Comment by ZeroGravitas
5 days ago
This is one of the things that most fascinates me about the anti-woke.
You're advocating for people to be described in whatever term they prefer and not have a term imposed upon them from outside.
That alien visiting for mars would think "Oh, this is this wokeness I have heard of, respecting groups desires to be addressed in their preferred way".
But no, you're only bringing this up because you believe the people you think are "woke" are imposing a name on these groups from the outside.
Is it a principle or is it a pointless gotcha? I would argue this is aggressively performative anti-wokeness!
No, my position is: stop policing the well-intentioned language of others based on a treadmill of acceptable terminology.
The principle is that language should be judged based on its intention, rather than on how it conforms the arbitrary fashion imposed by the most priggish among us (to use pg’s word).
Few of the treadmills we see are actually an organic expression of group preference. Nobody was asking for Latinx or Native American. Nobody was asking for “person experiencing houselessness.” Nobody was asking for the master branch to be renamed to main. These are activist-driven efforts masquerading as authentic priorities of the groups in question. So it goes with most of the causes generally described as woke.
In all cases we should judge speech based on its intention rather than how it conforms to shifting standards. But the fact that this language policing frequently is based on externally-invented treadmills just adds insult to injury, and exposes the vacuousness of the whole enterprise.
There's a difference between respect and compel. And it's not a fine line neither. Most people are fine with respecting people's pronouns, especially when it is someone they already respect.
The issue comes when you are compelled by your company/social circle/etc. to put your own pronouns in your bio (signalling fake political allegiance), being fired for accidentally misgendering a (badly passing) trans-woman, and so on.
It doesn't help your point at all that your two examples are things that don't actually happen outside the imagination of reactionaries.
Have you ever worked at a large organization that markets themselves as progressive? If you have and don't have any experience with being pressured or outright told to comply with performative measures like email signature changes, your experience would appear to be an anomaly.
And whether you agree with it or not, there are numerous documented cases online where people were fired for misgendering someone.
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This distinction seems to be an untraversable chasm for the prigs PG is talking about.
Anyone (whether I already respect them or not) comes to me and asks me to refer to them by a specific name or term, I'll gladly do it.
Someone comes and accuses me of being an -ist or -phobe because I didn't put my pronouns or link to the latest iteration of a corporate-speak diversity policy in my email signature or just tells me to do it without explanation or discussion, and I'll tell them to pound sand.
If that person cared to ask why I don't put them in my email signature, I'd gladly tell them that I might have if anyone bothered to ask nicely and/or explain the merit of their request but ultimately I don't care one whit what pronouns someone uses to describe me and am well aware the corporation I work for doesn't actually stand for anything in the aforementioned statement. But the prigs won't ask.