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Why “Of course”? Do all autistic people have gender dysphoria in your experience? Also, this person’s name is Jessica and their gender is ‘she’. It would be ap

Why “Of course”? Do all autistic people have gender dysphoria in your experience? Also, this person’s name is Jessica and their gender is ‘she’. It would be appropriate to simply refer to her as Jessica, not referring to their old name at all. Also most trans people do not agree that they have changed gender, as your post suggests. Instead, they view themselves as have been misgendered at birth. Thus, to refer to their past by their old pronouns is to continue to misgender them in the present. So please don’t. Finally the persons gender here is no more important than their race, religion, or countless other unimportant things that you didn’t mention. Maybe leave the whole transgender thread out of any future conversations.

bsaul 4y ago
As a non-US person i think OP story was quite interesting, including the gender transition part (because it very much adds to picturing the personality of that steve / jessica and also reflects on a current trend in the US) and the way he told it pretty comprehensive (using other pronouns would have made it much more difficult to follow for example). Please don’t try and censor someone’s speech whose view you don’t agree with, especially when the person is simply telling a story in the chronological order.
- lowbloodsugar 4y ago
  Ah yes, this is the justification for referring to African Americans as the N word when taking about them in the past because in the past that was considered a reasonable description. You don’t use the N word just because you are taking about an African American in the 18th century and you don’t use a transitioned person’s misgendered pronouns with the excuse that it is “chronologically accurate”. This story would have been entirely as informative if the story had simply been about a woman called Jessica. So yes, I will censor bigoted views. I will censor Nazi propaganda. I will censor racism. And I will censor outing transgender persons.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    i assume you are in good faith so i'm just going to ask a simple question : how do you tell the story of someone who changed their name and gender, without stating their original name and gender ?
    - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
      Let's take OPs story as an example. This is a thread in response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse." Here is that exact story. --- The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Jessica, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. She had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Jessica's parents as well as her uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time she was 18 years old Jessica had a dozen years of programming experience under her belt. On one occasion she was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Jessica disapproved of. So, one weekend, Jessica entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because she had humiliated the collaborators. (One thing to note about Jessica is that she was on the spectrum -- as smart as they come, but not good at reading social and political situations.) Jessica was not out of a job for long, however -- she was fired in the morning and by that afternoon she had accepted a job with a proprietary trading desk on Wall Street (she had a connection). Her salary at least doubled. A year after that incident Jessica called me up and asked me to come down and join her at the prop trading desk, so I did. We had a good ride until the 2008 financial crisis and then our entire division (several prop trading desks) was fired on Jan 2nd, 2009. It was difficult to get a job on Wall Street in early 2009 because everyone was laying people off and going belly up. But Jessica immediately landed a $400,000/year job with an options trading house. When we were catching up over coffee a few months later she mentioned to me that one of her projects was designing a trading system that needed to solve 500,000 differential equations per second. I just wished her luck and thanked God that I had moved into coaching the LSAT instead. Unfortunately, Jessica only lasted about 18 months at the options trading house -- she had a disagreement with another engineer about the best way to implement parallel processing for a certain situation and Jessica was not one to give an inch when she thought she was right. So she got fired. The conclusion that Jessica drew from this was that she never again wanted to work with someone who did not have a Ph.D., so she moved to a division of NASA that was doing research on how to model the melting of glaciers, and which is apparently a space that is full of people with Ph.Ds. It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, so Jessica ended up doing heavy mathematical programming in Fortran. As far as I know, this is what she is still working on. --- In removing the dead-naming and misgendering, did I reduce the usefulness of this story in any way, as a response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse"? No. You might ask why I didn't remove the bit about "being on the spectrum". I left this is because, as an Autistic person myself, I too suffer such discrimination in the workplace.

bsaul 4y ago

As a non-US person i think OP story was quite interesting, including the gender transition part (because it very much adds to picturing the personality of that steve / jessica and also reflects on a current trend in the US) and the way he told it pretty comprehensive (using other pronouns would have made it much more difficult to follow for example). Please don’t try and censor someone’s speech whose view you don’t agree with, especially when the person is simply telling a story in the chronological order.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago
Ah yes, this is the justification for referring to African Americans as the N word when taking about them in the past because in the past that was considered a reasonable description. You don’t use the N word just because you are taking about an African American in the 18th century and you don’t use a transitioned person’s misgendered pronouns with the excuse that it is “chronologically accurate”. This story would have been entirely as informative if the story had simply been about a woman called Jessica. So yes, I will censor bigoted views. I will censor Nazi propaganda. I will censor racism. And I will censor outing transgender persons.
- bsaul 4y ago
  i assume you are in good faith so i'm just going to ask a simple question : how do you tell the story of someone who changed their name and gender, without stating their original name and gender ?
  - lowbloodsugar 4y ago
    Let's take OPs story as an example. This is a thread in response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse." Here is that exact story. --- The best software engineer I ever worked with, whom I'll call Jessica, ended up working in Fortran after we parted ways. She had a Ph.D. from Harvard in Computer Science and we met at a research lab at Harvard Medical School. Interestingly, both of Jessica's parents as well as her uncle were professors of Computer Science at top schools. By the time she was 18 years old Jessica had a dozen years of programming experience under her belt. On one occasion she was on a team that was collaborating with a team from MIT that had contributed some software to the project that Jessica disapproved of. So, one weekend, Jessica entirely re-wrote the software that the MIT team had contributed. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a firing offense because she had humiliated the collaborators. (One thing to note about Jessica is that she was on the spectrum -- as smart as they come, but not good at reading social and political situations.) Jessica was not out of a job for long, however -- she was fired in the morning and by that afternoon she had accepted a job with a proprietary trading desk on Wall Street (she had a connection). Her salary at least doubled. A year after that incident Jessica called me up and asked me to come down and join her at the prop trading desk, so I did. We had a good ride until the 2008 financial crisis and then our entire division (several prop trading desks) was fired on Jan 2nd, 2009. It was difficult to get a job on Wall Street in early 2009 because everyone was laying people off and going belly up. But Jessica immediately landed a $400,000/year job with an options trading house. When we were catching up over coffee a few months later she mentioned to me that one of her projects was designing a trading system that needed to solve 500,000 differential equations per second. I just wished her luck and thanked God that I had moved into coaching the LSAT instead. Unfortunately, Jessica only lasted about 18 months at the options trading house -- she had a disagreement with another engineer about the best way to implement parallel processing for a certain situation and Jessica was not one to give an inch when she thought she was right. So she got fired. The conclusion that Jessica drew from this was that she never again wanted to work with someone who did not have a Ph.D., so she moved to a division of NASA that was doing research on how to model the melting of glaciers, and which is apparently a space that is full of people with Ph.Ds. It turns out that Fortran is the best tool for modeling glaciers, so Jessica ended up doing heavy mathematical programming in Fortran. As far as I know, this is what she is still working on. --- In removing the dead-naming and misgendering, did I reduce the usefulness of this story in any way, as a response to "Why Fortran is a scientific powerhouse"? No. You might ask why I didn't remove the bit about "being on the spectrum". I left this is because, as an Autistic person myself, I too suffer such discrimination in the workplace.