Comment by buuyytp
17 hours ago
I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you. I'm allowed to have people I think about as allies, I'm allowed to think of others as assholes. To suggest otherwise is a much stronger control over someone than to say, "I would find it less uncomfortable if you spoke differently."
You are, in essence, saying, "I want you to think differently."
I made no claim that it costs nothing. Changing language use is non trivial. Which is why I never demand it. I make a preference known, you can act on it or not.
I made the claim that: a) it does not offend me and b) I prefer others not use it and c) if I've expressed my preference and you choose not to honor that preference, it will diminish my opinions towards you.
This is how preferences work. We communicate them. Others find the request reasonable or not and act accordingly. If my preference was no music playing in desk areas, and you played music in the desk area, I'd think less of you as a result. If you gave me a nickname and I asked you not to use it, and you still used it, I'd think less of you.
Maybe you shouldn’t sort people into allies and assholes based on whether they are willing to change decades of language use to accommodate something that doesn’t even offend you (or as you say anyone else).
I try my best not to offend anyone at work, but policing my language to match the preferences of everyone around me would be exhausting. I grew up speaking a non-prestige dialect. I have a lifetime of experience policing my words. It can be exhausting. It’s easy to underestimate the mental cost if you speak a prestige dialect.
I spent a few decades being made fun of for saying y’all. I now find it a bit weird people who would have made fun of me for using it 20 years ago now use it themselves. I’m not offended by it, but my preference would be that non-southerners don’t use it.
However, I realize that it would be a bit much to ask that of everyone I interact with. And if I did it would be insane to label people who didn’t comply assholes.
I prefer that people that people don’t use learnings instead of lessons. I prefer not to be referred to as a USian. But I don’t expect people to follow my preferences.
I don't expect either. Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
Not the person you're replying to, but my take on it: because in the grand scheme of things it's small potatoes, and putting even a minor burden onto someone else to change their language seems unreasonable and unnecessary.
You clearly do have expectations if you are classifying people who don’t meet them as assholes.
People aren’t assholes just because they don’t accommodate your every preference.
> Why is it unreasonable to say, "I'd prefer something other than USian"?
Because all I’ve done is to fix my minor annoyance by making it the speaker’s minor annoyance.
And many people don’t like the term American, so now the speaker has to decide whether to please me or other people in the group, or come up with some ridiculous compromise like Citizen of the United States.
A big part of being an adult is dealing with minor annoyances.
> I think if you want people to give you the grace to form your own opinions of others, you need to be comfortable with us forming an opinion of you.
This is both trivially true (I recognize that everyone has the right to form their own opinions of everything) and still counter to things I assume you believe (such as: people shouldn’t make assumptions about others based on their gender or skin color).
I do want you to think differently. I want you to think that people who continue to use a phrase widely considered to be gender neutral are not in fact your enemies. Some of them probably are your allies.
For what it’s worth, if I knew you in real life and you made that preference known to me, I would try to respect it, but that respect would depend on the closeness of our relationship. It’s hard to remember every preference of someone you meet once every two months, but I don’t like to be an asshole and try to respect the preferences of people I interact with.
The problem though is that somewhere along the line, continuing to use “you guys” became a sort of reverse shibboleth among a certain set of people who try to use things like whether someone uses “you guys” or whether they have their pronouns set on their profile to determine whether they are allies or, presumably, enemies. And yeah, I do object to that sort of mindset.
First, I definitely don't judge people for a preference I haven't expressed. If something genuinely hurts me, I need to advocate for myself. And I'd only do that if it was really something that genuinely hurt.
From there, if I only see you once every few months I don't expect you to remember flawlessly. The only time I judge someone is if they say no.
As for pronouns, they are a useful signal, but not the entire signal. Like, their presence indicates "this person might be safer", their absence indicates nothing.
You are missing the point. You're allowed to think highly or lowly of whomever, for whatever reason. That's your business (freedom of thought). It's more problematic when you express, overtly or not, such low opinion, as you will cause resentment. And there is the risk that the mere request is seen as a "correction". In our society, it's not generally polite for adults to correct other adults' speech.
I would also take issue with reasonableness of the request. You concede it does not offend you, and that it's merely a preference. I also have a myriad of preferences about speech: the intonation, accent, the grammatical constructions, the words, etc. To ask of other people, whom I don't even know intimately, to match my preferences is something else altogether. It's to impose my preferences over that person's dialect or ideolect, which is also rightly frowned upon.
Why would I express that opinion though? There's zero benefit to me to indicating you've slightly damaged your reputation. We both move on.
And it's never couched as a correction. It's always an expression of the impact on me, "Hey all, I know this is a bit of a hang up, but the use of 'guys' feels exclusionary to me, any chance folks would try alternatives? Folks, peeps, y'all, etc?"
In a work context this still creates tension and constraints. Work is not a context where we are free to express ourselves, so even such an "expression" creates a situation where I either piss off someone else or self-police. Given that you might have a particular role in the organization, might be trusted by people in a certain role or might simply represent a potential case where HR gets involved, self-policing becomes the safest, obvious choice. This means I don't really have a free choice to make, because the impact of such choice can go beyond our respective opinions on each other.
My personal experience in a UK/US company as a non-native English speaker includes this specific case. I still remember this very example (I.e., the use of "guys") being used as an example of noninclusive language from day-2 in the company (it was in some policy), 5 years later. It requires a nontrivial amount of energy and attention for me to self-police in a language that is already not my own, and I personally stress about it (including the few times I had slip-ups where I automatically said "hi guys" to a mixed group and corrected myself in a clumsy way). There are countless ways I could express my preference (speak slower, less accent when speaking, don't use idiomatic expressions or metaphors that are very language specific, maybe learn to pronounce my name how I pronounce it rather than english-ize it). I personally never expressed any of these because I wouldn't want to cause stress to anybody for something so minor, and I believe people will feel less free to talk with me.
This is just my opinion, but being someone who cares about not making others uncomfortable, I think we should all be realistic about what it really means to express such preferences at work, because it's not just a personal matter.