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Moderated Using wrong pronouns= violence??

Shalamar said:
Conservatives have a current hate-on for trans folks, and they need something to be outraged over.
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No. That is wilful conflating of concern about youth irreversibly harming their bodies and minds with adults engaging in lawful (but awful) cosmetic surgery and drug therapy.
 
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mumblethrax said:
What? Cosmetic surgery wasn't even mentioned.
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I edited to make clearer. Republicans are legislating against affirmative programs for minors. I happen to agree with that legislation after doing due diligence of scores of hours of podcasts etc listening to all the arguments I can find, and having had a brother who wanted to be a woman.
Pronouns are the gateway linguistic drug for this misguided post modern experiment.
 
Samson said:
I edited to make clearer. Republicans are legislating against affirmative programs for minors. I happen to agree with that legislation after doing due diligence of scores of hours of podcasts etc listening to all the arguments I can find, and having had a brother who wanted to be a woman.
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Ok. What the **** does any of that have to do with anything? We're talking about college students.

Pronouns are the gateway linguistic drug for this misguided post modern experiment.
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That's highly implausible.
 
First, I don't understand for the life of me why adults would hit each other in an argument. That level of immaturity is astounding. If the shoe fits anyone, I don't want to know.

Second, seems to me that there's a line between 'provocation' and 'perceived insults'. It might be a blurry line but outside of the blurry middle of this continuum, the two terms are being conflated here.
 
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mumblethrax said:
Ok. What the **** does any of that have to do with anything? We're talking about college students.


That's highly implausible.
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Pronouns anywhere become pronouns everywhere.
Dangerous for reasons listed in my last few posts.
 
mumblethrax said:
Which is why we probably should [not] characterize innocuous speech as "dangerous". That's seldom a prelude to protecting free speech.
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Is "violent" preferable to "dangerous" when talking about something as (in)consequential as gendered pronouns?

I really don't care if you folks refer to me as he or she or they unless you're talking about something where that would be particularly confusing, e.g. "Her children took care to make her feel special on Fathers' Day." Why should we all care so much how we are being gendered? The link in the OP makes it sound profoundly important, but doesn't say why this ought to be so.
 
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d4m10n said:
Is "violent" preferable to "dangerous" when talking about something as (in)consequential as gendered pronouns?
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Probably, if only because we don't have a history of criminalizing "violent" speech (possibly because it just doesn't really make sense).. "Dangerous" speech...well, that's the pretext for just about every suppression of free speech in history (or at least, since we've recognized the concept).

I really don't care if you folks refer to me as he or she or they unless you're talking about something where that would be particularly confusing, e.g. "Her children took care to make her feel special on Fathers' Day." Why should we all care so much how we are being gendered? The link in the OP makes it sound profoundly important, but doesn't say why this ought to be so.
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I generally think people engage in some unsupportable linguistic relativism around this topic. You can't literally erase someone by using the wrong pronouns, and you can't make someone think of themselves as transgender with pronouns. Language just doesn't have that kind of power.
 
mumblethrax said:
Probably, if only because we don't have a history of criminalizing "violent" speech (possibly because it just doesn't really make sense).. "Dangerous" speech...well, that's the pretext for just about every suppression of free speech in history (or at least, since we've recognized the concept).


I generally think people engage in some unsupportable linguistic relativism around this topic. You can't literally erase someone by using the wrong pronouns, and you can't make someone think of themselves as transgender with pronouns. Language just doesn't have that kind of power.
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Yet I argue it has malevolent power for school kids.
 
Samson said:
Yet I argue it has malevolent power for school kids.
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It is traditional in skeptical circles to link one's arguments back to some actual scientific findings. Your hypothesis that pronouns are a sort of gateway drug is intriguing, but it may as well be sci-fi at this point.
 
d4m10n said:
It is traditional in skeptical circles to link one's arguments back to some actual scientific findings. Your hypothesis that pronouns are a sort of gateway drug is intriguing, but it may as well be sci-fi at this point.
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It is what Scott Newgent claims and the way he topples the dominos a useful argument. Remember he/they was a woman and now fiercely opposed to the whole thing.
 
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