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Comment by xaa | Hacker News Reader

My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it.

When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and communicate clearly.

I find it especially objectionable when the only argument in favor of blurring the definition of a word is "because someone wants me to" or "someone would be offended if I didn't". Our mere preferences don't change reality; why should they change words, which are meant to convey an accurate representation of reality?

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Look, we're all coders here, I get the instinct to be precise with our words. But what about the cost/benefit trade-off? Is a small matter of personal policy related to definitions really worth hurting somebody who's already a member of easily the most downtrodden and crapped-upon group in modern society? Is preventing a tiny incremental shift in vocabulary really worth kicking somebody while they're down? I mean, I'm as grumpy as the next geek about the literally/not-literally thing, but this?

Also, think of it like an interface - the idea is that you should treat the transgendered person as their identified gender. So if you're planning on treating this person as a woman in every way in respect for her situation, wouldn't the pronoun/terminology actually make the matter clearer?

Obviously I don't condone any mistreatment of or discrimination against transgendered people and think they should have full legal protections. On a personal level, they should be treated ethically and equitably, just like any other person.

But regarding the use of language, and forgive me for invoking the slippery slope argument, where does it end? The two propositions, "Person X is a Y" and "Person X feels they are or wishes they were a Y", are not the same. In fact, they aren't even close. As a society it would be ridiculous and ruinous if we were to conflate the two.

I believe it is possible to respect people and linguistic accuracy ("truth", if you like) at the same time. Also, I don't think respecting someone necessarily means doing (or saying) everything they want.

How far do we take this? This is a conversation about the actions of these people. It is not coder pedantry to refer to Manning with male gendered pronouns. Are we now required to know how everyone feels about their gender before we use any pronouns describing them in every context? In fact, we have to keep with everyone's opinions about their genders throughout their whole lives. This is impractical.

I think here, we just have delusion of persecution.

The word "sex" refers to physical realities; "gender" refers to social constructions. By conflating the two words, you are the one diluting our vocabulary.

Now, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable for you to assert that pronouns should be tied to sex, not gender; but that's not what you're saying here.

@LukeShu

I'm well aware of the current usage of "gender" in educated circles. That's why I chose it as an example.

"Gender" previously was essentially a synonym for "sex" (except in the field of linguistics). But now that it has been repurposed in some circles, half the American population thinks it refers to a state of mind and the other half thinks it refers to biology. The result: confusion and miscommunication.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be a word to refer to what is now called someone's "gender identity". I'm saying the repurposing of an existing word which meant something similar, but distinct, has caused confusion. (I do expect the current sex/gender distinction to continue to be the accepted usage, though).

The same confusion is now happening with pronouns. And, yes, I would prefer if something as fundamental to the language as a pronoun referred to a physical reality rather than a mutable state of mind. That is a debate worth having, but all too often it isn't framed as a debate, it's framed as "you're insensitive and politically incorrect if you don't agree to our new terminology".

There is no debate, because this isn't about correctness. It's about respect. Let me throw out some hypotheticals here:

My given name is Jonathan. I think this sounds childish, so I tell you that I go by Jack instead. But you've seen my birth certificate, so you keep calling me Jonathan.

I got married and changed my last name to my husband's. You think it's confusing to change names, so you continue to write me using my maiden name.

Although I'm married, I don't want to be defined by my marriage, so I go by Ms. You think that inaccurately reflects my relationship status, and introduce me as Mrs. instead.

I have told you that the use of the male-gendered pronoun "he" makes me severely uncomfortable, and ask you to call me "she" instead. You flip up my skirt, take a good survey, and decide it would be dishonest to represent me as if I didn't have a penis.

The issue in all of these scenarios is a moral one: Do I have the right to define my own linguistic identity, or am I stuck with the one I was assigned at birth? Are you going to be an agent of my liberation, or my oppression?

