Over in another thread somewhere (not linked because I don’t think the source is really relevant), a poster used the word “transgenders” to refer to transgendered people, and was told it’s offensive. Someone else brought up the example that “black people” isn’t offensive, but “blacks” is.
This general rule seems to hold.
Why is this?
I have two totally conflicting thoughts.
The adjective used without referent is reductive. Without mentioning that it applies to people, you’re generalizing in a way that minimizes the humanity of those involved.
I can see this being the case particularly in cases where the ellided noun isn’t “people” but something else. For example, the terms “illegal immigrants” vs “undocumented immigrants”. The phrase chosen is itself a judgment, and when the former is reduced to simply “illegals”, the implication is that their whole being is illegal, rather than them being people who have violated certain specific laws.
It is totally arbitrary, simply language used as a test of wokeness. For example, “colored people” vs “people of color”. There’s no linguistic principle there (that I can think of), it’s simply that one phrase is dated and passe and by extension mildly racist, while the other is modern and current and by extension aware.
There are probably other options I’m not thinking of, and maybe both are partly true.
I think in a post-bigoted world, it’d be no more offensive than “gamers” or “accountants” or “redheads” or “guys.” It’d just be a plural noun that identified a group of folks by a common trait.
But as long as a trait is currently used to stereotype and oppress and deny rights to folks who have that trait, it’s gonna sound a bit skeezy to use those nouns, gonna sound like, as Asimovian says, you’re reducing folks to that trait in the way that’s done as a precursor to discrimination.
As mentioned you want to avoid reductionism. This of course has sometimes subtle variations, ocassionally you may be able to use the group descriptor standing alone when referring to to the collective (“gays faced a crisis during the Reagan years”) when you could not use it as a singular (“I just hired a gay for the post”). (and ISTM lesbian/lesbians does not seem to carry that kind of hindrance- perhaps because that was a dual function adjective/noun all along, while “gay” was just an adjective?).
In the case of the Example (2), a variation in construction may be introduced in order to avoid a callback to an earlier usage. “Colored people” is archaic, it pretty much only survives in the NAACP name because that’s a name adopted over 100 years ago, and was used mostly to refer to black people in the context of an age of de jure disenfranchisement. “People of color” OTOH is an inclusive usage to refer to multiple ethnicities. So it works because it is not a straight substitution, and the one was already essentially abandoned into quaint relic status before the other took off.
As was mentioned in the other thread where this came up, that argument doesn’t work. Who says or who counts and determines the threshold if not unanimous?
Some of the other posts do a better job of at least looking for definable reasons why a usage might be avoided. The best ones admit it’s often in part arbitrary*.
There’s nothing wrong with the usage ‘blacks in the military’ assuming the arbitrary wheel hasn’t turned to the point ‘black’ itself is unacceptable rather than ‘African American’**. An actually good reason why ‘I hired a black’ might be avoided is as was mentioned: it could reasonably be seen to imply that single word defines an individual. In fact it really just amplifies the question of why you’d refer to the race of a particular hire, even with ‘person’. Whereas ‘blacks in the military’ is only distinguishing a characteristic of one sub group within a larger group. The idea that black members of the military are also members, not just blacks, is right there. ‘People’ is superfluous.
There isn’t a good reason to complain about ‘transgenders in the military’ again assuming ‘transgender’ itself hasn’t gone out of favor like ‘colored’. When I read the complaint on other thread I actually thought the latter might had happened and I just hadn’t gotten the memo.
PC usage rules are a continuum. Some are reasonable, others aren’t. But ones proposed on the fly where the rule maker actually has an argument with the content not form of the statement have a tendency to be of the less reasonable sort. In this case it was apparent the complaint was really about transgenders participating in ‘destruction of civilizations’ (or something) as part of the military. A general rule that says you have to append ‘people’ in any use of a group label would be an example of a silly kind of PC usage rule.
*why ‘colored people’ for blacks is not acceptable but ‘people of color’ can acceptably include black people. People shouldn’t try to come with an entirely rational reason for that, because there isn’t one.
**while it wasn’t invented for that reason AFAIK, the term makes it generally redundant to add ‘people’.
Not to nitpick too much but even colored is context or audience sensitive. My prior neighbors who were black predominately used and seemed to prefer the term colored. Perhaps it was their age. I had a lot of fun talking politics with them.
For me it was never about PC, it was about language. While lots of things are acceptable or regional or colloquial, compare the following three sentences:
“I saw Islamics at the airport yesterday.”
“I saw Islamic women at the airport yesterday.”
They both get the point across, but the first sentence sort of dehumanizes the subject (arguably the first could be taken to mean something else other than human, like a sculptures or slogans). The second one clearly seems more meaningful and accurate.
It seems to me the same applies with transgender.
“I saw a transgender being kicked and beaten by Trump supporters yesterday.”
“I saw a transgender person being kicked and beaten by Trump supporters yesterday.”
Ah, that is helpful. That shows that what I thought was a different thing in case 2 (colored people vs people of color) is sort of the same principle. One form emphasizes humanity, the other doesn’t.
