It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community. Pick you battles please, we're losing good things because of this silly conflict.
The entire point of a pronoun is to convey my perceived relation to the noun. We do it all the time with possessives and formalities; if gender is truly a fluid, to-be-perceived, non-biological construct, then why shouldn't we treat it the same way?
That makes me think that it's not really about pronouns, it's about people using bad-faith misinterpretation and unjustified accusations to hold a witch-hunt. Pronouns are just the purported subject.
But I'm new to the whole kerfuffle, so I may be missing something.
They also did this at 6 pm on a Friday. She's Jewish.
In fairness, there really isn't a good time to fire someone. I would normally think that the end of the work week is one of the least bad times to fire someone.
Edit: Also, even if that's the best time, you should ensure you make personal contact, and not just do the equivalent of a ghosting.
(Honesty question. I'm curious what the connection is, and that's the best I can think of.)
People that think like this baffle me
When I refer to people online, I rarely use 'pronouns'. IMO in online communication, it's most clear/neutral to just refer to people by their name or username, e.g. if I'm referring to you I might just say @beerandt. I can't imagine how that could be seen as offensive in any way
I can see a case where trolls could abuse it, but that shouldn't preclude well-intentioned use.
If it were a common expression of homophobia to to refer to gay people's husbands/wives/boyfriends/girlfriends as their "roommate", SE made a rule against doing that, and a moderator asked if it would be fine if they always referred to the partners by their full names ... I wouldn't really get the impression that the moderator is trying to follow the spirit of the CoC.
Maybe not every user needs to be on board with the spirit of the CoC, but the moderators that are responsible for enforcing it probably should be.
This could have been a complete non-issue if there hadn't been so much stubborn hate and disrespect towards transgender and non-binary people. A single case of misgendering would be easy to take as an honest mistake if it wasn't against a context of decades of hate and denial of their identity. So use of pronouns seems to have become the main signifier of whether they're getting the respect they deserve.
That doesn't make one particular view on the use of pronouns right or wrong, but it does make it complex and laden with a lot of baggage that not everybody is aware of.
Personally, I always try to draw the line from a natural rights approach. If one "right" requires the infringement of the rights of someone else, then it's not really a natural right. If your personal belief requires me to have a certain personal belief, it's not a natural-right, it's a form of religious jihad.
People need to realize that if you aren't "normal" in some way (whether it's a personality quirk, weird hobby, odd fetish, or disability, or whatever) that life isn't guaranteed to be easy, and you're going to need to take certain conversations or commentary with a thick skin. (I know "normal" can be a no-no in this topic, but I mean in general terms, which I think is still appropriate for this context.)
And the "coerced" or "forced speech" approach really doesn't make sense in practice if we're strictly looking at self-identity. If it were strictly about self-identity, we'd still say pro-life and pro-choice, instead of pro-woman and anti-abortion. "Racist" would basically be off limits except for the very small number of people that openly embrace it as a badge. Making any assumption about anyone's outward appearance (or any assumption about the underlying motive of anyone's actions) could land you in trouble with the thought police.
People say 1984 and BNW, but I think the whole thing is...it's very Victorian- just with a different set of taboos and standards. Although with the direction me-too is headed, with people being offended (or even feeling harassed or assaulted) just by being asked-out in (what they perceive to be) an offensive manor, we've almost come full circle.
So yeah, we need some balance. You can't expect to never ever get offended, but at the same time, we should be trying to accept people who are different.
The comparison with racists doesn't quite work, as they're defined specifically by not accepting people who are different in a specific way. Of course they'd like to see that normalised, but at the same time they oppose the normalisation of others who are not hurting anyone in any way, and that's something that needs to be called out. But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone. And I think the reason they overreact is because they get hurt so much. I think you and I would react much the same way if we were constantly under attack merely for being ourselves.
>And when you get it wrong, correct yourself.
This is where I strongly disagree. At most, the compromise is to keep it ambiguous. Otherwise you're putting your personal belief system over mine, and expecting me to modify my outward behavior to accommodate your beliefs (and by defying my own).
Whereas my beliefs would require no outward change in behavior on your part, let alone one that you might find internally immoral. You would just have to be tolerant.
Re: the racist thing. The technical definition doesn't fit the applied use of the term. Most people the left labels racist are at most apathetic, if you leave them out of it. And I don't mean forcing them to treat everyone equally. I mean being accused of racism if you don't actively support whatever political agenda is the flavor of the week.
It's the same forced participation that draws the comparison. And it's counter productive because it fosters resentment.
>they oppose the normalisation of others
This has become some sort of fetishisation, 99% of people being called racist want normalisation through assimilation. There's no personal grudge because a person is different. It's the special treatment being demanded that people have a problem with.
>But transgender people just want to be themselves, not hurt anyone, and not get hurt by anyone.
By demanding that others go against these same principles.
Because no one sane can keep up outside of a small personal group of friends.
I suspect that's what's going on at SO.
Google isn't turning up anything. What was the issue with Friends?
Apparently friends is problematic. Racist, homophobic, transphobic, sexist and fat'ist (Is that an 'ist?).