You can make a good case that each of these blatantly disrespectful behaviors is, by some robotic standard, "correct". To paraphrase a great man, maybe you aren't wrong, but you're still an asshole. You can say this is something you would like to debate, but you don't respect me and I don't like to spend time around you, so go ahead and debate by yourself, thanks.

I'm sorry, but I'm not quite the asshole you think I am.

If someone asked me to call them by a certain pronoun or salutation (names are different as they are completely arbitrary), I would do it, out of respect for them. But let's be clear about what's being asked: I am being asked to lie -- to misrepresent reality -- to that person, and possibly to other people for that person. That's a (small) favor being asked, and it is somewhat irritating to be asked a favor with the sort of sense of moral entitlement found in your last paragraph (especially when the favor being asked is a violation of my own morals).

Also, unfortunately, we don't have the right to define our own linguistic identities. I know it isn't fair, but this extends far beyond gender. I don't become "rich", "President", "Filipino", "Doctor", or "intelligent" just by willing it or even by asking other people to call me those adjectives. They are fuzzy categories, some people don't clearly fall inside or outside of them, but they do have non-arbitrary (i.e., outside your mind) meanings.

You know what? I'd also be pretty pissed off if I worked hard to be considered an American and you insisted on calling me Filipino because you happen to know where my parents are from. I would be pretty sore if you acted like not doing that was a special favor you were doing me, by "lying" to people about my ethnicity, and not just being a decent human being.

It would sound like you value my expressed wishes for how I am represented less than you value showing off to strangers some secret you think you know about what's between my legs or in my blood that frankly is none of your business, let alone theirs.

I'm not really sorry if that feels like an imposition on your morals, because if it does then your morals kind of blow.

I get a little annoyed when people say that I'm German. I mean, despite my ancestry, I was born in America, and I've never even been to Europe. And I'm a little annoyed other times when people refer to "native Americans" as if I'm not one of those.

Those are little annoyances. I don't believe that the speaker is trying to disrespect me -- certainly not intentionally -- and I take it with a grain of salt.

In other words: this seems like making much to-do over very little.

If you are an American citizen then you are American. A more apt example is someone living in Philippines wanting to be called American even though they are not a citizen.

Someone living in Philippines who has no citizenship to America says "i am American", you would look at them and say "no you are not". No matter how much they wanted it to be true the facts do not support it.

You appear to think that sex and gender is a simple, binary, option defined by XX or XY chromosomes.

I don't want to be too flippant here but you seem to be making case that we would not want to refer to you specifically in any context ever because you are determined to make it frighteningly complicated to avoid persecuting you.

You're just wrong here. Whether "gender" is pure a social construction is a matter of debate. Your fallacy is in assuming a position you personally hold is a priori. You're just espousing one particular position.

Which definition is being blurred, exactly? Definitions may be being changed, but that's in order to make our words more accurate and more practically useful.

It's actually quite hard to determine who is the intended target of a word like "he", since experience presents us with all kinds of difficult cases; appeal to appearance or behaviour or even chromosomes doesn't work universally. At some point, we either have to let people decide for themselves what they want, or impose our own arbitrary classification on them. Someone is making a judgement and I'd rather it be "I feel I am male" than "I feel you look male".

Sure, it might be nice if there were a simple flowchart, based on only objectively observable data, that we could follow to end up with either "he" or "she" in the end. But no such flowchart exists. I propose to drop the "objective" criterion and just ask the person what they prefer - especially given that the only reasons for having a he/she pronoun system are historical and social. If you want to talk about what's going on biologically, in great detail, then feel free, but the pronoun system doesn't have to correspond to that.

Here is just one sample of such a line. "fallon fox" he is an mma fighter who now fights in womans division. We could get into great detail of the biology, height and so on that a man keeps even after surgery. Hopefully you see some of the real unalterable issues that arise from such things, can't wait till shaq has gender reassignment and fights women.

I shall be called emperor of all, sadly simply saying it doesn't make it true. Facts are stubborn like that.

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