Pronouns

[gordo12]

I would make the argument that you are just a more polite version of gordo12

So you were curious about the conversation...apparently if it only goes the way you think it should go.

"Me" generation for sure!

What do you do at parties? Hand out a list of everyone's preferred pronouns so nobody gets offended?

 

[Winter_Fare]

So you were curious about the conversation...apparently if it only goes the way you think it should go.

"Me" generation for sure!

What do you do at parties? Hand out a list of everyone's preferred pronouns so nobody gets offended?

But you're not even trying. Is it that difficult to even try? Nobody says you have to genetically re-engineer your whole personality into grovelling people pleaser, just don't be straight up callous to other people.

 

[SimonDoom]

No, you think YOUR opinion matters on something that isn't about you.

To the extent that you are making demands on me about what words I use, yes, it is about me.

The nuttiness and tediousness and frustration of the conversation that you and I are having is that in substance, I don't disagree with you. If you said to me, "Here's how I want you to address me," I would comply and respect your wishes. I have no objection to that at all. I would do that without hesitation.

But there's a bigger issue here that is worth discussing, and we can all have a part in discussing it. We (society, the world, whatever) are going through an interesting process now of changing the way we use language, and we should all be able to participate in that conversation without absurd accusations being made of "disrespect for basic human rights." The expression of an opinion about word-use does not show a disrespect for basic human rights.

 

[Winter_Fare]

I would say that when someone says that they should get a say in how someone else is identified, that's not innocent, its disrespectful, and dehumanizing. I'm not talking about OP, just Simon. I would not, for example, welcome his opinion into the queer-good-or-bad discourse because it is none of his business to try and push his views into my group, a historically marginalized group, in fact.

Titles have always been bestowed upon people by society throughout history. Master, Mistress, goodwife, child, that's where the cognitive dissonance bites.

 

[gordo12]

But you're not even trying. Is it that difficult to even try? Nobody says you have to genetically re-engineer your whole personality into grovelling people pleaser, just don't be straight up callous to other people.

Why should I? She-he-it-they-her-orwhatever asked how I would handle it in writing. I can't be bothered to pay attention to something I consider ridiculous.

And this: "cis het white men: disgusting, pigs, make my blood boil, deserve to die, there are no good ones, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, overall bigots," is hardly the mark of someone respecting other's opinions. It's the mark of someone so far down the rabbit hole they can't see anyone else's point of view.

 

[Winter_Fare]

Why should I? She-he-it-they-her-orwhatever asked how I would handle it in writing. I can't be bothered to pay attention to something I consider ridiculous.

And this: "cis het white men: disgusting, pigs, make my blood boil, deserve to die, there are no good ones, racist, homophobic, misogynistic, overall bigots," is hardly the mark of someone respecting other's opinions. It's the mark of someone so far down the rabbit hole they can't see anyone else's point of view.

Listen, comrade. They're not"down the rabbit hole" they're swimming up hill in a society that fucks them over at every opportunity.
I knew a trans woman that lived thirty years as a man before transitioning with hormones. Had a stroke in her fifties and that was the end of her dream. No longer a candidate for surgery, literally sneered and sniggered at for the last ten years of her life in a nursing home by ignorant staff that refused to use her preferred pronouns because she had a penis.
This isn't an uncommon issue
It hurts to be misgendered
It hurts to be mocked
Don't be surprised when people bite back

 

[SimonDoom]

I'm not talking about OP, just Simon. I would not, for example, welcome his opinion into the queer-good-or-bad discourse because it is none of his business to try and push his views into my group, a historically marginalized group, in fact.

This is hallucinatory. I haven't been involved in a "queer-good-or-bad" discourse and I never have. I'm not anti-gay. I never have been. I'm not pushing my views on anybody. But you have no right to push your views on me.

