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Comment by beat | Hacker News Reader

Let me give you a libertarian answer... it's up to individuals to decide what their own identity is. When an individual identifies as one thing, and society refuses to accept that identity and imposes labels they find offensive, then they are being oppressed. And that's a much more substantial form of oppression than "Please don't say that" is.

I'm utterly shocked (not really) how many people proudly wave a flag of liberty, but are quite content for society to denounce and punish harmless individual expression, if they aren't comfortable with that expression.

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> it's up to individuals to decide what their own identity is. When an individual identifies as one thing...

That's actually not true and not workable. A very obvious example is a criminal who identifies as a good, upstanding person.

IMHO there are actually two kinds of identity (at least). They are separate things, but related and often confused.

1. Self-identity: the identity that someone applies to themselves based on their own thoughts and aspirations. This is very closely related to one's inner life. This is the identity that you're referring to above.

2. Applied-identity (for lack of a better term): the identity that each person applies to someone else based on their own thoughts, beliefs, and experiences with that person. Someone's reputation is an example.

If you try to force everyone's applied-identity of you to conform with your self-identity, that's also a form of oppression. What and how they think of you is their own business.

I'm not sure that's a particularly libertarian answer. But whether your views belong to a particular political label or not is not my main concern.

My question was whether you think such identity claims are true.

Now maybe you don't think it matters, and that we should use preferred pronouns regardless. But at that point you are saying that people should lie for the sake of politeness. The request isn't just "Please don't say that"; it's "Please say this other thing even if you don't believe it's true".

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