7 ms·

Does anyone else feel like the recent focus on gender identity/pronouns/trans is being totally driven by the extreme 5% on both sides (left and right)? Meanwhi

by jc_811 5y ago

Does anyone else feel like the recent focus on gender identity/pronouns/trans is being totally driven by the extreme 5% on both sides (left and right)? Meanwhile the remaining 90% of us are under the attitude of "equal rights for all, do and/or call yourself whatever you want as long as it brings no personal harm to others". Personally, for every gender non-binary person I've encountered (there have been multiple), when I incorrectly use the wrong pronoun, I get gently/nicely corrected and the conversation moves on without anyone caring further. In the article the author laments "At the time, I was exhausting so much mental energy memorizing my coworkers' pronouns and all of the new progressive dogmas out of fear that I would be fiercely condemned if I slipped up" My question is, does this really happen as described? Or only at the extreme end? And I'm being totally non-facetious here. Again, I've called non-binary people "her" before and you know what happened? They said "Hey actually, I prefer 'they' just FYI", I responded with "ah, sorry, got it!", and we moved on. That was it.

germinalphrase 5y ago
My experience is largely the same as yours.
kgwxd 5y ago
We could all mostly ignore it if there wasn't a bunch of idiots in government passing laws every chance they get to ensure it continues being a very real human rights issue. The right initiates all this non-sense, they do some oppressing and the left has no choice but to react, because you can't just let that stuff slide, so both sides end up completely consumed by an issues most people aren't effected by.
- replygirl 5y ago
  It's unambiguously safer and easier to be trans in America now than at any time in history. I haven't been anywhere I felt unwelcome; I can drop into places like Dallas or rural PA and interact with strangers just fine. The only ongoing drama I can see being credibly interpreted as a human rights issue is the stuff with very young children. I came out ten years ago, and I didn't get to learn about transness until that process started. If you came up in the nineties you'd see The Crying Game in your early teens and not know the difference between a trans woman and a "hermaphrodite" (intersex person) until your twenties. Nowadays, kids develop alternative lives on the internet much earlier than my cohort did, and they learn not just that trans people exist, but what it means to transition and what leads people to transition, before they get to middle school in many cases. The pushback on that, post-bathroom-hysteria, has largely been to try to reclaim some of parents' ability to know what's going on and to control their child's level of exposure to information—much like with sex and drugs in the teen years, it's import for younger children to explore their identities in a way that allows their parents to mentor them and help them interpret what they're feeling. I don't think this is a human rights issue—I think we've misplaced our wariness of abusive parenting and allowed it develop into a skepticism of nuclear-family parenting in general. Much of the nonsense is initiated by the right, yes—bathrooms and ID laws and whatever else—but what everyone's talking about _right now_ has to do with a change in our understanding of The Family, initiated by the left, that I expect will play out in increasingly interesting ways over the next 20-30 years.
  - Avshalom 5y ago
    >it's import for younger children to explore their identities in a way that allows their parents to mentor them and help them interpret what they're feeling. thing is though: Texas, Florida, Idaho, couple others, have declared that child abuse.
    - replygirl 5y ago
      as i understand it, those states have seen pushes to leave it up to parents to educate and nurture their kids in early development, carving out a space where the state cannot take over for parents, which was not a controversial thing to want for families until recently
      - a_shovel 5y ago
        The Florida Department of Health recently released new guidelines stating "Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents." [0] For those unaware, "social gender transition", in addition to changing their pronouns and name, would be things like a trans girl switching to wearing dresses or growing out her hair, or a trans boy cutting his hair or wearing boy's clothes, or engaging in gender-stereotyped interests like dolls, or any other sort of action the kid finds gender-affirming. It does not include any medical procedures. There is no conceivable benefit to the child of preventing this, and it could prevent them from doing many actions that in cisgender children would be seen as ordinary nonconformance to gender stereotypes. That it is included alongside a ban on puberty blockers and hormones and a ban on gender reassignment surgery, and an exception to that for intersex people (which intersex advocates oppose, because some doctors will perform unnecessary and risky surgeries on intersex babies to "correct" their genitals before they can consent), shows that all of these have the same goal: enforcing gender conformity. [0] https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1516773653391806464 https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1516773653391806464