Disclaimer: It was written in 2009, read in context it's very clear the first interpretation is the correct one, there's an entire concept of identity that didn't exist in the public discussion when this was written.
I think it's a pretty good idea to think about how to not be a "Java programmer" or a "kitesurfer" (to pick two things that I could be identified as), since the former sets my brain up to be implicitly against, say, Kotlin or Haskell, and the latter sets my brain up to be against windsurfing. And I like all of those things too!
But certainly, there are things that are core to someone's identity, and I guess that's where each of us needs to find our own boundaries.
Identity can be a tool and a crutch. My feeling (as someone who identifies as human and has been hanging out/coping with the world for 3-4 decades -- a feeling, informed by a lifetime of good and bad situations) is that identity politics hurts more the identity-assertion people; the opposite faction is merely annoyed.
This is pretty common amongst business leaders; comparing their statements against their serious work quickly shows that it's not all so warm-and-fuzzy.
Virtue signaling may be its own reward to the masses, but it serves a real function for the well-to-do in preventing or at least confusing a Marie Antoinette effect. If there's any "let them eat cake" to be found, they can point to an abundance of more recent "truth to power" statements that will create enough ambiguity to tamp down the fervor of the mob, if and/or when it comes to that.
Furthermore, some people would say that everyone staying in the closet is bad advice for the gay community overall, as it means the average person will only hear about the 1% of gay people who are arrested for sex crimes, not the 99% of gay people who are perfectly nice people living normal lives and minding their own business, or the great scientists and inventors and authors who happened to be gay.
This is, as I understand it, an area of substantial strength of feeling in the gay community - it's part of what underlies concepts like 'gay pride' and the famous chant "we're here, we're queer, we're not going to disappear".
And although I've used gay men in the example above, it applies to any minority group - although with different details, I've never seen a female programmers' pride march!
But here's the nub: the mental illness belongs to some contexts (therapist, friends, intimate relationship) and not others (trying to sell a project to a client).
The part about preferred pronouns feels a little too abstract and counterproductive. This is a personal feeling, coming from a personal interpretation of sources of wisdom. And it's not because it makes other people react in this or that way -- the point is not conquering the Other, you can't do this anyway. It's about how you set about to cope with the world and grow with it; how you deal with your own subjectivity.
Maybe I'm wrong. It's a very different minoritarian perspective.
Disclaimer: I don't have a strong opinion about the specifics of the stackexchange case. Without knowing all of the details, it seems the actions and new policy was a bit extreme and will do more harm than good.
> It's incredible that pronouns can bring down an entire community.
This is obviously talking about the pronouns that transgender folks identify as. Where is the disconnect?
That's not necessarily saying people shouldn't be trans. The charitable reading [aside below] is that it could be saying that if they're trans, they should still expect to be disrespected and we should be fine with that.
I think that there are respectful ways to make that point. What are the exact limits to how much respect we should be expected to extend to people who defy our preconceptions of society? The line exists somewhere. But that kind of conversation should be approached with care and clarity. To just hint at that point doesn't imply a nuanced view, but implies a general disrespect to a lot of the hard-won acceptance of LGBT people.
Aside: I don't think I'm wrong calling it a charitable reading. Charity doesn't mean I'm going to think endlessly until I find a non-offensive thing it could mean; I'm still going to weight my reading by how I expect most people to have read it. Ultimately I'm publicly arguing against what other people are reading, not the intention that exists privately in the writer's mind. Even if the author just happened to think now was a good time to remind people they should avoid Ruby vs Python holy wars, it's little use for me to read it as that and respond to that if no one else is reading it that way. If people really think the critics' reading (that the critics have explained) is so off-base, there's been plenty of time by now for them and others to elaborate on whatever the intended reading really was.
You are obscuring the details of the case to make your case and you should be ashamed.
The Opal project's little kerfuffle[0] a while back comes to mind, and the subsequent adoption by several Ruby projects of the Contributor Covenant[1] (of which, it never seems to be applied to its supporters - maybe that's just me being cynical). It convinced me that the best way to go is no code of conduct (I favour the delightfully named NCoC[2]) for most projects.
[0] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
Still, like many things, it's a choice between one bad thing and one worse thing, and these "covenants" and other well-meaning straitjackets have the same old free speech arguments applicable to them - it's not nice to hear people be nasty but it's worse to have some jumped up little authoritarians choose how us plebs should be "nice" while they get free reign to be horrible.
I wonder, has Torvalds ever acted like that to people's faces?
So against that background, it's entirely understandable that they react more emotionally also to accidental mistakes. That doesn't mean overreaction is a good idea, but it's a backlash against a long history of having their identity denied. If we don't like the backlash, maybe we should work harder to address the original hatred that it's reacting to.
With European names, I also saw plenty of times when wrong genders were assumed, but those things shouldn't be taken as malice. It would be weird for an adult to use that a a means for insult, so why not assume it's an honest mistake?
The same insult doesn't really work on men in that same setting, since we're not really a minority. So we're more armed against someone calling us "she".
