Anyone who harbors such an intense attachment to specific gendered pronoun preferences clearly sees it as much more than a superficial aesthetic designator.
This makes you sound like a bit of a straw vulcan imo. All I have to do is imagine how jarring and upsetting it would be to have everyone start calling me “she” and it’s very obvious how, for almost all people, what pronoun others call them is deeply emotionally salient.
What would be upsetting about being called “she”? I don’t share your intuition. Whenever I imagine being misgendered (or am misgendered, e.g., on a voice call with a stranger), I don’t feel any strong emotional reaction. To the point that I generally will not correct them.
I could imagine it being very upsetting if I am misgendered by someone who should know me well enough not to misgender me, or if someone purposefully misgenders me. But the misgendering specifically is not the main offense in these two cases.
Perhaps myself and ymeskhout are less tied to our gender identity than most?
If random strangers start calling you “she”, that implies you look feminine enough to be mistaken for a woman. I think most men would prefer to look masculine for many reasons: not being mistaken for a woman, being conventionally attractive, being assumed to have a ‘manly’ rather than ‘effeminate’ personality, looking your age, etc.
If you look obviously masculine, then being misgendered constantly would just be bewildering. Surely something is signaling that you use feminine pronouns.
If it’s just people online misgendering you based on your writing, then that’s less weird. But I think it still would bother some people for some of the reasons above.
That’s the thing, I generally present as very masculine and if anyone referred to me as ‘she’ I would find it more confusing than anything else. If I actually cared, maybe I’d look for what effeminate signals I gave off, but I can’t imagine a scenario where I would find it offensive or get mad at the person.
It is important to note that people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, ranging from willing to undergo extreme body modification in order to match their gender identity, to those who don’t care in the slightest.
The issue is that cisgender is the default, and if you don’t have a strong attachment to your gender identity, you have no reason to change the label. Hence, cisgendered people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, from strongly identifying with it to no attachment at all.
(There is also the group of agender, which includes those who have deeply examined their gender identity and decided that they don’t really care (and probably also want to signal their examination and non-caring of gender identity))
Someone who is transgender obviously has an attachment to their gender identity, and this is obviously from which the Pronoun Discourse stems. They have a strong preference for a gender, and a preference to be referred to with the appropriate pronouns, and thus being misgendered is upsetting, as their preferences are violated.
(Of course, most of this rests on the ability to communicate the preference, and accidental violations when the preference was not communicated are less egregious than deliberate violations.)
Otherwise misgendering can be upsetting if it is tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and attempting an insult based off those stereotypes.
I also don’t think it’s useful to try and learn much about pronouns qua pronouns social battles over them. Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
I don’t think everyone proxies it that way—I know there are some people who are just old-fashioned, or passionate about prescriptive grammar, or have essentialist beliefs about gender but are libertarian about others’ behavior. I think that if everyone had very high confidence that someone not using the pronouns they requested meant that at worst that person mildly disapproves of them but would still actively defend their civil + legal + human rights, there would probably be a lot less of the handwringing you mention, and we’d be able to learn a lot more about the fundamental intrinsic meaning of pronouns.
Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.
I guess refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns is weak Bayesian evidence for wanting to have them killed, but the conclusion is so unlikely it’s probably not appropriate to raise it to the level of serious consideration.
Depends on the context. There are definitely contexts where a white man says n***** and it gives me the sense that he at least fantasizes about killing African Americans.
Similar contexts do occur with trans people and certain groups of white men.
If you were occasionally the target of such veiled threats, it might start becoming hard not to lump less directly threatening instances of similar-ish behavior in with the truly threatening.
This makes you sound like a bit of a straw vulcan imo. All I have to do is imagine how jarring and upsetting it would be to have everyone start calling me “she” and it’s very obvious how, for almost all people, what pronoun others call them is deeply emotionally salient.
What would be upsetting about being called “she”? I don’t share your intuition. Whenever I imagine being misgendered (or am misgendered, e.g., on a voice call with a stranger), I don’t feel any strong emotional reaction. To the point that I generally will not correct them.