        replygirl 5y ago
        i think it's fair for the department of health to not allow adolescent therapists and psychiatrists to prescribe social transition—there are implications for a parent blocking access to something legally considered a medical treatment. from what i read it seems like parents still have some leeway to respond to their childrens' needs independently, at least on the social side. to be fair i don't think i've seen any policy regime, in effect or proposed, that feels quite right to me. in florida's case i would change the language to allow that sort of prescription subject to parental consent whether it's social or hormonal. on the blockers though, it's not the end of the world that i grow hair on my face and have a little more muscle mass than most women. dysphoria peaks when you first acknowledge it, then slowly subsides over a few years once you're Living Your Truth. i am more than my annoying body > and an exception to that for intersex people this has been an intersex rights issue for much longer than what's in the spotlight right now, and should be considered separately imo. one thing i learned from the intersex people in my life is they don't like intersex concerns being lumped in with trans concerns, even if many do grow up to be, or present as, trans. if we have to consider both at the same time, i would say "leave bodies as they were born until the person inhabiting them is old enough to know what's best for themself" > enforcing gender conformity. elsewhere in this thread i voiced my opinion that contemporary queer ideology has eroded the usefulness of identity markers. to build on that, i also think most liberals (i.e. people who believe "progress" is both real and virtuous) have a pretty narrow idea of how gender nonconformity can present itself
- laserdancepony 5y ago
  Yes, the screeching radical left is completely innocent in derailing the political debate to an extent incomprehensible to anyone with a braincell left. Not that the right wing gonzos are not to blame for it too, but to offload all of the guilt onto a single side of the horseshoe is very much just as undifferentiated as you are calling your political enemy.
  - kgwxd 5y ago
    You know damn well it's not the same. They don't directly target marginalized people every chance they get, and if some non-sense does come up, they don't move in lockstep, at the expense of all personal integrity, like the right does.
civilized 5y ago
> My question is, does this really happen as described? Or only at the extreme end? And I'm being totally non-facetious here. You won't get an answer to this question. These op-eds usually exhibit a glaring lack of humane, sharply observed, or life-like storytelling. Everyone seems to be a prop standing in for a different coalition's ideology... if there are any specific humans at all in the story. They're a yawn no matter what side they come from.
algebra-pretext 5y ago
I’d like to believe that most people are like you and are just doing their best to make everyone productive and comfortable. I was a bit surprised to see how most people I interact with over the age of 40 or so (my parents incl.) are pretty stubborn about referring to people based on what they consider right, like it’s some act of bravery to disregard how someone else would like to be treated. I agree with you that this hyper-focus and polarization on the topic is driven by some extremely opinionated media personas, and unfortunately when looking at my parents’ usual YouTube feed it’s apparent that the influence of this niche is far-reaching. I just wish people would get along.
- darrenf 5y ago
  > I was a bit surprised to see how most people I interact with over the age of 40 or so (my parents incl.) are pretty stubborn about referring to people based on what they consider right, like it’s some act of bravery to disregard how someone else would like to be treated. Crikey. Anecdote, for sure, but I’m 47 and can’t think of a single person I interact with in my age group (and that’s the majority of my colleagues and friends) who acts or opines as you describe.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Same here, though I’m considerably older than you. We might both be in a bubble though.
    - darrenf 5y ago
