aargh the slatestarcodex commentators
so Scott made formal what I think has been policy for a while, which is that you get warned and then banned for misgendering people, and a lot of people responded to this by explaining how they have principles about the use of language that make it impossible for them in an intellectually honest way to use trans peoples’ preferred pronouns
and I’m exasperated because this is the internet, literally the only information anyone has about anyone else’s gender is what that person says, there’s nothing principled about “I will take you at face value about what you claim your gender is on the internet, unless you also claim on the internet to be trans, in which case I will guess your birth gender and call you that, because I feel like it’s dishonest of me to do otherwise”.
if you want to take a brave stand against language policing, “I will only believe 95% of the people I talk to on the internet about their gender, the other 5% I can’t, on principle, believe” is not such a stand.
and if you want to misgender people on the internet to prove you won’t be silenced by the Man, why not misgender cis people? you’ll cause less hurt, and you have as much reason to believe I’m really a woman as you have to believe anyone else is really a woman. in the case of all of us, you are taking our word for it.
You know, I have principles about not misgendering people, and there are many blogs where I will be banned for not calling people the pronouns of their assigned sex at birth.
I solve this problem by not commenting on those blogs.
I would commend this strategy to others.
1 month ago · tagged #strongly endorsed #cissexism cw · 109 notes · source: theunitofcaring · .permalink