3 ms·

> If person A comes along and demands that I refer to them by their "preferred pronoun" (even if it is a mismatch for their genetic sex or the grammar of the l

> If person A comes along and demands that I refer to them by their "preferred pronoun" (even if it is a mismatch for their genetic sex or the grammar of the language being spoken) and I refuse, that's considered an insult. Call me crazy, but yeah, that's an insult. Not a deadly one, but that's like someone insisting I call them "Doctor" - I may think they're a pretentious ass, but it's an insult if I don't follow that small, easy request. And the tone I read in the above (which, granted, is a tone I'm reading from text) where they say "even if it's a mismatch for their genetic sex or the grammar of the language being spoken" tells me they intend it as insult. It's similar to those that refer to Beto O'Rourke as "Robert Francis" or that always dropped in "Hussein" when they mentioned Barack Obama - they are using something technically "correct" as a social attack. And that's insulting. I understand there are nuances, and I don't fully know all the issues involved, but this did not give my sympathy for the author. I read this as "I don't get to be snide and I'm going to try to raise a reasonable-sounding case and raise the specter of thoughtcrimes in my outrage". Being polite when you don't want to is basically the DEFINITION of being polite. I'm not active on SE sites, and this author probably did great work in supporting things...but this doesn't sound like an attitude that is a terrible loss for any site that involves many people interacting.

shakna 7y ago
To me, that sentence is first stating a current fact, not the problem. The problem is in the following sentence. That is, they acknowledge not using the pronoun is an insult, but SE has now changed it so that avoiding a pronoun by referring to someone in a different way is now also an insult. Like, for example, I haven't referred to you by a gender-specific pronoun. If you asked me to refer to you as, say, 'she', I would probably still not refer to you using a gender-specific pronoun. I'd continue to use 'you' or 'ergothus'. That would not be acceptable under the new rules coming into play.

shakna 7y ago

To me, that sentence is first stating a current fact, not the problem. The problem is in the following sentence. That is, they acknowledge not using the pronoun is an insult, but SE has now changed it so that avoiding a pronoun by referring to someone in a different way is now also an insult. Like, for example, I haven't referred to you by a gender-specific pronoun. If you asked me to refer to you as, say, 'she', I would probably still not refer to you using a gender-specific pronoun. I'd continue to use 'you' or 'ergothus'. That would not be acceptable under the new rules coming into play.