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Comment by BelleOfTheBall | Hacker News Reader

I'm a cis woman but any person who gets genuinely upset at people for asking to be addressed by their preferred pronouns comes off like a clown. If I change my name and ask to be addressed by my new name, anyone who wouldn't do it would be ridiculed. And yet someone changing their pronouns asking for the same is somehow too much.

You don't have to be super-woke or tolerant to simply refer to people correctly.

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yeah, the whole thing reads like clown city. "I'm way more studied on policy topics" is not exactly the sure sign of an even-handed CEO who's doing a good job at generating consensus or taking feedback. "whether differences in human sex exist at all" is what sexists say when they want to pretend they're just being reasonable, and "hey we have to fire people because they're upset about DEI, feeling disrespected in the workplace, and debates about THE FREAKING N-WORD" is just incredibly unprofessional.

not needing to have debates about the N-word has got to be the absolute definition of table stakes when it comes to competent management. this is the funniest Twitter thread I've read in ages.

edit: and this is the CEO's pitch for RECRUITING! this is clown shit on the level of Theranos, or when Coinbase was handling all its financial transactions through Mongo.

There is a slight difference though. In the pronoun case the asker is implicitly demanding that norms change on their behalf. The changing (or fighting the change) of those norms is an explicitly political act.

Similarly, my wife not taking my name upon our marriage was an implicit political act and my mom going by Ms. was as well.

At different points in time either of those acts could have brought ridicule to my wife and mother so that’s not a terribly good standard.

Personally, I view addressing people as they want to be simply polite but let’s not pretend that our view of “correct” isn’t a political act that is potentially outside the current norms.

I think it’s made to be political but I think the line of what is or isn’t political and avoiding it is itself a political behavior by its nature. It’s inherently political to say one name change is political because “I will go by Jacob instead of Jessica”, and another name change isn’t political because of “only my dad calls me David, I go by Dave”.

I go by Muhammad Ali because I don’t acknowledge my slave name and I call him Cassius Clay because his momma did are both political.

It turns out the political impact of an action is derived from its deviance from acceptable norms or its reaction.

I don’t understand your point. I’m merely pointing out that calling something political is itself a political behavior.

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