Well, you can start working on your personal problem now, since you are aware of it. It is also probably that you do know a trans person or two, along with a fair percentage of gays and lesbians. You just don’t know that they are. And indeed it is not really your business.
Not trans, but I’m going to make the wild guess that what they in general want is for people to make an honest effort. Not be perfect, just keep trying.
Okay, honest question, how can I “work on” my personal problem in an environment that’s doing a convincing impersonation of one with no subjects for me to test myself on? My concern is about my non-conscious reactions. I can’t talk myself out of those.
It’s my understanding that the usual way to train yourself out of pernicious instinct is to immerse yourself in the thing you’re reacting to and train your subconscious that it’s not a big deal by repeated exposure. Step one of that is the immersion/exposure.
Dammit, I KNEW I screwed up something!
I mean, you’re worried about a kinda weird / unlikely scenario. It’s very rare you’re going to run into a trans woman who reads entirely as “just a man.” You’re MUCH more likely to be in a scenario where you think, “Oh, this person may be a trans woman” than “Huh, this dude just told me to call him ‘Becky.’” And, in the latter case, hell, just call him Becky. If he says, “HEY! I’m not a LADY! My name isn’t really Becky!” just say, “oh, you never know with names.”
Contrary to what you may see in bad facebook posts or the like, trans people aren’t going around trying to “catch” or “trick” people in order to be confrontational. They generally just want to live their lives, and the worst reaction you will get for accidentally misgendering somebody is going to be, “I prefer ‘she’” or, more likely, no reaction at all.
Well, I gotta worry about something. In actual fact the likelihood of me addressing ANY new human by name is virtually zero, given my insular lifestyle, so worrying about outside cases regarding their names, sexualities, or anything else is just spinning my wheels about nothing.
But one still worries. I mean, I’d hate to drive somebody to suicide!
That is Peterson’s interpretation of the federal law, which he then advances to support a free speech argument. It’s not supported by the interpretations given to the law by the Canadian Human Rights Commission.
The bill in question does not address names or pronouns. It’s an amendment to the federal human rights act that adds gender-identity to the list of protected personal characteristics. It’s meant to ensure that people don’t lose their job, get denied housing or public services, and so on because of their gender identity. Those are the big issues, not the pronouns.
As well, the bill doesn’t apply to private citizens, but only to federal government institutions and federally regulated businesses, like banks and airlines. It does not apply to universities, such as the university where Professor Peterson works, which are under provincial human rights laws.
These points have been made many times by public officials, lawyers, and representatives of the federal human rights commission. Yet, Professor Peterson continues to make his assertion that his free speech rights are affected.
I wonder why that is?
The thing is, begbert2, you’re not going to even know the wrong name if you just meet someone who is trans. So you can’t deadname them. Unless you actually knew the person pre-transition, you have to go out of your way to find out someone’s old “dead” name.
I also find that misgendering is quite difficult to do, since trans people present in the gender they are. So it’s trivial to always use the pronoun of what they look like, even if they might look a bit more masculine than the average woman or something.
The main thing I sometimes slip up on is using “they” with non-binary people (enbies). I practice by consuming fiction with enbies and then talking about them. I also go out of my way to use singular they in situations where I might previously have arbitrarily assigned a pronoun.
In doing so, I’ve actually “caught” myself actually writing they in situations where I do know the gender, which I consider a success.
That’s not what the study shows. It shows an “association”. That doesn’t imply causality. it’s quite possible that if you convince everyone to call transgender youth by their preferred name, it would have zero effect on their suicide rate.
For instance, let’s imagine that half of transgender youth live with parents who treat them well and call them by their preferred names, and the other half live with parents who beat them and call them by a non-preferred name. Forcing the evil parents to use a preferred name, but doing nothing about the beatings, might well have zero effect on the suicide rate.
It could be that getting people to use the preferred names of transgender kids does reduce their suicide risk. But this research doesn’t show that, much less quantify that reduction.
