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Comment by jurassic | Hacker News Reader

The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far.

People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. People are so far up their own asses on victimhood culture that the people of high education and privilege driving these initiatives are looking for literally any reason to feign offense on behalf of other peoples' identities and disabilities.

With the prioritization of equity also comes erasure of identity. For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech".

The recently reported bowdlerization of Roald Dahl by 'sensitivity readers' is another symptom of this illness. The whole equity language sterilization process forgets that words which are synonyms are not interchangeable because to the writer each word is chosen with intention for the flavor it provides, its connotations and rhythm, the image it creates in the mind. People should be able to communicate using whatever words they wish. Otherwise we're just deleting colors from the artists' palette.

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> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people"

Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language.

"Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out the door it goes.

There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. To the extent that it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"

Our entire group of animals is named after tits:

Mammals.

How can referring to the fact people have what our entire branch of the tree of life is named after be offensive?

Good thing tits are global but have have different names in other languages, Meisen in the case of my primary-guardian language.

...Probably better not to point that out, or next thing you know we're gonna have to rewrite damn near every textbook...

Isn’t this ongoing already?

Yeah, it's like a competition between the worst of two groups of people as to who can change them more and skew the language, or lack of it, in their ideological direction.

Incidentally not all mammals have nipples. Male kangaroos don't.

Time for some class-affirming surgery then.

> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment.

This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity.

I've been somewhat worried about there not being much of place in the world for my sons when they grow up. Now I'm imagining needing to explain to my daughter that there's no point having any sporting aspirations unless they are in a sport where biological women have an advantage.

Edit: on reflection, perhaps it was completely foreseeable. Modern feminism spent a lot of time dismantling masculinity; it makes some sense that femininity would be next against the wall.

You do realize that the terminology is meant for transmen right? It's weird you're complaining about terminology used for transmen, and then linking it to transwomen in sports.

Why it is weird? In both cases, as the GP said, the concept of womanhood is being erased.

Neither are erasing womanhood. That's like saying gay marriage is erasing hetero marriage.

I sometimes feel this is some nefarious plan to reconstruct a new masculinity. It won't be as "toxic" as the old version, but we'll be back on top.

I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are about to be sentenced to jail time.

But men are largely still men. I've never heard "penis havers", or "vertical urinators". Perhaps I would if I hung about in certain circles. No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...

> No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport.

By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]

> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...

That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.

There's just very few sports in which the male body is not at an intrinsic mechanical advantage.

When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.

This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.

But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.

> There's just very few sports in which the male body is not at an intrinsic mechanical advantage.

Yes. So it's interesting that even in something as cerebral as chess, men dominate.

One plausible explanation I've heard for this is that while men and women have the same average mental capabilities, men have a higher standard deviation than women. There there are more outliers in both directions. Champions are found at the upper extreme.

Well, there are more homeless men than homeless women.

(If that serves as an illustration of the other side of the bell curve.)

Regarding toilets, it is because women's toilets have also traditionally served as a 'safe space' (i.e. without men). It is somewhere they can go without being subject to (for example) what is colloquially termed the 'male gaze'. Hence the disquiet over trans-women using such spaces, and the lack of disquiet over the reverse.

Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.

Sporting aspirations at the elite level is generally an illusion unless the parents are also at elite level. Last time I looked at studies, the average sport is around 75-99% determined by genetics when it comes to the top elite in those sports. World champions has to first win the genetic lottery, and then do the hard work to even have a chance to win. This is why its fairly common to see top elite sport players having parents, siblings or children that is also at similar elite level.

The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.

Feminism has always been about eradicating gender roles, and that's usually fine because the gender stereotypes that existed were almost all factually incorrect. It's definitely going in directions people never expected though.

It's ironic because the entire concept of online language policing was invented by arch rivals the radical feminists in the 2010s (anyone remember donglegate?), but the pendulum has swung so far back in the other direction that now the very concept of women is being erased. Geez!

Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.

It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.

However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.

"Mail carrier" instead of postman started in the 70's. Same with "flight attendant" instead of stewardess. This has been going on a long time.

Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.

> Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.

no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.

it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.

None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.

Username checks out.

I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."

Have a look at the many names people around the world have for Germany and the Germans.

“-ess” has always meant woman.

I was kind of with you, birthing person does sound pretty obstruse. But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.

There are some uses radfems get super upset about that I find useful, though. Like "people with cervixes" if you are asking for cervical cancer screenings. Because increasingly, that affects people who do not feel spoken to if you use the word woman and this adds clarity to who the audience is.

> But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.

Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.

"What is a woman" is the rhetorical work of Matt Walsh, who describes himself as a "theocratic fascist".

