Being misgendered constantly is a very difficult thing for trans people. Why wouldn’t it be?
because i don’t need another person’s consent or validation to be myself?
It’s not about consent or validation, it’s about being harassed. I’m not sure why that isn’t clear to you. Do you think trans people have an easy life?
If which seat you get on the bus is the most difficult thing in your life…
Was sitting in a particular seat the entirety of the civil rights movement? Is being addressed by your correct pronouns the entirety of the trans movement? Are they both smaller manifestations of much larger issues of bigotry and bias that shitty people can isolate to try and mock and trivialize the hardships that minorities and marginalized people face?
Doesn’t work because of the ratios of the populations. For a majority group, their interaction with the minority group is 1 in 100 interactions. For the minority group, they are interacting with the majority group 99 of 100 times.
Being mindful 1 time every 100 is not a big deal. Hearing something hurtful 99% of your day every day is a very big deal and could easily be the most difficult thing in your life.
You can disagree with the reason the minority group is feeling hurt, you can’t proclaim that they aren’t feeling hurt.
And with that being the situation you can only decide whether you have the empathy and belief in common humanity to do your small part in reducing the amount of hurt in the world. Or not.
That problem is never the worst in someone’s life, though. If they have that problem, they also have the problems of people calling the police if they use a public bathroom, or being killed on a first date… Slightly bigger problems.
As a person who learned English as a 2nd language, I would like it if you could transform the language into gender neutral and end this insanity.
I still get classic genders wrong, this whole LGBTQ movement is confusing me even more when I’m trying to type/speak.
English is gender neutral. You have to deliberately apply a gender to something unless that word is gender specific, like cow or bitch referring to female animals.
In my brief forays learning other languages one of the more frustrating things to learn is that you can have female refrigerators, male buses, and gender neutral roofs. That is not gender neutrality.
So I don’t get your issue with genders, seeing as they have nothing to do with English language neutrality and everything to do with how you address a specific individual at their request.
The fuck you are talking about? You didn’t have to explicitly say your forays of language studying were brief, anyone could tell that after a second of reading this. English is a gendered language. Obviously. It has gendered pronouns. My native language doesn’t have genered pronouns AS SUCH. It is a non genderd language. They are rare but they do exist. The fact that nouns can have pronouns that apply to specific Nouns, like das Külschrank, doesn’t make it a more gendered language. This is just factually wrong, and is so poorly researched it is amusing.
Hey buddy, if you’re gonna be that mad, at least be correct.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_grammatical_genders
Notice how “English” is listed there in the “No grammatical gender” list, which is what’s being talked about here.
From zero to insult in one post? C’mon man, your incorrect use of terms isn’t my problem. I don’t need a PhD in linguistics to meet your unstated requirements to have an opinion on this.
If you want gender neutral pronouns in order to avoid the inconvenience of having to address the groups of people you singled out, like LGBTQ, that’s what you should have said instead of clearly specifying an entire language’s use of gender. You obviously know the difference in your ragepost, so next time spend some effort to get your message across correctly the first time and don’t have a fit when people can’t read your mind.
I think you should also understand that even if gender neutral informal pronouns like “they” do develop and become common usage, you’re still going to have to learn to address people in their preferred pronoun if they ask.
In Persian we don’t have genders for anything. No words, no pronouns, nothing. So having gendered pronouns for me is not gender neutral. I would rather call everyone equally “they” than get into this game of what are you identifying yourself because it makes the language more complex for me.
How is it more difficult? If someone’s name is Joe Smith, you would commonly expect to refer to them as Joe. But say they ask you to refer to them as Mr. Smith. Ok, no big deal, right?
Referring to someone by their preferred pronoun is no different. If Joe wants to be “they”, it’s no big deal.
The apparent issue is with gender and people’s personal hang ups with it. People change how they address others all the time, formally, informally, professionally, familiar, marriage name change, etc. So all I’m getting here is resistance to what…? LBGTQ people?
In what fucked up language are refrigerators female? They’re obviously male.
Honestly biggest reason I list they/them is just because I don’t think we should gender language in general. Any pronouns are fine, as long as you aren’t trying to be dehumanizing with it. I use they/them a lot when referring to other people and most people don’t care, but a few cissies thought a hissy fit over singular they.
The thing about grammatical gender is that it doesn’t really have much to do with sex or gender identity. In German, for instance, ‘mädchen’ (girl) is neuter. Gender in French is 98% assigned based on the pronunciation of the three final syllables. In Danish, living things tend to be ‘common gender’ and inanimate objects tend to be ‘neuter’.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
It’d be more accurate to call it ‘noun classes’ than gender.
And that’s exactly what they’re called in other languages like Hawaiian and Swahili.
Well, as a German, I wouldn’t agree. Generally, nouns describing men are masculine and nouns describing women are feminine. “Das Mädchen” is just an odd one out because it’s the diminutive (always neuter in German) of “die Maid”, which in turn is feminine.
