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> Take the pronouns thing oh boy. > Why are you putting your pronouns up? To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that peo

by rrose 4y ago

> Take the pronouns thing oh boy. > Why are you putting your pronouns up? To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs. > they/them They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever. > And yet dissent and mockery of this abject stupidity is largely censored. Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. You can still disagree with the censorship but to act as if it's mostly good-faith arguments being censored is just naive.

hyperdunc 4y ago
Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear. This trend isn't meaningful, it's narcissistic.
- rrose 4y ago
  it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.
  - hyperdunc 4y ago
    It being incredibly important to them is part of the narcissism. They can believe whatever they want, but they don't get to demand validation from anyone who's not willing to freely give it. This pronoun nonsense is as much of a coercion as it is a kindness. I won't participate.
    - rrose 4y ago
      It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly. Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.
    - donkeybeer 4y ago
  - wyclif 4y ago
    Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      >Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will >bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine >I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?
      - wyclif 4y ago
        In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.
- jquery 4y ago
  I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.
  - hyperdunc 4y ago
    Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me. We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.
    - jquery 4y ago
      It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them. I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.
Banana699 4y ago
>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs. This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns. It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous. Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded. >They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever. Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy". >Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress. This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely. [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- rrose 4y ago
  what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.

by rrose 4y ago

hyperdunc 4y ago

Sorry, a person's gender identity just isn't that interesting, and the extra cognitive load of remembering pronouns isn't something I'm willing to bear. This trend isn't meaningful, it's narcissistic.

rrose 4y ago
it not being interesting to you doesn't mean it isn't incredibly important to them. The fact that it is incredibly important to them is obvious, and the "cognitive load" you're talking about is completely trivial. If you're not willing to take even the tiniest effort to make the people around you feel welcome, you may be the one being narcissistic.
- hyperdunc 4y ago
  It being incredibly important to them is part of the narcissism. They can believe whatever they want, but they don't get to demand validation from anyone who's not willing to freely give it. This pronoun nonsense is as much of a coercion as it is a kindness. I won't participate.
  - rrose 4y ago
    It's no more coercive than any other social norm. If you act disrespectful to the people around you, they will treat you accordingly. Everyone everywhere accepts this in 99% of situations and it is interesting to see the specific exceptions they make.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    I don't quite get your stance. You're free not to use those words. It's not like it is against the law to not use those pronouns. It is a simple and nearly effortless courtesy, that you can ignore if you want, with the consequence that people may think you're a twat and treat you accordingly. Like, you're not mandated by law to greet someone with "good morning" instead of saying "fuck you". Yet it is widely understood that if you do this and refuse to say good morning, people will be upset and become hostile towards you. It's a perfect analogous situation. I'm not really sure what you want.
  - donkeybeer 4y ago
- wyclif 4y ago
  Count me as another long-time HN user who refuses on principle to play the My Pronouns game. Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will, or bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine—but I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters and virtue signallers.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    >Burn me at the proverbial stake if you will >bring out the HR version of the portable guillotine >I will never, ever knuckle under to the heresy hunters My god you really need to take yourself way less seriously. Is this what happens when you've lived your life in first-world middle class comfort? You think you're a martyr for... being slightly impolite to people?
    - wyclif 4y ago
      In my view (and actually the view of a lot of people, given the responses in this thread), it has almost nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with avoiding being manipulated by wokeists.
jquery 4y ago
I'm learning Japanese and they have dozens of pronouns, perhaps hundreds of them. Not only is someone's gender identity bound to their pronoun, but other important aspects are bound as well such as job and age. I don't see anything wrong with introducing a few more to the English language, we've been too restrictive for too long and the language is just getting downright creaky.
- hyperdunc 4y ago
  Some of the recent pronouns I've seen are barely pronounceable. Getting others to refer to you in an unwieldy way seems more like a power play to me. We already have some titles that signal achievement, like Doctor. I'd be for introducing more of them. Maybe we can get rid of the hereditary ones, too.
  - jquery 4y ago
    It's easier to just think of it like someone's name. Even if someone's name is hard to pronounce, we generally make an effort *if* we want to socialize with them. I won't disagree there's power plays going on. Lots of people glob onto any well-intentioned movement to push their own egos. But I'm more concerned with being kind to those in the margins than accidentally validating a narcissist. Idk. I get where you're coming from. But. A lot of these people are genuinely not "he" or "her" and it's just kind of degrading to force them into one of those buckets.

Banana699 4y ago

>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs. This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns. It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous. Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded. >They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever. Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy". >Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia. Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress. This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely. [1]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

rrose 4y ago
what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.