The beginning of this essay explains the phrase pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMM3l156Oo

And since nobody has asked that question before that well known rhetorical work we know everyone who mentions the same question is just dog whistling a reference to it.

You left that part out.

The throughline of

>it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"

to Matt Walsh is pretty clear. The entire documentenary is based on the premise that it's now controversial to ask this, because the answer must inevitably be "adult human female". It's treated as if these are magic words that dispel gender ideology instantly. Meanwhile in reality, nobody finds this question controversial, only that Matt Walsh puports to know the one and only, extremely obvious answer. That many people disagree with.

What do you mean that nobody finds the question controversial? I remember it being a huge controversy when the US congress asked it during Kentanji Brown Jackson's interview.

You got the order of events wrong. That was after it became a dogwhistle for bioessentialism. As a consequence of Matt Walsh.

I guess if you want to be exact, I will correct to "nobody found this question controversial before it became a dogwhistle". But the question itself is still not controversial, it's all context.

So how can someone phrase the exact same question in a different way that is not a dogwhistle?

If you explain to me the purpose of the question - that not being invoking the dogwhistle - I'll let you know. Otherwise I'm not interested in playing this game with a bad faith actor.

The purpose is that in the law we have clearly determined concepts such as Women's Rights. Thus, the justice system needs to be able to determine who is or not a woman in order to do its job properly. For instance, in the UK wolf-whistling can be considered a hate-crime if and only if the receiver is a woman.

Why not just make wolf-whistling a hate crime regardless of the receiver's identity? From the responses I've gotten around here a woman is an adult. Now we're legally OK with young girls being wolf-whistled at?

Aside that we are in agreement that laws should not be gendered if we want equality (not examining whether wolf-whistling should be a hate-crime - imho it’s ridiculous it is in any context) since we live in reality and there ARE gendered laws I’ll reply to the second part of your comment.

It does exactly make the point, you are somehow trying to define what a woman is, and asking if the definition only encompasses adult human females or underage as well.

It's amazing that some are seemingly convinced a conservative man came up with a problem that feminists (so-called "radfems") have highlighted for years. Goes to show how little attention many pay to women's issues.

"What is a woman" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a legislator who refuses to acknowledge that women exist. I certainly would never vote for someone who believes that women are defined as "whatever I feel right now." I'm disappointed you think it's the people demanding acknowledgement which should be labelled "theocratic fascists" rather than the misogynists refusing to acknowledge women exist.

I didn't label anyone a theocratic fascist. That's just Matt Walsh's twitter bio. Though radfems seem not too uncomfortable with Walsh, considering JKR praised the man for his "documentary" and received little backlash from her loyal following.

Which legislator refused to acknowledge that women exist?

It absolutely does not add clarity. Enough people do not even know what a cervix is, or whether they have one, that it's an obfuscation. One which harms women disproportionately, like most other things radfems get upset about.

Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.

But... that's absolutely a thing? Is this the same selective perception that brings radfems to proclaim that trans lesbians don't date each other?

(That being said, the likelyhood of getting prostate cancer on HRT is pretty low. Not quite the level of cis men getting breast cancer, but it's down there. It's a very androgen dependent cancer.)

If it only takes a simple sentence to set you off. You should be careful how much you’re reading into peoples language. The worlds not filled with facists in disguise. Look at people that way and you’ll see it everywhere. It will drive you mad.

I would be pissed if anyone referred to my wife as some kind of breeding vessel. These DEI bureaucrats have lost their minds, and companies have lost their minds for allowing this layer to grow so large.

Wait, so you’re saying words matter and you want to language police them?

The utterly hilarious defense by the left for a movement that - above all others - is deeply patriarchal in its attempt to overwhelm and wipe out the very concept of "woman".

This is the idea behind TERFs, right? How can women have equal rights if “women” don’t even exist? I’m honestly surprised more feminists don’t have strong anti-transgender sentiment.

It seems to me that one of the issues is that the (more extreme) woke culture has put the entire burden of communication on the speakers rather than the listeners. Is not enough that you intend to offend, or that you say something that offends someone, is whether something that you say could possibly offend someone, even if you didn't have the slightest intentions. On the other say the listeners are free to interpret the message in the most uncharitable way possible, and blame you for it.

Eh, that’s just internet discourse in general. Once you put down Twitter this stops being an issue. I would love for someone to deconstruct what about social media, regardless of leaning of the platform, the people, or the subject being discussed causes these bad faith takes.

The issue is when you didn't say it on twitter, or even intend it for public consumption and it's posted as receipts on twitter as examples of your badness - often out of context. Then there are some knock on second and third order effects on your life.

