You can have any opinion you want as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t try to force anyone else to do what you want.
People can also have the opinion that you’re an asshole for the opinion that you hold.
This attitude doesn’t work. It’s impossible to keep your opinion to yourself in some situations, like when you need to talk to someone who wants to be called by a certain pronoune, or when some decisions have to be made that affect multiple people.
We have to figure this out as a society and get people on board, there is no way around it.
Society has figured it out. You’ll never be able to convince everyone though. The best that can be hoped for is that they just aren’t assholes.
Judging by the fact that we are still debating about genders, biology, pronouns, declinations, sports, bathrooms and so on, society at large has not figured it out yet imo.
You can have any opinion you want as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t try to force anyone else to do what you want.
So you shouldn’t force someone to refer to you as they/them instead of using their natural language flow?
And what about language flow would you call “natural”? You’re aware of the fact that there are many other languages besides English, aren’t you? In most of them neither he or she or they are even words! Nothing natural at all. It’s just habitual.
Would you call Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay? Would you claim doing so would not not be offensive?
Since when has singular they/them not been natural language flow? It’s been a common part of the English language foriterally hundreds of years. Shakespeare used it, but many before him did as well.
Your stupid arguments about things being “natural” are always missing (or ignoring on purpose) so much context. It makes no one want to take you seriously.
I’m a cis-gendered straight white man by the way. I’m not asking anyone to treat me differently from the way I’ve always been treated, but I think others deserve the same respect for the way they want to be treated. If you want to disrespect others who have done nothing wrong then you don’t deserve respect.
@Cethin @Mr_Blott To be fair, there was a big thing in schools about it being “improper English” for a bit. Some n+1th language speakers don’t find it comes naturally, and *in theory* there might be native variants of English where it isn’t present (though I have yet to see one – even anti-singular-they teachers tend to use it).
Linguistic prescription is bad, but that goes both ways. I find the ‘correctness’ argument much less compelling than the ‘common decency’ argument.
