Napoleon is merely an argument for “just because you strongly believe it, even if it is a statement about you, does not necessarily make it true”.
When people make arguments, they often don’t list all of the premises. That’s not unique to trans discourse. Informal reasoning is hard to make fully explicit. “Your argument doesn’t explicitly exclude every counterexample” is a pretty cheap counter-argument. What people experience is important evidence and an important factor, it’s rational to bring up instead of stopping yourself with “wait, I’m not allowed to bring that up unless I make an analytically bulletproof argument”. For example, if you trust someone that they feel strongly about being a woman, there’s no reason to suspect them of being a cosplayer who chases Twitter popularity.
I expect that you will disagree with a lot of this, and that’s okay; I am not trying to convince you, just explaining my position.
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you. I thought it was “I’m not sure if trans people are deluded in some way (like Napoleons, but milder) or not”. But now it seems like “I think some people really suffer and others just cosplay, the cosplayers take something away from true sufferers”. What is taken away?
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you.
Two major points.
1) It annoys me if someone insists that I accept their theory about what being trans really is.
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
Also, from larger perspective, this is moving the goalposts. Long ago, tolerance was defined as basically not hurting other people, and letting them do whatever they want as long as it does not hurt others. Recently it also includes agreeing with the beliefs of their woke representatives. (Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that. Furthermore, I claim that even trans people themselves are not necessarily experts on themselves. Science exists for a reason, otherwise we could just make opinion polls.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
2) Every cause gets abused. It is bad if it becomes a taboo to point this out.
A few months (or is it already years?) ago, there was an epidemic of teenagers on TikTok who appeared to have developed Tourette syndrome overnight. A few weeks or months later, apparently the epidemic was gone. I have no way to check those teenagers, but I think it is reasonable to assume that many of them were faking it. Why would anyone do that? Most likely, attention seeking. (There is also a things called Munchausen syndrome.) This is what I referred to as “cosplayers”.
Note that this is completely different from saying that Tourette syndrome does not exist.
If you adopt a rule that e.g. everyone must use everyone else’s preferred pronouns all the time, no exception, and you get banned for hate speech otherwise, this becomes a perfect opportunity for… anyone who enjoys using it as a leverage. You get an explosion of pronouns: it starts with “he” and “she”, proceeds with “they”, then you get “xe”, “ve”, “foo”, “bar”, “baz”, and ultimately anyone is free to make up their own pronouns, and everyone else is required to play along, or else. (That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
Again, moving the goalposts. We started with trans people who report feeling gender dysphoria, so we use their preferred pronouns to alleviate their suffering. So far, okay. But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Another annoying thing is how often this is used to derail the debate (on places like Twitter and Reddit). Suppose that someone is called “John” and has a male-passing photo. So you try to say something about John, and your automatically use the pronoun “he”. Big mistake! You haven’t noticed it, but recently John identifies as agender. And whatever you wanted to talk about originally is unimportant now, and the thread becomes about what a horrible person you are. Okay, you have learned your lesson; but the point is that the next time someone else is going to make the same mistake. So it basically becomes impossible to discuss John, ever. And sometimes, it is important to be able to discuss John, without getting the debate predictably derailed.
Shortly: misgendering should be considered bad manners, but not something you ban people for.
I think about transness in a similar way to how I think about homo/bisexuality.
If homo/bisexuality is outlawed, people are gonna suffer. Bad.
If I could erase homo/bisexuality from existence without creating suffering, I wouldn’t anyway. Would be a big violation of people’s freedom to choose their identity and actions (even if in practice most people don’t actually “choose” to be homo/bisexual).
Different people have homo/bisexuality of different “strength” and form. One man might fall in love with another man, but dislike sex or even kissing. Maybe he isn’t a real homosexual, if he doesn’t need to prove it physically? Another man might identify as a bisexual, but be in a relationship with a woman… he doesn’t get to prove his bisexuality (sexually or romantically). Maybe we shouldn’t trust him unless he walks the talk? As a result of all such situations, we might have certain “inconsistencies”: some people identifying as straight have done more “gay” things than people identifying as gay. My opinion on this? I think all of this is OK. Pushing for an “objective gay test” would be dystopian and suffering-inducing. I don’t think it’s an empirical matter (unless we choose it to be, which is a value-laden choice). Even if it was, we might be very far away from resolving it. So just respecting people’s self-identification in the meantime is best, I believe. Moreover, a lot of this is very private information anyway. Less reason to try measuring it “objectively”.