It's one thing if communities on twitter would like to define their own use of the language - it's another when it's imposed on others without their consent.

Until the Twitter people are running your HR department or university or media outlet or government.

I describe these scenarios to my young children as concentric circles. One person can be acting reasonably (small circle around them) or very badly (larger circle). A person nearby can be very resilient (small circle) or fragile (larger circle). Where the circles overlap, is when there is tension and there are fights, tears or anything else that requires me to intervene.

Obviously very bad behaviour (large circle) is going to overlap with a nearby resilient child. Or a very tired and fractious child is going to sulk by their sibling doing just about anything. But the more resilient and better behaved the combinations, the better.

If the children are fighting, I've taken to just calling out "Circles!"

Unfortunately, a polarised society and social media seem to make everyone treat interaction as war, which is pretty tedious.

Pediatric Postel Principle.

Pedantic Prosaic Pediatric Postel Principle

Love that explanation. And gives motivation to reduce your circles.

I personally believe that 2 things have greatly affected P2P communications. Anonymity and attempting to hold meaningful conversation strictly through text. When we communicate with text we cut off non-verbal communications that are a major source of interpreting the intent of the speaker and the receptiveness of the listener. In-person conversations are constantly adjusting what and how things are said depending on non-verbal cues. This becomes impossible in text only communications so the words have to convey everything and word choice the dominant replacement for non-verbal cues. The fact that we are communicating primarily via text these days has spilled over into in person communication. IMHO

Not even anonymity. I've seen people posting insane shit on social networks using their real names.

But interpreting someone's words in the most uncharitable way possible is an ancient sport, intended to slight and annoy the opponent, when finding reasonable, material objections fails. It's just an ancient hold of wresting in the (verbal) mud. It sort of gives the party who successfully pulled it an upper hand.

Now that these wrestlers found out that they can persuade the public that the most uncharitable interpretation is actually harmful to some third party (nobody from the audience usually says that they personally are offended), this approach became immensely popular.

Since simple reason would usually dispel much of the effect, leaving only the small and easily correctable issue, it is common to excite a large amount of reason-eclipsing emotions over such issues, preferably the righteous rage.

But it may feel fun to express a strong and righteous emotion, especially in a crowd of other people doing the same. It does not take thinking, it does not take making a difficult decision (because everybody around can't be wrong), so it feels good. A big echo chamber like a popular Twitter thread make it feel epic in scale.

This makes that kind of righteous rage a very convenient tool of manipulation, for fun, profit, and any other purposes.

And to be clear, these uncharitable interpretations go far beyond word policing.

The one that actually annoys me the most is “analogy policing”. If I say “would you be ok if i stole your bike”. And then your response is “now you’re equating me to a bike thief!” Or “ you’re trivializing This to bike theft?!”

We can’t have discussions because every phrase is taken as a way to win an argument. IMO this is far worse than language policing as there is not even the intention of trying to protect a disadvantaged group.

It's almost as if the goal of winning an argument might contradict the goal of coming closer to truth, or to an agreement.

Much like bringing a knife to a gunfight, attempting to seek truth during a status-assertion contest is not very efficient.

It's also a losing battle and constantly moving target. Pretty much anything said can be interpreted badly.

Yep. There’s an old saying I love - “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”.

This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.

An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing.

The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.

It's not just academia, it's the modern "meritocracy" more broadly. When getting into a campus club at a top college requires four rounds of interviews, you look for easy ways to signal your eliteness and being hip to the new verbal trends is a great way for the well-heeled to extend their advantage over the less-enlightened.

This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.

All social structures survive through their self-perpetuation...it's a general critique with a lot of explanatory power that I've had on my mind.

Any kind of senseless decorum or self-defeating policy comes down to the intersection of self-perpetuating framings of reality with actors who either promote it out of self-interest, or take it upon themselves to become footsoldiers on faithful behalf of that idea, extending it to unreasonable, totalizing lengths in the process of protecting it like a child.

And that can manifest as "my way is right behavior and that is wrong behavior", or "we are good because they are bad", or any number of other illogical defenses. It's just automatic once you decide some thought has to be defended, and when it forms a really persistent, robust structure you end up with a religion, national mythos, economic norm etc. The structure is looking out for itself first, and the current elites hold the most gravity in deciding whether to further perpetuate or not. But elites aren't immune to being true believers either - they have to be able to let go and examine what they want to accomplish, and if the belief they have is too firmly tied to their immediate self-interest, they can't do it.

My reading here is derived somewhat from Heather Marsh's writings, but with different focus and phrasing.

> As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving for

In fact, proponents can’t even define this equilibrium, despite stating that it is the end goal. This proves that the goal is a lie.

