Rehabilitating "political correctness"s' negative image

[Pantastic]

@aldiboronti

But people are being labeled bigots who are not bigots at all simply by not using the ‘correct’ up-to-the-minute terminology. That’s bullshit, pure and simple, and it’s stuff like this that gives PC the terrible reputation it has.

I’ve seen that with transsexual versus transgender - transsexual was the older term, but transgender is the newer term, but someone who’s perfectly fine with trans rights saying transsexual instead of transgender has a good chance of getting chewed out for the terrible bigotry of using the outdated term. I remember I was dating a trans guy back when I was first exposed to the concept, and a SJW type got angry at me for using ‘transsexual’ which I thought was the scientific term. There’s also big arguments about transgender vs transgendered, trans vs trans*, transgender vs trans-gender, and many more little variants that really shouldn’t be a big deal.

And note that it’s almost always PC-warrior types who make the distinction, I’ve never known an actual trans person who cares about it, generally they’re glad if you call them by the correct pronouns and don’t make a big deal out of it. (By ‘actual trans person’ I mean someone who actually identifies as a gender other than assigned at birth and tries to live their life that way as opposed to the ‘I self-identify as trans because I dress androgenously sometimes at university, I’m so modern’ types).

[octopus]

@Velocity

A major liability emerged for the political left in this election, which was that, over the course of the past few decades, “political correctness” came to have an increasingly bad connotation associated with it, to the point where last year, in 2016, it may have been the deciding factor that swung the election to Donald Trump, as voters found Trump’s non-PC behavior to be “refreshing”.

Many defenders of political correctness insist that it is primarily about ensuring that people are treated well - that racial and sexist slurs are combated, etc. And that may indeed be their sincere intent and belief - that PC is about promoting decency and civility. However, that is increasingly not what PC is ***perceived ***as, by a large swath of America. PC has become ***perceived ***as a form of tyranny, a speech police, a form of punishing people who don’t obey “the speech rules,” a way of enforcing conformity.

A major step for Democrats to retake the White House and Congress in 2020 would be to rehabilitate the bad reputation that PC has developed, because as long as “PC” is perceived as being tyrannical and Red Guards-ish, it will be an anchor dragging down the Democrats’ electoral hopes. Not to say that Democrats can’t win elections despite it, but that the bad image of “PC” will make it harder. But how is to be done?

It is almost impossible to enforce speech conformity on people without suffering a backlash in return - in this instance, in the form of Trump votes at the ballot box. At the same time, how exactly does one discourage use of racial, sexist or other slurs *without *being perceived as a form of speech police?

I don’t think it should happen as the way PC-ness is used has rightfully earned it a label of Orwellian thought control.

[Velocity]

@Pantastic

I’ve seen that with transsexual versus transgender - transsexual was the older term, but transgender is the newer term, but someone who’s perfectly fine with trans rights saying transsexual instead of transgender has a good chance of getting chewed out for the terrible bigotry of using the outdated term. I remember I was dating a trans guy back when I was first exposed to the concept, and a SJW type got angry at me for using ‘transsexual’ which I thought was the scientific term. There’s also big arguments about transgender vs transgendered, trans vs trans*, transgender vs trans-gender, and many more little variants that really shouldn’t be a big deal.

And note that it’s almost always PC-warrior types who make the distinction, I’ve never known an actual trans person who cares about it, generally they’re glad if you call them by the correct pronouns and don’t make a big deal out of it. (By ‘actual trans person’ I mean someone who actually identifies as a gender other than assigned at birth and tries to live their life that way as opposed to the ‘I self-identify as trans because I dress androgenously sometimes at university, I’m so modern’ types).

Agree. I think that castigating someone for using “transsexual” as opposed to “transgender” is like berating someone for eating dessert with a salad fork or eating salad with a dessert fork. As long as the person isn’t willfully doing it to irritate people, society should be content enough that they are at least even eating it with the appropriate utensil (fork of any type) at all.

[steronz]

@Velocity

Agree. I think that castigating someone for using “transsexual” as opposed to “transgender” is like berating someone for eating dessert with a salad fork or eating salad with a dessert fork. As long as the person isn’t willfully doing it to irritate people, society should be content enough that they are at least even eating it with the appropriate utensil (fork of any type) at all.

I’m not sure many people, especially here on the dope, would disagree with you.

But what do you say to people who oppose transgendered bathroom protections under the umbrella of “PC culture run amok!”?

eta: As an example, here’s Ted Cruz accusing Trump of “pandering to political correctness” by daring to support transgendered rights.

[Aspidistra]

@Damuri_Ajashi

A lot of these theories are trying to grasp pretty subtle ideas.