My thoughts about transness specifically:
We strive for gender equality (I hope). Which makes the concept of gender less important for society as a whole.
The concept of gender is additionally damaged by all the things a person can decide to do in their social/sexual life. For example, take an “assigned male at birth” (AMAB) person. AMAB can appear and behave very feminine without taking hormones. Or vice-versa (take hormones, get a pair of boobs, but present masculine). Additionally there are different degrees of medical transition and different types of sexual preferences.
A lot of things which make someone more or less similar to a man/woman (behavior with friends, behavior with romantic partners, behavior with sexual partners, thoughts) are private. Less reason to try measuring those “objectively”.
I have a choice to respect people’s self-identified genders or not. I decide to respect them. Not just because I care about people’s feelings, but also because of points 1 & 2 & 3 and because of my general values (I show similar respect to homo/bisexuals). So I respect pronouns, but on top of that I also respect if someone identifies as a man/woman/nonbinary. I believe respect is optimal in terms of reducing suffering and adhering to human values.
When I compare your opinion to mine, most of my confusion is about two things: what exactly do you see as an empirical question? how does the answer (or its absence) affect our actions?
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
I think we need to be careful to not make a false equivalence here:
Trans people want us to respect their pronouns and genders.
I’m not very familiar with Blanchard, so far it seems to me like Blanchard’s work is (a) just a typology for predicting certain correlations and (b) this work is sometimes used to argue that trans people are mistaken about their identities/motivations.
2A is kinda tangential to 1. So is this really a case of competing theories? I think uncertainty should make one skeptical of Blanchard work’s implications rather than make one skeptical about respecting trans people.
(Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that.
Two homo/bisexuals can have different opinions on what’s “true homo/bisexuality” is too. Some opinions can be pretty negative. Yes, that’s inconvenient, but that’s just an expected course of events.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
I feel it’s just the nature of some political questions. Not in all questions, not in all spaces you can treat disagreement as something benign.
But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Agree. Also agree that lynching for accidental misgendering is bad.
(That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
I’m pretty sure the helicopter argument began as an argument against trans people, not as an argument against weird-ass novel pronouns.
I agree with most of that, but it seems to me that respecting homosexuality is mostly a passive action; if you ignore what other people do, you are already maybe 90% there. Homosexuals don’t change their names or pronouns after coming out. You don’t have to pretend that ten years ago they were something else than they appeared to you at that time.
With transsexuality, you get the taboo of deadnaming, and occasionally the weird pronouns.
Also, the reaction seems different when you try to opt out of the game. Like, if someone is uncomfortable with homosexuality, they can say “could we please just… not discuss our sexual relations here, and focus on the job (or some other reason why we are here)?” and that’s usually accepted. If someone similarly says “could we please just… call everyone ‘they’ as a compromise solution, or simply refer to people using their names”, that already got some people cancelled.
Shortly, with homosexuals I never felt like my free speech was under attack.
It is possible that most of the weirdness and pushing boundaries does not actually come from the transsexuals themselves, but rather from woke people who try to be their “allies”. Either way, in effect, whenever a discussion about trans topics starts, I feel like “oh my, the woke hordes are coming, people are going to get cancelled”. (And I am not really concerned about myself here, because I am not American, so my job is not on the line; and if some online community decides to ban me, well then fuck them. But I don’t want to be in a community where people need to watch their tongues, and get filtered by political conformity.)
I think there should be more spaces where controversial ideas can be debated. I’m not against spaces without pronoun rules, just don’t think every place should be like this. Also, if we create a space for political debate, we need to really make sure that the norms don’t punish everyone who opposes centrism & the right. (Over-sensitive norms like “if you said that some opinion is transphobic you’re uncivil/shaming/manipulative and should get banned” might do this.) Otherwise it’s not free speech either. Will just produce another Grey or Red Tribe instead of Red/Blue/Grey debate platform.
