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I'm not, unless they're willing to do the same for me, in which case mine are Sir/His Lordship.
If we're allowed to semi-arbitrarily declare pronouns and we agree to recognize them because it validates the other person's choice of identity, then this should be a small ask, and I would find it massively validating, thank you kindly.
Or we draw some bright lines around which ones people are 'allowed' to use and have an actual discussion around why some are allowed and some aren't, rather than the unilateral declaration that every identity is valid.
Hell, we've had the concept of "nicknames" for fucking ever. If you want to be identified as something other than your biological sex then come up with a nickname that you like that captures this and most people will go along with it, right?
If someone were to genuinely ask me "what are your pronouns" my response is "go ahead and use your best judgment and I promise not to be offended either way."
It is a hassle to be 'made to care' about this game in the first place, so I would shift the burden back to the person who wants to play.
Sir/His Lordship is just douchey.
But there are far more triggering pronouns than those. It’s the identities Meloni claims. Christian, American, Father, son, husband.
You think on zoom that the wokes want to identify someone as Christian every time they speak.
The most triggering of all might be Mother.
As long as we're claiming the ability to give ourselves titles which confer some level of privilege, I'm going all the way.
If the cutoff is whatever is 'too douchey' I'd love to have that conversation at length!
I'm placing the cutoff at whatever is an actual honorific, or implies actual deeds (such as "mother"). You may think "he" or "she" confers privilege all you want.
Of course, there are ways to persuade me to call someone "Mommy" without them having birthed anyone.
Or 'Mister' and 'Mrs.'
I dunno, there's a workable framework for this sort of thing already in existence. I still place most of the burden of proving why we should upset this in favor of the new pronoun system on those proposing it.
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Why is sir/lordship douchey? Plenty of people refer to prince William as his highness, and to whatever rank of nobility is signified by that(barons? I'm going with that) as sir/lordship. If a person with a penis can arbitrarily declare that he/him is now she/her with no possibility of being wrong, why can a commoner not claim to be a baron with no possibility of being wrong? It is, after all, far less reality defying.
I have never met an IRL British peer, although I did briefly meet the heir to the pretender to some European country or other who preferred his/your highness, which I abided by because it seemed reasonable. After all, the title might be meaningless, but no one seemed to dispute it was his. That doesn't mean that my idiot cousin calling himself king of the neighborhood gets to be called your highness. I would ask why the same principles don't apply to gender, something that we can probably all agree is far more fundamental to human nature, and less changeable, than being a king.
The concept of nobility has a baked-in assumption that they're better than you in some way. No such thing with the concept of being a different gender.
I'm fine calling people a different pronoun than what I would've assumed, because I do not believe they're asking for it to literally lord it over me.
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Because we all know the people using the pronouns are doing it to mock the other people using pronouns and not because it’s a sincere identity.
They're still more likely to be a duke/baron/prince than a transwoman is to be a real woman.
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What if it is sincere? For example: if we live in a world where no one gets to customize their pronouns, then I accept he/him as a matter of necessity, but if you concede that pronouns are customizable based on what feels validating to one's internal identity, then I would sincerely prefer and feel validated by your use of pronouns that imply that I am nobility.
You might argue that any given person doesn't actually believe the above sincerely, but if you assume a hypothetical where your interlocutor does, will you actually start calling him "sir" and "his lordship," not just to his lordship's face but also in conversations where his lordship isn't a participant?
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So if someone sincerely wanted to be called "your lordship" you'd do it?
What do you think of otherkin? They sincerely want to be considered animals. Would you refer to someone as a cat if they sincerely wanted it?
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Of course the irony in this statement is that many, myself included, consider that the people using xim/xer are ALSO doing it to mock other people ("squares", "my dad", the laws of God and nature) and not because it's a sincere identity. Because play-acting as a girl when you have a penis is the very definition of insincere.
But apparently because they got there first and have the left-memeplex stamp of approval, we're not allowed to call them out for it.