Yes, this doesn’t really apply to objects, but it mostly does for people.
Using pronouns isn’t a “problem” though, it’s that people genuinely don’t care.
I don’t care very much if I’m honest. I’ve never interacted with someone who informed me that their pronouns were not the usual ones.
Gender-concerned people telling me how to speak is like fundamentalists telling me to wear a dress. I tell them both to piss up a rope.
the fundies are just as full of performance moral grandstanding hypocracy as the pronoun nutbags.
I don’t understand. What is the middle ground between “you should refer to trans people by their chosen gender” and “you shouldn’t refer to trans people by their chosen gender”? Do you flip a coin?
People genuinely do care considering Jordan Peterson’s entire career is based on the whole “you can’t force me to use your pronouns” bullshit that no one was trying to force him to do in the first place.
I will start by saying I am very open minded and really don’t agree with a lot of what Peterson says. I’m also pro LGBT and leaving people be who they are and love the life that makes them happy… But he’s right that we shouldn’t be forced to use someone’s pronouns. At the time there was discussion about making this a law. If someone wants to be a prick let them. Better to know who they are.
No one is being forced.
For fuck’s sake.
Peterson just lied about the bill.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qbnamx/no-the-trans-rights-bill-doesnt-criminalize-free-speech
No one is stopping him or anyone else from being a bigoted asshole. Asking people to stop doing it and telling them why is not forcing them.
It was made a law, it’s also a law in many parts of the US. It’s not about preventing random people from being pricks, it’s about discouraging harassment from employers, school administrations, and government officials. They’re prohibited from persistently misgendering you in the same way they’re prohibited from calling you slurs. I struggle to imagine a scenario where life would be improved by removing those sensible guard rails on civil society.
Nobody is “forced to use pronouns” at present but this stance misses the point. It looks at the harms of misgendering as a situation that doesn’t cause other inequities and harms.
For the average social interaction where you are on equal terms but can walk away being misgendered is something a lot of us hate but live with like any small annoyance. It is like stubbing your toe. Not fun but whatever it’s fine that’s just “someone being a prick”. But if deliberate misgendering is allowed to happen over a long period in a workplace setting it is not something we get to walk away from. If we have to regularly interact with that person or lose our ability to feed and house ourselves then we are forced to have mental health problems because someone essentially doesn’t like being told what to do. Having to deal with panic attacks at work because you had to be locked in a room with someone hitting every trauma trigger you have exposed to the world or else you have to find a new and maybe worse job is a barrier to participation in society.
If it’s in a medical setting where we have to balance our health outcomes knowing that if we don’t comply with the misgendering our care is impacted because a doctor holds our lives or the relief from pain in their hands. A lot of trans people become shy and don’t seek help early and often because they equate doctors visits with a sense of powerlessness and shame knowing that they can’t stand up for themselves. In that instance it’s not just “someone being a dick” you are placing someone’s complete physical wellbeing before someone’s egotistical need to be “right” about you.
If a trans person in a social club and misgendering isn’t checked by a majority it can mean that they might not have a choice on whether or not to go. The world becomes a smaller place when you have gender related trauma.
Deliberate misgendering in a professional setting isn’t just “someone showing you they are a prick” the burden always falls upon trans people disproportionately because our participation in society often forces us to compromise directly on our health and there are real traumas and weaknesses that underlie our transness. If someone was openly making rape jokes around someone you knew had sexual assault trauma you’d step in right? Why not the same for someone with gender related traumas?
What Peterson is railing against is protections for participation in regular society through professional setting misgendering cases.
Both of those things are lies. And I showed a link that demonstrated the lies.
So you’re saying that the loonys care.
Loony for. Loony against. Twins, basically.
No, I’m saying bigots and assholes care. You can be sane and be a bigot and/or an asshole. And there a huge number of such people.
And if you mean that people who know what their gender is are loony and would prefer it if people didn’t get it wrong, you are probably loony yourself.
It also never happened to me but I imagine the conversation would be something like:
Hello X
Please don’t call me X I don’t like it, call me Y instead
Ok
~ ~The end~ ~
You’d hope that.
But in my experience it’s a 50/50 chance they will go off on you.
My experience has been that transgendered people will correct you politely when accidentally misgendered. They get it. They don’t like it, but they get it.
It’s the cisgendered people who get offended when they are accidentally misgendered (i.e. calling a cis-female who has masculine features “he/him”).
No different than assuming a fat woman is pregnant or a man with a high voice is gay. And the embarrassment is felt all the same, for both parties.
Okay imagine that… but with an internal crushing anxiety knowing that under best case there will be probably around five somewhat invasive follow up long answer questions either about your personal history or about trans people’s existence in general. Then an optional depressing thing people think is them being magnanimous where they say “I don’t get it but okay.” OR they look at you like you grew another head and walk swiftly away to watch/glare you with furtive long stares or try and speed run whatever brief social interaction you are participating in like you have the plague.
Aaaaand mental picture complete!