I think it’s legit to assume that there’s a strong correlation between people who call someone by their preferred name and people who show respect in other ways. I didn’t actually read this study as being specifically about names, but being about markers of respecting a trans kid’s preferred gender.
Space Veggie, this is the dope and you are pointing out a key point. That said, even if it’s just a casual correlation, we’re talking youth at risk of suicide, so I believe Miss Manners would opine that preferred name would be the right thing to do.
Hell, my first name is considered by everyone I’ve ever met in my life to be a girls name, and believe me I appreciate it when I say “I go by my middle name (one of the apostles) and they call me by my middle name thereafter”. It ain’t rocket science nor about me, people prefer to be called by their preferred name. Now that may not be quantifiable but sure as shit is reality for most folks. While I empathize, I cannot imagine what it’s like to be transgendered and having to try get people to call you by your name. Caitlyn Jenner probably would be a millionaire by that alone if she got a nickel every time someone insisted she was “Bruce” Jenner.
I agree. If I know someone’s preferred name I will try to use it, whether they are transgender or not. Having lousy memory for names and faces it will probably take about ten tries before I get it right, but I’ll always try.
But I don’t believe for a second that my use of a correct name, or my participation in any minor social interaction, has any effect whatsoever on anyone else’s having or not having depression or suicidal urges.
And I say this because I’ve had major, major depression for most of my life and suicidal urges and plans to commit suicide on a vast numbers of occasions when I was young (ages roughly 11-21). And I remember that when I was having a bad depressive/suicidal episode, particular during the younger part of that age range, my mind always threw the blame for that episode outwards. At various times, I was sure that the fault lay with some student who bullied me at school, or some student who was nice to me at school, or my science teacher, or the Principal, or the Ford Motor Corporation, or President Bush, or the New England Patriots, or certain members of the Straight Dope Message Board, or … People in the grip of depression can think a whole lot of crazy things.
But all of that blame-throwing was untrue. The real cause of the depression was medical problems in the brain. Once those problems were cured (via anti-depressants, herbs, therapy, proper diet, exercise) the depression became manageable and is now almost entirely gone. Social interactions, politicians, big corporations, sports teams, all other parts of the social world that I deal with are not that much different from what they were back then, but since the brain chemistry problems that actually caused the depression are cured, I no longer have delusional beliefs about how every single person I meet is causing the depression.
And, certainly, because that was your experience with suicidal ideation, all other suicidal ideation must be essentially identical to what you experienced.
I’m guessing you don’t know know many (or any) trans people, then.
Look, the sample size in this study isn’t huge. It’s not a very powerful study. Normally, I’d be tempted to point that out. But, as pointed out above, this is a study in the “no duh” vein - shit we’ve known for ages, finally quantified for the sake of the people who don’t interact with the trans community. And whether the result is because of the use of the name or (more likely) because it serves as a useful proxy for acceptance and validation, this is absolutely a thing. Being told by those around you that your identity, the identity you feel for yourself, is not real (and often that you’ll be punished or ostracized for expressing your identity) is incredibly harmful.
So, as Miller points out, your major depression is not the same thing as their gender dysphoria. Your major depression isn’t even the same as my major depression - when I feel like shit, I constantly and consistently put the blame on myself, and redirect that inward (and boy, that’s a lot of fun!).
But let’s just take this analogy a little further.
Imagine, over the course of your major depression, you found that if someone spoke to you in the right way, you felt… better. Imagine all it took to stave off those suicidal ideations for a day was someone calling you by your chosen name, instead of your birth name. Imagine that made you feel so much better that, statistically, you were less than half as likely to kill yourself.
In what universe is this not a gigantic medical breakthrough? In what universe do the people who care about you not just use your chosen name, but insist very loudly that everyone else does as well? If someone cares about you, in what universe is their response, “Yeah, well, so what, I’m still gonna call him Bob because fuck your feelings”?
