7 ms·

Fuck the world. He's action is true to himself. For that, I respect the guy.

by dferlemann 13y ago

ck2 13y ago
If you respect Manning, please stop saying "he" and "guy".
- CWuestefeld 13y ago
  This is clearly something that we as a society are going to have to wrestle with. It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns. There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord". So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
  - umanwizard 13y ago
    It seems pretty simple to me. If you ask me to describe my best friend, I might say he's smart, studied this or that in school, speaks such-and-such languages, likes such-and-such music, and so on. His height and weight would be pretty far down the list of things I find important. Similarly, we think of our mind as being our "self" in a much more fundamental way than our toes. If a person is female in their mind but has a male body, it seems very clear that we should consider the former to be their "real" gender. Why should the body matter more or be more fundamental?
    - hrjet 13y ago
      I would say the the catch phrase in your argument is "best friend". If the person you were describing wasn't your best friend, you might automatically focus more on the physical aspects, since you wouldn't know the intimate details of their mind. That said, I am not advocating deliberate misuse of pronouns; I am just saying the topic may not be as simple as it seems.
  - sanxiyn 13y ago
    It seems totally unreasonable to me to intentionally misgender anyone against their wishes even after such intention was communicated. What possible purposes such action can serve? I think it's more comparable to calling someone by their old name even after someone went through a trouble of changing one's official name because they hated the name given by their parents. You'd agree that's a bad manner.
  - handsomeransoms 13y ago
    This posts reeks of cisgender privilege [0]. Gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, and it is disrespectful to refer to someone as a gender that they have explicitly stated they do not identify with. I'll let you fill in the comparisons to widespread sexism, racism, and homophobia for yourself. Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines". [0] http://www.t-vox.org/index.php?title=Cisgender_privilege http://www.t-vox.org/index.php?title=Cisgender_privilege
    - TillE 13y ago
      > Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines". Better, read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which deals sharply and directly with exactly those sort of suggestions from white people. It's quite wonderful. http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h... > We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."
  - king_jester 13y ago
    > It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns. Gender != your chromosomes and gender != your "hardware" or any other body part for that matter. Gender is about social identity and structure. > There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord". Laying claim to a royal lineage is not the same as having a gender. Also, lord is a title and we are talking about pronouns, things used when talking about anyone. > So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view. We already know where to draw reasonable lines: Manning has already publicly stated her gender. You have disrespected this person by misgendering them. Manning's world view is not an "alternate" world view and you are being incredibly transphobic.
    - CWuestefeld 13y ago
      While I really do tend to lean in the direction you suggest, I don't think it's quite a cut-and-dry as you claim. Here are a few things to consider. First, we're only talking about language. We get those gendered pronouns not because of a need to distinguish between how a person views his gender (or how the world views it), but because of stupid linguistic convention going back to English's Indo-European roots. You'll see that in many languages in the same family, nouns all have gender, even absurd ones like "airplane" or "shoe". These genders have absolutely nothing to do with sexual identity, they're essentially randomly assigned, conferring no additional meaning (but providing a parity check in communication, helping ensure clear transmission). Coming from this history, we shouldn't be too concerned with the way pronouns correspond to individual humans. Second, I don't think it's hard to imagine socially-undesirable consequences of honoring anyone's own claimed gender. I'm thinking of a biological-male claiming to self-identify as female, so that he can use the women's locker room at the gym. So under what circumstances do we want to honor their self-image (or, for that matter, to believe their claimed self-image)? Third, with identity politics still having legal bearing in our system, it seems that self-identification of gender may derail efforts to ensure gender equality. Given that there are legal structures in place to protect females, may I (as a biological male) claim to self-identify as female, and achieve those same protections? May I at least self-identify on official forms (thereby making enforcement of workplace protections unenforceable)? Not that these things are insoluble, but I think that we need to give thought to the repercussions should we choose to take any person's claims of gender at face value.
  - Pxtl 13y ago
    There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it. Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning. I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it really matter that much? Obviously the extreme SJW flamewar reaction you usually see on misgendering is excessive, but after being politely informed that's not how she identifies, how are you harmed by going along with it? Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
    - wwweston 13y ago
      > Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. I think we'd do better to make sure they don't go through a heap of terrible crap (no bullying/abuse for personal choices) and leave people some personal freedom to have different views on pronouns. > Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something? Seems to be happening.
    - xaa 13y ago
      My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it. When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and communicate clearly. I find it especially objectionable when the only argument in favor of blurring the definition of a word is "because someone wants me to" or "someone would be offended if I didn't". Our mere preferences don't change reality; why should they change words, which are meant to convey an accurate representation of reality?
      - LukeShu 13y ago
        The word "sex" refers to physical realities; "gender" refers to social constructions. By conflating the two words, you are the one diluting our vocabulary. Now, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable for you to assert that pronouns should be tied to sex, not gender; but that's not what you're saying here.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    In polite society we respect the ways that others wish to be addressed, as long as the request isn't unreasonable (I want you to call me 'Doctor wavefunction' yet I lack the credentials). It is not absurd to refer to someone by the gender they prefer.
  - pitt1980 13y ago
    people have a long history of taking offense when you don't address them as they prefer to be addressed from Mohammed Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, not wanting to be referred to by their given names to all sorts of doctors and professors wanting to be address by their professional titles to all sorts of adults not wanting people under a certain age referring to them by their first name you to intend to offend, by all means, offend away but don't act under the pretense that referring to someone other than how they prefer to be referred to won't cause offense
- 01Michael10 13y ago
  I have no problem if someone wants to identity with a different gender but it can get confusing for others as some people don't limit their pronoun choices to "he" or "she" to identify themselves. How about this for an idea... Pvt. Manning? Easy and no disrespect.

