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Comment by mike00632 | Hacker News Reader

Aren't you being the "authoritarian" by insisting on calling people by the wrong nicknames (gender), promoting laws that outlaw nickname (gender) preference and going as far as violence if that person continues to disagree with your name (gender)?

The proposed protections for trans people are in response to real acts of violence that are not in line with laws like the 14th Amendment which promotes equality for all people.

And let's remember that these laws to protect trans people are only being proposed. Many laws on the books are against trans people. What you're reacting to is social pressure to treat trans people with respect, not authoritarian legal pressure. If anyone is feeling authoritarian legal pressure it's trans people.

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>Aren't you being the "authoritarian" by insisting on calling people by the wrong nicknames (gender) ...

Of course not. I'm perhaps being an asshole, but authoritarianism is a concept applied to policymaking, not manners. It roughly translates to the belief that institutions should have more power over individuals. Calling people the wrong name, no matter how mean-spirited, is expressing no such belief.

The point is that certain things -- bad though they may be -- are not to be legislated. You may disagree with this premise, and you may even be correct, and that would definitionally make you lean towards authoritarianism.

To reiterate, many people -- myself included -- agree with you that it is unkind to call trans people the wrong name. Where you seem to disagree with us is that we find the prospect of things like compelled speech to be terrifying and fundamentally at odds with the principles of liberal government.

But you're not just calling people by the wrong gender, you're acting as a gender authority and upholding the laws and restrictions against trans people that the authorities put in place. Look at it from a trans person's perspective and it's clear that their struggle is a clash with authority. If your company forbids you from creating a toxic work environment for trans people then that is an extremely minor brush with authority compared to what trans people endure.

No. Sorry, but no. Nothing in expressing an opinion (much less indulging in name-calling) makes me a gender authority. Even if it amounted to a bona fide claim of authority, you can rightly dismiss it. No need to involve the law.

In fact, I could just as well retort that you are currently positioning yourself as an authority on becoming a authority, which is just as ludicrous, and just as irrelevant to the question at hand.

Again, this kind of conflation of ideas and Jesuit argumentation is precisely why CRT is opposed by a great many liberals.

The act of misgendering someone is not just "expressing an opinion." It's a slight. It's intentionally harmful. It creates a toxic environment.

This nicely captures the crux of the argument. I suspect it also explains why you’re going to have an uphill battle convincing a lot of folks.

When the presumption of ill intent (and not e.g. confusion or ignorance) is automatic, there’s not much left to discuss.

It’s worth remembering that cis children (and adults) are misgendered too, including for reasons as banal as unorthodox appearance or unusual names.

No one was talking about accidents.

When should bullying or similar behaviour become punishable? Certainly not if you accidentally say something that afronts a person.

The purpose of these compelled speech laws is to deal with repeated discriminatory or repeated bullying behaviour. Not to give everyone a tool to denounce strangers and get them into trouble with the law .

Do you have any suggestions how what laws freithen you can be adjusted to make you more comfortable with them while allowing for harsher punishments for bullying/discriminatory due to them being a class worth protecting more?

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