Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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It’s not. The parent is leaving out basically all the context so that this kind of thing sounds inherently unreasonable.

Bailey: I’m avoiding using someone’s preferred pronouns because I don’t respect their gender identity.

Motte: “What so using someone’s name is offensive now?”

From what they did say I think it’s reasonably safe to assume that the person they we’re talking about was non-binary, agender, and went by they/them but it really doesn’t matter.

A very common experience that trans people face is people unnaturally avoiding the use of their pronouns and either structuring sentences awkwardly or by using their name all the time. The literal act of using someone’s name isn’t offensive but when it’s done because you’re avoiding using their pronouns then it’s rude. And it’s super obvious when people do it which makes everyone feel uncomfortable.

Now because trans people deal with this all the time it’s possible that they were more sensitive to it than normal and overreacted but given the parent took offense to being called out and they used dismissive scare quotes to describe the person’s gender identity rather than it being a two second “oh my bad” thing I think suggests not.

In my case - the downside to misgendering someone is extremely high. If my work day was to skip work and go hiking, or go into work and misgender someone, the latter has much higher downside consequences in some areas.

The other issue, I've had preferred pronouns change. I'm not sure if that has settled down, but there was a lot of new language / wording constantly churning. There was a him that was a her, but then I found out they preferred they instead of her - so I'd been mis-pronouning them even though I wasn't misgendering them.

Given the amount of risk involved in getting this stuff wrong, it really is safer just to use names.

If you use names, you need to use them for everyone. This can get complicated for some folks because names like Ted, Bob, Sue, Joe etc may be more familiar from a pronunciation standpoint for a white person for example, but then that person avoids pronouncing Khamala or Nkosazana because they are uneasy with how to pronounce the name. That becomes obvious pretty quickly.

Managers also have had some awkward situations correcting minority employees use of terms if the manager is of a different background, ie, someone saying latino community (who is themselves latino), and manager has to correct them that it is latinx not latino.

Here's an example of a fairly natural bit of text referring to somebody who uses he/him:

> Kerrick's wife called; he isn't going to make it today because he's sick. We're with him in spirit.

Here's an example of unnaturally replacing all pronouns with somebody's name, which reads quite awkwardly:

> Kerrick's wife called; Kerrick isn't going to make it today because Kerrick is sick. We're with Kerrick in spirit.

It is awkward, no question.

But I’m not the one trying to redefine reality.

I think you’re thinking about this too mechanically. Context and intent matter here. It’s not at all about the literal act.

Using someone’s name instead of their pronouns isn’t offensive and vice versa. The thing that’s invalidating [1] is when someone goes out of their way to not use your preferred name or pronouns when that someone would have called you by your name or used your pronouns if you were cis. That kind of thing is noticed by people who are trans and feels supper shitty.

So yeah anyone who tries to make a rule saying “you must always use pronouns after using their name in a sentence” or something like that is being ridiculous and also missing the point.

[1] I don’t think offended really makes sense in this situation because that’s not really the emotion at play.

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