It’s pure power seeking, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, because that is precisely what they assert determines truth and shapew society. Not some natural order, but people who held power over others. They complain about it but if you watch, it’s exactly what they’re doing themselves. Pure projection.

I came to realize that this is the case with advocacy groups. These groups will never want to say, "Hey, things aren't that bad anymore. We're working on some small problems, but honestly, we solved most of the stuff we were concerned about." Everything always needs to be in perpetual crisis. Wikipedia always needs to be in danger of shutting down. Political enemies are always supposed to be one step away from destroying the country forever. That's what drives the donations and prestige that keeps these groups going.

As groups become more successful, they're more likely to shift from reasonable goals to extreme goals.

Yeah. Over time this has killed my interest in charitable organizations, sad to say. I just don't trust them anymore because I think if I donate to an apparently well defined cause it'll actually just be embezzled and put to use hiring hard left activists who spend all their time harassing normal people in pursuit of their deranged ideology. The prevalence of dumb language purity guides amongst these organizations just reinforces that feeling. Nowadays I'm much now likely to donate to crowdfunders for the victims legal fees.

Organizations tend to be self-perpetuating. People whose power is derived from the organization and people who make money from the organization will want to keep the racket going.

It’s important to remember, however annoying they are, their side is losing.

Look at Dave Chappelle, who was the attempted target of cancellation and Netflix and people buying tickets to his shows completely ignored it.

Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular.

Twitter doesn’t reflect the real world.

On the other hand, I can't write "sanity check" without getting on HR's naughty list.

The fact that you can only name a handful of people who survived full frontal attacks (for now) indicates that this is more than merely annoying. The ranks of the cancelled far outnumber them and we should recognize the disturbing historical parallels too. This type of language editing was a key plot point in 1984 because it is the habit of extremely dangerous far left regimes. I feel like the west is in danger of experiencing a communist revolution at some point.

Now a lot of readers will feel like that's absurd, extreme, maybe even trolling. But it was only a handful of years ago that I was posting here warning people that they should refuse to rename git master branches to main because accepting this for short term convenience or out of ideological sympathy would lead to an endless spiral of power games, used to purge anyone not on the far left. And here we are, not so long after, with lists of banned words so long nobody even bothers enumerating them all, any one of which can be used to build a case for getting rid of you.

There's a clear pattern here in which people are repeatedly not taking wokeness seriously enough. This isn't a game and they spend every waking hour taking over every institution. A communist revolution doesn't require capturing the seat of government permanently, if you can capture every institution that surrounds it and essentially eliminate all ability for a non revolutionary government to operate.

The fix is simple enough though: do a DHH and get rid of all woke people in your organisation. It's quite easy as given a hostile environment they tend to leave en masse and they weren't doing much work for the organisation anyway. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

There’s a cute story I read the other day about an “Offensiveness consultant” who teaches companies how to be just offensive enough on Twitter to make sure woke people don’t want to work at your company. The story is written for comedy - but the more I think about it, the more I wonder might be something people actively do, for all the reasons you’re talking about.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-hou...

That story is really great - I can honestly imagine a Silicon Valley startup party going exactly like the story describes.

You don't even have to be offensive. Just give an all hands where the leadership publicly commits to merit-based promotion/hiring, tell people the org is now "mission focussed", stick a few rugs around the place that say "Meritocracy" on them and then get rid of anyone who complains. No offense will be taken by anyone who you don't want to be offended.

Policing language and beliefs is a lot older than communism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

Beliefs, yes. But which part of the Inquisition was specifically about banning long lists of specific words, replacing them with semantically identical equivalents? Perhaps they did it, my history isn't that good, but the wiki page doesn't seem to discuss it much if so.

The Reformation replaced the Latin mass with something pretty much equivalent, but in a different language

I certainly agree with you, and I do believe this is a very active fight where both sides are going strong. I'm not sure yet that they are losing, but it does feel like it's a worth fight. Of course, whoever is fighting against must also be sharply aware of not letting the fight itself get completely derailed by the opportunist bigots on the other side.

> Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular.

I think to some extent this is largely because Rowling was kept at arm's length. If Rowling was the mouthpiece for the game's story, showing up in interviews, etc., then I think more of the backlash against Rowling's personal actions would be impacting the game.

See also how Disney happily sells Pirates of the Carribean while maintaining they will never work with Johnny Depp again.

Don't forget that Rowling wasn't invited to the filming of the giant Harry Potter reunion special.

This phenomenon is known as a purity spiral, and here's a great story about one tearing an online knitting community to shreds.

In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…

https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...