I could imagine it being very upsetting if I am misgendered by someone who should know me well enough not to misgender me, or if someone purposefully misgenders me. But the misgendering specifically is not the main offense in these two cases.
Perhaps myself and ymeskhout are less tied to our gender identity than most?
I feel complimented when people inadvertently misgender me on this website. It implies I have successfully modeled the Other.
If random strangers start calling you “she”, that implies you look feminine enough to be mistaken for a woman. I think most men would prefer to look masculine for many reasons: not being mistaken for a woman, being conventionally attractive, being assumed to have a ‘manly’ rather than ‘effeminate’ personality, looking your age, etc.
If you look obviously masculine, then being misgendered constantly would just be bewildering. Surely something is signaling that you use feminine pronouns.
If it’s just people online misgendering you based on your writing, then that’s less weird. But I think it still would bother some people for some of the reasons above.
That’s the thing, I generally present as very masculine and if anyone referred to me as ‘she’ I would find it more confusing than anything else. If I actually cared, maybe I’d look for what effeminate signals I gave off, but I can’t imagine a scenario where I would find it offensive or get mad at the person.
It is important to note that people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, ranging from willing to undergo extreme body modification in order to match their gender identity, to those who don’t care in the slightest.
The issue is that cisgender is the default, and if you don’t have a strong attachment to your gender identity, you have no reason to change the label. Hence, cisgendered people have a wide range of attachment to their gender identity, from strongly identifying with it to no attachment at all.
(There is also the group of agender, which includes those who have deeply examined their gender identity and decided that they don’t really care (and probably also want to signal their examination and non-caring of gender identity))
Someone who is transgender obviously has an attachment to their gender identity, and this is obviously from which the Pronoun Discourse stems. They have a strong preference for a gender, and a preference to be referred to with the appropriate pronouns, and thus being misgendered is upsetting, as their preferences are violated.
(Of course, most of this rests on the ability to communicate the preference, and accidental violations when the preference was not communicated are less egregious than deliberate violations.)
Otherwise misgendering can be upsetting if it is tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity and attempting an insult based off those stereotypes.
I also don’t think it’s useful to try and learn much about pronouns qua pronouns social battles over them. Using the pronoun people ask you to use has become a proxy for all sorts of other tolerant/benevolent attitudes towards that person and the way they want to live their life, and to an even greater extent, refusing to do that is a proxy for thinking they should be ignored, or possibly reviled, or possibly killed.
I don’t think everyone proxies it that way—I know there are some people who are just old-fashioned, or passionate about prescriptive grammar, or have essentialist beliefs about gender but are libertarian about others’ behavior. I think that if everyone had very high confidence that someone not using the pronouns they requested meant that at worst that person mildly disapproves of them but would still actively defend their civil + legal + human rights, there would probably be a lot less of the handwringing you mention, and we’d be able to learn a lot more about the fundamental intrinsic meaning of pronouns.
There’s an interesting mechanic here, a hyperstitious cascade. In certain educational environments, people are taught to use approved language with protected-class members. In that environment, anyone who uses forbidden language is, therefore, some kind of troublemaker. That then makes it somewhat less illegitimate for the most sensitive of those protected-class members to say they feel threatened when someone uses forbidden language. Which then makes it all the more important to teach people to use approved language, and have harsher enforcement on it. If this goes far enough, then we get to where one can make the case that unpunished usage of forbidden language constitutes a hostile environment, which would therefore drive out the protected classes and hence violate civil rights law.
I guess refusing to use someone’s preferred pronouns is weak Bayesian evidence for wanting to have them killed, but the conclusion is so unlikely it’s probably not appropriate to raise it to the level of serious consideration.
Depends on the context. There are definitely contexts where a white man says n***** and it gives me the sense that he at least fantasizes about killing African Americans. Similar contexts do occur with trans people and certain groups of white men. If you were occasionally the target of such veiled threats, it might start becoming hard not to lump less directly threatening instances of similar-ish behavior in with the truly threatening.