It’s important to understand that Hank is specific to say “correct prounons” and not “preferred prounons”. We as creature of civilization have to right to control our place in that creation, so when someone misgenders, it’s not that they are nessecarily showing disrespect, but being factually wrong. It’s okay to state the wrong thing if you don’t know, but if you insist that only YOUR interpretation of another person is correct, even more so than how THEY THEMSELVES interpret themselves, then you have crossed the rubicon in to bigotry.
To see another person on the street and think you have a better view of them than they do in a mirror is just wild levels of arrogance. They know themslevss far more than you ever will.
This is exactly the comment I was gonna leave, I strongly dislike the phrase “preferred pronouns,” because that implies that it’s a preference. Big props to John for making the distinction
The problem with “correct” pronouns is that what’s considered correct will differ depending on who’s saying it. There’s no confusion with “preferred” pronouns. Also, it is a preference, because some people use pronouns that are not the standard he/she/they ones. It’s not their gender that they chose, it’s (potentially) what pronouns they want to use to refer to said gender.
🤣 😂
Sorry if the quick comment I left on my phone while on the toilet wasn’t up to your standards, but since you aren’t actually contributing anything of substance I don’t see a reason to care what you think.
Edit: Jesus your comment history is sad. Seems like you never can think of anything worthwhile to say. Stay mad I guess?
Hey, just FYI the period before “dimwit” should be a comma. If you’re going to hold other people to a standard, at least hold yourself to the same one, asshole.
One of john green’s tiny, ridiculous problems is that he has an ego that requires him to share his thoughts via tweets to fix the world.
His thoughts are like mine, fairly irrelevant, reprehensible to some and an echo chamber to others. At least I have the modesty and humbleness to know that my thoughts belong in the comments section of an unknown social media platform where it will be read by, at most, 20 people.
John Green actually has a large following. You have no one who cares what you say.
I like how you realized you had to hedge at the end to not look like a ridiculous hypocrite. “What I’m doing here is totally different because my audience is smaller.” You can just delete the comment if you find yourself backed into a corner like that. It’s sunk cost fallacy to go ahead with posting it.
Sounds like you’re just jealous that John Greene has more people that care about him than you do.
But don’t count yourself short, the votes on this comment of yours suggest more than 20 people read your comment!
You could also tweet your opinions and it would only be seen by 20 people
He’s building hospitals/maternity wards in Sierra Leone, fighting healthcare companies to reduce the cost of life-saving medications, and creating free educational content as some of his side projects while also being a writer and consistent YouTuber. He’s doing far more than ‘sharing his thoughts via tweets to fix the world’. He’s doing the work too.
What you’re projecting doesn’t come across as ‘modesty and humbleness’. Feels more like jealousy and bitterness.
I know what he’s done because I’ve followed his instructional video channels for years. You know, where he teaches stuff, not just ridicules groups he doesn’t agree with.
Oh, you’re upset because you’re feeling called out, not because you don’t understand. Sorry to hear that this non-problem is the hill you’ve chosen the die on.
So you’re saying calling people by their preferred pronouns is a great difficulty for you?
I call people by their preferred pronouns because this is something that’s completely inconsequential and meaningless to me. But the same kind of argument can be made against you: “So you’re saying taking “no” for an answer is a great difficulty for you?”
If I traveled to some country where a particular religion - let’s call it X - was the most common, and in X people were ascribed different pronouns based on some rules or rituals, I would call them by their preferred pronouns because as an atheist and moral anti-realist that’s just not something important to me. But if a Christian felt uncomfortable doing so because it goes against their religion their position is just as valid - arguably it’s more valid since in this example the people from X are asking the Christian to change their vocabulary, while the Christian isn’t asking anything of the people from X.
Some Christians feel uncomfortable treating people of another skin color as equal to them and say it’s because of their religion. I don’t really give a shit if you think your magic sky god gives you license to be rude.
First, I would ask that ‘Christian’ why they felt the need to travel to a country they felt uncomfortable using the local language in.
Also, in this scenario they would be asking for something from the people of X: The right to not use their language in their land.
I know the Christians near me have specific views on when other people should speak their language when they’re on their land.
If that’s so, then your comments here are worse than irrelevant. I don’t know who the linked person is, but this was a very weird hole you dug for yourself.
And yet you’re still posting. If you posted on Twitter, no one would give a shit. That’s because people like him and find value in what he has to say. And he’s trying to help people in that tweet.
If you think you’re posts are so valueless, couldn’t you just take your own advice and shut the fuck up?
Goodbye, one month old account that had nothing to say in the past week until John Green suggested that refusing to use someone’s pronouns is a stupid hill to die on 👋😊
That’s sad. I hope you gain the courage to speak your truth openly someday
I didn’t speak about anyone’s rights. Just about egos and the need to share ridicule.
According to you he stepped out of line for having the audacity to post his thoughts on a platform made for posting thoughts. The truth is it’s not his ego that you have an issue with it’s that one topic.