I am incapable of even understand the mental model of people using pronouns.
I do understand the mental models of people trying to mock them.
Basically I can’t call them out for being dishonesty because I can’t even understand them but I can call out “your highness” because I understand it’s mockery.
But you're not being clear on why mockery shouldn't be allowed.
The pronoun people haven't set up a ruleset that would exclude it. So they in fact imply that any pronoun you want to use SHOULD be allowed until proven insincere.
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I don't think there is any kind of good faith equivalency there, but as I said, my tolerance doesn't extend to semi-arbitrarily declared pronouns (especially made-up ones), only to people who I think are being sincere and not trolling or mentally ill. (Leaving aside the question of whether one considers trans or non-binary identification as de facto mental illness.)
IOW, if you want me to call you "she," I will. If you want me to call you "they," I will grit my teeth but try to remember. If you want me to call you "Your Lordship" or "Θ", I will disregard this request because you're either trolling or crazy.
I'm not sure there's much 'good faith' to be had anywhere in the pronoun debate.
There's very little way to tell the difference between sincere/trolling/mentally ill if we already grant that a person's pronouns are based solely on their mental experience of their own identity, not any externally verifiable signal. You can't tell if someone is 'making it up' or not because you can't really get a peep into their true thoughts unless, perhaps, you get to know them extremely well.
Privileging a persons' inner 'reality' over the actual observable reality that we can confirm with our own eyes is a recipe for conflict. I can never be fully certain if the 'facts' someone is trying to assert are honest beliefs or an attempt to fool me into taking some course of action, when the facts are dependent solely on what's in their head. This also goes for people who claim particular emotional responses to a particular stimuli! Trust CAN be built, mind you.
As I indicated my problem isn't so much with an individual wanting to be called something other than the obvious (hence, nicknames!) but with being expected to buy into the larger game this represents. A game that, I remind you, doesn't have any prescribed rules and whatever rules do exist, haven't been discussed or agreed to, and yet violation of which can be punished via social means.
You want to be polite and assume that you won't be pilloried for rejecting 'made up' pronouns, but there's literally nothing that makes your boundaries the ones that matter. They're already inserting stuff like "Xe/Xim/Xir" into the lexicon.
So I'll object to the game itself every time someone tries to get me to play it, unless and until we have the discussion regarding the rules.
But end of the day I anticipate that they want the rules to remain fluid and convoluted, since being able to hold them to any standard would diminish their ability to use this game to push for social outcomes that they want and to punish defectors, which is the nature of the true meta-game being played. Or so I believe.
Much simpler for me to engineer my personal social group to avoid people who make a big deal of pronouns than to openly accept and appease every person I encounter, including on the internet, for no personal benefit.
I believe most trans people genuinely do identify as and perceive themselves to be the gender they say they are. I consider their request to be made in good faith whether or not I believe their object-level claims about what gender they are. So yes, I'll be polite as far as using the pronouns they prefer. If you meet a trans woman who's introduced to you as a woman, do you make a practice of saying "Bullshit, you're a dude"?
Well, yes, in some cases.
I know people who genuinely and sincerely claim to have heard God talking to them - not in a delusional "God spoke words to me and told me I was the Chosen One" kind of way, but in a "I absolutely know for a fact that God is real because I have Experienced Him" kind of way. And people who've had like religious and/or allegedly supernatural experiences which I consider as delusional or non-real as any trans identification.
I don't think they're crazy or trolling, and while I won't pretend I believe that their experiences are real, nor will I start a fight with them. I don't feel obligated to sneer and say "You're just experiencing things you've convinced yourself are real."
I'm sure I could find myself being pilloried for rejecting made up pronouns, but since I don't hang out on Twitter and I'm not in the public eye or in a profession where I have to worry about woke shit-testers, it's not a significant concern to me.
Maybe at some point I will encounter one of these hypothetical "Please call me Ravendarkhart (Xe/Xir)" people in the wild, and I'll have to figure out if I can navigate that without either acquiescing to that bullshit or starting a fight. But while I won't say trans women aren't on that slippery slope, I don't personally feel like I am sliding dangerously down it by not striking a contrarian posture every time I meet a trans person.
