this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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Oh you're so right, those poor people being forced to not be intentionally mean to lgbtq people, women, immigrants, etc. It's so obvious when you think about it, all the transphobes, misogynists, homophobes, and racists are just being nice from their perspective. They must just come from a culture where having less rights because of your gender or who you're attracted to or where you were born is a sign of respect. We've all been so wrong to suppress them from expressing their love for others in their own unique way. I know I for one will make sure to thank the next person I see being mean to someone now that I understand the true meaning.
Those topics you listed are not really controversial. Pretty much everybody agrees (except maybe for some far-right extremists). Also, "forced to not be intentionally mean" is not something I said in any way. That's your interpretation.
For example, If I say that I feel like I was born in outer space, should people be forced to refer to me as an alien? You might argue that everyone who claims I'm not an alien is mean to me and force people to "be nice" and also claim I'm an alien, but I personally will not claim something that is false to make someone feel better.
You may frame these all like just "trying to get you to be nice" but actually, they are fundementally ideological disagreements. They disregard the disagreement about what is ultimately fair or true. Similar issues apply for forcing people to call people by their non-biological gender or forcing people to "show solidary" and give away 90% of their income. Wouldn't that be nice? Do you understand why people could have a problem with that?
Okay, so in your analogy, if alien dysphoria somehow existed and someone was genuinely miserable living as a human in a way nothing else could help with and they somehow had the ability to live as an alien, you would go out of your way to call them a human, knowing that makes them miserable, just because you think it's right? Does it really matter if you're right? What does being right accomplish in this scenario other than just making someone unhappy?
Or for a more realistic scenario, if someone was born missing an arm and had a prosthetic one, would you refuse to call it their arm? If they said "there's a fly on my arm", would you correct them? Would you tell them that there can't be a fly on their arm because their arm isn't a real arm and they'll never have a real arm? Depending on how you look at it, you would technically be right. But is being right really worth taunting someone about a major part of their life? Why does it matter?
At the end of the day, alien dysphoria probably doesn't exist, a prosthetic arm is an arm, and a trans man is a man. Society defines the words it uses, and if one definition of a word makes people more comfortable than another and using that definition costs us nothing, shouldn't we use it?
I wouldn't go out of my way to call them a human (why would I?) but I wouldn't go out of my way to call them an alien either. For example, I would find it ridicolous to try to force the captcha boxes to be changed to "I am a human or an alien".
As for your prosthetic arm example, that wouldn't be an issue for me. However, a person with two healthy arms claiming their left arm was a prosthetic one would be questionable IMO. That doesn't mean, again, that I would go out of my way to annoy them with that. But I wouldn't want to be forced to say "clap your hands or prosthetic hands" by someone who doesn't even have a prosthetic hand but just claims to have one. This is not inclusion to me; that is, IMO, people purposefully excluding themselves and then demanding to be included back in with extra attention.
Depends on the matter I guess but forcing people to make factually wrong claims (in a sense) to account for other people's feelings is not acceptable, IMO. I wouldn't stop calling the Earth a globe even if flat earthers took issue with that. (I hope you get the analogy I'm trying to make here).
For the prosthetic example, that is literally the opposite of the point. No one wants you to say, for example, "women and trans women", that would be ridiculous, just like if they expected you to say "women and tall women". People just want you to call people by the gender they identify with, or if you don't know what gender they identify with, there's nothing wrong with just calling them a person, that has been a word you could use the whole time.
The shape of the earth is a terrible comparison. The shape of the earth is a proven fact, gender is a societal construct. There is nothing biological that says people with two x chromosomes must present themselves the way we've decided is "feminine" or xy chromosomes should be "masculine", that's just traditionally what we've done, but there's no reason that can't change. You could say that now that we know about sex chromosomes we should use them to define gender, but that isn't useful in the vast majority of situations. Unless you've had some sort of test, neither of us know with 100% certainty what our chromosomes are. It's unlikely, but either of us could be intersex and have no idea.
I'm not asking you to change the shape of the earth, I'm just asking you to trust people when they say who they are, they're the only ones who can know. It's the same level of respect people give you by calling you by your name.
Alright, glad we agree here but there certainly are people claiming to be their own gender ("non-binary") or wanting me to refer to them as xe/xer and there is an ongoing debate about including extra asterisks in German words to signify the inclusion of extra genders.
I'm not asking for anyone to present themselves in any way, dress how you want. However, things like men participating in women's sports competitions because they identify as a woman is not something I'm okay with. I have a question for you: If a gender is just something I identify with or choose, what meaning does one's gender even have? Wouldn't that make gender just some arbitrary group with literally zero meaning behind it?
And: If I claimed to be 100 years old and identified as such, would I be entitled to a senior citizens discount, in your opinion?
If you want to include all genders, like I said, just don't use gendered words. The word people exists along with many others that can be used. For pronouns, unless you like actually know the person, pretty much everyone is going to be okay with they/them. If you know the person, you should try to use the pronouns they actually want which shouldn't be hard since you know a fairly limited number of people.
As for sports, if you think trans women participating in women's sports or trans men participating in men's sports is unfair, you do not understand the effects of HRT. End of story.
Yes, gender is an arbitrary thing with no inherent meaning. We assign meaning to it as a society, and the empathetic choice is to go along with the meaning that doesn't make people horribly uncomfortable living their lives. (Or to just get rid of the concept entirely, but that's a debate for another time and I'm not entirely sure which side of it I would be on)
If you claimed to be 100 years old that would be completely different. Numbers are a much much more concrete concept than gender, and redefining them would have far too high of a cost (and, almost everyone gets to experience a wide range of ages already, so the benefits would be negligible). I would like to point out, however, that every 100 year old was born at age 0. Who we are born as does not define who we will be. If I buy a kit to make a table, and use the pieces to build a chair instead, I have a chair. It doesn't matter that it was expected to become a table. It is a chair.
Using gender neutral words is easy enough in English but most languages don't have a form like the generic "they" for a person whose gender one doesn't know. This is a debate for another tiem though.
Neither do you. Or can you prove to me that a "trans woman" athlete doesn't have an advantage in any way? What exactly determines the point in time where they don't anymore?
What meaning, for example, do we assign to it?