All things are not the same thing. We are not talking about using the wrong pronouns, or deadnaming, intentionally or otherwise. We are talking about somebody who expressed a preference to favor "writing in a gender-neutral way" (her words) over using specifically "them" and "they" for (ostensibly) a linguistic reason having nothing to do with the identity of people who prefer those pronouns for themselves.

It's irresponsible to trot out this sort of vague common-sense rhetoric (most of which I agree with, of course) to justify inventing an offense, or blowing something small way out of proportion, and on that basis piling on in public social media to paint the accused with the brush of transphobia or racism or whatever it may be.

You have a right to have whatever identity you have, but others should not be enforced to respect that. That they do is a courtesy extended to you by the person you're interacting with. This much I'm fine with. Doubly so with assumed genders, which is IMO, a perfectly reasonable thing to go on. We don't fit to outliers after all and simply correcting when requested seems like a reasonable approach to me.

However, I've seen a steadily rising trend of weaponized fragility and crusading on this particular topic, along with a particularly virulent group which uses this as a tool to force compliance and control. It's bad enough that while I can observe my personal opinion of the T side sliding towards the negative through frequent contact and exposure with that sort.

I don't get how this became a thing. 5 years ago half of the people who are railed up about this didn't even know what word 'pronoun' means.

Why would using the wrong one be harmful to anybody?

You can call me a she but it just would mean that you'd be wrong. It would harm your public image more than mine since there would be no harm to mine. None of my self-worth or my worth to other people relies on people believing me being any specific gender.

And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice. You could have chosen otherwise. Any harm you might feel when someone misgenders you is self inflicted.

Try to imagine a thing that's very personal to you, and secret. Imagine that you pour it out into some creative work, like a painting or a story, and you share that thing with the world. You feel anxious exposing yourself like this but also joyful, because you're finally telling everybody who you really are.

Now imagine that nobody sees any of the things you love about your work, and that all your anxieties are borne out. You are crazy, a freak, a slut, a pervert, an idiot. Delusional, more than anything. Nobody ever looks at you the same way again. You took the leap you desperately needed to take, and you fell on your face.

The older we get, the less we care what other people think, and some people probably literally cannot identify with this even if they scour the depths of their adolescent memories looking for an analog. I think it would be sad to be one of those people, but I guess maybe they're the lucky ones?

> Now imagine that nobody sees any of the things you love about your work, and that all your anxieties are borne out. You are crazy, a freak, a slut, a pervert, an idiot. Delusional, more than anything. Nobody ever looks at you the same way again. You took the leap you desperately needed to take, and you fell on your face.

That's pretty much the feeling that every even mildly controversial artist experiences at some point. The question remains "was that a good idea to make something like this out of your gender?" I'd say, never.

> The older we get, the less we care what other people think, and some people probably literally cannot identify with this even if they scour the depths of their adolescent memories looking for an analog.

Maybe that's it. I'm 40 year old fart whose life partner died a month ago because of brain cancer. My scale of how significant teenage-like problems are, must be off. But even as I reach towards my adolescent memories ... I struggle to find any instance where I was desperate to be recognized as a man or a boy. Maybe that's because I was raised as a single mother, never met my father and my male model was my grandfather who above all was a tinkerer so that became much more important part of my identity then being of specific gender.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I think it's important to recognize that most of us fall into one of two buckets that are considered "normal" wrt. our sex and gender. If you don't fall into one of those two buckets, you are going to feel tension externally, in the ways other people interact with you, and internally insofar as you've internalized societal sex/gender norms, which is hard to avoid doing when you've lived in society your whole life.

So really it is not so much about looking for a problem ("I've decided to hang my identity on my gender") as it is about having to solve a problem that most people (including you) don't have ("I'm in the wrong body"). It's a distressing problem to have, and not an easy one to solve.

But isn't the best solution for not falling neatly into those two buckets, paying less attention to the buckets and promoting giving less attention to the buckets? Maybe taking some additional labels out of the buckets and putting them on the floor so everyone can enjoy them?

Not putting out your own new bucket with a laud bang, puting yourself into it, and claiming it is just a legit as those two because you put 0.1% of people in there with yourself (which may or may not want to be put there) and getting offended when your bucket doesn't get equal recognition as the ones containing over 3bln people each?

...

I am very sorry for people that have constant feeling that there's something wrong with their body and when I meet them in person I always try to be mindful and help them however I can in either accepting or changing it. Although I must admit I lean toward option that brings less harm to their physical health. I am a materialist and believe that except for very rare cases you should avoid permanent damage to your hardware just to make possibly software bug more bearable.

I don't have any transgender friends (that I know of) but I would definitely try to talk to them in a way they find most comfortable. However being required to always use that way rubs me the wrong way. That seems like something authoritarian. There's a specific way you should address royalty or clergy or teacher in school system with threat of violent reaction looming. I don't think we should enlarge that group of people and put that rules in writing.

When priest welcomes you in Poland he always says "let be praised Jesus Christ" and you are supposed to say "for ages of ages, amen".

