← Back to context

Comment by echelon

5 years ago

> The site is the work of a guy, "him", and "his" work. We don't have to guess and say "them" and "their" work.

Assumptions are presumptuous and harmful. Everyone is a they/them until otherwise stated. These are extremely useful pronouns.

You're a they/them.

Calm down. You seem to be overly attached to regressive labels. I don't know what drives this in you, but the universe is burning and people just want to be happy. Your life is short; you're going to die and rot away. Is this really something to get worked up over?

In the future, when our descendants are all uploaded to computers or replaced by an AI overlord, people will be all sorts of genders. They won't be bound by yesterday's norms. Would you be a stuffy gender policeperson, or will you just let people be who they are?

36 comments

echelon

Reply
kepler1  5 years ago

I'll share something with you.

The level of consideration you have for people who are no more than 1% of the population is admirable. Very admirable, in comparison with the actual large problems that I'm sure you pay 0% attention to each day, and do make assumptions about. So very admirable that you go out of your way to bring this to the level of everyone having to select a pronoun in their dropdown menu because you feel morally superior for doing this.

Extremely useful. I'm sure you live among people who are 50% transgendered and cannot tell the difference between an man and woman with every person you come across.

Is it any wonder that most of the country feels you and such people are out of touch with the needs of the world, and vote in a backlash against you?

  • antonfire  5 years ago

    You're literally complaining about having more dropdown menus in your life like it's a big deal. Not a good place to "you're out of touch with the needs of the world" from.

    While it's true that pronoun usage in English is a relatively unimportant problem compared to lots of other existing problems in the world, it's worth noting that the person who seems to be the most emotionally invested in that problem here is you. You might accurately feel that using "they/them" this way is forced on you in other situations, but that's not what happened here. In this conversation, you observed "them" being used that way; you didn't get told that you have a moral or ethical obligation to use it that way. That a pretty important distinction.

    You're the one that's being high and mighty and trying to impose a standard on somebody else's use of language here, not vice versa.

    Also, until just now, the "1% of the population" that you are talking about (which I presume is trans people) wasn't even directly relevant. You're right that part of the cultural shift towards greater use of gender-neutral pronouns is socially driven by trying to make trans people's lives easier, but you could easily have the more or less the same conversation and not have trans people in mind at all. That shift is also socially driven by just trying to leave gender out of the picture when it's irrelevant. That's an aspiration that one might reasonably have even if one doesn't give a shit about trans people.

    The thing you're upset about in the first place wasn't a case of someone using "them" because it was a preferred pronoun or whatever. It was case of using "them" as a gender neutral singular second-person pronoun because they didn't bother to do the legwork to work out the gender of the person they were referring to.

  • echelon  5 years ago

    You're lashing out in anger. Calm yourself.

    It seems like you dislike trans folk. I'm not sure what they did to hurt you, but I suspect your fears and hate are the result of conditioning.

    What harm is it to use singular "they"?

    It avoids assumptions. It also avoids sexism. Do you want a world where all contributions are assumed to come from men?

    You've got a lot of fear and anger. Reflect on it. Let it go.

    I don't know if you're a Christian, but even if you aren't, remember that Jesus said to love one another first. It's one of the most important messages for the world. Love, not hate and fear.

    • HexagonalKitten  5 years ago

      Your rhetorical style is very harmful to the people you claim to support. You received criticism for your interactions and you immediately redirected that towards hatred for "trans folk" in an effort to smear the person who said it.

      > What harm is it to use singular "they"?

      That's not what the OP is saying. Because of course there's no harm in any pronoun. But there is societal harm in acting high and mighty about how saying "they" is somehow making a better world and then acting like a prat when called on it.

      > regressive labels. ... people will be all sorts of genders. They won't be bound by yesterday's norms.

      No, modern twitter activism is just making a bunch of crap up, and this over-concern on properly labelling everyone's gender expression just harms actual transexual people with actual body dysmorphia.

      What people who harp on pronouns miss is that pronouns are not used to refer to someone's gender but their sex. I can see your sexual characteristics from across the room, and referring to them is a good way to narrow down who I'm talking about. "That's her there, the tall one in the red dress". Nobody is going to say "That's zir, the one who is only sexually interested when they're romantically attracted to someone, and whose gender expression varies with the weather." Not only is it a bunch of totally irrelevant and inappropriate discussion for most settings, but it's invisible and thus worthless in a referential sense.

