Moderated Using wrong pronouns= violence??

[Ziggurat]

Yeah every person who wants to treat people badly suddenly remembers they "A GLORIOUS CHAMPION FOR WONDERFUL FREE SPEECH!" when called out on it.

I no longer care about the rights of people who only want to use those rights to hurt other people.

You aren't defending free speech you're defending being horrible and worst of all you want all of us to think that's the same thing.

What do you think free speech even means? Speech that people don't find offensive never needs protecting. But you're delusional if you think your own speech will never be considered offensive. And you're also delusional if you think that there's any objective difference between offensive speech and speech that will "hurt other people".

If you only protect speech you agree with, you're not protecting free speech.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Then you're referring to the title of the blog, not the title of the piece. Furthermore, the title of the piece contains a (not-uncommon among the semi-educated) punctuation error that further devalues the credibility of the article itself. And talking of the article itself, it's nothing more than a self-affirming piece of nonsense that effectively argues "I'm right because I'm right".

Oh well. As you say: never mind.

OMG A PUNCTUATION ERROR! The whole thing is trash, toss it out. Obviously bad work.

 

[theprestige]

yeah, it feels right to him so it's right. nothing snowflakey about that.

Nothing more snowflakey than preferred pronouns, anyway.

 

[Emily's Cat]

OK I'll pose the question to you that I posed to d4m10n: Are you able to imagine that an insecure adolescent might be humiliated by being mis-gendered?

This is such a painfully obvious circumstance that I don't get how it is that people don't get it.

I get that an insecure adolescent might be humiliated by being mis-sexed, and by not having their internal gender identify be observable by other people, and by someone saying their haircut looks bad, and by someone not liking their shoes, and by someone thinking they're too tall or too short or too thin or too fat or any other number of things that insecure adolescents tend to be easily humiliated by.

A cousin of mine at age 15 had a complete meltdown - falling on the floor and crying inconsolably - because their parent referred to then as "emo" instead of "goth".

I get that it happens, I observe it to happen. I don't get why it should be considered such a big deal, and I don't get why the rest of the world should be expected to go learn all the details of what distinguishes an emo from a goth. I don't get why it actually matters.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Might benefit from a reading of DSM-V.

(Hint: one of these two things - i.e. "trans-ethnic identity" and "transgender identity" - is currently (with no sign of change any time soon) viewed by the consensus of world's experts in this field as a mental health disorder. The other is not.)

Stop making references to the DSM 5, you have repeatedly demonstrated an inability to understand it.

 

[Emily's Cat]

You seem unaware that not all violence is physical in nature.

Sometimes they are.

Once again, I will point out the distinction between figurative language and literal language.

Literal violence is always physical in nature. That is the meaning of the term violence.

The term gets used figuratively to represent an abstract concept, to represent cases where a person has negative feelings or negative psychological responses to things that are not physical in nature.

Words may be figurative violence; Words are never literal violence.

 

[Hercules56]

Yeah every person who wants to treat people badly suddenly remembers they "A GLORIOUS CHAMPION FOR WONDERFUL FREE SPEECH!" when called out on it.

I no longer care about the rights of people who only want to use those rights to hurt other people.

You aren't defending free speech you're defending being horrible and worst of all you want all of us to think that's the same thing.

Or even worse you honestly DO think it's the same thing.

So you believe the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations are wrong to defend the Free speech rights of KKK, Neo-Nazis and other hate groups?

We should only defend Free speech rights for people we agree with or find tolerable?

Huh... Never imagined that is what our founding fathers wanted.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Either way.

I'm perplexed why you repeatedly offer up your sensibilities, as if pertinent to society at large. Do you care about the feelings of the humiliated adolescents you've observed?

It's possible to care about their feelings without necessarily kowtowing to their feelings. I get where you're coming from, but I question the premise here.

Seriously - think about all the kinds of things that you were utterly humiliated or embarrassed about when you were an adolescent. You survived them all, as did every one of us here. And I would bet that with the wisdom of maturity looking back, you can recognize that most of them weren't actually as big a deal as they felt like at the time, right?

Can you think of an event when you were a teen where you think it would have been appropriate for someone else to have been forced to say something different or to have looked at you differently in order to protect your feelings at the time?

 

[mumblethrax]

Contrary to the advice given in the original CU Boulder page, I've found that people (outside of progressive activist settings such as Skepticon) rather rarely take the trouble to ask for pronouns at the outset of a social interaction. Why is that? The only reason that springs readily to mind is that they are using pronouns automatically and unthinkingly to refer to apparent sex rather than one's inner sense of self.

"Apparent sex" is culturally-laden in obvious ways, meaning that pronouns must refer to gender rather than sex per se.

 

[dirtywick]

Nothing more snowflakey than preferred pronouns, anyway.

you know what, i'll give you that one. they are acting as equally snowflakey as trans betas.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Denying the existence of some of the domestic violence against women is a bold stance. Will you also be laughing in the face of abused women, along with the rest of the world?

Are you under the impression that domestic violence against females is only words, never physical? Do you think that abused females are only being called names?

What on earth do you think you're arguing here? Because it's coming across as if you're saying that if we don't accept the claim that non-preferred pronouns are violence, then we're also refusing to accept that many females are physically abused by their domestic partners.

 

[lobosrul5]

So you believe the ACLU and other civil liberties organizations are wrong to defend the Free speech rights of KKK, Neo-Nazis and other hate groups?

We should only defend Free speech rights for people we agree with or find tolerable?

Huh... Never imagined that is what our founding fathers wanted.

Well, they should've written an extra amendment that states "the right to insult others shall be inalienable, and free from any forms of consequence".

