I’m not even going to pretend to address the first half of your comment. You’re making extreme jumps of logic that are in no way justified by the conversation.
So that is the strong-request/demand that it’s reasonable for people to get from “society”. (If people in power were unambiguously saying “In order to be polite and not be called bad, you must think of these people in a certain way”, then I think there would be revolts.) If someone hasn’t become emotionally close friends with any trans people, I’d say it’s not too surprising if they haven’t picked up on something subtler than “socially enforced rules”.
The content of the sentence “I am a transgender man” is more or less “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman.” This has nothing to do with socially enforced rules and everything to do with the basic meaning of language. I did not realize that it was common for people to not know what the word “transgender” means.
You’re talking as though there is some background you don’t share with me, so I shall establish that background.
I tried googling “fired for not using pronouns”, and the results page had news articles pointing to several different cases of that—usually teachers—as well as this page, seemingly written by lawyers, titled “What Can Employers Do About Employees Who Refuse To Refer To Transgendered Employees By Their Preferred Names Or Pronouns?”.
The page basically recommends firing them; it says “Even if the employee has “for cause” protection through an employment contract, there’s a pretty good chance that intentionally misgendering their coworker is sufficient cause to terminate”; it further says that “allowing them to call transgendered employees by something other than their preferred name or pronoun [...] amounts to allowing one employee to discriminate against their transgendered coworkers” and cites a court decision saying that something like that would create an “increased risk of liability” for the company.
There are plenty of U.S. companies (especially tech companies) and academic and other institutions that loudly proclaim their support for trans people, and, although I’m not sure if it’s usually spelled out in their public policies, I think that if an employee or teacher said (as calmly and politely as possible) “No, I don’t believe that you’re a man, and I will continue to call you ‘she’” and stuck to it, then I’d expect the majority of observers would say there’s at least a 50% chance of that person getting fired for it. If the above lawyers’ page is correct, then presumably most U.S. companies who listen to their lawyers (which is most U.S. companies of nontrivial size) will tend to behave like that.
Social groups have much less in the way of top-down enforcement, and I expect lots of variation there. Still, I think there are plenty of social groups—especially involving those who’ve recently attended school—where deliberately not using someone’s requested pronouns is considered rude at best and carries nontrivial risk of ostracization.
Is any of the above new and surprising to you? If so, congratulations on somehow avoiding it—are you in the U.S.?
Anyway, with that background, I think it’s clear that, when someone says something like “I’m a trans man”/”I’d like you to use male pronouns for me”, socially enforced rules have a lot to do with it. (“Threat of being fired” is arguably not “social” enforcement, but it’s certainly enforcement.) It is possible that, to the trans-person in question, all they’re doing is sharing information about their personal feelings, and they may be not thinking about the enforcement aspect—some of them probably oppose it (and a few are probably unaware of it), and it’s not their fault that the enforcement mechanism exists. Nevertheless, it does exist, and that is relevant for the other person.
The sociology of this is interesting. I suspect that only a small minority of trans people would say “Yes, I think other people should be fired if they don’t use my requested pronouns”, yet here we are. I think there are several mechanisms involved that tend to boost some signals over others; also, once some legal precedent is in place, fear of legal liability creates an institutional response (the fear could be exaggerated; I wonder if company lawyers have an incentive to exaggerate legal fears to make their services seem more vital), and the institutions’ social environments evolve in that direction.
What does the word “man” mean in the sentence “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman”? Given that popular opinion is, in fact, wrong about this, we should be able to describe some observation or experimental test where the man makes better predictions than the populace, right? What is it, specifically? (I think there are real answers to this, but I’m interested in what you think.)
I’m not even going to pretend to address the first half of your comment. You’re making extreme jumps of logic that are in no way justified by the conversation.
What are the extreme jumps of logic? I confess that I can see none, in the post you’re responding to. If you think otherwise, I should like to see you defend that claim.
I’m not even going to pretend to address the first half of your comment. You’re making extreme jumps of logic that are in no way justified by the conversation.
The content of the sentence “I am a transgender man” is more or less “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman.” This has nothing to do with socially enforced rules and everything to do with the basic meaning of language. I did not realize that it was common for people to not know what the word “transgender” means.
You’re talking as though there is some background you don’t share with me, so I shall establish that background.
I tried googling “fired for not using pronouns”, and the results page had news articles pointing to several different cases of that—usually teachers—as well as this page, seemingly written by lawyers, titled “What Can Employers Do About Employees Who Refuse To Refer To Transgendered Employees By Their Preferred Names Or Pronouns?”.
The page basically recommends firing them; it says “Even if the employee has “for cause” protection through an employment contract, there’s a pretty good chance that intentionally misgendering their coworker is sufficient cause to terminate”; it further says that “allowing them to call transgendered employees by something other than their preferred name or pronoun [...] amounts to allowing one employee to discriminate against their transgendered coworkers” and cites a court decision saying that something like that would create an “increased risk of liability” for the company.
There are plenty of U.S. companies (especially tech companies) and academic and other institutions that loudly proclaim their support for trans people, and, although I’m not sure if it’s usually spelled out in their public policies, I think that if an employee or teacher said (as calmly and politely as possible) “No, I don’t believe that you’re a man, and I will continue to call you ‘she’” and stuck to it, then I’d expect the majority of observers would say there’s at least a 50% chance of that person getting fired for it. If the above lawyers’ page is correct, then presumably most U.S. companies who listen to their lawyers (which is most U.S. companies of nontrivial size) will tend to behave like that.
Social groups have much less in the way of top-down enforcement, and I expect lots of variation there. Still, I think there are plenty of social groups—especially involving those who’ve recently attended school—where deliberately not using someone’s requested pronouns is considered rude at best and carries nontrivial risk of ostracization.
Is any of the above new and surprising to you? If so, congratulations on somehow avoiding it—are you in the U.S.?
Anyway, with that background, I think it’s clear that, when someone says something like “I’m a trans man”/”I’d like you to use male pronouns for me”, socially enforced rules have a lot to do with it. (“Threat of being fired” is arguably not “social” enforcement, but it’s certainly enforcement.) It is possible that, to the trans-person in question, all they’re doing is sharing information about their personal feelings, and they may be not thinking about the enforcement aspect—some of them probably oppose it (and a few are probably unaware of it), and it’s not their fault that the enforcement mechanism exists. Nevertheless, it does exist, and that is relevant for the other person.
The sociology of this is interesting. I suspect that only a small minority of trans people would say “Yes, I think other people should be fired if they don’t use my requested pronouns”, yet here we are. I think there are several mechanisms involved that tend to boost some signals over others; also, once some legal precedent is in place, fear of legal liability creates an institutional response (the fear could be exaggerated; I wonder if company lawyers have an incentive to exaggerate legal fears to make their services seem more vital), and the institutions’ social environments evolve in that direction.
What does the word “man” mean in the sentence “contrary to popular opinion, I am in fact a man and not a woman”? Given that popular opinion is, in fact, wrong about this, we should be able to describe some observation or experimental test where the man makes better predictions than the populace, right? What is it, specifically? (I think there are real answers to this, but I’m interested in what you think.)
What are the extreme jumps of logic? I confess that I can see none, in the post you’re responding to. If you think otherwise, I should like to see you defend that claim.