I do think progressives underestimate free speech damage. To me it’s the biggest issue with the Left. Though I don’t think they’re entirely wrong about free speech.
For example, imagine I have trans employees. Another employee (X) refuses to use pronouns, in principle (using pronouns is not the same as accepting progressive gender theories). Why? Maybe X thinks my trans employees live such a great lie that using pronouns is already an unacceptable concession. Or maybe X thinks that even trying to switch “he” & “she” is too much work, and I’m not justified in asking to do that work because of absolute free speech. Those opinions seem unnecessarily strong and they’re at odds with the well-being of my employees, my work environment. So what now? Also, if pronouns are an unacceptable concession, why isn’t calling a trans woman by her female name an unacceptable concession?
Imagine I don’t believe something about a minority, so I start avoiding words which might suggest otherwise. If I don’t believe that gay love can be as true as straight love, I avoid the word “love” (in reference to gay people or to anybody) at work. If I don’t believe that women are as smart as men, I avoid the word “master” / “genius” (in reference to women or anybody) at work. It can get pretty silly. Will predictably cost me certain jobs.
Well, the primary goal of this place is to advance rationality and AI safety. Not the victory of any specific political tribe. And neither conformity nor contrarianism for its own sake.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid.
What is an (un)acceptable concession? For me, it is a question of effort and what value I receive in return. I value niceness, so by default people get their wishes granted, unless I forget. Some requests I consider arbitrary and annoying, so they don’t get them. Yeah, those are subjective criteria. But I am not here to get paid; I am here to enjoy the talk.
(What annoys me: asking to use pronouns other than he/she/they. I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.)
Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that. And the rest is about the balance of power, where the individual employee is often in a much worse bargaining position.
Agree that neopronouns are dumb. Wikipedia says they’re used by 4% LGBTQ people and criticized both within and outside the community.
But for people struggling with normal pronouns (he/she/they), I have the following thoughts:
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is not easier than using the words. Don’t project beliefs onto words too hard.
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is still a violation of free speech (if we have such a strong notion of free speech). So what is the motivation to propose that? It’s a bit like a dog in the manger. “I’d rather cripple myself than help you, let’s suffer together”.
Don’t maximize free speech (in a negligible way) while ignoring every other human value.
In an imperfect society, truly passive tolerance (tolerance which doesn’t require any words/actions) is impossible. For example, in a perfect society, if my school has bigoted teachers, it immediately gets outcompeted by a non-bigoted school. In an imperfect society it might not happen. So we get enforceable norms.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid. (...) Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that.
I’m not familiar with your model of free speech (i.e. how you imagine free speech working if laws and power balances were optimal). People who value free speech usually believe that free speech should have power above money and property, to a reasonable degree. What’s “reasonable” is the crux.
I think in situations where people work together on something unrelated to their beliefs, prohibiting to enforce a code of conduct is unreasonable. Because respect is crucial for the work environment and protecting marginalized groups. I assume people who propose to “call everyone they” or “call everyone by proper name” realize some of that.
If I let people use my house as a school, but find out that a teacher openly doesn’t respect minority students (by rejecting to do the smallest thing for them), I’m justified to not let the teacher into my house.
I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.
I just think “disliking deadnaming under most circumstances = magical thinking, like calling Italy Rome” was a very strong, barely argued/explained opinion. In tandem with mentioning delusion (Napoleon) and hysteria. If you want to write something insulting, maybe bother to clarify your opinions a little bit more? Like you did in our conversation.
When people make arguments, they often don’t list all of the premises. That’s not unique to trans discourse. Informal reasoning is hard to make fully explicit. “Your argument doesn’t explicitly exclude every counterexample” is a pretty cheap counter-argument. What people experience is important evidence and an important factor, it’s rational to bring up instead of stopping yourself with “wait, I’m not allowed to bring that up unless I make an analytically bulletproof argument”. For example, if you trust someone that they feel strongly about being a woman, there’s no reason to suspect them of being a cosplayer who chases Twitter popularity.