When you get asked where you are from. Are they asking what European country your ancestors are from? Is this a common thing? Is this a common experience among most white people to get asked about the nationality of their ancestry?

I was under the impression that this was considered a microaggression exactly because it is NOT commonly asked.

“Where are you from?” is a boringly normal question that gets asked of pretty much anybody all the time. It’s right up there with “what do you do?” and “what do you think of this weather we’re having?”

Of course, if they reply to your “Chicago” or “Melbourne” or “New York” with “No, where are you REALLY from?”, then that’s just obnoxious. But why assume someone’s intending to be obnoxious before they actually are?

My husband gets asked if he’s English quite often (actually, so do I, but usually in response to hearing my parents live there, which is at least an actual reason). Neither of us have an ancestor born outside Australia for about 4 generations. We have no idea why this happens. It’s just one of those things…

[Pantastic]

@steronz

But what do you say to people who oppose transgendered bathroom protections under the umbrella of “PC culture run amok!”?

Talking to that crowd isn’t really relevant to the subject of the thread, and is generally pretty useless. What I’d say to people who want to rehabilitate the term PC, or at least stop opposition to it from being used as a rallying cry to that sort of thing, is to stop accusing people of being bigoted for using whichever variant of trans-something that’s not the exact correct one for today. Trans rights are already a low priority for most people, since they aren’t trans and don’t know anyone who is. If they’re going to get the same accusation of transphobia for calling a trangender individual transsexual (or worse, for using trangendered instead of trangender) as the guy who wants to force non-gender-conforming people to carry birth certificates or stay home, then they’re likely to just tune out the whole issue instead of listening to you when you try to explain how awful bathroom laws are.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

There are two different discussions that get confused:

1. Is the term “politically correct” a useful term? The only people I know who think it is are folks on the right, in the same way that I never know anyone except folks on the left who describe a policy as “reactionary.” So it’s useful, but only as an insult. The left ain’t gonna try to rehabilitate it, and the right has no reason to do so.

2. Are the concepts that the right labels as “politically correct” good or bad? This one is way more complicated. A lot of these areas are, but some of them aren’t. They can’t be evaluated en masse.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

An example, pertinent to the thread:

Occasionally, we white people talk about our heritage. “Where’s your family from?” I get asked once every few years, and I’m happy to talk about our Scots-Irish heritage, and to recount the weird story about how my mother’s grandfather might have been Cherokee, or might have been descended from a Swedish king, depending on which myths a particular member of the extended family prefers.

But in my youth I worked for a doctor who wasn’t white. From his name, you might guess Middle-Eastern. He was an amazing trauma physician and a thoroughly decent person, and a reporter was doing a bio-piece on him. She called me for background: “Where is he from?”

I went to his office and asked him. “The United States,” he snapped. I chuckled nervously, started to clarify. He cut me off. “I know what she meant. Tell her, the United States.”

This was in 1995, I think, and the lesson has stuck with me all these years. There’s no goddamn way in a bio-piece about yet another southern White doctor she’d ask where he’s from like that: she wanted to place him in a different country, and this amazing dude was tired as hell of that question.

The question, innocent for a white guy like me, was a loaded question for him.

[steronz]

@Pantastic

Talking to that crowd isn’t really relevant to the subject of the thread, and is generally pretty useless.

:dubious:

@Pantastic

What I’d say to people who want to rehabilitate the term PC, or at least stop opposition to it from being used as a rallying cry to that sort of thing, is to stop accusing people of being bigoted for using whichever variant of trans-something that’s not the exact correct one for today. Trans rights are already a low priority for most people, since they aren’t trans and don’t know anyone who is. If they’re going to get the same accusation of transphobia for calling a trangender individual transsexual (or worse, for using trangendered instead of trangender) as the guy who wants to force non-gender-conforming people to carry birth certificates or stay home, then they’re likely to just tune out the whole issue instead of listening to you when you try to explain how awful bathroom laws are.

Of course people are assholes if they wantonly throw out accusations of bigotry in cases of, as you’re describing, honest ignorance of terminology or honest mistakes.

But I’ve seen, on this very board, posters patiently explaining the differences to, let’s be honest, dipshit trolls who then gleefully go on referring to transgendered people by the wrong term (e.g., as **Velocity **says above, “willfully doing it to irritate people”). If we call those people bigots, then the anti-PC brigade still lumps that in with PC culture run amok!

And I’ve already posted an example of a genuine concern for transgendered rights lambasted as “pandering to political correctness.”

Be honest here, accusations of political correctness as a pejorative are completely overused. Rehabilitating the phrase will require people to, you know, stop overusing it as a pejorative.

