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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   34055 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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I do not support trans norms. But it seems incoherent to go ‘well sometimes I use preferred pronouns and sometimes I don’t’. Either use preferred pronouns all the time or insist on calling Caitlyn Jenner he.

I reserve myself the prerogative of offering and rescinding to anyone the privilege of appearances.

How about "I use my personal judgment. Sometimes this aligns with their preferences, sometimes it doesn't."

Eh, I guess I'm incoherent then. I generally do use people's preferred pronouns in person; it's polite, and not every moment of your life needs to be spent fighting political battles. Caitlyn Jenner's put a lot of effort into living as a woman, and isn't a bad actor, and has passed some poorly-defined tipping point where I'm ok with calling her a her. I just don't want it to be mandatory. I want it to be ok to disagree on who's a "valid" trans person. I absolutely don't want Stalinist revision of history/Wikipedia to pretend that Bruce Jenner never existed. And in the appropriate discussions I want to be free to point out that it's all just paying lip service to a fantasy. "XXX isn't a real woman" is a true statement that I should be allowed to say; but I generally wouldn't, any more than I'd point out that "YYY is ugly".

Politeness requires judgment. If I were to see a doctor in their office, I'd call them "Doctor" because I respect them and the social role they occupy. If I were, by some staggering coincidence, to meet Kim Jong Un in a bar, I wouldn't call him "Respected Comrade General Secretary", because I don't owe respect to that social role. It makes perfect sense to call a trans friend "her" and to call Chris-Chan "him", because I see one has a legitimate claim to my politeness and the other does not. (For an additional analogy, you can go deeper into who deserves to be called "Doctor". Everyone agrees on physicians, I would be happy to call a sufficiently respectable hard scientist "Doctor", but humanities/education/etc. PhDs should be laughed out of the room for asking)

The humanities PhD came first, of course. It’s called Doctor of Philosophy for a reason. Literature, history etc. wouldn’t have been regarded as a fit object of study, however.

(Medical doctors are really physicians, and I think theologians get Th.D).

Eh, there's a ThD(doctor of theology), JD(doctor of law), MD(doctor of medicine), PhD(doctor of philosophy), but the PhD didn't actually come first. Doctor comes from the Latin root 'Doctus', meaning 'learned' or 'well studied', and was a title granted to those qualified to teach at a university level in the middle ages. The letters in front of the D refer to the department your branch of study would have been categorized under in a medieval university.

Which is understandable, given that back then a doctor was a bloke with leeches and a hacksaw. Back in my academic days we occasionally used to joke about how the students in other disciplines getting their PhDs was proof they were jealous of us in the philosophy department.

That's a surgeon- 'physician' and 'surgeon' were different professions in the pre-modern world.

There are plenty of coherent positions between preferred pronouns and birth certificate pronouns. The long version mine is here: https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/those-categories-do-not-work-for?r=eqn2u The tl;dr is it rounds close to whether they have been surgically altered.

That is not always a readily knowable fact in polite company.

True, but birth certificate gender has the same problem. I don't imagine a norm of verifying birth gender in social settings.

Indeed.

You could more readily default to whether people pass, or commit enough effort to do so. But that's more fuzzy of course.

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