Fuck the world. He's action is true to himself. For that, I respect the guy.

ck2 13y ago

If you respect Manning, please stop saying "he" and "guy".

CWuestefeld 13y ago
This is clearly something that we as a society are going to have to wrestle with. It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns. There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord". So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view.
- umanwizard 13y ago
  It seems pretty simple to me. If you ask me to describe my best friend, I might say he's smart, studied this or that in school, speaks such-and-such languages, likes such-and-such music, and so on. His height and weight would be pretty far down the list of things I find important. Similarly, we think of our mind as being our "self" in a much more fundamental way than our toes. If a person is female in their mind but has a male body, it seems very clear that we should consider the former to be their "real" gender. Why should the body matter more or be more fundamental?
  - hrjet 13y ago
    I would say the the catch phrase in your argument is "best friend". If the person you were describing wasn't your best friend, you might automatically focus more on the physical aspects, since you wouldn't know the intimate details of their mind. That said, I am not advocating deliberate misuse of pronouns; I am just saying the topic may not be as simple as it seems.
- sanxiyn 13y ago
  It seems totally unreasonable to me to intentionally misgender anyone against their wishes even after such intention was communicated. What possible purposes such action can serve? I think it's more comparable to calling someone by their old name even after someone went through a trouble of changing one's official name because they hated the name given by their parents. You'd agree that's a bad manner.
- handsomeransoms 13y ago
  This posts reeks of cisgender privilege [0]. Gender is a social construct, not a biological inevitability, and it is disrespectful to refer to someone as a gender that they have explicitly stated they do not identify with. I'll let you fill in the comparisons to widespread sexism, racism, and homophobia for yourself. Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines". [0] http://www.t-vox.org/index.php?title=Cisgender_privilege http://www.t-vox.org/index.php?title=Cisgender_privilege
  - TillE 13y ago
    > Go back to the leaders of the American civil rights movement and tell them to let things "percolate through society" so they can know "where to draw reasonable lines". Better, read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which deals sharply and directly with exactly those sort of suggestions from white people. It's quite wonderful. http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.h... > We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never."
- king_jester 13y ago
  > It seems reasonable to me that this person, having XY chromosomes and all the hardware that go with them, may be correctly referred to using masculine pronouns. Gender != your chromosomes and gender != your "hardware" or any other body part for that matter. Gender is about social identity and structure. > There's something to be said for respecting the wishes of the individual in how they'd like to be addressed. But there's definitely a point at which that drifts off into absurdity. Just because I can claim descent from Henry VIII doesn't mean that I can reasonably expect people to address me as "lord". Laying claim to a royal lineage is not the same as having a gender. Also, lord is a title and we are talking about pronouns, things used when talking about anyone. > So I'm interested in respecting people, but think we need to let this percolate through society first, and determine where to draw reasonable lines, before you accuse someone of disrespect for failing to honor someone's alternate world view. We already know where to draw reasonable lines: Manning has already publicly stated her gender. You have disrespected this person by misgendering them. Manning's world view is not an "alternate" world view and you are being incredibly transphobic.
  - CWuestefeld 13y ago