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That's not surprising, but the comparison isn't meant to say I think believing you're trans and believing in God is an exact analog. Use any example you like of people believing things, based on their personal experience, which are completely internal to them and thus unverifiable to anyone outside their own head. Hence I used the example of people who believe they have experienced God directly and not, for example, people who believe they saw a UFO (something that in theory could be verified by anyone else who was there to see it).
The rest of your objection is basically "You can brush off someone's religious beliefs with impunity, but you can't do that with trans people," which is true today, in our society, but is not true in every society (trying telling an authority figure in Iran that their religious beliefs are nonsense) and has not been true historically in ours.
I am obviously against the current regime which so heavily punishes anyone who questions trans orthodoxy (see: J.K. Rowling and anyone else labeled "gender critical"), for the same reason I'm against religion having that much power. Even in the absence of such a regime, I wouldn't insist on calling a transwoman a man to his face, for the same reason that as an atheist I won't be rude to you just because you're talking about beliefs I don't share.
Also, in most workplaces (including mine), being disrespectful of someone's religious beliefs would get very similar treatment from HR as disrespecting someone's gender identity.
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That raises the question of otherkin.
Aside from that, the reason it's even vaguely plausible that they're sincere is that your allies have created an environment where sincerity may be assumed. It's with circular reasoning where people wouldn't use unusual pronouns if society didn't accept them first, but society decides whether to accept them based on the fact that people use them sincerely.
If this was 1970 and someone wanted to be called xe/xim, or even if a man wanted to be called "she", you'd know that they're trolling because it's so frowned upon that nobody would want to do that for real. Even if closeted trans people exist in 1970, they would know that society frowns upon the request so they wouldn't ask--anyone who does ask you in 1970 is probably trolling. Trans or custom gendered pronouns in 1970 are in the same position as "your lordship" is in right now.
Imagine that there was a social movement about people's right to be called "your lordship", and because of that movement, there were people who sincerely requested to be called "your lordship", so you could no longer assume that such a request is trolling. Also imagine that even then, the connotation of "your lordship" is still what it is now. If someone asked to be called "your lordship", would you do so? Or would you say "even if you're sincere, by making that request, you are trying to claim the conventional connotations of 'your lordship', and they don't apply to you, so I wouldn't call you that"?
Sure, yeah, we assume sincerity now because they made it sincere. Just as we assume sincerity about claims such as "maybe people from other countries are real people too" or "there shouldn't be an unelected king".
Are the connotations of "he" and "she" now what they were before? Anyway, sure, if we assume that society developed in a way that changed my mind about "your lordship", then my mind about "your lordship" is changed. So?..
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"My allies," forsooth!
You're mixing up several different things here. Some otherkin probably are sincere (which doesn't make them less deluded). I do believe most trans people are sincere, and trans people, by which I mean actual people who believed they were a different sex than the one they were born as, not just gender nonconforming people that trans activists try to retroactively label trans, certainly existed before the 70s. As for the newer genderspecials, probably they are about as sincere as otherkin, which is to say some of them are sincere and deluded and some are just adopting the cool fashionable new hairstyle and will abandon it when it's no longer cool.
The argument isn't "someone can sincerely be trans", it's "someone can sincerely demand trans pronouns". In 1970, most trans people would not demand pronouns, and any person who does demand one is probably a troll, not a trans person. This is the situation today for "your lordship"; anyone who would (in a more permissive society) want to demand it sincerely probably stays silent, so any demands you hear come from trolls.
I edited it into the previous post so you might not have seen it, but if society changed, so you couldn't assume that people who wanted to be called "your lordship" were insincere, would you call people that upon request?
In 1970, transwomen definitely tried to live as women and wanted to be referred to as "she."
I don't assume sincerity or insincerity. That's why pure conflict theory is lazy.
