The post is explicitly about pronouns, so I’m not sure what you mean by “I don’t think this implies …”.
(I am not suggesting that Zack’s purpose is to get everyone to refuse to call people by the pronouns they prefer; I take him at his word when he says he almost always goes along with people’s requests and thinks that others should generally do likewise. If anything I wrote sounds as I think he wants to change that, then I screwed up and I apologize.)
(I am not suggesting that Zack’s purpose is to get everyone to refuse to call people by the pronouns they prefer; I take him at his word when he says he almost always goes along with people’s requests and thinks that others should generally do likewise. If anything I wrote sounds as I think he wants to change that, then I screwed up and I apologize.)
Hm, then I’m not sure what you meant by
“What pronouns we should use”
as a topic.
Like if you see Zack taking a position on “What pronouns we should use”, and you don’t see him taking a position that pronouns should be used in accordance with biological sex, then what position do you see him taking?
I think we’re somehow at cross purposes. To whatever extent that’s my fault, please accept my apologies.
The phrase “what pronouns we should use” wasn’t mine. mukashi proposed two options for what Zack’s post is really about: “Eliezer not following good rules” and “what pronouns we should use”. I wouldn’t pick either of those exact phrases myself, and took them as gesturing at two broader possibilities: “about general principles of thinking” and “about gender issues in general and pronouns in particular”, and either way I couldn’t agree with your statement that it’s definitely “the former rather than the latter”: I think there’s as much of “the latter” as of “the former” in it.
More precisely, what I think is that Zack’s purpose is something like to correct any cognitive errors he sees that tend to encourage the idea that trans Xs are real Xs or should be thought of as such. Eliezer is a mere target of opportunity; pronouns happen to be the specific issue; Zack’s post is “about” both, though not exactly about Eliezer not following good rules, I think, and not exactly about what pronouns we should use.
I think Zack’s position on pronouns is that we should generally refer to people with the pronouns they prefer, that we should take care not to let that manipulate us into thinking that those pronouns are correct in any sense beyond social convenience, and that it would be better if fewer people whose self-image and what-Zack-considers-actual-sex diverge asked others to use what-Zack-considers-less-accurate pronouns for them. (More precisely, each bit of those is a thing I think to be Zack’s position, but I may have some parts wrong and there’s a very good chance that the whole thing therefore fails to be an accurate summary.)
The phrase “what pronouns we should use” wasn’t mine. mukashi proposed two options for what Zack’s post is really about: “Eliezer not following good rules” and “what pronouns we should use”.
Oh, my bad, I hadn’t realized you and mukashi were different people.
More precisely, what I think is that Zack’s purpose is something like to correct any cognitive errors he sees that tend to encourage the idea that trans Xs are real Xs or should be thought of as such. Eliezer is a mere target of opportunity; pronouns happen to be the specific issue; Zack’s post is “about” both, though not exactly about Eliezer not following good rules, I think, and not exactly about what pronouns we should use.
So I think there are two things to say here.
First, yes, Zack seems to be motivated partly by a point like this, more so than by general correctness (judging by the difficulty I’ve had getting him to engage with various critiques that are orthogonal to the whole trans issue). It seems like a general thing to me, that one cannot really get people to summon the energy to care about getting things correct if they don’t happen to be about topics that they care about.
But secondly, my impression is that this is less stuff that he wanted to write about, and more stuff that he felt forced to write about because people kept dismissing other of his concerns with “trans women are women”. If there’s a cognitive error that entirely shuts down discussion about a topic, then that seems like something worth addressing?
I think Zack’s position on pronouns is that we should generally refer to people with the pronouns they prefer, that we should take care not to let that manipulate us into thinking that those pronouns are correct in any sense beyond social convenience, and that it would be better if fewer people whose self-image and what-Zack-considers-actual-sex diverge asked others to use what-Zack-considers-less-accurate pronouns for them. (More precisely, each bit of those is a thing I think to be Zack’s position, but I may have some parts wrong and there’s a very good chance that the whole thing therefore fails to be an accurate summary.)
I don’t really like the phrasing “what-Zack-considers-actual-sex”. It seems to me that Zack’s position on “actual sex” is quite popular, even among trans people. Specifically, Zack and many others seem to favor something along the lines of taking a number of socially relevant sex characteristics, and defining actual sex to be the first principal component of those characteristics. (Essentially, the thingspace-cluster definition.)
