In person, I’m fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don’t have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy—don’t have to swish around in crinoline, don’t have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as “she”, don’t have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls’ name). People don’t assume based on where I am or what I’m doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)
Now, I recognize this disparity is because it’s considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender… except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t know doesn’t casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone’s looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person’s gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don’t guess, you find out, and if you’re wrong, that’s not okay.
Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for “alicorn gender” on this very site—it’s in the second result!) signifies that I am not a “real person” in the above sense. It’s okay to guess. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong. He won’t care, and if she does, it’s about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn’t even have a way for me to correct em.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn’t care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:
On the other side of this interaction, we should consider the possibility that our offensiveness sense may be tuned too sensitively, perhaps for an ancestral environment where mass media didn’t exist and any offense might reasonably be considered both personal and intentional.
But I admit that I’m still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. “Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer. I’d be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.
I wouldn’t mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:
The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn’t care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.
Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn’t care.
Note the real analogy here: the two men don’t care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn’t matter whether they are right or not.
Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed.
The other difference when calling a ‘she’ a he’ in real life is:
If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a ‘he’ then it probably means you haven’t noticed her breasts, don’t consider her facial features to be differentiated and don’t even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.
“Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer.
Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
I’m pretty sure that’s a function of where you hang out.
My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.
About gender pronouns, your gender, gender politics in general or something more esoteric?
About me.
In person, I’m fairly obviously girl-shaped. No one has ever made this mistake when interacting with me in person, and I don’t have to do Obvious Girl Things™ to get that accuracy—don’t have to swish around in crinoline, don’t have to conveniently quote third parties who refer to me as “she”, don’t have to carry my purse everywhere I go, or even say my name (which is a girls’ name). People don’t assume based on where I am or what I’m doing or how surprising it would be for me to be a girl before they figure out that I am one anyway and pronoun me accordingly.
And—in person, when people can’t tell what gender someone is, they don’t guess, unless they feel able to rely on visual cues or maybe being married to someone of a known gender (and when they are wrong they are mortified). People will bend over backwards to avoid using the wrong pronoun for someone who’s in the room with them. They’ll ask third parties or construct their sentences to avoid making the assumption or learn the person’s name to get a clue. It’s just not socially acceptable to get it wrong.
Online, people feel free to guess, and on the geeky parts of the Internet I frequent this is most likely to affect women negatively. (I also frequent various anti-prejudice parts of the Internet, but there a) I generally lurk and b) under the circumstances they take the trouble to be careful about that sort of thing!)
Now, I recognize this disparity is because it’s considered insulting to say that someone looks like the opposite gender, and not so with writing like the opposite gender… except that when people talk about third parties one of them knows in person and the other doesn’t, the one who doesn’t know doesn’t casually hurl pronoun caution to the wind even though someone is right there to correct them should they be wrong without any implications about anyone’s looks having been made. When there is a mechanism to find out a real person’s gender, it gets taken advantage of. With real people, you don’t guess, you find out, and if you’re wrong, that’s not okay.
Getting my gender wrong when it would have been pretty easy to get it right (for crying out loud, ask me! Or someone else! Or do the most cursory of searches for “alicorn gender” on this very site—it’s in the second result!) signifies that I am not a “real person” in the above sense. It’s okay to guess. It doesn’t matter if you get it wrong. He won’t care, and if she does, it’s about eir politics or something dismissible like that, not about whether you took four seconds to fact-check. Not about identity, or consideration, or the fact that this happens about once a week and the blogger, unlike most people who make the mistake, doesn’t even have a way for me to correct em.
It seems somewhat unreasonable to get so upset over the fact that a random person on the Internet doesn’t care about you. I wonder what you think about this quote from my post The Nature of Offense:
But I admit that I’m still quite confused about the proper relationship between rationality, values, and emotions. “Too sensitively” above makes some sense to me intuitively, but if someone asks “too sensitive compared to what?” then I can’t really give an answer. I’d be interested in any insights you (or anyone else) might have.
I wouldn’t mind if the person had chosen not to blog about me at all. But having made the choice to a) blog about my article and b) couch this entry in terms of what puzzles me, etc., not checking up on my gender places the entire thing in a sort of uncanny valley of care. The blogger basically tried to order up my content a la carte, and there is a limit to how modular my contents are.
I tend to agree with Wei Dai, and it seems to me that your analogy between the way people behave on the internet and the way people behave in person is flawed. To illustrate this:
The internet behavior in question: the blogger didn’t care enough about you to find out your gender, but did care enough about what you said to comment on it, also not realizing that you would read the blog post.
Real world behavior that would be actually analogous: two men (more likely to be uncaring) are walking down a street in a large city. Two other persons pass them, walking in the other direction and speaking with one another. The two men overhear something, but it is difficult for them to be sure of the gender of the two persons. Then, one of the two men comments to the other on what they overheard. He uses whatever gender pronoun seems to him slightly more likely, even while knowing that there is a good chance he is wrong, and he doesn’t care.
Note the real analogy here: the two men don’t care about the two persons they pass, but are interested in what they overhear, and so say something about it. They have no reason to expect that the persons will hear what they say, so, in their view, it doesn’t matter whether they are right or not.
Of course, people may well underestimate the probability that other people will read blog posts about them, so maybe they should be more careful.
The other difference when calling a ‘she’ a he’ in real life is: If you can actually see her with your eyes and you call her a ‘he’ then it probably means you haven’t noticed her breasts, don’t consider her facial features to be differentiated and don’t even have a polite, respectful appreciation for her feminine form. That makes the situation extremely embarrassing for both parties.
Too sensitive compared to how you would want to feel if you knew more about your preferences (how low worlds rank where the offense was made) and more about what the world is like, e.g. the state of mind of those making the perceived offense?
I’m pretty sure that’s a function of where you hang out.
My impression is that transgendered people have a hard time getting their choices taken seriously in most social circles.
Your impression is accurate. It’s frequently an issue in gatherings of trans people, let alone in mixed groups or majority-cis spaces.