Your hypothetical is stupid, since "your lordship" would be addressing someone by a title that doesn't exist in this society and literally nobody (at least in the US) can lay claim to it. That's like asking "What if someone wants to be referred to as Mr Attack Helicopter hurr hurr hurr'."
But supposing there was some new movement of people genuinely convinced that they are noblemen born in the wrong century and social class, no, I would not call them "your lordship." Nor would I call someone who sincerely believes he's an attack helicopter Mr Attack Helicopter.
Your answer was basically "anyone who wants me to call them 'your lordship' is trolling or crazy." If they're not crazy, that assumes insincerity.
Why then is your answer different for "your lordship" and for trans pronouns?
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It's not nice, but ... it is true, and what would've happened if voltaire, jesus, moldbug, etc took this approach? Even if it makes the person 'mad' or 'sad', surely it benefits them to understand the situation better? They're making significant decisions based on these claims, and .. what else is there to their belief in god, besides the way they understand things, and decisions they make resulting from it? (no, not saying moldbug is jesus, they are varying examples of the same point)
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Did the person who'd heard the voice of God insist you call them prophet?
Is there evidence you can argue someone out of mental illness? I'm not arguing with the phophet, dementia patients or the girl at the party who's convinced the universe is sending her message either.
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No, I would never make any extra effort to intentionally 'misgender' or otherwise antagonize someone by repeatedly getting their pronouns wrong. Because as I have noted twice now, individually I have no problem with the concept of referring to someone as they prefer to be referred. Nicknames, initials, whatever. There's ample precedent for letting some pick their own name and having it be accepted socially.
The game I don't play is "EVERYONE must now make their pronouns explicit and everyone must accept those at face value."
And using the 'wrong' pronouns intentionally would also be caring waaaaaaaaaay to much about this game too.
But by the same token, if you get viscerally upset and attempt to shame or otherwise directly influence my behavior because I slipped up once or twice, I'm also less inclined to think you're acting in good faith, and using it more as a bid for status or control.
Like, there are people who still mispronounce my actual birth name even after knowing me for a while. I may or may not correct them but it just never even occurs to me to take offense or pretend to take offense.
So it's not clear to me why the pronoun thing is even worth stressing over.
Right, but I wouldn't accommodate someone who said "GOD HIMSELF told me that you have to give me $20" either. Because no matter how emphatically they believe it, there's no external signal I can use to verify it, and I'm not buying into this game when there's a personal cost attached.
Likewise, I won't exchange pronouns with every single person I meet or police my own language merely because someone may be within earshot and care about this stuff.
If I'm dealing with someone at a professional level who wants to be called 'he' or 'she' and makes a point of stating this I might do it just to grease the wheels of the interaction, since its not worth interrogating someone's mental state when you're just trying to have a professional conversation and complete a transaction.
But again, the game is "everyone must accept every other person's pronouns."
Right. And I've got my social environment arranged such that I am vanishingly unlikely to encounter someone who would make a big deal out of this particular issue.
And hell, I know some trans people who I have some rapport with and I refer to them as their preferred gender because that's easy. But I'm also reasonably sure they wouldn't have a conniption or try to publicly condemn me if I got it wrong, if I thought they'd do that, I'd minimize contact with them.
The reason I care on a meta-level is that the world seems to be shifting towards the situation where you will be made to care about this stuff and punished for not doing so.
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But this isn't anything like a trans person. If a person sincerely (or trollishly) says they've experienced god, nothing changes for you. You need not call him "Holy One". This god experiencer doesn't then start undergoing sterilizing medical procedures. There is nothing to start a fight over.
Sure it is. In both cases, someone is making a claim based on what they experience inside their head, and you can choose to believe them, disbelieve them quietly and be polite, or disbelieve them aggressively.
If someone says they're a woman, nothing changes for me either.
You're just arguing that accepting someone's gender identification has real world political (and physical) implications, which is true, but so do religious beliefs. I have certainly seen more conflict over the latter than the former.
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