I’m reminded of what Scott Alexander (an actual psychologist) has to say on this:
Miyamoto Musashi is quoted as saying:
[INDENT] The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy’s cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.
Likewise, the primary thing in psychiatry is to help the patient, whatever the means. Someone can concern-troll that the hair dryer technique leaves something to be desired in that it might have prevented the patient from seeking a more thorough cure that would prevent her from having to bring the hair dryer with her. But compared to the alternative of “nothing else works” it seems clearly superior.
And that’s the position from which I think a psychiatrist should approach gender dysphoria, too.
Imagine if we could give depressed people a much higher quality of life merely by giving them cheap natural hormones. I don’t think there’s a psychiatrist in the world who wouldn’t celebrate that as one of the biggest mental health advances in a generation. Imagine if we could ameliorate schizophrenia with one safe simple surgery, just snip snip you’re not schizophrenic anymore. Pretty sure that would win all of the Nobel prizes. Imagine that we could make a serious dent in bipolar disorder just by calling people different pronouns. I’m pretty sure the entire mental health field would join together in bludgeoning anybody who refused to do that. We would bludgeon them over the head with big books about the side effects of lithium.
Really, are you sure you want your opposition to accepting transgender people to be “I think it’s a mental disorder”?[/INDENT]
(Bolding mine.)
How does this work in practice?
“Hey, what did you do with that book?”
“I gave it to they.”
Not judging this, just wondering how it works.
“I gave it to them.” You use they/them as a singular pronoun, the way you would when talking about an unspecified person or a person whose gender you did not know. For example:
“That person over there - are they a girl or a boy?”
“I dunno, but they’re so cute I’m going to ask them out no matter what the answer is!”
(Your mistake was basically missing the difference between “he” and “him”. 
)
One of the issues when writing manuals in English is precisely that you need to pick a gender for the person in the examples or keep saying “the worker”, “the operator…”, “the technician…”. Using “they” as a singular pronoun dodges the assumptions about what will be the gender of your production workers, your maintenance operators or your lab techs.
:smack:
As a psychologist I find the whole study questionable.
I have no problem calling people whatever they want, but that study when you look at the details, leaves much to be desired. It’s too small, the people are cherry picked and the thoughts simply don’t indicate action, and I could go on and on…
All people have to learn how to deal with things, you don’t do any good by teaching children, not getting their own way is a matter of life and death. I deal with many poor, inner city and children of criminals. These people learn from day one how to deal with problems not and that is the way it should be.
I won’t go off any more on a tangent, but again, people should be called what they want, but if they are not, we need to be teaching coping behaviors, not hoping everyone else changes while the kid waits for the world to change.
As I keep saying, I’m sure there’s plenty to kvetsch about with the methodology, but it’s easily believable if you’ve spent much time around people with gender dysphoria because this is their lived reality, day in and day out. I can’t go searching now, but this isn’t the first study of its kind I’ve heard of.
Look, I appreciate the sentiment, but when dealing with gender dysphoria, a rather serious (but quite treatable) mental disorder, this is exactly the wrong message to send. For trans kids, having their identity validated is quite literally a matter of life and death. It’s not just a matter of “getting their own way”, it’s a matter of whether or not the community they’re in validates them and treats them like goddamn human beings. Y’know, like how when someone has depression and suicidal ideation, you want to be careful to steer them away from media that might trigger them - it’s not just “not getting their own way”.
The point of studies like this is to point out that kids “coping” with misgendering should be treated the same way as kids “coping” with bullying, or sexual harassment, or substance abuse problems - an actual threat to their safety and well-being. Yes, obviously, teach them how to deal with transphobic bigots, because those aren’t likely to go away, but also push for action that treats that transphobia as the dangerous harassment that it is. A teacher intentionally misgendering their student is bullying that student and it should be treated the same way as if a teacher constantly referred to one of the kids as “fatty” or “lardo” - as a fairly serious, potentially career-ending offense.