I’m going to start using this terminology. It’s good to have simple phrases for this. It’s so much easier to say “I’m not going to engage in perpetuating a purity spiral” or “your not helping anyone by continuing the purity spiral long past the point of helping anyone who was genuinely affected by this”

It’s short and pithy, and it can sort of cover the core concept without needing deep academic understanding of the social dynamics involved.

It's also very googleable which means when you casually drop it into conversation they can just look it up without you having to explain it.

Nice, thanks for the link. ”Moral outbidding” is also a great term, very clear and expressive.

There is much wrong in this comment.

> This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.

Not at all. Academia is about the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. What you are describing is happening in academia, but that is not its purpose or its main role. Academia is as much about the mating habits of the spotted fizzbuzz up in the Andes or the design of advanced composite materials or developing vaccines for malaria than the understanding of how humans behave in society.

The ridiculous extremes are not confined to academia, this is just an anti-intellectual talking point. Nobody is running around panicking that the purpose of elections is to produce fascists.

> An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement.

Again this weird focus on academia. Journalists, politicians, and random blokes on the internet do it. Most of academics don’t. The problem is humans in general, your scapegoat is meaningless. By ascribing your issues to an immaterial Other entity out to get you, you absolve the rest of society, which is really where the problem lies.

I will concede to you that I was too general in my comment. As an academic myself (with nearly a decade on the senior circles of higher education in a highly developed country), I absolutely agree with you that the main goal of academic work is the pursuit of knowledge. To be honest, I wanted to use the term "academic issue" more as a way to express that the issue is disconnected from the more practical issues of the real world, rather than to mean only the formal, academic world. I was inaccurate in that. You can pursue academic interests and discuss academic issues outside of the university; I think of it as an interchangeable term with "philosophical", for example.

I also agree with you that these issues happen outside of academia. It just so happens that I perceive this specific problem as being academic. The fact that I argue that this is an academic problem does not imply that this only happens in academia (one example does not necessarily generalize to the whole).

And yes, obviously, running towards extremes is not confined to academia; however, my point was that it is more-or-less ok to do it in academic work as long as you do not try to force your extreme views back down to the rest of society (which most academics don't, or if they do, fail). Actually, I'd argue that there is no better way to do it. Research often means pushing things to extreme, and most of its results die gracefully and are replaced with something else that is more reasonable for the current times (or simply gets forgotten). Don't take this wrong, as if I believe that research is useless. In the same way that a startup dies (and must die) if it cannot offer a feasible, interesting, useful product, research also dies (and must die) if its results make sense but are not applicable. No problem there.

The problem begins when the academic issues (whether they are discussed in the university or not) which are being pushed to the extreme in order to test the waters are then being pushed down society's throat aggressively like this, without regards to whoever they trample over on the way. These academic issues are being forcefully, steadily introduced into public and private institutions that have a very real, concrete power over how many people act, behave, work, and communicate. These are (in one way or another) governing agencies that, while they are not the police so to speak, still have under their belt lots of different means and tools to enforce certain things over large groups of people. This is extremely irresponsible of those who think of themselves as drivers in this movement.

I think the “people-first language” is actually kind of dumb in a lot of cases. Because the idea behind it is not really sound.

Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.

Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.

I'm trans myself and this language policing game is insane. The most surreal part about it is it's rarely anyone allegedly impacted by it who is actually asking for these things.

Yep, same with disabilities, or children playing/costuming as cowboy and indian, or cultural appropriation where certain people are now not allowed wear a rasta haircut, or, or, or... Most ""affected"" people actually don't give a shit AND don't want this shit. But sjws can scapegoat any doubt to this holy mission and make one look like a Nazi.

Usually never is also the intention or context taken into account.. You will always find someone who will say he feels insulted for anything, but we won't find a common denominator if we need to account for every salty person on earth. True respect, equality and no discrimination for everybody is what should count... but it feels today more and more that this is actually alienating, and also excluding people more than what it helps, the contrary! How to stop? Intention is good, but taken to the extreme, this is todays discrimination and exclusion..

Realistically I think what has happened is the puritanical culture has donned new clothes. Blind subservience and self-flagellations to ever increasing standards of a sacrificial victim sky man who never asked for these things in the words they twisted, replaced with blind subservience to sacrificial victims in the present who one again, never asked for these things in the words they twisted.

It makes me feel like a pawn in their own self-actualization, not someone they remotely ever gave a thought or care about.

I agree - it's basically a new strain of puritan thinking. The problem is that unlike established religions - where you can step away and say "I don't recognise your moralising" with pretty much no repercussions, the line between "progressive left" ideology and wider society is much less clear - and so fighting this type of thinking can have real repercussions for your career or social life. It's not really worth rocking the boat.

