However I'm very nervous at some of the Orwellian redefinitions of words like hatred, racism, sexism, white supremacy and so forth.
Sometimes when you scratch under the surface of an accusation, you get a string. If you tug the string, it turns into a complex worldview, and it turns out the thing is a straw man used against political opponents. One red flag for this is when someone starts by saying, "So, you're really saying..." or, "The logical conclusion of your argument is..."
I was told recently that Louis CK's joke (recent underground taping that ended up on YouTube) was transphobic. I then listened to the joke and didn't come to that conclusion. Who's correct?
I read on HN someone coming out supporting law enforcement in the US. Someone responded that that made them racist, due to the history and the logic of institutional racism.
Be careful when you hear accusations.
I usually see “hate” used very loosely here, when the reality is much more nuanced, and mischaracterizing it as trans hate (or hate in general, for whatever the issue might be) is contributing to the problem.
I understand the former (calling a cis woman a man and insisting on referring to her as he pronouns) to be incredibly rude. But the idea of calling a trans woman a woman is a political move?
It’s possible for someone to disagree that a man is a woman without hating them for thinking they are a woman. It’s also possible for them to be sensitive about how they express that without unnecessarily harassing or harming the other person. And it goes both ways. The degree to which others, particularly those with incompatible views, are willing to modify their own life in order to accommodate yours, is going to vary greatly. Figuring out where to compromise is the difficult part.
Do you think it’s disrespectful for someone to eat a big juicy steak at work while sitting right next to a vegan animal rights activist who sincerely feels anguish at the thought of us factory farming and slaughtering animals for food?
I think that issue is a lot simpler than some of these other issues, and yet I doubt that polite society can even agree on that.
Similarly, what happens if you believe espousing homosexuality as normal is hateful? What is the sensitive, non-harmful manner to ask your co worker to never bring up his husband, ever, in the workplace?
I'm not asking meanly, I genuinely don't understand.
Can trans women fight biological women in MMA? Can they compete in tennis? If you think they shouldn’t, is that hate and misgendering? Who is allowed to apply for scholarships reserved for women? Do trans women get lower insurance rates? Should we even be discriminating on scholarships and insurance rates to begin with? Is it reasonable to expect someone to use other pronouns that didn’t previously exist in English simply because someone requests it? Is a man allowed in womens change rooms because he puts on high heels but otherwise has taken no steps to transition his/her/their identity, or is there some arbitrary level of transitioning that counts? Who decides that? Everybody seems to have strong opinions on a lot of these issues and nobody is going to agree anytime soon. Yes, sometimes it’s hate, but it doesn’t take an ounce of hate for two individuals to be radically opposed on how this is supposed to work.
As long as you don’t define what you mean with “trans hate”, there’s no way for an outsider to judge if your “conservative” colleague held a reasonable position or not.
Constantly defining opposing views as “hate” is IMO one of the most effective ways you can kill reasonable discourse and increase polarisation.
And if “everything” is “hate”, clearly “hate” is no big deal, so why should we care?
Maybe what you encountered were not actually “hate”, but something we back in the days used to call “disagreement”?
It’s a pretty normal thing.
If you say "taxes are theft" I may disagree with your viewpoint, but I'm not personally attacked by it. If your viewpoint is a challenge to their personal identity, you should probably keep that to yourself.
Edit: just as a final thought, I've been on both sides of this, I've been silenced and I've silenced other people and honestly they both suck. I hold this view with the believe that some middle ground of things not being okay is the only one that works. If someone thinks that a free for all of ideas works well they are welcome to try it on their social media and at their company and I could be convinced if I could see it work at scale. It's really a practical view more than a philosophical one
That sounds like a rather discriminating and polarising policy.
And are we allowed to discuss that (clearly leftist) policy?
Others believe this is hatred.
Google provides onsite gyms at many locations, which have change rooms. In this case, that discussion will likely have to take place at work.
“Don’t ask don’t tell” is a tempting policy, but that’s how you end up surrounded by TERFs when something inadvertently outs you.
This is because, what you may be describing as "trans hate" may simply be someone that simply doesn't accept the non scientifically proven theory of gender fluidity. And may be people that simply are stating that transgenderism should be approached and supported like other cases of body dysphoria.
Being offended and upset is a personal problem, not a public one. Requiring colleagues to bend over backwards to accommodate your needs should be a matter of politeness, not company policy.
Good thing, then that the debate is about third person pronouns, which are used to talk about someone, not with them.
I have literally never seen anybody use customized second person pronouns (although of course honorifics are traditional — try refusing to address a judge in court as "your honor" because you don't want to remember their honorific).