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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

In everyday life I've never found it to be too inconvenient to be as accommodating as possible to others and communicate with them on their own terms, whether that means remembering to use the pronouns they want or using alternative terminology if they think some word is offensive.

I've never had to think about how my outlook might change if all of that got a lot more inconvenient though (if more people start requiring ever more varied pronouns, or if so many words get soft-banned as being offensive that it's difficult to communicate with clarity). Much less have I thought about what if I were compelled by force/law to do the thing I've been doing voluntarily all along. I can understand and be sympathetic to Peterson's position in that sense, although I'm not sure if I agree.

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Much less have I thought about what if I were compelled by force/law to do the thing I've been doing voluntarily all along.

Have you never made a mistake in common courtesy? What if any mistake in common courtesy meant that you could be hauled before a kangaroo court which can use a scientifically dubious "test of unconscious bias" against you as evidence? What if that kangaroo court could get you kicked out of your job? Go and read the law Jordan Peterson is complaining about.

It's easy in one-on-one conversations with people you know or have a reasonable way of learning about.

It's hard for public or mass communications with people who have rapidly-evolving preferences and sets of things that can cause offense.

Peterson sounds like a dick in his methods, but there's a dangerous regressive trend picking up in mainstream circles of treating disagreement as heresy. We've picked up the worst habits of religion. (And the "right" is too intellectually dishonest to notice that this treend of whining/heresy/safe-spaces-desire trend is deeply entrenched in evangelical and right-wing America, with private schools, "wars on Christmas", etc.)

>It's hard for public or mass communications with people who have rapidly-evolving preferences and sets of things that can cause offense.

I'm not convinced of this. "Hi all" works as a salutation, in public speaking, you can substitute ladies and gentlemen with lots of far more engaging variants (eg: "Dear friends", "my fellow students" (a favourite of one of my best instructors in college), "distinguished guests", etc), announcers have been using "attention all passengers" and other formal identifiers for a while.

The outrage is less, but you can still catch flak for little slips like referring to an unknown party as "he" or "she" instead of "they." (A perfectly cromulent third-person-singular pronoun with plenty of history, IMO, but some people dislike it, too.)

But I'm thinking more of things like "creating a gender drop down box for a tool where demographic info was desired." Or do we just drop the idea of even having a meaningful response to such a question? Sometimes it's relevant, though, especially in medical industries.

It's been my experience that trans/genderqueer people indicate what their preferred pronouns are when goy meet them. The annoyance comes if someone repeatedly misgenders them afterwards. It seems to be me to be on par with calling them the wrong name a few times. It's not an especially huge transgression, but it's a bit oblivious. Not saying anything about Shapiro-caliber deliberate provocation here.

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