How do you deal with it? The trans people I know tend to grit their teeth at risk of making an already awkward social interaction worse. But that surely must result in a lot of bottled up resentment.

> For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings.

Well, that's entirely up to you and me isn't it?

I think what bothers me is not so much the word police (ignore them) but everyone else that allow them to set the agenda.

I talk the way I've talked my entire life and I don't care what people think about it.

> People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me

Why is that? I’m genuinely curious. Who should be offended by the word slave? Is it I, the Slav? The etymology of the word concerns my heritage, and yet I’m not offended. It’s not as though people toying with language today is going to bring back my relatives who died as slaves, nor will it undo the suffering they endured.

Reminds me of Norm McDonald commenting on Patton Oswalt saying the worst thing about Bill Cosby was the hypocrisy. But he thought it was the raping.

https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1437871709911195655?s=...

I doubt slaves care so much about being called slaves or enslaved people, but having their freedom and autonomy stripped from them and treated horribly with no avenue for recompense.

I agree, and personally found it upsetting once when someone who was from a relatively well off family tried shaming me for using the term slave in my code. I'm of Ukrainian descent, and my grandfather was separated from his family at the age of 12 and sent to a forced labor camp, never to see them again. No human should ever have to experience that, and we must remember that even now there are still humans being treated like literal tools, as our computers are also nothing but tools. If seeing the word slave makes you uncomfortable, then good, it should make you uncomfortable that there are humans who have been treated no better than your computer, potentially even in the supply chain of making it.

Wait, it means slavery implies whites.

Slavery doesn’t imply any particular race. Some people hold the belief that it does, or that one needs to be of a particular race to take a position on or claim victimhood of slavery, but this, quite frankly, is racist.

>For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.

The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".

> now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".

Which is partly right, to be fair. It’s a fundamental human right issue about who can force things on your body. The consequences also affect whole families, not all men are arseholes who vanish when their girlfriend gets pregnant. Framing this as only women’s issue is part of a dangerous tribal war.

It is also part of a pattern of subjugation of a social group on religious grounds, and as such part of a broader attack on secular, liberal societies.

1. the embryo/fetus inside the mother's body is not the mother's body.

2. it is not the mother's body, but it's completely dependent on it to live.

3. parents have and have to have natural responsibility over their offspring.

4. the society establishment (both secular and religious) are there to protect society's norm.

5. not killing innocent humans is a social norm.

6. the embryo/fetus is a human.

7. saying that someones on "religious grounds" want to subjugate "secular, liberal societies" by opposing to killing innocent humans is no more that projecting USA's domestic radicated bipolar politics to the global level.

8. "religious grounds" are nothing mystical, nothing like "things which only unreasonalbe superstitious are afraid of", but a core attribute of the human nature: just »don't kill humans who are annoying to you even if they don't have social security ID yet, even if they don't pay taxes yet, even if they are your own children«

9. "abortion rights" group also stands on religious grounds, except it worships Moloch.

10. "abortion rights" people often comes from the pre-assumption that they are entitled to enjoy sex without consequences and without any responsibility. gain without pain.

11. "abortion rights" is an other level of productionalization of people. our life is already mostly a product of soulless companies. now they are turning babies into commodity which you can return if you changed your mind or not satisfied with it. wondering how much does it differ from the menacing "slavery".

If human's mind was erased to embryo stage, does it constitute killing?

I'm unsure if you're joking, so I'll bite: if 6 is true (a fetus is a human), then is a zygote a human? Can a human be a single cell? Of course not.

I'd say 9 is more fun to pick apart. Looks like there's only two kinds of religions in the world, those that worship the Right Deity and those that worship Moloch.

needless to go on theology grounds to argue against unborn killing. you don't need to accept any particular theology to come to the conclusion.

btw it is sorted in a list not because of any argumentation structure.

i don't think (and don't see what indicated it to you) that there are only these 2 options in terms of worship targets. but phrasing the other option the "only" "right" one, paints me an intolerant blind-faithed, which i reject.

Just leave 'Moloch' out of the picture. It makes your argument weaker for the HN audience.

Btw, you might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_abortion and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortion interesting.

yea, i thought that referring to a supernatural being by a name which is also found in books associated with religion may indeed turn the reader dismissive. however i hoped a slight chance to draw maybe a few reader's attention to the point that fetus-killing arguments often are as religion-based as the oppotent is represented to be. the difference which hides this similarity is that religions which are not public, visible, inquireable, are not called "religion".

This angle works in the other direction as well: Is a newborn a human? If yes, is a baby in the process of being born a human? If yes, is a baby who will be born in a week a human?