As an atheist I refuse to participate in this and respond with "hello". Which communicates "your cognitive problems and solutions you've chosen are not mine and are different form mine, I won't reinforce your beliefs" or I hope it at least "ah, non-believer, I shouldn't put too much Jesus on him". This is mean spirited of me, because it's just a customary greeting and I might be harming this man a bit by poking at the image of reality he internalized and keeps reinforced daily, but I'd like to have the option to do that. I wouldn't like to be forced by code of conduct or law to respond (or talk) to religious person in their preferred way even if that's the most polite thing to do. Right to be mildly impolite to people you don't agree with to let them know you'd prefer they kept their distance because you don't share their mindset is maybe not the nicest thing but I think it's how a lot of people protect themselves and a thing that people should be required to suffer through.

Of course that doesn't mean that you should be free to stalk people, telling them things that make them feel bad as they are trying to isolate themselves from you. That behaviour is reprehensible because of intentional nature, persistence, high disruption it brings and physical and emotional cost incurred to counter it, not because of the content of what the offender is saying. Content might be expression of love and still the action is horrible. We won't solve stalking by banning compliments and expressions of love. We should ban targeted insistence in causing distress instead. And if anyone would try defend it with freedom of speech, you do have right to speak, but not loudly into specific person's ear as you follow them around.

> And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice. You could have chosen otherwise. Any harm you might feel when someone misgenders you is self inflicted.

Would you say the same about a person being called a racial slur for example? “You shouldn’t have built your worth on your race”?

Any harm you might feel when someone [calls you the n-word] is self inflicted, of course.

> Why would using the wrong one be harmful to anybody?

As alexwennerberg said elsewhere in this thread:

> The reason that people are so sensitive and strict about this is because the stakes for trans people are very high -- some people don't believe trans people exist, should exist, or should have the same rights as cis people. Refusing to use the right pronouns reveals either a benign misunderstanding about trans people or a willful hostility towards their existence. The latter is extremely common and can be both hurtful and often scary, as trans people, especially trans people of color, are often subject to violence because of their identities.

I think that's absolutely horrible when people intentionally call others names they don't want to be called by. Even worse if it's done in hostility and if it escalates to violence.

I think that people taking strong offence from a racial slur or any other slur made the mistake of making "I'm a universally respectable person" part of their identity. Then any display of disrespect becomes attack on identity. Making race part of your identity would backfire not when people recognize your race even with a racial slur but when your race is doubted ("you are not that black") or misrecognized, like hearing n-word when you had some black ancestors but you think of yourself as white and made it a part of your identity.

'n-word' rose in popularity immensely over last two decades. Earlier either people said it or didn't say it but never people made the mental gymnastic of saying a lot 'that word that we do not say'. It could be made taboo because it's fairly useless and there are fairly good alternatives. People born in the fifties in the US might disagree but this never bothered me much, being born in 99,99% white country that never had any expeirience of exploiting people of other races. Also any reflexive negative feeling you get when hearing specific words is self inflicted harm. You trained yourself to react that way to those words. It's not innate. Getting mad at people is punishing yourself for their stupidity and you should try to do as little of that as you can.

Unfortunately you can't convince people who despise you especially when you don't know who are those people. And they will not stop despising you.

By trying to convince everyone what you might get is a lot of people despising your actions when you try to turn a common word like 'he' or 'she' into a contextual slur.

A lot of people care how their actions affect other people and don't like when they affect other people negatively. Telling them that your plain speech affects you negatively and possibly intentionally, affects them negatively. I think striving to not harming people is important part of a lot of people's identity as is gender for some and telling them they are harming you is attacking their identity.

I guess I just figured out why this is a thing.

There are just two fractions of offended people. One fraction suspects other of intentionally attacking their identity by using improper gender pronouns. The other feels like the first one intentionally attacks their identity of being a good person by insinuating that there's harmful intent in their use of common words. Words they use every day. Words they learned around age 3.

While the despicable people grab popcorn, fuel the fire, and watch from the sidelines as vulerable people and good people hurt each other.

I see no resolution of that conflict. It will just gradually die down by a lot of people removing gender out of their identity and a lot more removing 'being good' from their identity to remove themselves from the conflict. This is all sad.

I guess lesson for me is, be ready to shed parts of your identity when they become source of harm for you.

> And if you build your worth on your gender should I really be interested? It was your choice.

We live in a world where entire social structures are built up based on gender. It's not a choice.

Also, it's not about "worth". It's about identity. If we lived in some alien society that defined nothing along gender lines and didn't even have gender specific pronouns, maybe there would be some merit to the argument. But we don't and there's none.

Your gender is not a choice (i think? Not sure where science stands on that) but whether you make it part of your identity or not is a choice. "I'm a male" is statement of a fact, but "I identify as a man" is a statement of choice.

I choose to identify as a hacker, potentially useful, solver, youthful, intelligent, mostly self-reliant, good person. If you don't successfully harm my perception of myself in those aspects then you won't threaten my identity. And even if you do I'm ready to shed parts of my identity if they start to be too troublesome to uphold. If you called me 'not that white' or 'half of the man somone else is' or 'a pussy' or a 'weakling' it wouldn't harm me in a bit because those are not the parts of my identity.

What societal structures are based on gender? The only one I can think of in modern western society are the toilets/dressing rooms of gyms and pools, clergy, husband, wife and mother.

This comment is off-topic to the issue at hand, which is about forcing people to use "they" instead of any other singular gender-neutral pronoun or simply avoiding pronouns.