be rather dangerous...if "trans people" actually existed, outside of a few basement dwellers nobody ever sees in daylight.
Yup, €10K, thanks to the recently(ish) passed Selbstbestimmungsgesetz. It already resulted in a peak-Germany situation where a neonazi got jailed for neonazism, had a sudden sentencing-day transition, and started suing people for being referred to as anything other than a stunning and brave woman.
Eh, much like everywhere else, the average transgender case changed from weird middle-aged dude that likes to throw on a dress, to autistic adolescent girl having trouble making sense of her place in the world.
It's common enough that I've actually seen the latter organically (i.e. not because I'm obsessed with the subject)
Reading that article had me grinning from ear to ear at the ridiculous troll situation.
I feel bad for the women that ended up locked up with him, but hopefully he is just a troll, and not an actual psycho.
I suppose since modal HR wokescolds aren't the woman in prison with him, the schadenfreude of leopards eating faces is probably a bit of a misplaced feeling. However it is germany, so I probably misunderstand what the modal underclass female prison believes politically.
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I recall that you have some OPSEC in place, so no sweat if you refuse to answer, but where?
Here in the Provinz, there just aren't any. I mean, for sure they are somewhere, we do have the internet after all and social contagions do spread, but it doesn't look like they go outside enough to be encountered in the wild. Or the whole pronouns business is after all not important enough to actually make it public in person.
I think some time ago I PMed you where I was at. It's not exactly rural, but my impression is it's still seen as relatively conservative. I think the girl's father lives in one of the wokest parts of the country though, so that could have contributed to the contagion.
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That is not the point; 4bpp is specifically analogizing the overnight invalidation of documents where you called yourself "Dr." to the overnight invalidation of ID papers which included transgender people's chosen genders instead of their sex. In either case, it seems inordinately disruptive to the lives of the people involved, even if one were in favor of phasing out the practice as far as issuing new documents is concerned.
I think this interpretation stretches credulity enormously. You don’t go out and picket over minor changes in procedure, even if it is annoying; you do so for perceived loss of privilege (the inability to use the Dr. prefix as a signifier).
Every trans person has lost the privilege to drive if their documents are immediately invalidated. Driving without a valid license is a crime in Kansas. Any trans person driving around with their old license would be risking arrest and prosecution until they could secure an updated license.
I admit to not following this at all, but surely as for all procedural changes like these there would be a grace period where people could get their licence changed?
I don't have the text of the law to hand so maybe, but the article at least doesn't describe any. It does mention that Kansas' law differs from other states with similar requirements by invalidating existing licenses.
I get the impression those other states required new/renewed licenses to have the new sex marker, but Kansas' law makes that requirement retroactive, which is what invalidates the existing licenses.
But didn't these Kansas transgenders have warning that the law was going to go into effect?
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I suppose I would feel stung from having invested so much into a title that is now less useful, but it's not as if me removing "Dr." from everywhere means that I no longer have a PhD. I might protest, but only to the extent of making my voice heard. I don't think it would be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and I would probably have bigger things in my life to worry about.
The big difference is that I can't see there being a good reason for the change in PhD accreditation, especially retroactively. Meanwhile, changing back the definition of gender to be the one that billions of people have understood for thousands of generations, and which is rooted in biological reality, makes sense to me.
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