My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.

most of the times they don't argue about killing single cells, but an undisputedly multicellular fetus with human DNA. the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human? if no, when this "growing clump of cells" become an organization separate from its host? i don't know other event of a pregnancy which more clearly shows that here is something new which was not there before. "Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …

So is a miscarriage manslaughter? If not, why not? Based on your premises, it's the unintentional taking of a human life.

yes, miscarriage is a real death of a human. is it killing? yes, it can be a result of an intentional act. can it be caused by neglect? yes, then it's the unintentional taking of a human life.

why we usually threat neglecting the born and unborn differently? because they need different level and kind of care: eg. smoking hurts unborn differently than born. did the mother eat honey which happened to be infected and caused her embryo to die? it was not considered neglect until this honey-effect was discovered.

> the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human?

A cell being of a species does not make it an instance of that species, in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.

> "Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …

If a single cell is not an instance of a human, it follows that there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously. Mostly the disagreement is about where this line is.

> in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.

IMO, there is a substantial difference between a conceived egg and any other cells: an egg turns into a human being over time (provided it's left doing its businnes normally), other kind of cells don't operate this way AFAIK.

> there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously

completely agree. IMO we can even extend it by omitting the "If a single cell is not an instance of a human" condition: even if we qualify a specific single cell to be a human, there must be a point when it became a human.

Hard to miss the similarities with Orwell’s Newspeak.

The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.

Absolutely:

> Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion.

Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":

> Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Further: Literally everyone has limited financial resources.

If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.

The "justice-involved person" one is especially gross and disingenuous depending on context: Through repetition it strengthens the assertion that a conviction is justice, and it erases the power imbalance between convict and court employees/cops. Plus, it's a transparent euphemism - Nobody will refer to a judge as a JAP for example

> Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins.

That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom.

English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech company, and the working language is English, which I'm perfectly fine with. But when we get subjected to DEI training material which was very obviously made for an American audience, even though nobody in this office is a native English speaker, I think it goes too far and ironically becomes slightly insensitive in its own way.

I briefly worked for Facebook in Singapore. I felt a similar disconnect with their concern about African-Americans. (I think it might have been 'black history month' or perhaps the 'black lives matter' riots were ongoing. I can't remember.)

Singapore has its own problems and groups of people that aren't doing so well. A focus on African-Americans felt extremely tone-deaf to me. Almost like it was designed to mock the whole DEI enterprise.

I'm probably be downvoted to death for that but, while I have nothing against transgenderism - do whatever you want people, I don't care - it baffles me that the subject takes so much space in the political discourse. It's like 1.6% of the population by applying the broadest critieria available.

Sometimes I wonder if some interests are not all too happy to see people fight about who they might have to share a public bathroom one day in their entire life rather than issues actually affecting them.

I largely agree with your first paragraph, but I do think the term “birthing parent” is important in contexts such as parental leave policies.

“Mother” could be inadequately specific in situations involving same-sex relationships, surrogacies, and/or adoption. For example, Washington state offers up to 6 weeks of medical leave to the birthing parent, in addition to the 12 weeks of bonding leave that are offered to both parents.

Policy language needs to be specific and able to accommodate minority or edge cases.

A pregnant person is a woman.

At least, the person that birthed you is your mother.

I'd question the association between mother and woman, rather than mother and birth

Thank you, I swear half the time I can’t figure out if people are genuinely confused by inclusive language or if they confuse it on purpose just to get riled up.

It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.

No — people are just aware that humans are sexually dimorphic and don’t appreciate people demanding they not use language that accurately describes the peaks of a bimodal distribution because there’s a small percentage of outliers. Mammals in general are sexually dimorphic.

Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.

We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.

Girl you gotta get off the internet. No one is demanding you use this language. It’s actually the opposite where people have a visceral reaction to someone voluntarily choosing to use inclusive language. Style guides like these are for awareness, everyone has had the moment where they discover a word they picked up is actually offensive. One that happened for me was “gypped.” A lot of the guides do contain silly substitutions but that’s because they’re wrong about the history of the words and their usage not because the idea or intent is bad.

I am almost certain the person who told you that was offensive was not someone from the group allegedly being offended, but by some person from a highly educated privileged background deciding to be offended on that group’s behalf.

“Hey by the way that word is offensive” isn’t really the same as being offended. It was a 5 second interaction where they were like “that word is like jewed or welshed but for the Roma” and I was like, “my bad didn’t know that.” That was it. Despite what the internet told me I wasn’t immediately canceled. Like what is the point you’re trying to make, that it’s not offensive or that someone who isn’t Roma isn’t allowed to recognize that using an ethnicity’s name as a verb in a disparaging way is offensive?

