At least it got flagged! But since I can't reply to it and put some effort into typing a reply, I hope you don't mind me dropping it below.
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What? I agree that for my tastes a lot of people take gender very seriously. But it seems wild to me to think this is somehow a new phenomenon.
For millennia in many societies one's society-assigned gender determined a great deal about one's status, including what work you could do, what work you could do, and what sort of violence against you was acceptable. And in a lot of times and places, misgendering somebody was used as a deliberate insult and could even be seen as "fighting words", legitimate legal cause for violence.
The only thing that has changed lately is a bit of individual freedom in picking that role for one's self. For those people, many consider it rude to ignore their choices, partly because of the history of gender, but partly because those people are targets of bigotry and violence. There's a whole list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_bein...
All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them, just like all legal codes do. If you're going to be rude, people may, gasp, say something about it. You trying to establish a different coercive moral code against that isn't somehow better. And getting all het up about it in this specific case, instead of all the other codes of politeness, suggests it's not really "coercive" morality you care about.
Personally, it seems to me that trans folks have a pretty hard role in life. They always did, but now at least they're getting to be open about it. I'm glad to support them in that; calling them how they want to be called seems like literally the least I could do. Indeed, as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
It looks like you posted a strident reply and then replaced it with something anodyne. Given that people have already replied, that strikes me as both rude and confusing. Just so everybody knows the edit history, here is your original comment:
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>At least it got flagged!
Ah yes, censorship is good when it is an opinion you do not share, right? That I was flagged is wrong on the part of hacker news, and whoever got that ball rolling.
>All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them
Coercion is good too. Are you sure you're not the baddie here? Are you really sure?
>as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Another popular strawman. I stated explicitly "live how you want" and yet you assert that I'm against difference or outcasts. You lied.
>trans folks have a pretty hard role in life
I'm speaking specifically of custom pronouns. If you cut off your junk and wear a dress, I think its rude not to call you "she". It is a shitty kind of idea that encourages people to introduce new error modes into their relationships, and the bitter irony is you think you're doing people a favor by doing that.
>Anyone who doesn't have the capacity to accept being called any pronoun has a mental health problem.
By this metric the vast majority of humanity has a mental health problem, and you're an exception. Most cis, het men do not like to be called she or a girl.
Yeah, that's pretty special. Personally as a cis nerd, I find the neurotypical obsession with gender roles pretty weird. I think we would be healthier if there were less of it, and like that we seem to be heading that way. But I don't think that makes everybody mentally ill.
Worth drawing a distinction between gender roles, which are mostly "socially constructed", and gender identity, which is someone's inherent sense of their gender (with a strong biological component).
Gender identity is an essential part of what makes us human. Some people have a stronger sense of it than others. To the extent that mental illness describes an actual objective thing, having a gender identity does not make someone mentally ill, because it doesn't by itself disrupt one's healthy functioning in society. It is when that gender identity is invalidated by others that it can affect people's mental health (just like calling someone a slur or insulting them can affect their mental health). It is still not an illness, though.
I don't want to involve myself in this argument but I will say that I can not see their original post. It displays as just "[flagged]" for me. I don't know if that's the app I'm using or what, but I cannot see the post.
Really? I see the "[flagged]", and the post, it's just slightly dimmer and I had to manually open it. I'm using no special extensions or anything, just a normal browser.
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What? I agree that for my tastes a lot of people take gender very seriously. But it seems wild to me to think this is somehow a new phenomenon.
For millennia in many societies one's society-assigned gender determined a great deal about one's status, including what work you could do, what work you could do, and what sort of violence against you was acceptable. And in a lot of times and places, misgendering somebody was used as a deliberate insult and could even be seen as "fighting words", legitimate legal cause for violence.
The only thing that has changed lately is a bit of individual freedom in picking that role for one's self. For those people, many consider it rude to ignore their choices, partly because of the history of gender, but partly because those people are targets of bigotry and violence. There's a whole list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_bein...
All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them, just like all legal codes do. If you're going to be rude, people may, gasp, say something about it. You trying to establish a different coercive moral code against that isn't somehow better. And getting all het up about it in this specific case, instead of all the other codes of politeness, suggests it's not really "coercive" morality you care about.
Personally, it seems to me that trans folks have a pretty hard role in life. They always did, but now at least they're getting to be open about it. I'm glad to support them in that; calling them how they want to be called seems like literally the least I could do. Indeed, as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.