I think I still don’t understand the main conflict which bothers you. I thought it was “I’m not sure if trans people are deluded in some way (like Napoleons, but milder) or not”. But now it seems like “I think some people really suffer and others just cosplay, the cosplayers take something away from true sufferers”. What is taken away?
Two major points.
1) It annoys me if someone insists that I accept their theory about what being trans really is.
Zack insists that Blanchard is right, and that I fail at rationality if I disagree with him. People on Twitter and Reddit insist that Blanchard is wrong, and that I fail at being a decent human if I disagree with them. My opinion is that I have no comparative advantage at figuring out who is right and who is wrong on this topic, or maybe everyone is wrong, anyway it is an empirical question and I don’t have the data. I hope that people who have more data and better education will one day sort it out, but until that happens, my position firmly remains “I don’t know (and most likely neither do you), stop bothering me”.
Also, from larger perspective, this is moving the goalposts. Long ago, tolerance was defined as basically not hurting other people, and letting them do whatever they want as long as it does not hurt others. Recently it also includes agreeing with the beliefs of their woke representatives. (Note that this is about the representatives, not the people being represented. Two trans people can have different opinions, but you are required to believe the woke one and oppose the non-woke one.) Otherwise, you are transphobic. I completely reject that. Furthermore, I claim that even trans people themselves are not necessarily experts on themselves. Science exists for a reason, otherwise we could just make opinion polls.
Shortly: disagreement is not hate. But it often gets conflated, especially in environments that overwhelmingly contain people of one political tribe.
2) Every cause gets abused. It is bad if it becomes a taboo to point this out.
A few months (or is it already years?) ago, there was an epidemic of teenagers on TikTok who appeared to have developed Tourette syndrome overnight. A few weeks or months later, apparently the epidemic was gone. I have no way to check those teenagers, but I think it is reasonable to assume that many of them were faking it. Why would anyone do that? Most likely, attention seeking. (There is also a things called Munchausen syndrome.) This is what I referred to as “cosplayers”.
Note that this is completely different from saying that Tourette syndrome does not exist.
If you adopt a rule that e.g. everyone must use everyone else’s preferred pronouns all the time, no exception, and you get banned for hate speech otherwise, this becomes a perfect opportunity for… anyone who enjoys using it as a leverage. You get an explosion of pronouns: it starts with “he” and “she”, proceeds with “they”, then you get “xe”, “ve”, “foo”, “bar”, “baz”, and ultimately anyone is free to make up their own pronouns, and everyone else is required to play along, or else. (That’s when you get the “attack helicopters” as an attempt to point out the absurdity of the system.)
Again, moving the goalposts. We started with trans people who report feeling gender dysphoria, so we use their preferred pronouns to alleviate their suffering. So far, okay. But if there is a person who actually feels dysphoria from not being addressed as “ve” (someone who would be triggered by calling them any of: “he”, “she”, or “they”), then I believe that this is between them and their psychiatrist, and I want to be left out of this game.
Another annoying thing is how often this is used to derail the debate (on places like Twitter and Reddit). Suppose that someone is called “John” and has a male-passing photo. So you try to say something about John, and your automatically use the pronoun “he”. Big mistake! You haven’t noticed it, but recently John identifies as agender. And whatever you wanted to talk about originally is unimportant now, and the thread becomes about what a horrible person you are. Okay, you have learned your lesson; but the point is that the next time someone else is going to make the same mistake. So it basically becomes impossible to discuss John, ever. And sometimes, it is important to be able to discuss John, without getting the debate predictably derailed.
Shortly: misgendering should be considered bad manners, but not something you ban people for.
...and that’s basically all.
I’ll describe my general thoughts, like you did.
I think about transness in a similar way to how I think about homo/bisexuality.
If homo/bisexuality is outlawed, people are gonna suffer. Bad.
If I could erase homo/bisexuality from existence without creating suffering, I wouldn’t anyway. Would be a big violation of people’s freedom to choose their identity and actions (even if in practice most people don’t actually “choose” to be homo/bisexual).