      I’m sure there’s an aspect of that. That said, I include in my claim a raft of friends I’ve had since my teens, or others met through football (UK definition; I’m a Brit in southern England) - many of whom live pretty different lives to mine. And we have plenty of disagreements about other stuff - just not “treat folk how they wish to be treated”!
  - idkwhojamesis 5y ago
    To be fair, I'm also just drawing from limited personal experience and social media exposure; it never really happened until the past year or so when this topic became so polarizing. My parents have a more nuanced take of "I will try to be nice until the gays push their agenda on my children", which I guess they have.
init2null 5y ago
It's red meat for the conservative base, so they run with it. Mix in a little "grooming" and you end up with repackaged LBGTAnything-phobia from the '80s and '90s. The far left has tried to take possession of the conversation to show sensitivity and contrast. Which is unfortunate. It shouldn't be political. Still, we use gender in plenty of places where it doesn't really matter, and I'm good with eliminating it or broadening the classifications. It's a no-brainer. Beyond that, why not just call people what they want to be called? It's just respectful. In my experience, most people in general are certainly chill if they're in a sexual or gender minority. I won't get pissed if you assume I have/want a girlfriend or wife. It's really not an issue if no insult is intended.
getaloadofthis0 5y ago
mrguyorama 5y ago
The problem is that small group of the right is pushing for laws that harm everyone. The "95%" of people on the right that supposedly don't follow that opinion are doing nothing to stop it.
matthewmacleod 5y ago
What you're describing is basically how it works in the real world, for the most part. People have far more important things to do, and are profoundly uninterested in making an issue out of other individuals' personal identities. But: Does anyone else feel like the recent focus on gender identity/pronouns/trans is being totally driven by the extreme 5% on both sides (left and right)? I don't really feel this way, to be honest. I think this is a cliché culture war issue that is driven primarily by one "side", and that's the conservative one. I don't doubt for a second that there are terrible people who'll describe themselves as "progressive" trying to insert themselves into this discussion – these people are indeed the dumb extremes. But they're also not the group driving the conversation or enacting the laws, and ascribing a kind of "both sides" responsibility is not correct in my view. The thing is, I remember personally experiencing exactly the same shit as a gay man growing up in the 90s, and it's alarmingly familiar. This was a result of the UK moving to repeal "Section 28" – a law similar in intent to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation. I remember exactly the same tactics being used – the talking heads and the campaigns and the billboards and the newspaper articles talking about the danger of predatory gay men who were pushing a "pervert's agenda", hoping to worm their way into schools so they could find children to abuse. Scare stories about paedophiles waiting in the wings, getting ready to groom children into homosexuality – and the same tactic of spotlighting extremist views at the fringes of that movement and claiming them as mainstream. It was a shitty tactic then and it's shitty now. The thing that angers me most is to see so many people fall for exactly the same playbook this time around.
- a_shovel 5y ago
  Absolutely. It's been repeatedly noted that every transphobic attack is a recycled homophobic attack. Even before I was told that, I found it obvious that the surge in transphobic rhetoric was a response to the gains and eventual success of the fight for gay marriage, and it was being done by the same people for the same reasons.
leephillips 5y ago
Using the pronoun that someone demands rather than the correct pronoun for the person’s sex can contribute to material harm for others. You’re trying to be nice, but, as often happens, you are contributing to injustice in doing so. Lia Thomas’ acceptance by the officials in charge as a woman swimmer has harmed an entire generation of actual female swimmers. Calling him “she” contributes to the pretense that he’s a woman, and helps to legitimize the injustice against these athletes.
a_shovel 5y ago
You have no idea how many people would call your non-binary friend a "gender extremist" for the brief interaction you described here.
- nomdep 5y ago
  “Them/their” was a gender-neutral way to talk about a person when you didn’t know their gender. But expecting that people you interact with, keep calling you *in plural* because you can’t decide you are he or she, or maybe want to feel like the queen of England, is insane.
throwthisaway8 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

