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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38037 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.

I mean, it seems quite clear what they mean - especially if you look at the full paragraph: they're not paying respect to the new woke pronoun regime and all that entails.

Why can't they see the issue with phrasing it that way? If we have to unfurl it:

The old conception of pronouns was unchosen titles that were assigned to people based on which of two sexes they were. This was done automatically and many older people may not have even considered themselves as having "personal" pronouns as a result. They just consider those pronouns the appropriate ones for their sex. Before the woke wave the way to correct someone was not "those are not my pronouns/use my pronouns" but "I'm actually a man/woman" - and then the other party would be expected to switch.

It's thus not a shock that random people slip up and say "we don't use pronouns" instead of "we don't use preferred pronouns" or "we don't use neo pronouns" for two reasons:

  1. the Leftists are the ones who keep talking about "use my pronouns" so you can assume that any ask to "use [someone's pronouns] will involve "woke" deviations from the old conception. So "pronouns" as a culture war issue means "woke/preferred/neo pronouns"

  2. normies aren't always watching every single word to thwart some Twitter nitpicker from having a dunking session. A more cautious or introspective person might have avoided it, but it's hardly a big impediment in debates.

My bet is that almost everyone knows what they mean. Including the people "owning the cons".

I'm down for abolishing gender, we can go back to sex! For nearly all of history there was no real concept of gender, no notion that it deserved a word. Ignorance is, in this case, bliss.

No-one may have conceived of the notion of gender in the current usage in ages past, but that doesn't mean gender was simply non-existent. Which is to say that retrospectively we can distinguish between sex and gender in history, even if no-one did so then.

Don’t forget the man who invented “gender” was a pedophillic child molester. German sexologist societies honoured him for his work in forcible castration of little boys and molesting them soon afterwards.

nothing new under the sun eh?

The people you're arguing with think that gender was always a thing, and that abolishing it would mean zero social expectations would be placed on people due to sex.

I'm down with whatever. As long as people keep making babies instead of being "cat and dog moms".

It's thus not a shock that random people slip up and say "we don't use pronouns" instead of "we don't use preferred pronouns"

Is it really a slip-up? If that is a slip up then so is "please use our pronouns" or "what are your pronouns?". The reason that is never corrected to "preferred pronoun" is because everybody knows that "pronoun" can refer to the progressive idea.

Qualifying "pronoun" with "preferred" would be a tactical error by gender-believers. The way they say it now is a rhetorical technique to obscure the fact that the mainstream idea and progressive idea are different. Rather than framing the discussion as "should we change how pronouns work?" it is "please use my pronouns." It's not much different than the "basic human decency" rhetorical technique.

"please use our pronouns" or "what are your pronouns?"

Well those are different because of the possessives. What are 'your' pronouns unambiguously refers to preferred pronouns, because it couldn't be anything else, whereas 'we don't use pronouns' or equivalent is just a nonsense.

That's a good point I hadn't considered. I was focused on the word "preferred" that the original poster had brought up.

Is it really a slip-up?

Yes, because the literal reading is wrong and it doesn't reinforce the normative point you're making.

"There's no such thing as preferred pronouns" or "the pronouns for men are "he/he" or "you don't have 'your' pronouns; you have the pronouns of your sex' are not problematic on a surface reading and also highlight that there is a change being pushed here and therefore aren't slip ups, even though they does what you want (highlight that it is indeed a change being asked for here)

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