Different people have homo/bisexuality of different “strength” and form. One man might fall in love with another man, but dislike sex or even kissing. Maybe he isn’t a real homosexual, if he doesn’t need to prove it physically? Another man might identify as a bisexual, but be in a relationship with a woman… he doesn’t get to prove his bisexuality (sexually or romantically). Maybe we shouldn’t trust him unless he walks the talk? As a result of all such situations, we might have certain “inconsistencies”: some people identifying as straight have done more “gay” things than people identifying as gay. My opinion on this? I think all of this is OK. Pushing for an “objective gay test” would be dystopian and suffering-inducing. I don’t think it’s an empirical matter (unless we choose it to be, which is a value-laden choice). Even if it was, we might be very far away from resolving it. So just respecting people’s self-identification in the meantime is best, I believe. Moreover, a lot of this is very private information anyway. Less reason to try measuring it “objectively”.
My thoughts about transness specifically:
We strive for gender equality (I hope). Which makes the concept of gender less important for society as a whole.
The concept of gender is additionally damaged by all the things a person can decide to do in their social/sexual life. For example, take an “assigned male at birth” (AMAB) person. AMAB can appear and behave very feminine without taking hormones. Or vice-versa (take hormones, get a pair of boobs, but present masculine). Additionally there are different degrees of medical transition and different types of sexual preferences.
A lot of things which make someone more or less similar to a man/woman (behavior with friends, behavior with romantic partners, behavior with sexual partners, thoughts) are private. Less reason to try measuring those “objectively”.
I have a choice to respect people’s self-identified genders or not. I decide to respect them. Not just because I care about people’s feelings, but also because of points 1 & 2 & 3 and because of my general values (I show similar respect to homo/bisexuals). So I respect pronouns, but on top of that I also respect if someone identifies as a man/woman/nonbinary. I believe respect is optimal in terms of reducing suffering and adhering to human values.
When I compare your opinion to mine, most of my confusion is about two things: what exactly do you see as an empirical question? how does the answer (or its absence) affect our actions?
I think we need to be careful to not make a false equivalence here:
Trans people want us to respect their pronouns and genders.
I’m not very familiar with Blanchard, so far it seems to me like Blanchard’s work is (a) just a typology for predicting certain correlations and (b) this work is sometimes used to argue that trans people are mistaken about their identities/motivations.
2A is kinda tangential to 1. So is this really a case of competing theories? I think uncertainty should make one skeptical of Blanchard work’s implications rather than make one skeptical about respecting trans people.
Two homo/bisexuals can have different opinions on what’s “true homo/bisexuality” is too. Some opinions can be pretty negative. Yes, that’s inconvenient, but that’s just an expected course of events.
I feel it’s just the nature of some political questions. Not in all questions, not in all spaces you can treat disagreement as something benign.
Agree. Also agree that lynching for accidental misgendering is bad.
I’m pretty sure the helicopter argument began as an argument against trans people, not as an argument against weird-ass novel pronouns.
I agree with most of that, but it seems to me that respecting homosexuality is mostly a passive action; if you ignore what other people do, you are already maybe 90% there. Homosexuals don’t change their names or pronouns after coming out. You don’t have to pretend that ten years ago they were something else than they appeared to you at that time.
With transsexuality, you get the taboo of deadnaming, and occasionally the weird pronouns.
Also, the reaction seems different when you try to opt out of the game. Like, if someone is uncomfortable with homosexuality, they can say “could we please just… not discuss our sexual relations here, and focus on the job (or some other reason why we are here)?” and that’s usually accepted. If someone similarly says “could we please just… call everyone ‘they’ as a compromise solution, or simply refer to people using their names”, that already got some people cancelled.
Shortly, with homosexuals I never felt like my free speech was under attack.
It is possible that most of the weirdness and pushing boundaries does not actually come from the transsexuals themselves, but rather from woke people who try to be their “allies”. Either way, in effect, whenever a discussion about trans topics starts, I feel like “oh my, the woke hordes are coming, people are going to get cancelled”. (And I am not really concerned about myself here, because I am not American, so my job is not on the line; and if some online community decides to ban me, well then fuck them. But I don’t want to be in a community where people need to watch their tongues, and get filtered by political conformity.)