by jc_811 5y ago

germinalphrase 5y ago

My experience is largely the same as yours.

kgwxd 5y ago

We could all mostly ignore it if there wasn't a bunch of idiots in government passing laws every chance they get to ensure it continues being a very real human rights issue. The right initiates all this non-sense, they do some oppressing and the left has no choice but to react, because you can't just let that stuff slide, so both sides end up completely consumed by an issues most people aren't effected by.

replygirl 5y ago
It's unambiguously safer and easier to be trans in America now than at any time in history. I haven't been anywhere I felt unwelcome; I can drop into places like Dallas or rural PA and interact with strangers just fine. The only ongoing drama I can see being credibly interpreted as a human rights issue is the stuff with very young children. I came out ten years ago, and I didn't get to learn about transness until that process started. If you came up in the nineties you'd see The Crying Game in your early teens and not know the difference between a trans woman and a "hermaphrodite" (intersex person) until your twenties. Nowadays, kids develop alternative lives on the internet much earlier than my cohort did, and they learn not just that trans people exist, but what it means to transition and what leads people to transition, before they get to middle school in many cases. The pushback on that, post-bathroom-hysteria, has largely been to try to reclaim some of parents' ability to know what's going on and to control their child's level of exposure to information—much like with sex and drugs in the teen years, it's import for younger children to explore their identities in a way that allows their parents to mentor them and help them interpret what they're feeling. I don't think this is a human rights issue—I think we've misplaced our wariness of abusive parenting and allowed it develop into a skepticism of nuclear-family parenting in general. Much of the nonsense is initiated by the right, yes—bathrooms and ID laws and whatever else—but what everyone's talking about _right now_ has to do with a change in our understanding of The Family, initiated by the left, that I expect will play out in increasingly interesting ways over the next 20-30 years.
- Avshalom 5y ago
  >it's import for younger children to explore their identities in a way that allows their parents to mentor them and help them interpret what they're feeling. thing is though: Texas, Florida, Idaho, couple others, have declared that child abuse.
  - replygirl 5y ago
    as i understand it, those states have seen pushes to leave it up to parents to educate and nurture their kids in early development, carving out a space where the state cannot take over for parents, which was not a controversial thing to want for families until recently
    - a_shovel 5y ago
      The Florida Department of Health recently released new guidelines stating "Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents." [0] For those unaware, "social gender transition", in addition to changing their pronouns and name, would be things like a trans girl switching to wearing dresses or growing out her hair, or a trans boy cutting his hair or wearing boy's clothes, or engaging in gender-stereotyped interests like dolls, or any other sort of action the kid finds gender-affirming. It does not include any medical procedures. There is no conceivable benefit to the child of preventing this, and it could prevent them from doing many actions that in cisgender children would be seen as ordinary nonconformance to gender stereotypes. That it is included alongside a ban on puberty blockers and hormones and a ban on gender reassignment surgery, and an exception to that for intersex people (which intersex advocates oppose, because some doctors will perform unnecessary and risky surgeries on intersex babies to "correct" their genitals before they can consent), shows that all of these have the same goal: enforcing gender conformity. [0] https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1516773653391806464 https://twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/1516773653391806464
      - replygirl 5y ago
        i think it's fair for the department of health to not allow adolescent therapists and psychiatrists to prescribe social transition—there are implications for a parent blocking access to something legally considered a medical treatment. from what i read it seems like parents still have some leeway to respond to their childrens' needs independently, at least on the social side. to be fair i don't think i've seen any policy regime, in effect or proposed, that feels quite right to me. in florida's case i would change the language to allow that sort of prescription subject to parental consent whether it's social or hormonal. on the blockers though, it's not the end of the world that i grow hair on my face and have a little more muscle mass than most women. dysphoria peaks when you first acknowledge it, then slowly subsides over a few years once you're Living Your Truth. i am more than my annoying body > and an exception to that for intersex people this has been an intersex rights issue for much longer than what's in the spotlight right now, and should be considered separately imo. one thing i learned from the intersex people in my life is they don't like intersex concerns being lumped in with trans concerns, even if many do grow up to be, or present as, trans. if we have to consider both at the same time, i would say "leave bodies as they were born until the person inhabiting them is old enough to know what's best for themself" > enforcing gender conformity. elsewhere in this thread i voiced my opinion that contemporary queer ideology has eroded the usefulness of identity markers. to build on that, i also think most liberals (i.e. people who believe "progress" is both real and virtuous) have a pretty narrow idea of how gender nonconformity can present itself
laserdancepony 5y ago
Yes, the screeching radical left is completely innocent in derailing the political debate to an extent incomprehensible to anyone with a braincell left. Not that the right wing gonzos are not to blame for it too, but to offload all of the guilt onto a single side of the horseshoe is very much just as undifferentiated as you are calling your political enemy.
- kgwxd 5y ago
  You know damn well it's not the same. They don't directly target marginalized people every chance they get, and if some non-sense does come up, they don't move in lockstep, at the expense of all personal integrity, like the right does.

civilized 5y ago

> My question is, does this really happen as described? Or only at the extreme end? And I'm being totally non-facetious here. You won't get an answer to this question. These op-eds usually exhibit a glaring lack of humane, sharply observed, or life-like storytelling. Everyone seems to be a prop standing in for a different coalition's ideology... if there are any specific humans at all in the story. They're a yawn no matter what side they come from.

algebra-pretext 5y ago

I’d like to believe that most people are like you and are just doing their best to make everyone productive and comfortable. I was a bit surprised to see how most people I interact with over the age of 40 or so (my parents incl.) are pretty stubborn about referring to people based on what they consider right, like it’s some act of bravery to disregard how someone else would like to be treated. I agree with you that this hyper-focus and polarization on the topic is driven by some extremely opinionated media personas, and unfortunately when looking at my parents’ usual YouTube feed it’s apparent that the influence of this niche is far-reaching. I just wish people would get along.

