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Comment by pikma | Hacker News Reader

Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone? I see this expression often, but I'm genuinely puzzled by what it means in practice.

I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that. It's about people who are tolerant of others and in general try to be nice people, but just disagree about certain things - for example, how criminal transgenders should be incarcerated, or whether affirmative action is a good way to help disadvantaged people.

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>I agree with you that "purposely misgendering one's colleagues" should lead to firing, but I think this article isn't about that.

I do think the article is about that. I think it was purposefully left vague so he could take advantage of people giving the benefit of the doubt. I don't think people's pronouns should be up for debate, and I believe PG does.

This is the problem of this “free speech”. They think it is “free speechl to call one “he” even if that one prefers being called “she”.

Anyway, maybe GP is talking about other “heresies”.

> Can you explain what it means to "deny the existence" of someone?

Here's an example:

"There's no such thing as a trans person. Trans is not a real thing, it's a mental illness and a delusion that needs to be cured. "

If you hear that and you are trans, then you are bound to feel like someone is denying you actually exist. Its a strange feeling that someone whose existence has always been validated by society cannot really relate to. I imagine that's why you are puzzled by its meaning.

I mean that hypothetical argument doesn't really make sense. Are mental illnesses not real ? And shouldn't we try to cure these people, in the most extreme cases by sex change surgery + hormone therapy ? (Or what kind of cure would that be ?)

(Is it more about denying trans people's suffering perhaps ?)

I guess that this dismissal of mental illness (and here also of trans people) also comes from equating "anormal" with "bad". At least I can see where the conservatives are coming from with this, but I have much more trouble to understand it when progressives fall into this trap !

Just replace trans with gay. We've been through this whole thing before, and the only reason we are having this debate about trans people at all is because conservatives have so thoroughly lost the culture debate over gay rights, yet the animus that motivated the debate persists.

But back then we heard all the same things. "Oh, we can't have gay men teaching young boys because they are sexual predators and they are trying to recruit our young children to be gay." Or that "being gay is a mental disorder that needs to be cleansed through re-education".

It's just striking to me how similar the arguments are, right down to the legislating intimate space use like bathrooms and locker rooms, and the moral panic over children (who are yet again being used as moral shields). It used to be you couldn't even be gay in the military. Now they let gays in and it turned out to be not a big deal at all. But without missing a beat they've recycled the same baseless arguments but crossed out "gay" and filled in "trans", seemingly without any recognition or reflection about how badly their anti-gay arguments aged.

Yeah, that's kind of what I thought...

Yet the situation is radically different, since trans, in addition to having "social issues", also have "body issues" ?

(Then there's also the situation with (real) pedophiles, which, unlike for gays, we have decided to keep in the mental illness category - and understandably so, considering the danger for children.)

Interesting - I would never knowingly refer to someone by pronouns other than those which correspond with their birth sex, it would violate my conscience to do so. Obviously not a majority position in SV but also not an extremely rare position to hold in the world more largely. I suppose that means you would fire me and others of the same opinion if you had the chance.

I don't know whether this is the kind of example Graham had in mind, but it does seem that the particular zeal that some have to exclude from normalcy even widely-held minority views is relatively unique to our time.

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