Again, I feel like I’m in crazy town here. Are there vocal assholes who have, at some point, attacked people for making honest mistakes in transgendered terminology? Probably, sure. Is this a serious problem? Are they responsible for Ted Cruz, a US Senator for christ’s sake, using a completely dishonest accusation of political correctness as a political weapon? Is there anything that people won’t try to blame on “social justice warriors”? How is this some random 20-year-old-college-student-that-you-saw-in-that-one-youtube-video’s fault what Ted Cruz says?

[bump]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I don’t find the concept of trigger warnings controversial (we use them on TV programming, movies, video games, etc).

I don’t think it’s the concept that people don’t understand, or even disagree with. It’s that a lot of the trigger warnings and the people crying that there weren’t trigger warnings on something have tended toward the absurd in a lot of the public’s perception.

For example, if they put a warning at the beginning of “Forrest Gump” saying that it has extremely realistic combat scenes, that would have been a sort of trigger warning for PTSD-affected Vietnam Vets. (actually knew of a friend’s Vietnam vet former infantryman dad who dove for cover in the movie theater during the Vietnam battle scenes because he wasn’t prepared). Nobody would really care about that.

But a lot of the trigger warnings we see are about things like racism, sexism, anti-semitism, colonialism, etc… not about things most people would actually see a trigger warning as useful for, like sexual assault.

Put simply, a lot of the trigger warning stuff seems to be engineered to make sure that special snowflake college students and millenials never have to read anything controversial or distressing, not legitimate warnings to warn people who might have actual adverse effects from consuming that particular media item.

[Quartz]

@Bridget_Burke

So, we really need to be nicer to the rude assholes?

No, you’re supposed to respect their right to say what you deem to be rude. Declaring something non-PC (or PC) is controlling behaviour.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@bump

Put simply, a lot of the trigger warning stuff seems to be engineered to make sure that special snowflake college students and millenials never have to read anything controversial or distressing, not legitimate warnings to warn people who might have actual adverse effects from consuming that particular media item.

“A lot”? What percentage of trigger warnings in your personal experience are engineered in this way?

If the answer is undefined, since it requires a div/0 operation, then where are you getting this from? From the media, who has a financial interest in outrageous stories? From Fox News, who has an ideological interest in discrediting the left? What’s the source of your perception?

[steronz]

@bump

I don’t think it’s the concept that people don’t understand, or even disagree with. It’s that a lot of the trigger warnings and the people crying that there weren’t trigger warnings on something have tended toward the absurd in a lot of the public’s perception.

Funny story, my introduction to trigger warnings was a friend of mine, an avowed feminist, sending me a link to some crap on Jezebel that was, to put it politely, a defense of trigger warnings. I read the blog piece and then, not really knowing what trigger warnings were but having already made a knee-jerk opinion about them, I spent some time googling examples. Pretty much every example I saw seemed absolutely absurd to me – trigger warnings for sexual harassment on rape survivor blogs, for instance. Like, if you’re going to read a rape survivor blog, you should expect some stuff like that. I argued back and forth with him, and then I felt like I had a killer point – nobody put trigger warnings for PTSD on soldier blogs! Just to make sure, I googled something like “trigger warning ptsd Iraq,” and I was inundated with actual examples of just that. Well fuck, how had I missed all of those before? Precisely to your point, nobody cared about them so they had completely slipped under the radar, whereas I found lots of examples of sexual assault trigger warnings because people were falling over themselves to post links to such trigger warnings so they could make fun of the “precious little snowflakes who couldn’t handle the real world.” I found myself trying to justify why I was so up in arms over sexual assault trigger warnings (which I never would have seen, mind you, had I not been going out of my way to find trigger warnings to get offended by) but I found the trigger warnings for IED explosions so unoffensive, and decided that I was just being a prick.

[iiandyiiii]

Trigger warnings take almost no effort, no time, and inconvenience or harm no one. It’s literally just saying “hey, this is what I’m going to talk about here…”. Why would anyone complain about their existence?

[k9bfriender]

@Quartz

No, you’re supposed to respect their right to say what you deem to be rude. Declaring something non-PC (or PC) is controlling behaviour.

Are they not to respect our right to say that what they said was rude?

Declaring that we must respect your right to speak whatever you want without reply is controlling behavior.

@iiandyiiii

Trigger warnings take almost no effort, no time, and inconvenience or harm no one. It’s literally just saying “hey, this is what I’m going to talk about here…”. Why would anyone complain about their existence?

It’s almost like just seeing the words is enough to cause them harm.

Maybe we should make sure that there are trigger warnings for the trigger warnings in the future.

