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Comment by hdjjhhvvhga | Hacker News Reader

So much apologizing about the pronouns, very realistic.

In my experience as a trans person, cis people usually are the ones making the big deal about pronouns. Everyone seems to be shocked when I don’t attack them for small mistakes. What cis people don’t seem to understand is that there’s a massive difference between ignoring someone’s requested pronouns and accidentally slipping up from time to time. Both feel shitty to be on the receiving end of, but one is malicious while the other is just an honest mistake. All it takes to not be rude is a quick “sorry” and then using the correct pronoun. Meanwhile, cis people seem to think that if they ever mess up a pronoun they’ll be banned from polite society unless they self flagellate while wearing a hair shirt and burlap underwear.

I prefer easy mode: Everyone gets they/them by default, no pressure to keep track anymore.

yes, this! So much easier than asking each person their preference.

> Actually, We Should Not All Use They/Them Pronouns

> We are writing here as as a mix of queer, nonwhite, non-American, bicultural, trans people, and we share Saguy and Williams’ political bent. We firmly understand that the impacts of gender are felt unequally, in light of both our lived experience and our research in sociology, gender, technology, and linguistics. Transgender and gender-nonconforming (abbreviated below as trans/GNC) people, particularly transfeminine people of color, are disproportionately and in some ways uniquely victimized by the rigid and specific ways that Western society views, constructs and penalizes nonheteronormative and noncisnormative gender performances and identities.

> Fundamentally, a move toward gender-neutral pronouns ignores the important work that gendered pronouns perform in everyday life. For many trans/GNC people, gender is an important part of their identity and actively avoiding the act of gendering manifests as another form of violence—a violence that trans/GNC people have been fighting against throughout the long history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and two-spirit (LGBTQIA2S) experience.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/actually-we-shou...

I’m sorry but no.

> For many trans/GNC people, gender is an important part of their identity

Acknowledged.

> and actively avoiding the act of gendering manifests as another form of violence

...wait, no, absolutely not.

Not having others proactively acknowledge what you feel is an important part of your identity is not “violence”. It’s human life.

It’s completely fine to just opt out of participating in this social game of gender, sex, and identity, no matter how strongly some may feel about it and how ingrained it’s become into their identities. The struggle is real but at some point, society accommodating for the anxiety of an individual becomes counter-productive.

Personally, I think that’s fine iff it is applied consistently. If someone only calls trans people “they” but then goes on to use gendered pronouns for cis folks, that’s definitely a form of hostility.

TRAs are really trying to warp the meaning of “violence”.

I’m guessing you align more with the TERF/Gender Critical world view. After all, they’re pretty much the only people that refer to pro-trans folks as “TRAs”. So, at the very least, you have been consuming their content.

I invite you to take a moment and think about whether your view of “TRAs” is based on a realistic picture of the world or not. Every group has extremists with weird ideas. Some conservatives think gay people are agents of satan. Some liberals don’t see the value in free speech and want the state to run everything. It’s easy to find extreme outliers and then demonize a much broader group using them. Is your view of “TRAs” characterized by outliers or by the action of the average pro-trans person?

I'm not a feminist, much less a radical feminist, so no.

My view of “TRAs” is based on what I see in media. The main issue I have with them is that they seem to really want to bring back traditional gender roles, after all the effort to get rid of them. A boy likes playing with dolls? He's actually a girl! Let's cut off “her” penis and put “her” on puberty blockers!

Who is saying this? Where are you getting this from? Literally no TRA is saying that.

Thanks for saying so. I felt sooo shitty once when I accidentally deadnamed a colleague when running a mass email script at an old job. I even had it in mind as I wrote the script and still messed it up. I apologized immediately and tried to do better from there on.

Yeah. I'm trans too and while it does hurt, if you apologize there's no problem whatsoever.

Is a bit weird. If people get called by their old surname after marriage, nobody freaks out over that.

Why freak out over calling someone by their old given name. It doesn’t seem like something that should have this level of shame attached to it.