As they didn't we can only guess what their thoughts were. I'd probably piece together that some of them thought the proper redress would be pistols or swords at dawn. And anyways the amount this country should base its society on the opinions of people who have been all been dead for 196 years and 11 months* should be all but negligible. Although highly interesting in a historical context.

*I did not come up with that figure "out of thin air".

 

[dirtywick]

i don't think the aclu should waste their time

 

[TurkeysGhost]

i don't think the aclu should waste their time

Generally lawyers need people to suffer damages for them to care about such things, which is pretty hard to find in this example of a non-authority group of students using arguably hyperbolic rhetoric on non-binding policy statements. Fortunately reactionaries don't suffer from such practical concerns.

 

[Hercules56]

Well, they should've written an extra amendment that states "the right to insult others shall be inalienable, and free from any forms of consequence".

As they didn't we can only guess what their thoughts were. I'd probably piece together that some of them thought the proper redress would be pistols or swords at dawn. And anyways the amount this country should base its society on the opinions of people who have been all been dead for 196 years and 11 months* should be all but negligible. Although highly interesting in a historical context.

*I did not come up with that figure "out of thin air".

Unfortunately I think the most important speech to defend in the United States is that speech which many people find reprehensible.

Pornography, hate speech, blasphemy, socialism, insults, etc. If we allow such speech to be censored and persecuted, everybody else will be next, as it will have been ingrained into our heads and culture that censorship and persecution of undesirable speech is acceptable.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Imagination is a rather nebulous concept, but yes, I know that it happens and I know that it causes difficulties. In fact my daughter's best friend from preschool to the present had issues in high school with some other students as he struggled with the realization that he is gay. During that period I was as supportive for him as I could possibly be. Knowing that it happens, knowing what the consequences could be for that adolescent, and knowing that I would never knowingly mis-gender any person does not change the fact that I really cannot imagine the actual emotions that that adolescent (or my daughter's friend) would struggle with. Maybe there is something abnormal in the "wiring" of my brain where the processing of emotions is concerned. And maybe others with different, perhaps more "normal" emotional "wiring" find this difficult to comprehend, but this is me. And I think I have learned to compensate fairly well.

I think that a lot of people have never been actually physically hurt by another person. They've never had someone actually abuse them, actually batter them, actually attack and physically injure them on purpose.

And because they've never had that experience, the worst pain they can envision is emotional in nature. Thus they view that emotional pain as being the worst thing possible, and they imagine that it is just as bad as physical violence and injury.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

I think that a lot of people have never been actually physically hurt by another person. They've never had someone actually abuse them, actually batter them, actually attack and physically injure them on purpose.

And because they've never had that experience, the worst pain they can envision is emotional in nature. Thus they view that emotional pain as being the worst thing possible, and they imagine that it is just as bad as physical violence and injury.

Galaxy brain take that trans people are sheltered from the risks of physical violence.

 

[lobosrul5]

Unfortunately I think the most important speech to defend in the United States is that speech which many people find reprehensible.

Pornography, hate speech, blasphemy, socialism, insults, etc. If we allow such speech to be censored and persecuted, everybody else will be next, as it will have been ingrained into our heads and culture that censorship and persecution of undesirable speech is acceptable.

Then you shouldn't bring up the founding fathers. Because the first amendment only protected you from FEDERAL prosecution for many decades after this countries founding. There were blasphemy laws all over the place in the US until pretty damned recently. Nor would they have been in favor of a University being mandated to NOT punish speech. Hell you could be kicked out for being even slightly rude or insulting to a professor in those days. Likely even whipped in some cases.

If CU-Boulder wants to kick students out for not using someone's preferred pronouns they are well within their right to do so. Just like if a Neo Nazi student kept calling their prof or a fellow student a "kike". I don't think the ACLU would've now, or ever, taken up such a case. And besides which, AFAIK, the CU-Boulder student group hasn't even suggested anyone be kicked out for using the wrong pronouns.

 

[Emily's Cat]

"Apparent sex" is culturally-laden in obvious ways, meaning that pronouns must refer to gender rather than sex per se.

Apparent sex is only culturally laden if your concept of sex relies on stereotypes alone.

For most humans, apparent sex is based on a collection of characteristics that tend to be sex-correlated. This includes (but is not limited to) height relative to other people of a similar background, size of hands and feet, breadth of shoulders relative to hips, tilt of pelvis, angle of femur relative to plumb, shape of chin bone, shape of jaw bone, angel of the nose ridge relative to brows, heaviness of brow ridge and its prominence, presence of absence of breasts, presence or absence of adams apple, smoothness of skin, distance from bottom of nose to top of upper lip, shape of hips relative to waist.

We observe other people based on these characteristics, and are accurate in determining their sex in about 99.99% of cases. There will be exceptions for cultures in which the entirety of a person's body is hidden from view... which somehow only ever seems to be applied to females.

 

[Shalamar]

Then you shouldn't bring up the founding fathers. Because the first amendment only protected you from FEDERAL prosecution for many decades after this countries founding. There were blasphemy laws all over the place in the US until pretty damned recently. Nor would they have been in favor of a University being mandated to NOT punish speech. Hell you could be kicked out for being even slightly rude or insulting to a professor in those days. Likely even whipped in some cases.

If CU-Boulder wants to kick students out for not using someone's preferred pronouns they are well within their right to do so. Just like if a Neo Nazi student kept calling their prof or a fellow student a "kike". I don't think the ACLU would've now, or ever, taken up such a case. And besides which, AFAIK, the CU-Boulder student group hasn't even suggested anyone be kicked out for using the wrong pronouns.

But they might! Which is why their speech must be curtailed according to the OP!