    While I really do tend to lean in the direction you suggest, I don't think it's quite a cut-and-dry as you claim. Here are a few things to consider. First, we're only talking about language. We get those gendered pronouns not because of a need to distinguish between how a person views his gender (or how the world views it), but because of stupid linguistic convention going back to English's Indo-European roots. You'll see that in many languages in the same family, nouns all have gender, even absurd ones like "airplane" or "shoe". These genders have absolutely nothing to do with sexual identity, they're essentially randomly assigned, conferring no additional meaning (but providing a parity check in communication, helping ensure clear transmission). Coming from this history, we shouldn't be too concerned with the way pronouns correspond to individual humans. Second, I don't think it's hard to imagine socially-undesirable consequences of honoring anyone's own claimed gender. I'm thinking of a biological-male claiming to self-identify as female, so that he can use the women's locker room at the gym. So under what circumstances do we want to honor their self-image (or, for that matter, to believe their claimed self-image)? Third, with identity politics still having legal bearing in our system, it seems that self-identification of gender may derail efforts to ensure gender equality. Given that there are legal structures in place to protect females, may I (as a biological male) claim to self-identify as female, and achieve those same protections? May I at least self-identify on official forms (thereby making enforcement of workplace protections unenforceable)? Not that these things are insoluble, but I think that we need to give thought to the repercussions should we choose to take any person's claims of gender at face value.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  There's a time and a place to be pedantic, and this really isn't it. Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. If anybody has earned that respect, it's ms. Manning. I mean really, how the heck does it hurt anybody to say "She" instead of "He" after you've been informed that's not how she identifies? Does it really matter that much? Obviously the extreme SJW flamewar reaction you usually see on misgendering is excessive, but after being politely informed that's not how she identifies, how are you harmed by going along with it? Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something?
  - wwweston 13y ago
    > Transgendered people go through a heap of terrible, terrible crap and the least we can all do is give them the dignity of using their identified pronoun. I think we'd do better to make sure they don't go through a heap of terrible crap (no bullying/abuse for personal choices) and leave people some personal freedom to have different views on pronouns. > Will the ghost of Plato arise and smite you down for failing to properly class something? Seems to be happening.
  - xaa 13y ago
    My personal value system (and perhaps milord grandparent's) rates the accurate use of words (aka, truth-telling) rather high on the scale of values. Clear thought is impossible without it. When we, as a society, take words such as "war" and "gender" that previously referred to physical realities and make them highly metaphorical or even completely arbitrary, we dilute our vocabulary. We make it harder to think and communicate clearly. I find it especially objectionable when the only argument in favor of blurring the definition of a word is "because someone wants me to" or "someone would be offended if I didn't". Our mere preferences don't change reality; why should they change words, which are meant to convey an accurate representation of reality?
    - LukeShu 13y ago
      The word "sex" refers to physical realities; "gender" refers to social constructions. By conflating the two words, you are the one diluting our vocabulary. Now, it wouldn't be totally unreasonable for you to assert that pronouns should be tied to sex, not gender; but that's not what you're saying here.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  In polite society we respect the ways that others wish to be addressed, as long as the request isn't unreasonable (I want you to call me 'Doctor wavefunction' yet I lack the credentials). It is not absurd to refer to someone by the gender they prefer.
- pitt1980 13y ago
  people have a long history of taking offense when you don't address them as they prefer to be addressed from Mohammed Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, not wanting to be referred to by their given names to all sorts of doctors and professors wanting to be address by their professional titles to all sorts of adults not wanting people under a certain age referring to them by their first name you to intend to offend, by all means, offend away but don't act under the pretense that referring to someone other than how they prefer to be referred to won't cause offense
01Michael10 13y ago
I have no problem if someone wants to identity with a different gender but it can get confusing for others as some people don't limit their pronoun choices to "he" or "she" to identify themselves. How about this for an idea... Pvt. Manning? Easy and no disrespect.