I think there should be more spaces where controversial ideas can be debated. I’m not against spaces without pronoun rules, just don’t think every place should be like this. Also, if we create a space for political debate, we need to really make sure that the norms don’t punish everyone who opposes centrism & the right. (Over-sensitive norms like “if you said that some opinion is transphobic you’re uncivil/shaming/manipulative and should get banned” might do this.) Otherwise it’s not free speech either. Will just produce another Grey or Red Tribe instead of Red/Blue/Grey debate platform.
I do think progressives underestimate free speech damage. To me it’s the biggest issue with the Left. Though I don’t think they’re entirely wrong about free speech.
For example, imagine I have trans employees. Another employee (X) refuses to use pronouns, in principle (using pronouns is not the same as accepting progressive gender theories). Why? Maybe X thinks my trans employees live such a great lie that using pronouns is already an unacceptable concession. Or maybe X thinks that even trying to switch “he” & “she” is too much work, and I’m not justified in asking to do that work because of absolute free speech. Those opinions seem unnecessarily strong and they’re at odds with the well-being of my employees, my work environment. So what now? Also, if pronouns are an unacceptable concession, why isn’t calling a trans woman by her female name an unacceptable concession?
Imagine I don’t believe something about a minority, so I start avoiding words which might suggest otherwise. If I don’t believe that gay love can be as true as straight love, I avoid the word “love” (in reference to gay people or to anybody) at work. If I don’t believe that women are as smart as men, I avoid the word “master” / “genius” (in reference to women or anybody) at work. It can get pretty silly. Will predictably cost me certain jobs.
Well, the primary goal of this place is to advance rationality and AI safety. Not the victory of any specific political tribe. And neither conformity nor contrarianism for its own sake.
Employees get paid, which kinda automatically reduces their free speech, because saying the wrong words can make them stop getting paid.
What is an (un)acceptable concession? For me, it is a question of effort and what value I receive in return. I value niceness, so by default people get their wishes granted, unless I forget. Some requests I consider arbitrary and annoying, so they don’t get them. Yeah, those are subjective criteria. But I am not here to get paid; I am here to enjoy the talk.
(What annoys me: asking to use pronouns other than he/she/they. I do not talk about people’s past for no good reason, and definitely not just to annoy someone else. But if I have a good reason to point out that someone did something in the past, and the only way to do that is to reveal their previous name, then I don’t care about the taboo.)
Employment is really a different situation. You get laws, and recommendations of your legal department; there is not much anyone can do about that. And the rest is about the balance of power, where the individual employee is often in a much worse bargaining position.
Agree that neopronouns are dumb. Wikipedia says they’re used by 4% LGBTQ people and criticized both within and outside the community.
But for people struggling with normal pronouns (he/she/they), I have the following thoughts:
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is not easier than using the words. Don’t project beliefs onto words too hard.
Contorting language to avoid words associated with beliefs… is still a violation of free speech (if we have such a strong notion of free speech). So what is the motivation to propose that? It’s a bit like a dog in the manger. “I’d rather cripple myself than help you, let’s suffer together”.
Don’t maximize free speech (in a negligible way) while ignoring every other human value.
In an imperfect society, truly passive tolerance (tolerance which doesn’t require any words/actions) is impossible. For example, in a perfect society, if my school has bigoted teachers, it immediately gets outcompeted by a non-bigoted school. In an imperfect society it might not happen. So we get enforceable norms.
I’m not familiar with your model of free speech (i.e. how you imagine free speech working if laws and power balances were optimal). People who value free speech usually believe that free speech should have power above money and property, to a reasonable degree. What’s “reasonable” is the crux.
I think in situations where people work together on something unrelated to their beliefs, prohibiting to enforce a code of conduct is unreasonable. Because respect is crucial for the work environment and protecting marginalized groups. I assume people who propose to “call everyone they” or “call everyone by proper name” realize some of that.
If I let people use my house as a school, but find out that a teacher openly doesn’t respect minority students (by rejecting to do the smallest thing for them), I’m justified to not let the teacher into my house.
I just think “disliking deadnaming under most circumstances = magical thinking, like calling Italy Rome” was a very strong, barely argued/explained opinion. In tandem with mentioning delusion (Napoleon) and hysteria. If you want to write something insulting, maybe bother to clarify your opinions a little bit more? Like you did in our conversation.