This is the nuttiness of this way of thinking. You perceive my refusal to accede 100% to your way of framing and talking about things--to your way of using language--as disrespect of human rights. I think that's nuts. We should be able to have conversations and have different opinions without feeling threatened and disrespected, and your way of thinking makes that impossible.

 

[Winter_Fare]

Also, PSA: Cis het white women can be just as fucking evil when they like.

 

[gordo12]

Listen, comrade. They're not"down the rabbit hole" they're swimming up hill in a society that fucks them over at every opportunity.
I knew a trans woman that lived thirty years as a man before transitioning with hormones. Had a stroke in her fifties and that was the end of her dream. No longer a candidate for surgery, literally sneered and sniggered at for the last ten years of her life in a nursing home by ignorant staff that refused to use her preferred pronouns because she had a penis.
This isn't an uncommon issue
It hurts to be misgendered
It hurts to be mocked
Don't be surprised when people bite back

Society fucks us all over at every opportunity. Get over it.

There are probably enough survival stories in this forum to make a book...which isn't a bad idea!

 

[SimonDoom]

Also, PSA: Cis het white women can be just as fucking evil when they like.

Everybody can be evil.

Evil has no color, gender, class, age, or sexual orientation.

 

[Winter_Fare]

Society fucks us all over at every opportunity. Get over it.

There are probably enough survival stories in this forum to make a book...which isn't a bad idea!

It's not a story gordo, that's a really callous response.

Everybody can be evil.

Evil has no color, gender, class, age, or sexual orientation.

See, everyone can be evil but their evil is toothless without power. Gordo despises the me generation, saying they're self-centred for trying to break down learned evils of the past. His nihilism is showing. He has no power, but these attitudes are pervasive at all levels of power and influence.

In

 

[SimonDoom]

See, everyone can be evil but their evil is toothless without power. Gordo despises the me generation, saying they're self-centred for trying to break down learned evils of the past. His nihilism is showing. He has no power, but these attitudes are pervasive at all levels of power and influence.

All it takes to have power is to pick up a gun or a knife or some other weapon and kill somebody. That's evil. It doesn't matter what your background is or what your "power" is. Power is situational.

I don't know what Gordo despises, and I wouldn't presume to say. I don't have the sense that you are accurately characterizing his attitudes, but he can speak for himself. I don't know. He doesn't strike me as a nihilist. I know I'm not a nihilist.

It's too bad this thread has gone off the rails.

 

[Winter_Fare]

All it takes to have power is to pick up a gun or a knife or some other weapon and kill somebody. That's evil. It doesn't matter what your background is or what your "power" is. Power is situational.

I don't know what Gordo despises, and I wouldn't presume to say. I don't have the sense that you are accurately characterizing his attitudes, but he can speak for himself. I don't know. He doesn't strike me as a nihilist. I know I'm not a nihilist.

It's too bad this thread has gone off the rails.

Predictably off the rails.
Nihilistic to the core, Simon. Nothing he says matters anyway, society fucks you over and that's life? No point trying to change it? Glossing over the real pain of excluding trans and non-binary people? Nihilism.
He says he despises people who demonise men, I will take him at his word.

Power is situational, and in everyday life the situation is that trans and non binary people have far less of it, old white guys have more of it, hence their BS affects more of us on the whole.

 

[gordo12]

literally sneered and sniggered at for the last ten years of her life in a nursing home by ignorant staff that refused to use her preferred pronouns because she had a penis.

As someone who has volunteered in three nursing homes over the last 9 years, I have yet to see any staff member mistreat a resident.
And there have been some doozies. Let's see...there was the 94-year-old guy who sat in his suite every day watching Nazi and Hitler videos while the staff had to work around him. He wanted to kill all the Jews, and god help any staff member without lily-white skin. He was tolerated right up to the point they discovered a hidden gun in his suite, and out he went.

On the other hand, the residents' abuse against those staff of colour has been something else.

 

[AlinaX]

Using people's stated pronouns is merely being polite. Common decency.

