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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   34053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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 This is essentially every liberal's root objection to (part of) the trans movement

Not in my experience. Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

the basic reasoning behind enforcing pronouns on others is that transsexuals would be psychologically damaged by being misgendered, and might have any of various negative outcomes most prominently including but not limited to suicide.

It's not really my basic reasoning for this, FWIW.

But also, at an epistemological level, I simply don't grant that using a trans person's preferred pronouns constitutes "lying". Like I said elsewhere in this thread, it doesn't involve communicating any untrue belief about physical reality. When I say "this trans women is, socially, within the object-class for which we use the pronoun she" I am not telling you she has a uterus any more than I'd be telling you a sailing ship had a uterus if I told you "traditionally, seafaring vessels are referred to with the pronoun she". If calling a wooden floating object anything but an 'it' bothers you for the same reason, well, I'm sorry for you, but so it goes.

Certainly parents tend to admit that they would, if pushed, prefer to have their child switch pronouns without medically transitioning, than medically transition without switching pronouns.

I would be interested to see if this was still the case if we had fully-reversible medical transitions.
I would be also interested to see if this was still the case if we had Clarketech-style indistinguishable-except-with-specialized-medical-tech medical transitions.

Here's hoping that I'll be able to see the answer to at least one of these questions within my lifetime...

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