Humans can handle exceptions without having to created incredibly vague or generic terms like "birthing person"

Many adopted people would disagree. “Biological mother” is closer, but surrogate pregnancy is a thing, so that doesn’t work reliably.

Part of the reason rule based language processing failed, is because language does not fall into hard and fast categories with no exceptions.

Normal people instinctively understand this, and “woman” and “mother” are completely understandable and useful terms, even if there are a handful of exceptions out of millions are exceptions to the strict definition.

Nobody seems to be able to define woman anymore. How can we be sure?

Flagged with 23 points. Looks like I ran afoul of the thought police.

> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.

I completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.

Why does it become purely biological and not social in this case? Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.

> Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.

Not quite sure what the commentor you are replying to means by the social part but they didn't state that giving birth => woman is a 2 way implication.

No. What GP is saying is merely that being capable of childbearing obviously requires female biological sex. But the implication doesn't have to go in the opposite direction for it to be true.

Another example: the only vertebrates that can fly are birds(ignoring squirrels and weird fish). That's not equivalent to saying that the ostrich is not a bird.

Flying vertebrate => bird

Bird =/> flying vertebrate

Bats are vertebrates, aren't they?

You're right, I forgot about bats! Yet I still took the time to disparage squirrels. Now I feel silly.

I guess I can fix it easily enough:

Flight(not gliding or floating) implies wings.

Wings don't imply flight.

That is ridiculous. Was this hospital on the coast? I did not hear this at our hospital.

> equity language censors took this way way too far.

In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.

Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.

Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.

Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.

No matter what you say and how you say it there can be people who might want to feel offended.

I take any equity language guides with a grain of salt, but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are. Obviously there are problems with it. It's largely performative, it can distract from bigger advocacy work, and it's often a lazy attempt by a large organization or corporation to avoid having to make meaningful changes. The thing is, when you add terms like "victimhood culture" to your response, it makes it extremely clear that you're not taking issue with awkward terminology, but with the entire concept of equity itself.

>but with the entire concept of equity itself.

A lot of people do take issue with the concept of equity itself. Because it's unattainable, a fantasy to keep the "movement" going. No amount of language puritanism will ever be enough for the kinds of people that write these guides, because no human society will ever exist - or has ever existed - where everyone is some sterile, "equitable" copy of each other.

> but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are

Does that mean they are bad, immoral people? I think equity is faulty concept. Seems like an attempt to create equality of outcome by policing language. But I'll defer to arguments made by the likes of Sam Harris, Julia Galef and Coleman Hughes. Or the Atlantic author of this article.

It’s an exercise of power by a wealthy ($30k/yr is rich in most world), western, educated, native English speaking elite over the unprivileged. Someone who studied English in high school in rural India does not have access to the latest equity terminology nor the western cultural context to understand it.

Changing language is a great tool to privilege the non working academic class with access and time to study the latest fad over the global working class who build the consumer products these elites type their screeds on.

Hell, most of it originates in the US, where we practice our cultural imperialism and force everyone else to bow to our ever evolving norms and sensibilities based upon our own country's fucked up history.

> People-first language (“enslaved people” not “slaves”)

“enslaved people” is not people/person-first language.

“People who are enslaved” is people-first language.

“enslaved people” is “situation first” (more commonly “identity first” or “disability first”, but neither strictly applies to “being enslaved”) language, just as “slaves” is. (In the disability context, “the disabled” and “disabled people” are textbook examples of “disability first” language, to which “people first” or “person first” language is contrasted.)

EDIT: Yes, I realize that this is an example of "people-first" language given near the opening of this opinion piece. It says something that in this rant about "equity language", the example given of the application of a particular form ("people-first language") of equity language is basically a textbook example of what that form seeks to avoid rather than what it prescribes.

> For example, it seems like we can’t say “mother” anymore in medical settings.

You can absolutely use “mother” to describe a specific person who, in fact, is a mother in medical settings. Because people of non-feminine gender identity can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth.

> I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother

Literally no one has a problem with your mother being described as a mother.

> At work, a “women in engineering” group got renamed to something bland like “gender minorities in tech”.

Presumably, it got renamed that because whoever made decisions for it decided the mission was broader than women. “Gender minorities” isn’t a bland alternative to “women”, it has a broader scope.

Close to a disability, I don't give a shit, and reading that I don't even understand til now what is better, for what reason... disability first, person first, what first, wtf?? Can we just communicate?

> can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth

Realize that smartassing someone with that excourse is alienating andor insulting andor exclusionary to other people the same, for whatever reason, may it be a different level of education or just disagreement.

> the mission was broader

It is good that you call it like that what it is, a mission for the new missionaries, almost just a religion of a strange minority that usually even is not affected at all. Please also try to understand a little the other side.

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