What's shocking is that as erotic authors we should all be in tune with the complexity of human gender and sexuality. Those of us who choose to ignore the complexity, who populate our stories with cis men and cis women only, are doing with gender what others do with race when they populate their stories with white people only.

I am not guiltless in this, but I understand well enough not to whine about other people getting hurt by my indifference.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

A cis-person has no right to tell a trans person what pronouns the trans person should use.

Good, we agree on that.

Not wanting to join in a pile-on of randoms on the internet, but I think there's some important points here:

But it's not obvious that a trans person has the right to tell a cis-person, "You have to change the way you use the English language and pronouns to accommodate me and the way I want to be referred to."

Really? I expect people to use my name or nickname or title, as I deem appropriate, to refer to me. I expect straight people not to call me a dyke or a poof and able-bodied people not to call me a fucking spazz. I have a right to human dignity, and therefore a right to tell people how to refer to aspects of my humanity. Similarly a non-binary or trans or genderqueer person also gets to 'tell' people - I'd say 'ask, with the expectation of receiving that respect - how to refer to them.

... But it's worth having a civil conversation about, and nobody should be excluded from the conversation.

Thing is, you may well be speaking in good faith here. I've read your contributions on these fora for the last couple years, so I figure you probably do mean what you say, no more and no less.

But the vast majority of people who get into the 'oh it's so difficult to remember how to refer to X, why won't they consider that I have to remember these things?' discussion are being disingenuous - what they mean is 'I don't approve of any gender expression beyond the two I grew up with, so I'm going to claim that learning someone's new name or pronoun is way too difficult for me'.

We never get the argument that women should never change their names on marriage because it's 'too difficult' to remember new ones, which surely should be equally hard (or more so, because people remarry...), and people who think it's too hard to remember not to use racist words in public seem to manage once the law goes against them, so this whole 'it's so complicated, we need to have a discussion about it' is a) bloody respetitive and b) just reeks of disrespectful dog-whistling.

Call people what they want to be called is a straight-forward principle. Thinking you should have a say in it puts you in with some very unpleasant companions.

Like I had to explain to my parents when they demanded to know why they couldn't refer to the local corner shop as 'the Paki shop' because Paki is 'just an abbreviation, did they say 'nigger'? Did they want to be thought of as the sort of people who would say 'nigger'? No? Well in Britain, if you say Paki, that's the sort of person people think you are. Etymology is irrelevant, connotation is everything.

 

[Winter_Fare]

As someone who has volunteered in three nursing homes over the last 9 years, I have yet to see any staff member mistreat a resident.
And there have been some doozies. Let's see...there was the 94-year-old guy who sat in his suite every day watching Nazi and Hitler videos while the staff had to work around him. He wanted to kill all the Jews, and god help any staff member without lily-white skin. He was tolerated right up to the point they discovered a hidden gun in his suite, and out he went.

On the other hand, the residents' abuse against those staff of colour has been something else.

Any trans or non binary residents?

 

[MelissaBaby]

Good, we agree on that.

Not wanting to join in a pile-on of randoms on the internet, but I think there's some important points here:

Really? I expect people to use my name or nickname or title, as I deem appropriate, to refer to me. I expect straight people not to call me a dyke or a poof and able-bodied people not to call me a fucking spazz. I have a right to human dignity, and therefore a right to tell people how to refer to aspects of my humanity. Similarly a non-binary or trans or genderqueer person also gets to 'tell' people - I'd say 'ask, with the expectation of receiving that respect - how to refer to them.

Thing is, you may well be speaking in good faith here. I've read your contributions on these fora for the last couple years, so I figure you probably do mean what you say, no more and no less.

But the vast majority of people who get into the 'oh it's so difficult to remember how to refer to X, why won't they consider that I have to remember these things?' discussion are being disingenuous - what they mean is 'I don't approve of any gender expression beyond the two I grew up with, so I'm going to claim that learning someone's new name or pronoun is way too difficult for me'.

