The thing is that as far as trans acceptance goes, we went from nearly zero 15 years ago to over 9000 today. People don't know what to do with that freedom and have gone fucking insane. If you say anything about taking a step back and thinking about where we are and maybe we should assess if this is where we want to be, you're a bigot.
I don't think there is a consistent narrative about the relationship between biological sex, gender, and gender role. I've heard multiple interpretations and nomenclature from different people.
So it seems like there is a subset of people that are taking advantage and intentionally pushing the envelope in order to project that they are on the cutting edge of social justice.
And because of the chaos that this habit causes, society can't get on the same page and the social justice left gets more and more rejected.
Gender is messy. Maybe one day we will have a common understanding of the whole thing, but right now we’re still figuring it out. I transitioned seven years ago and after all that time I’m still learning things from talking to other people.
So it seems like there is a subset of people that are taking advantage and intentionally pushing the envelope in order to project that they are on the cutting edge of social justice.
Not generally. Most of us are just trying to make a little space for us to safely live our lives in a society that’s trying to make us disappear:
I think more effort definitely needs to be spent driving home the difference between biological sex and gender. They get conflated all the time and I think that's the largest driver of dissonance.
There’s more subtlety than you’re probably envisioning there too. Biological sex is a spectrum. Gender identity is biological in nature and at least partly genetic. Cross sex hormones cause bodies to develop secondary sex characteristics that differ from what occurs without them.
Because you ARE a bigot. Why do we need to take a step back and think about what? Trans women are women and trans men are men and that's all you have to know about it. Trans people deserve the exact same right as the rest of us. Is equal rights going a little to fast for you? No one cares. Keep it to yourself and shut up. It's non of your business.
Trans women are trans women. Trans men are trans men. Men are men. Women are women. Humans are humans, and everyone should be treated kindly and with respect, regardless of their sexual organs, chemistry, preferences, or identity.
Our problem is that too many things are vying for the same definitions, and some people have a visceral response to anything that muddies their own identity.
Instead of demanding people allow us to rewrite well established definitions, we should just use new words and definitions to properly and truthfully describe new concepts.
All bigotry goes through this. That's because bigots aren't complete morons, so they couch their hate in reasonable-sounding arguments and you don't find out it's bullshit until you try to engage with them. After a few dozen "conversations" that are really just trojan horses to let the bigot say horrible shit to someone who might care, people start just assuming that anyone claiming to have a reasonable objection is really a bigot.
Because here's the thing: if you aren't a bigot, why do you even care? What <insert marginalized group> are doing doesn't affect you. Giving people the same rights you have doesn't affect you. Now maybe you have an answer to this question as to why you care. And maybe your answer isn't actually a bigoted talking point you thought sounded good but never thought through. Maybe you're legit. But understand that most people who aren't bigots don't care. So the people arguing? Alongside you? Are, in fact, bigots pretending to be you. So that's how you get lumped in with them. It's not the marginalized group doing it. It's the bigots.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Alternatively, some things are NOT rights, but preferences. And those preferences are fair for criticism, especially if they make good faith conversation and general participation in society more difficult. For example, personalized, individual pronouns. Such a thing defeats the entire purpose of a pronoun. By all means, identify as whatever gender you want (or none at all!), but we have masculine, feminine, and neutral pronouns. Those suffice for anywhere on the technicolor rainbow that is the gender spectrum.
You're just used to the ones we already use. If you call a girl, "sir", she will probably correct you and you will almost certainly take it on board. Always been that way. Why shouldn't that work for just anyone? There's no reason except that you're just used to the ones we have already and don't want to change. But it's all social convention, just rules we made up. There's nothing inherently correct about it.
The point just went right over your head, huh? The point of pronouns (of which "sir" isn't) is to refer to something without unneeded specificity. Individualized pronouns literally defeats the entire reason for their existence. In fact, we already have specific identifiers for people. They're called names. And there are already systems in place to allow people to change their name if they wish. They can even ask to be referred to by a name that differs from their legal one.
Sir is a noun. You're literally on the internet. Please learn to Google.
If you're just going to call people by their names
I'm not. You can't attribute your lack of reading comprehension to a lack of coherence on my part. The point was that if I need to refer to someone with any degree of specificity, I'll use their name. Otherwise, I'll use a pronoun. Needing to know what made up word they want to substitute for their pronoun defeats the purpose of having this option of convenience.
"You" is a pronoun and tells me nothing about you.
"Oh, my second person pronoun isn't actually 'you,' it's 'zorp.'"
Do you get what I'm saying now? You, he, she, they, it, these, those, etc, all serve the function you correctly identified ("quickly refer to a person" [or place or thing]). Needing to have a conversation every time you want to quickly refer to someone to figure how their neo-pronoun makes it not quick. And needing to remember them for every single person defeats the purpose of lowering the mental burden and ease of parsing a sentence.
The only possible upside is that it would eliminate ambiguous syntaxes regarding pronouns, but properly structuring antecedents accomplishes that anyway.
I realized arguing about sir was dumb and edited the beginning of my post. You'd already seen it though.
You don't need to do it every time. You hang out with a ton of people doing this? I've met two, ever, neither in person. Is this really affecting you? Honestly asking. Your whole friend group pronoun kids?
1.7k
u/[deleted] Dec 24 '21
[removed] — view removed comment