      The pronoun warriors are invariably not sexually dysmorphic, they're just deconstructing their parent's mores. They're today's goths, not some miraculous new human evolution. If they manage to do something new and valuable - if for instance Harry Styles actually looked good in a dress - all they'd end up doing is expanding the normal dress code for men, they wouldn't actually be creating a new identity. And this isn't helpful because society explores these things (copying elements of one sex's traditional styles in the other sex's new style, etc) via fashion designers and manages to do it without attacking each other's moral character and making queer/intersex people into political pawns.

      > It seems like you dislike trans folk. I'm not sure what they did to hurt you, but I suspect your fears and hate are the result of conditioning.

      If they had displayed any hate, and they did not, it would have been caused by conditioning from vocal jerks, not from trans people living their lives.

      > Would you be a stuffy gender policeperson, or will you just let people be who they are?

      Okay, in what way are people not already 100% allowed to express their gender? (In the USA, Canada, etc...)

      To someone in the Q-adjacent community who has been through Tumbler and Twitter, you're incredibly transparent. Everything you say is divisive, rude, harmful because it distracts from actual problems, and because it makes this nonsense seem important. You're clearly a justice warrior, not someone who works for justice.

      > You've got a lot of fear and anger. Reflect on it. Let it go.

      And you're doing this in the name of a community who was doing just fine on their own. Trust people to speak for themselves. Don't pick fights in their name.

      Since the LGBTQ institutions have been taken over by the woke they've pushed gendered nonsense and the public isn't blind. Mental breakdowns over pronouns, putting men in women's prisons, etc. Your behavior here is part of a pattern that has reduced LGB acceptance over the last few years, and while Trans acceptance is superficially up, it's at the cost of hateful wars against transexuals, for instance.

      I know an ~60yo MTF who was savagely attacked online, under their actual name, for saying that they were tranSEXual because they knew they were biologically male and wanted to be a woman. They were told their language was hateful and they were "killing us!" even though they nearly lost their job, and were being bullied in a way that actually causes people to kill themselves. This is an actual person who spent the last four decades living as the other sex, fighting actual discrimination back in the day, and the mob wanted to cut them down for not toeing the woke line.

      The effect of this allyship is similar to Portland, where white Antifa activists are using BLM as an excuse to riot. There's a 'funny' video of a black officer saying he's been racially insulted more during the BLM riots than in their entire career before that. He continues to say that every time a black person tried to speak to him - to ask about his actual views and rational for being an officer - that white BLMers come and physically block their interaction. The rioters don't want anyone to find a middle ground and solve anything because they're using black people to justify their anarchist cosplay. "Oregon Public Broadcasting reports Wednesday that black members of Portland’s Black Lives Matter movement are tired of their anti-racism demonstrations being hijacked by the mostly white “Antifa” anarchists and are working to separate the two movements as protests continue."

      Similarly, I've never seen the pronoun police display actual concern for anything other than their ability to control people.

      Reflect. Stop. Thanks.

      20 replies →

    • kepler1  5 years ago

      I love how you go right ahead assuming, at the same time you preach against it. It's really respect worthy.

      I'm not Christian. I'm not religious. I'm not Republican. I'm not disliking trans people. I'm not afraid of any such issues. All wrong. Yet you were happy to assume all that?

      What I don't like is people who take on for themselves the cloak of righteous moral positioning on behalf of others, and force others to conform to their thinking because they believe they're right. Or worse, believe they're better.

      "They" is not singular. You know the person is a man. You want to neuter everyone's speech to fit your worldview for the benefit of a 1%.

      Strong opinions do not equal anger. And not everything in the world should be solved by just "can't we all get along and let people do what they feel is good". Opinions and attitudes such as you're showing are deserving of objection and being opinionated in the opposite direction.

throwaway98797  5 years ago

“They” is historically understood to be plural. Some information fidelity is lost if “they” can mean multiple people and a person.

Language is hard, so I understand the need for compromise. “Zee” could be used to avoid gender centric labeling while maintaining language clarity.