But I can imagine it's hard to have to justify yourself every time for being a woman. Yeah that sucks, a lot of jerks out there and not much to do about it.
I stand corrected.
I'm male, and sometimes people outside my native country misread my name and read it as the feminine version of it. I've answered phone calls and gone to appointments where people were actually expecting a woman, not a fully grown man. That's people being silly, not rejecting my identity.
But I don't want any part in this discussion, like the OP in the article, I'll keep using "they" to refer to people on the internet.
[1] https://design-system.service.gov.uk/patterns/gender-or-sex/
Though, as you determined singular "they" is a simple enough implementation without needing a database lookup and keeping a pronoun database on hand.
[ETA: It's a small shame this particular DB is AGPL, keeping it from being maximally reuseful as a shareable standard library. Though data is not code and AGPL may not technically apply, but there's no separate data license such as a CC license mentioned in the repo, so one must assume AGPL-like conditions.]
more like people cant use Bob in an example and say He because "what if Bob is trans" comes up. cant even say "they" to be neutral because apparently "singular they" is offensive.
this is dumb. its not a real problem for the site. the rest of us dont need to deal with all that because some people have nothing better to do.
Everyone shouldn’t have to adapt to appease the 0.0001% hyper-sensitive. That’s not a reasonable proposition.
This isn't about singling anybody out with pronouns.
For those of us not quite up to date on social movements, and for slow-moving organizations, this is obviously tricky to navigate. My workplace is just starting to encourage everyone to state their "preferred pronouns" prominently when introducing themselves and on all correspondence (e.g. in email signatures), and to avoid gendered pronouns when possible in many situations or at least use "singular they" (e.g. in abstract examples or documentation). Last week I thought that was quite progressive. This week I have learned that "preferred pronouns" is no longer an acceptable phrase, that "singular they" is offensive to some, that avoiding pronouns itself is problematic (at least in SE's CoC, apparently), and that asking someone to give pronouns is problematic and hurtful to some. I don't know where that leaves me or my workplace.
theyre literally making EVERYONE work harder and waste time to not offend a single person who probably doesnt even agree with these rules
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
I thought it was quite interesting.
And if that's the thing you intend to be fighting, then yes, you've got a fight. But this shouldn't be a fight. Respecting people for their differences should be a normal part of being a decent person.
i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet. is that what you want? or should my offense be my own problem? ill let you figure out which one is better
In this context, intentionally denying people their identity. Those bathroom bills that force people to use the wrong bathroom, for example. But anyone who insists on calling a transgender woman "he" or a transgender man "she", even after having been corrected, is intentionally hurting them. It's intentionally being an asshole to someone.
> "you cant just make up rules."
We can do. Hopefully after some careful deliberation, or you end up with stupid rules like those bathroom bills, but yes, rules get made all the time.
That doesn't mean we should legislate everything. We can't and shouldn't. But what should and shouldn't get legislated, or captured in less formal community rules, is an ongoing discussion.
> "and are you seriously ignoring all the people who do get fired and jailed? lol wait till it happens to you"
I'm not. Lots of people are indeed getting fired and jailed for being LBGTQ, belonging to the wrong minority, etc. But nobody is getting fired or jailed for belonging to a demographic that is 99.9% of the population.
> "i find your comment offensive so youre banned for life from the internet."
There's a massive difference between accidentally offending someone, and going out of your way to offend. I'm addressing the latter. If we manage to address that, it becomes easier to assume that the offenses we do experience were not intentional.
...and yet the community that supports them vehemently punishes anyone that strays from their constantly changing and often contradictory directives.
Are any views invalid?
There was a discussion a few days ago about how a few people say that the terms "assigned male/female at birth" should apply only to intersex people and the trans community appropriated them. But if you look into it, you find that the trans community invented those terms, and the people who originated the claim are outspoken transphobes who want to invalidate trans people in any way they can. And there's probably some well-meaning people who were taken by those assholes, unfortunately. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139083
At the end of the day, all you can do is respect people's individual wishes when they express them, and when they don't, go with the consensus and try to extend the benefit of the doubt. Someone who's been hassled and harassed their whole life is gonna be high-strung about some things; you don't need to agree with them, but give them a little slack when you can.
Edit: I'm curious what their rationale for asking people not to state their pronouns was. I can't think of any way that could benefit anyone. Do you recall what they said exactly?
its only offensive if you listen to the 1 in a million people who want to make a big deal and control everyone elses speech
I think the point was that 'singular they is offensive' only when people have specifically asked for certain pronouns (ie you're blatantly disregarding people's requests)?
im not going to write bob and alice and then worry about "well what if these fake people in this example i made up are actually trans" lol give me a break.
Same as an author who is writing a novel, is free to invent characters and assign gender, sexual orientation, and any other character traits they want.
It's your story, they are your characters. You decide if it's a he, she, xe, or whatever.
and if anyone steps out of line against the insane number of rules about who you might slightly offend then you get mobbed and "cancelled" by being called a racist/sexist/bigot/transphobe/nazi and whatever cool word is in use until you lose your job and lifestyle and are permanently branded a terrible person