This position has a number of challenges, which Zack mostly seems to bite the bullets on. Zack regularly points out that e.g. trans people cherry-pick what characteristics they use for defining the principal component, but that’s disagreements within this conception of sex; as long as the conception remains popular, it seems a bit sketchy to blame it on him.
I wasn’t intending “what-Zack-considers-” to come with an implied “wrongly”, and I’m sorry if it sounded as if I was. What I intended was merely for it not to come with an implied “rightly”, since pretty much everything in this area is controversial. I agree that something like (what I take to be) Zack’s understanding of “sex” is both reasonable and widely held.
The post is explicitly about pronouns, so I’m not sure what you mean by “I don’t think this implies …”.
(I am not suggesting that Zack’s purpose is to get everyone to refuse to call people by the pronouns they prefer; I take him at his word when he says he almost always goes along with people’s requests and thinks that others should generally do likewise. If anything I wrote sounds as I think he wants to change that, then I screwed up and I apologize.)
Hm, then I’m not sure what you meant by
as a topic.
Like if you see Zack taking a position on “What pronouns we should use”, and you don’t see him taking a position that pronouns should be used in accordance with biological sex, then what position do you see him taking?
I think we’re somehow at cross purposes. To whatever extent that’s my fault, please accept my apologies.
The phrase “what pronouns we should use” wasn’t mine. mukashi proposed two options for what Zack’s post is really about: “Eliezer not following good rules” and “what pronouns we should use”. I wouldn’t pick either of those exact phrases myself, and took them as gesturing at two broader possibilities: “about general principles of thinking” and “about gender issues in general and pronouns in particular”, and either way I couldn’t agree with your statement that it’s definitely “the former rather than the latter”: I think there’s as much of “the latter” as of “the former” in it.
More precisely, what I think is that Zack’s purpose is something like to correct any cognitive errors he sees that tend to encourage the idea that trans Xs are real Xs or should be thought of as such. Eliezer is a mere target of opportunity; pronouns happen to be the specific issue; Zack’s post is “about” both, though not exactly about Eliezer not following good rules, I think, and not exactly about what pronouns we should use.
I think Zack’s position on pronouns is that we should generally refer to people with the pronouns they prefer, that we should take care not to let that manipulate us into thinking that those pronouns are correct in any sense beyond social convenience, and that it would be better if fewer people whose self-image and what-Zack-considers-actual-sex diverge asked others to use what-Zack-considers-less-accurate pronouns for them. (More precisely, each bit of those is a thing I think to be Zack’s position, but I may have some parts wrong and there’s a very good chance that the whole thing therefore fails to be an accurate summary.)
Oh, my bad, I hadn’t realized you and mukashi were different people.
So I think there are two things to say here.
First, yes, Zack seems to be motivated partly by a point like this, more so than by general correctness (judging by the difficulty I’ve had getting him to engage with various critiques that are orthogonal to the whole trans issue). It seems like a general thing to me, that one cannot really get people to summon the energy to care about getting things correct if they don’t happen to be about topics that they care about.
But secondly, my impression is that this is less stuff that he wanted to write about, and more stuff that he felt forced to write about because people kept dismissing other of his concerns with “trans women are women”. If there’s a cognitive error that entirely shuts down discussion about a topic, then that seems like something worth addressing?
I don’t really like the phrasing “what-Zack-considers-actual-sex”. It seems to me that Zack’s position on “actual sex” is quite popular, even among trans people. Specifically, Zack and many others seem to favor something along the lines of taking a number of socially relevant sex characteristics, and defining actual sex to be the first principal component of those characteristics. (Essentially, the thingspace-cluster definition.)
This position has a number of challenges, which Zack mostly seems to bite the bullets on. Zack regularly points out that e.g. trans people cherry-pick what characteristics they use for defining the principal component, but that’s disagreements within this conception of sex; as long as the conception remains popular, it seems a bit sketchy to blame it on him.
I wasn’t intending “what-Zack-considers-” to come with an implied “wrongly”, and I’m sorry if it sounded as if I was. What I intended was merely for it not to come with an implied “rightly”, since pretty much everything in this area is controversial. I agree that something like (what I take to be) Zack’s understanding of “sex” is both reasonable and widely held.