ICQ launched a year before AIM. And the implication of choosing your own pronouns being a "fad" just feels like casual transphobia.
Personally, I'm not sure it's a fad, and I still see it plenty in the wild.
Trans people are fucking badass. We’re damned lucky to have trans people.
I'm all for the rights of trans people, but saying we're lucky to have trans people is not very different from saying we're lucky to have depressed or bipolar people. Perhaps we're also lucky to have quadriplegic people?
(And yeah, obviously not all transgender people suffer from gender dysphoria)
I’m curious, why do you feel the need to hurt marginalized people? What do you gain?
>Did you actually just compare being transgendered to suffering from a spinal cord injury??
Both gender dysphoria and spinal cord injuries tend to be severely debilitating.
We're not lucky to have transgender people. Luck would be nobody suffering from gender dysphoria. The people who end up needing to correct their gender are absolutely not lucky. Why do you think their misfortune makes us lucky?
I'm all for trans rights, consequently I'm also disgusted by you making light of the suffering implied by gender dysphoria.
It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity. Which is fine, but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.
I've gone my entire life without be confused for a woman. So I would say that constitutes a good deal of empirical evidence.
>It seems like you view this as a political partisan issue and it's an important part of your identity.
Being a man is part of my identity, but I went my entire life without "being a man" being a political partisan issue. I didn't make this a partisan issue, a fringe group of leftist have. And if any part of this is "part of my identity" is that I have no desire to bend to some fringe activist groups demanding compliance for their latest "current thing".
>but it's not the logically-obvious thing you are claiming.
It's logically obvious to everyone who isn't on the fringe left. Is water wet?
Either trans people pass, in which case they, by definition, aren't singled out, or they don't pass in which case regardless of what's in your Twitter bio they will still be singled out. I heard about a situation where five or six women stood up to speak and said their pronouns and then a trans person stood up and shared theirs. The trans person said it felt awkward - like every person began by calling attention to the fact that some pronouns are obvious and others aren't.
To me it seems much more like signalling. In 99+% of instances I can guess the appropriate pronouns. When I can't then it makes sense to state them.
It also tends to then extend to things like pretending there are no sex differences and that everything is socially constructed (which I think is nonsense). I used to think this was a strawman, but the Lia Thomas story shows it isn’t imo: https://overcast.fm/+vpWbPtN0o
This is obviously a third rail internet topic and people can do what they like, but I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.
Only a small minority of people believe that.
> I won’t put pronouns in my bio and I won’t submit to pressure to do so in order to pass some sort of political morality test.
Literally no one is trying to force you to do that.
Not OP, but I had to do a conference talk on some or other live-stream platform and pronouns were 100% required for all speakers.
This is societal level, passive or "mild" bullying that the feminists have been complaining as a symptom of patriarchy for many years, yet here we are, reverse perpetuating things that we will most likely be judged on in coming generations.
I’m not sure how small it is and I don’t want to enable it.
There are people forcing/pressuring participation in the public display of pronouns/say your pronouns thing (you may just live somewhere insulated from it).
I’ve had it happen in Silicon Valley interviews and I know some groups at Stanford require it.