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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   22404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 22, 2026

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Well, there was, of course, an implicit "all else being equal" in the sentence you quoted.

No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.

I don't even know what you mean by "all else being equal" here. The phrase "all else being equal" normally comes into play when one is comparing two or more alternatives. I think the qualifier you are trying to insert retroactively is "absent extenuating circumstances"

So my next question is this: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?

No there wasn't. There really wasn't. You made an unqualified statement, which you now (apparently) concede to be incorrect.

I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding. If I said "If a man knocks at your door, explains he's starving, and asks for a crust of bread, it's clearly the correct thing to do to feed him", and I later clarified that obviously this statement takes all kinds of common-sense assumptions for granted (eg: "you" have some food to spare; "the man" is a stranger to you rather than a wealthy personal enemy of yours trying to discredit you with a hidden camera; etc.), only a pedantic logician would call that disingenuous.

I'm sorry, but I think this all kinds of an isolated demand for rigor and that no one reading my post in good faith would come away with the impression that I have some sort of reverse-Kantian objection to identifying a murderer in hiding.

I think they would come up with the impression that you hadn't really thought things through carefully. That's the most charitable interpretation. A less charitable interpretation would be that you were aware your generalization was limited, but you knew that inserting a qualifier would make your argument a good deal weaker. Because to do so would be to implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc. So instead you just hoped nobody would notice.

In any event, my question stands: Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?

(…) implicitly concede that there may be circumstances under which it's okay (or even preferable) to NOT indulge a trans person's desires in terms of name, pronouns etc.

I don't believe there are any such circumstances, unless you contrive a situation where their "desire in terms of name, pronouns, etc." is unrelated to their actual transness (e.g. a trans man happens to currently be impersonating a specific biological man for nefarious purposes).

Under what circumstances is it NOT clearly correct to call someone by their chosen name?

A variety of unrelated ones, much as there's a variety of unrelated reasons why you wouldn't feed the apparent starving beggar.

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