this isn't a legal matter, nobody on stackoverflow is going to sue you, they're apparently just going to stop you from being a moderator. If you work at the white house and you call the president Donny I would expect you don't have your job for very long. And that wouldn't be exclusive to the white house or stackoverflow either. If you start a pronoun rebellion at waffle house or are rude to your customers in some other way the same thing would happen.
Hasn't been as big as, say, Germany, but it can still be important to address someone with their proper name and title, as Barrin92 pointed out.
Consider that Mr., Ms, Mrs. and Miss are four very common honorifics in the US, to the point where there are forms which require entering one of those terms. Just why do I need to know someone gender and marital status?
Yet referring to a married couple as "Mr. and Miss Smith" can make people angry. Just like referring to someone as "Ma'am" can make them angry.
Go to, for example, United's web site to enroll in MileagePlus. They require a title, which must be one of Dr., Miss, Mr., Mrs., Ms., Mstr., Mx., Prof., Rev. Sir, and Sister.
Mx. is the the very new way to avoid the question of gender and marital status, but you likely won't get a good response referring to the couple as "Mx. and Mx. Smith".
Which means that Barrin92 is right, and the US is one example of "Communities have guidelines and addressing someone ... with their proper name and title" is something we do.
The Mx title is a very new way to avoid the gender+marital status problem, showing that, yes, the US has
Go back to Barrin92's statement, "addressing someone with their preferred pronoun seems as simple to me as addressing someone with their proper name and title."
It appears to me that your reply was that titles aren't important, and so therefore addressing someone with their preferred pronoun wasn't important.
I believe I have shown that titles have been and are important in the US. (Consider that in the US, children refer to adults by Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms while in some other countries, first names are the norm.) It's certainly not the case that the Constitution prohibits all titles.
Given that, your comment now seems to be that since people don't get banned for not referring to someone as Reverend, they shouldn't be banned for using the wrong pronoun.
Which is a rather different argument which doesn't depend on any history of titles in the US.
BTW, given that some reverends are touchy about being called reverend, and given that some people will deliberately not call someone a reverend, either to make them annoyed or as a protest over the right to be called a reverend, I find it very unlikely that someone wasn't banned from a website for refusing to call someone a reverend.
> It appears to me that your reply was that titles aren't important...
I didn't say it wasn't ever important. I said the U.S. isn't big on honorifics and they are largely unenforced.
If somebody wants to get snippy about honorifics or other so-called manners like elbows on the table, it's largely on them and everyone else is free to consider them a pain in the neck and avoid them.
Very rarely are there more than interpersonal consequences for ignoring honorifics. To the extent that they are honored (doctor, your honor, ranks), there is usually an involuntary imbalance of power involved with immediate consequences, at least in effect.
Nowhere am I able to put "Her Ladyship" or "Esq." on a plackard and enforce it with more than dirty looks and lectures. And, in the U.S., one would be considered tiresome for trying. It is plausibly an establishing scene for a bullying high society character in a film.
"Isn't big" is a relative thing. In the US, children (at least where I grew up) refer to most adults by their title + last name, like "Mr. Rogers". This holds even up to college, where professors are generally referred to by "Prof." or "Dr." + last name.
By comparison, in the Nordic countries, children often refer to adults by their first name, as well as college students to their professors.
To an Icelandic person, the US is big on honorifics.
But to get back to Barrin92's statement, "addressing someone with their preferred pronoun seems as simple to me as addressing someone with their proper name and title." We see that people do tend follow honorifics, even when there is no legal obligation. We also know some people do complain - loudly - when using the wrong honorifics. And we know there was a whole social movement in the 1970s to use "Ms" for women who didn't think that knowing her marital status was important.
Barrin92's statement doesn't depend on being "big on honorifics" only that honorifics are recognized as being important enough that most people follow the conventions.
An "involuntary imbalance of power" describes Stack Overflow, yes?
It's very convenient for me that you happened to pick "Esq." as an example, since that happens to be a protected term in some US jurisdictions. The Wikipedia link for 'Esquire' points to https://web.archive.org/web/20110530134510/http://www.abajou... :
> But some jurisdictions have reservations about the use of Esq. The Ohio Supreme Court’s Board of Commissioners on Grievances and Discipline, for example, prohibited a lawyer who was not licensed to practice law in the state from appending Esq. to his signature on business correspondence because it was deemed to connote licensure in Ohio. Ohio S. Ct. Opinion 91-24 (1991).
That would seem to undermine your argument.
Similarly, titles like "Engineer" and "attorney-at-law" and others are also protected. False use of these titles can be illegal.