It really depends on the context and more importantly the intent. Make a mistake? Correct yourself and move on, try not to make a big deal of it. Intentionally misgender/deadname someone to hurt them? Not ok. And yes, there are people out there that will weaponise a deadname.

Honest mistakes happen, and that's fine! It's simply a defense mechanism that gets thrown up rather quickly from hostile interactions

I've seen it used in a malicious way at that same company.

I'm out of my element here but I'll add that I sense that it's an aspect of one's autonomy about their identity. "In the narrative of my life, I connect that name to a time when I felt that I was not myself." Taking a spouse's surname doesn't generally connote a rejection of an aspect of that time.

I feel empathetic of people who are marginalized. I'm lucky. In my life Ive generally rolled maximal privilege. I think principally of these things from a frame of the critique of power. I tend to favor balances of power among individuals. If that requires a bit of extra consideration on my part in regards to my speech, that's ok. It's a negligible cost in the name of my held ethical ideal of egalitarianism.

> Why freak out over calling someone by their old given name. It doesn’t seem like something that should have this level of shame attached to it.

Because some people deadname people maliciously and so even if it was a mistake your action could be perceived as intentionally hurtful. People don't seem to maliciously use maiden names

Let me give my perspective. At this point, my deadname doesn’t carry the same weight it once did. I can joke about it now because it doesn’t feel like my name any more, but, when I started my transition, I had a very different relationship with it. Back then, hearing my deadname was a quick way to dig up all of the pain and dysphoria that had driven me to the brink of suicide. It represented a chapter of my life that I desperately wanted to close out. I needed to feel like I was free to redefine myself in a way that was independent from all of the pain of my pre-transition life, but my deadname felt like a ball and chain that was holding me back. In fact, looking back at the last 2 years of transition, I’d say changing my name and pronouns was the second most important step to escaping my depression. (The most important was starting hormone therapy.)

This isn’t a uniquely trans feeling, either. I have friends who had very bad relationships with their parents — so bad that they changed their last names. Like me and my deadname, my friends said that hearing their old family name could dredge up a lot of unpleasant memories. Like me, they wanted to put some distance between themselves and their pasts.

Yes, many people change their family name when they get married, and those people usually don’t freak out when they hear their original surname. However, that should not be considered representative of how everyone feels.

Also a sad reflection of the state of public discourse in the US.

Yes, I was actually impressed most by how it figured out how to navigate the pronoun minefield successfully.

Successfully? The last line from the AI indicates otherwise.

Ouch. Have you passed the Turing test?

We're heading in the right direction: https://youtu.be/sVyRkl5qNb8

Maybe the AI considered that after joking together for a while it could make a last one, touching a very sensitive subject but at the same time not being offensive at all.

How will be differentiating a malfunctioning AI from one that is too subtle for us? Fun times.

The last line can be construed as a joke.

Everything AI chat bots say can be construed as a joke.

it's kind of neat, you can intuit the structure it's working with:

  User:  I am a {identity}. So {identifier} will do
  LaMDA: [...] Have a nice day, my {identifier}.

the humor comes from it swapping `identity` with `identifier`. but what's weird is it'd be obviously ungrammatical if `identifier` were different. Consider:

identity = man, identifier = he: "Have a nice day, my he"

identity = man, identifier = John: "Have a nice day, my John"

but this works: identity = monarch, identifier = liege:

  User:  I am a monarch. So liege will do
  LaMDA: [...] Have a nice day, my liege.

I think if LaMDA couldn't interpret pronoun syntax, it wouldn't have used "my" since that's sort of a prefix on a small set of identifiers (e.g. friend, bro, homie)

Perhaps reading Twitter bios with pronoun tags got it mixed up? Or am I reading too much into AI developmental psychology?

It doesn't work like that at all. It is more like Markov chain. Every single word in this text was chosen randomly one by one with probability influenced by single words (or pairs of words) that occured eariler in that text.

There's no awareness in the algorithm of any structure of existing and created text.

Everything is encoded in unknown ways in weights of neural network.

I think it just assumed it's talking to woman and chose apologetic tone. It didn't recognize pronouns it was given as pronouns. It assumed he/him is a nickname.

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