Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you “politely accede to pronoun requests”. Which sounds to me like, “politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community”. (Specifically, people are socially required to use “woman” and “she” to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.
There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.
People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carverealityatthejoints. MtF transgenders unambiguously fall into the “male” cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as “he”. Anyone who breaks this protocol (except under duress) is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who follow other protocols are still welcome to be part of the community.
Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people’s preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people’s preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as “he”, but you don’t have to use “she”. You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns (no alternatives). This is the consensus position, but people who politely decline to do so are still welcome to join.
Same as above, except anyone who declines is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.
I don’t know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.
Edit: Reworded to taboo the phrase “Anyone who disagrees” as requested by RobertM.
Is there literally any scene in the world that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5? Like, a space where a transgender person is friendly with the people there and different people in a conversation are reliably using different pronouns to refer to the same person? My sense is that it’s actively confusing in a conversation for the participants to not be consistent in the choice of someone’s pronouns.
I guess I’ve often seen people default to ‘they’ a lot for people who have preferred pronouns that are he/she, that seems to go by just fine even if some people use he / she for the person, but I can’t recall ever seeing a conversation where one person uses ‘he’ and another person uses ‘she’ when both are referring to the same person.
Is there literally any scene that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5?
If you can use “they” without problems, that sounds a lot like 4.
As for 3 and 5, not to my knowledge. Compromises like this would be more likely in settings with a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, but such places are becoming less common. Perhaps some family reunions would have similar rules or customs?
I could believe it, but my (weak) guess is that in most settings people care about which pronoun they use far less than they care about people not being confused about who is being referred to.
Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
Any community is free to have whatever standards they want for membership, including politically-coded compelled speech. But it is not exactly shocking if your membership is then composed 70% of one side and <2% of the other.
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
The EA Forum has an explicit policy that you need to use the pronouns the people you’re talking about prefer.
I saw the the EA Forum’s policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don’t need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:
You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.
I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It’s important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.
It’s because of that goal that I’m encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let’s avoid that.
I don’t have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.
So I don’t agree that the statements are misleading.
(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it’s not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)
I disagree that his statements are misleading: the impression someone who believed them true would have is far more accurate than someone who believed them false. Is that not more relevant, and a better measure of honesty, than whether or not they’re “incorrect”?
Eliezer said you are welcome in the community if you “politely accede to pronoun requests”. Which sounds to me like, “politically-coded speech is required to be welcome in the community”. (Specifically, people are socially required to use “woman” and “she” to refer to MtF transgenders). And Eliezer is not just some guy, he is the closest thing the rationalist community has to a leader.
There is a broad range of possible customs the community could have adopted. A few, from more right-coded to more left-coded.
People should use words to refer to the category-boundaries that best carve reality at the joints. MtF transgenders unambiguously fall into the “male” cluster, and therefore the prescriptive protocol is to refer to them as “he”. Anyone who breaks this protocol (except under duress) is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, but it is only the consensus position, and those who follow other protocols are still welcome to be part of the community.
Anyone is free to decide for themselves whether to use people’s preferred pronouns. You can ask people to use your preferred pronouns, as long as you are polite about it. And people are free to refuse, as long as they are also polite.
As a matter of politeness, you are not allowed to refer to people by pronouns they asked you not to use. However, you are not required to use people’s preferred pronouns. (So you cannot refer to a MtF transgender as “he”, but you don’t have to use “she”. You could instead refer to them by the first letter of their name, or some other alternative.)
You should refer to transgenders by their preferred pronouns (no alternatives). This is the consensus position, but people who politely decline to do so are still welcome to join.
Same as above, except anyone who declines is not welcome as a member of the community.
Same as above, and economically literate people who are in favor of market solutions are also unwelcome.
I don’t know which of these solutions is best, but 1, 6, and 7 seem bad. Eliezer seems to support 6.
Edit: Reworded to taboo the phrase “Anyone who disagrees” as requested by RobertM.
Is there literally any scene in the world that has openly transgender people in it and does 3, 4, or 5? Like, a space where a transgender person is friendly with the people there and different people in a conversation are reliably using different pronouns to refer to the same person? My sense is that it’s actively confusing in a conversation for the participants to not be consistent in the choice of someone’s pronouns.
I guess I’ve often seen people default to ‘they’ a lot for people who have preferred pronouns that are he/she, that seems to go by just fine even if some people use he / she for the person, but I can’t recall ever seeing a conversation where one person uses ‘he’ and another person uses ‘she’ when both are referring to the same person.
If you can use “they” without problems, that sounds a lot like 4.
As for 3 and 5, not to my knowledge. Compromises like this would be more likely in settings with a mix of Liberals and Conservatives, but such places are becoming less common. Perhaps some family reunions would have similar rules or customs?
I could believe it, but my (weak) guess is that in most settings people care about which pronoun they use far less than they care about people not being confused about who is being referred to.
Thanks for clarifying. By “policy” and “standards” and “compelled speech” I thought you meant something more than community norms and customs. This is traditionally an important distinction to libertarians and free speech advocates. I think the distinction carves reality at the joints, and I hope you agree. I agree that community norms and customs can be unwelcoming.
Yes, it’s not a law, so it’s not a libertarian issue. As I said earlier:
By “compelled speech” being a standard for community membership, I just meant “You are required to say certain things or you will be excluded from the community.” For instance, as jefftk pointed out,
I saw the the EA Forum’s policy. If someone repeatedly and deliberately misgenders on the EA Forum they will be banned from that forum. But you don’t need to post on the EA Forum at all in order to be part of the rationalist community. On the provided evidence, it is false that:
I want people of all political beliefs, including US conservative-coded beliefs, to feel welcome in the rationalist community. It’s important to that goal to distinguish between policies and norms, because changing policies requires a different process to changing norms, and because policies and norms are unwelcoming in different ways and to different extents.
It’s because of that goal that I’m encouraging you to change these incorrect/misleading/unclear statements. If newcomers incorrectly believe that they are required to say certain things or they will be excluded from the community, then they will feel less welcome, for nothing. Let’s avoid that.
I don’t have a bunch of citations but I spend time in multiple rationalist social spaces and it seems to me that I would in fact be excluded from many of them if I stuck to sex-based pronouns, because as stated above there are many trans people in the community, of whom many hold to the consensus progressive norms on this. The EA Forum policy is not unrepresentative of the typical sentiment.
So I don’t agree that the statements are misleading.
(I note that my typical habit is to use singular they for visibly NB/trans people, and I am not excluded for that. So it’s not precisely a kind of compelled speech.)
I disagree that his statements are misleading: the impression someone who believed them true would have is far more accurate than someone who believed them false. Is that not more relevant, and a better measure of honesty, than whether or not they’re “incorrect”?