We never get the argument that women should never change their names on marriage because it's 'too difficult' to remember new ones, which surely should be equally hard (or more so, because people remarry...), and people who think it's too hard to remember not to use racist words in public seem to manage once the law goes against them, so this whole 'it's so complicated, we need to have a discussion about it' is a) bloody respetitive and b) just reeks of disrespectful dog-whistling.

Call people what they want to be called is a straight-forward principle. Thinking you should have a say in it puts you in with some very unpleasant companions.

Like I had to explain to my parents when they demanded to know why they couldn't refer to the local corner shop as 'the Paki shop' because Paki is 'just an abbreviation, did they say 'nigger'? Did they want to be thought of as the sort of people who would say 'nigger'? No? Well in Britain, if you say Paki, that's the sort of person people think you are. Etymology is irrelevant, connotation is everything.

I have always seen Simon as an honest and forthright contributor here, and see no reason to doubt that now.

 

[gordo12]

Predictably off the rails.
Nihilistic to the core, Simon. Nothing he says matters anyway, society fucks you over and that's life? No point trying to change it? Glossing over the real pain of excluding trans and non-binary people? Nihilism.
He says he despises people who demonise men, I will take him at his word.

Power is situational, and in everyday life the situation is that trans and non binary people have far less of it, old white guys have more of it, hence their BS affects more of us on the whole.

So my refusal to submit to your so utterly important word list is indicative of my broad hatred of all those groups you mentioned. You do smear people with a wide brush. This is exactly why you and your buddy can't be talked to. Too far down the rabbit hole, all drinking the cool-aid, it goes on and on. BTW is "Buddy" ok? I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of the sacred word list!

 

[MelissaBaby]

I wonder if anyone wants to step up and insist on the propriety of referring to Blacks as "Negroes" or Asians as "Orientals" in their stories.

That language has changed, and the language around gender is changing as well.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I have always seen Simon as an honest and forthright contributor here, and see no reason to doubt that now.

I agree, or I wouldn't have bothered giving him a detailed response.

 

[gordo12]

Any trans or non binary residents?

Yes, and staff!

 

[gordo12]

Any trans or non binary residents?

Not to mention gay or lesbian or of colour? 500 people in my last one. Hard not to have a selection.

 

[Winter_Fare]

So you're basically on this thread for a laugh. Because you specifically said you'd not bother using the correct titles for people, and in real life while you're a volunteer you obviously do.

 

[SimonDoom]

Call people what they want to be called is a straight-forward principle. Thinking you should have a say in it puts you in with some very unpleasant companions.

Your response to what I wrote was intelligent and respectful, and I appreciate that.

But the principle of "call people what they want to be called" has never been a widely accepted principle.

If somebody tells you they want to be called the King of England, you are under no obligation to respect their request.

I'm not saying that's the same thing as a transgender person wanting to be referred to as the gender they identify with. Obviously, it's not. But as an underlying principle, what you are advocating is novel, and unusual, and not believed by most people for most of human history. That's not the way language usually has worked.

As a general principle, you don't have the right to decide what you are, and insist that people call you what you want to be called. That's never been true.

If someone who is white one day tells you they want to be referred to as black, what do you say? There are many progressive people whose receptiveness to that is quite different from their receptiveness to gender identification. But in a scientific, empirical sense, race is far more fluid and less scientifically based than gender. The differences between men and women (traditionally defined) are far more profound than the differences among races, which are minor and superficial genetically and morphologically.

I cannot emphasize this enough: I don't disagree with anyone here about the evolution of the use of pronouns. As a matter of decency and courtesy, I want to respect someone's request. If someone told me, "Please refer to me with these pronouns," I would honor that request. But these are interesting issues and we should be able to share opinions without getting offended and insulting people and telling others, "You have no right to give your opinion on this subject because you are a [insert blank]."