[Starving_Artist]

Here’s the thing -

a. People don’t like to be told by other people what to say, or do, or how to think, and they find it particularly galling when someone presumes to do so.

b. People don’t like that political correctness assumes the right to interpret what is or isn’t offensive or racist or sexist and then behaves as though their view settles it.

c. People don’t like being called sexist, racist, misogynistic, etc. over things that are not sexist, racist, misogynistic, etc.

d. People don’t like the fact the politically correct continually attempt to portray them as being stupid/moronic/selfish/sadistic/evil because they aren’t liberals.

e. People don’t like the fact that political correctness has become a way of trying to force compliance with liberal dogma.

f. People don’t like that most of political correctness is silly as hell. For example, recent university whingement over “toxic masculinity” and how “Be a man” are the three most destructive and harmful words in the English language.

g. And finally, people recognize that there’s no way in hell a society is ever going to exist where no one ever gets offended by anything, and that if such a society ever were to exist, it would be so dull, drab and lifeless that people would die of boredom. So they see political correctness as tilting at windmills in an effort to create a society that no one would want to live in in the first place.

Instead they think that for the most part society’s offendees should use the same coping mechanism they use when they’re faced with having to come to grips with the fact they aren’t good-looking enough, or tall enough, or athletic enough, or smart enough, or rich enough, or whatever it is that is lacking in their lives that impacts negatively how they think life should be and yet are still able somehow to come to grips with it.

In other words, suck it up, deal with it, and get on with your lives. You’ll have a far happier and more successful journey through life this way than you will by being endlessly shattered by a never-ending variety of ‘offenses’.

[Miller]

I like how points a through f are all explanations about why people are offended by PC, and point g is, “Too many complaints about people being offended.”

[steronz]

SA, which one of those categories does Trump’s support for transgendered bathroom rights fall under?

[Pantastic]

@steronz

Of course people are assholes if they wantonly throw out accusations of bigotry in cases of, as you’re describing, honest ignorance of terminology or honest mistakes.

But I’ve seen, on this very board, posters patiently explaining the differences to, let’s be honest, dipshit trolls who then gleefully go on

Call them dipshit trolls and be done with them then. It’s not really hard to do. But what doesn’t work is completely dismissing the real issue of bogus accusations of bigotry by saying ‘hey, but sometimes trolls do say obnoxious stuff’.

If we call those people bigots, then the anti-PC brigade still lumps that in with PC culture run amok!

I’m not sure what the ‘anti-PC brigade’ is, then. I guess I’m not part of it in spite of what Miller and you claim, since I have no problem calling those people bigots.

Again, I feel like I’m in crazy town here. Are there vocal assholes who have, at some point, attacked people for making honest mistakes in transgendered terminology? Probably, sure. Is this a serious problem?

Yes, it’s a serious problem if you want to rehabilitate the term PC and not have it used to dismiss valid concerns about trans and similar issues. When people rant and drop accusations of bigotry because someone doesn’t keep up with the latest PC-approved terminology, it pisses off people that would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause, and lends credence to the idea that PC is a bunch of nonsense just used to attack people. You want to deny that it happens by pretending that it’s ‘one youtube video’, but it’s not just ‘one youtube video’. Also, isn’t denying the validity of other people’s experiences a common microaggression, that you’re engaging in rather egregiously here?

How is this some random 20-year-old-college-student-that-you-saw-in-that-one-youtube-video’s fault what Ted Cruz says?

Be honest, making BS up to try to discredit what I say isn’t a good way to get real conversation. I didn’t say anything about a “20-year-old-college-student-that-you-saw-in-that-one-youtube-video’s”, that’s a strawman that you invented so you could be dismissive of me. If you can’t engage in honest discussion, you’re not going to learn anything, and you’re not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.

[Pantastic]

@iiandyiiii

Trigger warnings take almost no effort, no time, and inconvenience or harm no one. It’s literally just saying “hey, this is what I’m going to talk about here…”. Why would anyone complain about their existence?

I had a friend who wrote a blog entry about educating one of her friends about trans issues, that included that when first came to her he said “I’d love to hook up with a tranny”. A few people working hard to get angry declared that she should have had trigger warnings for the slur, and that she was a bigot for using the slur (even though she was quoting someone else, not applying it to a person), and declared that people shouldn’t go to any events she organized. They were no great loss, but they did ‘boycott’ as much as a handful of angry people can.

It’s not ‘the existence of trigger warnings’ that bothers most people, it’s the insistence on accusing people who don’t use absurd trigger warnings of being bigots, of insisting on trigger warnings for minor issues that don’t need them.