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Notes -
So the Canadian Green Party had a meltdown over "misgendering". . No good deed goes unpunished in the land of fringe party circular firing squads; their attempt to be inclusive by having pronouns (but mistakenly picking the wrong ones) has become a firestorm.
Of course, there is the standard "it made me feel unsafe" stuff. All of the leadership came together to harshly criticize this and the President - a volunteer- resigned cause she felt scapegoated, regardless of the apology.
The statement from the leadership candidates:
I'm sort of bemused how they frame this as some sort of pattern of racism, like calling a black person a slur or making jokes about women coders (they even use the term "harassment" at one point)
When the reality is that this person has deliberately chosen an atypical set of pronouns that will naturally cut against how most people over 5 have learned to use those things and so will naturally get misgendered sometimes.
This just solidifies in my mind that this entire thing will generally breed confusion and then conflict. That may even the point.
Of course, the political opportunism immediately follows:
The President laments not only not being able to get anything done to the hysterical claims of harm but it being used to basically marginalize and remove her and other party figures:
Reminds me of that article recently about how charities and organizations can't get work done with woke employees who are constantly attacking each other.
TBH, the Green Party - despite what some people want it to be - is an utter mess and small party nonsense like this isn't surprising.
The problem is that it's unclear it'll stay small party nonsense. The problem is not just this norm being spread, but that it is being enforced by both hate speech and discrimination law (probably why "safety" and "harassment"* have been so emphasized)
* BTW: I recall Jordan Peterson argued that we would end up in a place where misgendering would lead to these sorts of claims. He was told it would never happen because it was about continued misgendering. To that I say: that's bad enough + this case doesn't bode well for that position. It was a single incident, there was an immediate apology and it still became a huge fracas. Dreher's Law of Merited Impossibility hasn't struck yet, but it's looming.
You know, maybe this is just my privilege speaking, but I've always had the feeling that if there's any big psychological pain point I have (for example, I am really squeamish about injuries or gore) it is my own responsibility to deal with it rather than want other people to change to accommodate me. Is this better or worse than trying to get myself accommodated? I can't say for sure, but I do think that just striving for resilience seems more likely to be good for me, especially to the extent I succeed.
Of course, I expect the reply to that would amount to “how dare you compare your trivial discomforts to the serious oppressions that these people face!” To which all I can say is that I can only use the information available to me; I can only look at what's going on outside and measure things that way.
The claim then tends to run (see: standpoint theory, Hegelian master/slave dialectic) that a privileged person like me can never possibly understand the experience of an oppressed person; that I am, for my privilege, the most stunted and insensate type of human who can exist, blind to everyone else's experience whereas everybody else can see right through my own. If that's true, well then – there really is nothing I can do.
But to the extent I have any valid judgment of my own, I note that this seems to violate all notions of “people are [anything] like each other inside” and seems to be a claim that belonging to an oppressed category makes a person a utility monster. And at some point, I have to ask which is more likely: that I cannot possibly see the truth, or that I am being told a lie that would advantage the people telling it to me.
I'm told it's an utter failure of empathy on my part, but I think I'll choose the side that says that empathy isn't impossible for me.
Standpoint theory is a ridiculous concept. It's a circular argument wherein anyone who claims that they're part of an oppressed group can state that everyone should accept their claims because they have knowledge that no one does. The entire house of cards is fundamentally based on the following horror: "I'm oppressed and you're privileged, thus I have a superior knowledge and you have no such standing. How can I be sure that I suffer the oppression which confers upon me this epistemic advantage in the first place? Because I'm oppressed and you're privileged". If I didn't know better, I'd say that the people who use this have no sense of logic. Unfortunately, knowing what I know it reads to me like activism in its most shameless and unprincipled form.
I feel very much the same way with psychological pain points. Claiming offence over something trivial when none was intended, then demanding that everyone you meet must immediately adapt themselves to kowtow to your sensibilities, is a dysfunctional way of approaching social interaction. It's even worse when you're asking people to rework their approaches to fundamental things that are based in reality like gender binaries - an approach that works with all but a tiny percentage of the population, I might add. It smacks of sociopathy. It's a way to assert power over people and get them to assent to things that are prima facie ridiculous for the sake of your comfort. Supposedly, acknowledging any worldview other than the one you want will make you feel unsafe and like you don't have the right to exist, and so anyone who speaks to you must repeatedly spit in the face of their own sense of reality for the sake of prioritising your comfort before their own.
The funny thing is that I check off many boxes in the Intersectional Stack (a model which is based on flawed premises most or all of which I reject), so progressives usually can't use the "You're just privileged and don't have empathy" shit against me since that would contradict the framework which they operate off.
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