darrenf 5y ago
> I was a bit surprised to see how most people I interact with over the age of 40 or so (my parents incl.) are pretty stubborn about referring to people based on what they consider right, like it’s some act of bravery to disregard how someone else would like to be treated. Crikey. Anecdote, for sure, but I’m 47 and can’t think of a single person I interact with in my age group (and that’s the majority of my colleagues and friends) who acts or opines as you describe.
- amanaplanacanal 5y ago
  Same here, though I’m considerably older than you. We might both be in a bubble though.
  - darrenf 5y ago
    I’m sure there’s an aspect of that. That said, I include in my claim a raft of friends I’ve had since my teens, or others met through football (UK definition; I’m a Brit in southern England) - many of whom live pretty different lives to mine. And we have plenty of disagreements about other stuff - just not “treat folk how they wish to be treated”!
- idkwhojamesis 5y ago
  To be fair, I'm also just drawing from limited personal experience and social media exposure; it never really happened until the past year or so when this topic became so polarizing. My parents have a more nuanced take of "I will try to be nice until the gays push their agenda on my children", which I guess they have.

init2null 5y ago

It's red meat for the conservative base, so they run with it. Mix in a little "grooming" and you end up with repackaged LBGTAnything-phobia from the '80s and '90s. The far left has tried to take possession of the conversation to show sensitivity and contrast. Which is unfortunate. It shouldn't be political. Still, we use gender in plenty of places where it doesn't really matter, and I'm good with eliminating it or broadening the classifications. It's a no-brainer. Beyond that, why not just call people what they want to be called? It's just respectful. In my experience, most people in general are certainly chill if they're in a sexual or gender minority. I won't get pissed if you assume I have/want a girlfriend or wife. It's really not an issue if no insult is intended.

getaloadofthis0 5y ago

mrguyorama 5y ago

The problem is that small group of the right is pushing for laws that harm everyone. The "95%" of people on the right that supposedly don't follow that opinion are doing nothing to stop it.

matthewmacleod 5y ago

What you're describing is basically how it works in the real world, for the most part. People have far more important things to do, and are profoundly uninterested in making an issue out of other individuals' personal identities. But: Does anyone else feel like the recent focus on gender identity/pronouns/trans is being totally driven by the extreme 5% on both sides (left and right)? I don't really feel this way, to be honest. I think this is a cliché culture war issue that is driven primarily by one "side", and that's the conservative one. I don't doubt for a second that there are terrible people who'll describe themselves as "progressive" trying to insert themselves into this discussion – these people are indeed the dumb extremes. But they're also not the group driving the conversation or enacting the laws, and ascribing a kind of "both sides" responsibility is not correct in my view. The thing is, I remember personally experiencing exactly the same shit as a gay man growing up in the 90s, and it's alarmingly familiar. This was a result of the UK moving to repeal "Section 28" – a law similar in intent to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation. I remember exactly the same tactics being used – the talking heads and the campaigns and the billboards and the newspaper articles talking about the danger of predatory gay men who were pushing a "pervert's agenda", hoping to worm their way into schools so they could find children to abuse. Scare stories about paedophiles waiting in the wings, getting ready to groom children into homosexuality – and the same tactic of spotlighting extremist views at the fringes of that movement and claiming them as mainstream. It was a shitty tactic then and it's shitty now. The thing that angers me most is to see so many people fall for exactly the same playbook this time around.

a_shovel 5y ago
Absolutely. It's been repeatedly noted that every transphobic attack is a recycled homophobic attack. Even before I was told that, I found it obvious that the surge in transphobic rhetoric was a response to the gains and eventual success of the fight for gay marriage, and it was being done by the same people for the same reasons.

leephillips 5y ago

Using the pronoun that someone demands rather than the correct pronoun for the person’s sex can contribute to material harm for others. You’re trying to be nice, but, as often happens, you are contributing to injustice in doing so. Lia Thomas’ acceptance by the officials in charge as a woman swimmer has harmed an entire generation of actual female swimmers. Calling him “she” contributes to the pretense that he’s a woman, and helps to legitimize the injustice against these athletes.

a_shovel 5y ago

You have no idea how many people would call your non-binary friend a "gender extremist" for the brief interaction you described here.

nomdep 5y ago
“Them/their” was a gender-neutral way to talk about a person when you didn’t know their gender. But expecting that people you interact with, keep calling you *in plural* because you can’t decide you are he or she, or maybe want to feel like the queen of England, is insane.

throwthisaway8 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]