What PC things today will be politically incorrect in the future?

Great Debates
121

All right, here’s a prediction:

One of these days, a heterosexual man is going to get paired with a transvestite by match.com or some similar dating service. He’s going to complain that he only wanted to be matched with WOMEN.

And that guy will be torn to shreds in the media. He will be called a bigot, because that person IS a woman, damn it, and a BEAUTIFUL woman at that. And he should have been THRILLED to be matched up with her.

Men who prefer girls without a penis WILL be condemned publicly before long.

122

Do you not understand the difference between “transvestite” and “transgender”? Or are you just misusing the word on purpose to be cruel?

123

:rolleyes: Pffffffft. Segregationists said exactly the same thing about racial integration half a century ago: “if blacks are allowed to marry our children then eventually they’ll DEMAND and EXPECT to marry our children! White people won’t be allowed to marry other white people!” yadda yadda yadda balls.

Guess what, there is still no social stigma attached to not dating or marrying interracially, even though interracial dating and marriage are becoming more common and accepted. Likewise, even though same-sex attraction is far more socially accepted and recognized than it used to be, there’s still no “public condemnation” of not being homosexual.

Same for your silly alarmism about transgender identity. Yes, as transgender existence and rights become more widely recognized, there will be greater acceptance of non-transgender people having relationships with transgender ones. But that’s not going to turn into any kind of general societal expectation that non-transgender people MUST be attracted to transgender ones.

Everybody is allowed to like whatever they happen to like, whether that means liking women who are taller than you or liking men who have dark skin or vaginas or liking women who have big butts or penises or liking any gender/genital configuration as long as they’ve got red hair and a cute smile.

Of course, nobody wants to hear your (generic you) bigoted judgemental ass going around declaring that people are objectively ugly or disgusting or repulsive because they happen to have characteristics you don’t find personally appealing. But **as long as you treat other people with politeness and respect, nobody really cares which other people you are or are not personally attracted to. **

124

That all sounds reasonable… and yet it’s demonstrably wrong.

Google “cotton ceiling.” There are ALREADY "women"with penises demanding that lesbians have sex with them, and calling them transphobic if they won’t.

It’s only a matter of time before straight males who decline to have sex with such “women” are given the same treatment.

And, btw, there are many SDMB regulars who DO think it’s racist not to date people of other skin colors.

125

Oh I see, you merely meant to predict that “there will be some individuals who will criticize a man for not wanting to date transgender women”. I thought you meant that there would be a widespread social stigma attached to such a preference, which there isn’t and won’t be.

In fact, according to anecdotal evidence there are already some individuals who will criticize a man for not wanting to date transgender women, so your prediction came pre-fulfilled.

But the more general social stigma that I thought you were talking about won’t happen. People are entitled not to be personally attracted to whatever combination of physical characteristics they happen not to be personally attracted to.

[QUOTE=astorian]

It’s only a matter of time before straight males who decline to have sex with such “women” are given the same treatment.

[/quote]

:dubious: However, people are not entitled to be rude about the physical characteristics they happen not to be personally attracted to. There’s nothing wrong with not feeling attracted to fat women, but there’s something wrong with calling them “lardass skanks” or “land whales” or other derogatory terms. There’s nothing wrong with not feeling attracted to dark-skinned women, but there’s something wrong with calling them…derogatory names referencing their skin color.

Likewise, there’s nothing wrong with not feeling attracted to transgender women, but there’s something wrong with referring to them as “women” in scare quotes. Being entitled to your own personal preferences about what attracts you does not entitle you to be an asshole towards the individuals who happen not to attract you.

[QUOTE=astorian]

And, btw, there are many SDMB regulars who DO think it’s racist not to date people of other skin colors.
[/QUOTE]

Cite? AFAICT from the concurrent thread on that topic, what’s being argued is that being turned off by a particular appearance is different from being turned off by a racial label.

For instance, to cite another poster’s example, there’s not necessarily anything racist about not being attracted to dark skin. But if you find a particular light-skinned person attractive when you think they’re racially white, and then stop finding them attractive just because you find out that they actually racially identify as black although they’re pale-skinned enough to be mistaken for white, that is arguably a racist attitude.

126

The problem with football is one of consent. Children can’t accurately judge the risks and rewards for playing a sport.

127

Chiraq’s gun laws not working? What about the laws against murder?

128

I had a white Jewish mate that Married a full blood Black woman and he loved her but he was a proud racist and hatted or looked down on and bagged the rest of her family and race, she was not worried about his ranting, he was 5 ft and she 6 ft and her boy is 6.8ft.
I would talk about her people and the problems they had with another black race that she hatted and I agreed on the problems and both of us understood the problems of what was going on with all the details, but her hubby did not understand bugger all of what we were talking about, he just looked around dumb foundered like thinking what the hell are you two on about, because he had never had hands on dealing with such things and was out of his depth with what we were on about. he was a smart man but just a city metro type that is just like most TV educated people living in a type of fantasy world that most people do nowadays, who easy swallow PC views and social norms around there own little lives.
What we were on about had noting to do with colour but how one race treated the natives so badly that we were both angered by how such could get away with such and how the media were total bastards who had no intentions to tell the truth about the reality of the situation going on and only supported the wealthy people who were not natives, not to mention working to destroy there culture and traditions of a lovely people that are being undermined by cunning greedy creeps.

Her people wanted them out or at least have some control of there country and I knew she was right but old mate could not care less about it at all, as the only thing that mattered was money and a persons position on the ladder in this world.

The thing is that filth like PC is just a tool to try control people and it works so well with wage earning types, that don’t have to think beyond there own little bubble of there short sighted narrow minded little world that they live in.
They love to let all the penned up hostility loose on things they are offended over, with going right over the deep end on crap, the fact is if a person is racist who cares, I don’t care at all if another calls me names or is bagging my race, most likely I could agree with them that it’s true and if it’s not I’m not bothered with it.
I will take the time to listen to another’s point of view, I am man enough to deal with anything and I am grateful to others who are honest in coming forward with there point of view, the last thing I support is gutless conniving people or such who try to force such things underground, because such stupidity will not work, it will come back and bite you in the ass.

PC is not your salvation, it’s just a works of man, that will in slave all in madness and lead to only filth and destruction and it has no true foundations at all, it’s just built on trendy whims.

129

Lest anyone thought I was lying when I suggested that the PC police do, in fact, condemn those who aren’t sexually attracted to people of other races…

It simply is NOT true that no one cares who you sleep with. The PC police care deeply, and are FURIOUS that white gays may not want to sleep with black men, and are saying so publicly.

I do not find it at ALL preposterous that, before long, straight men will be similarly condemned for refusing to sleep with “women” who still have male genitalia.

130

Pixie was her stage name.

131

How much health risk is there to children playing contact sports? From what I Remember as a kid, we could beat each other to our hearts content and injuries were rare. But as adults, we can deliver more damage but our ability to take it hasn’t increased commensurately.

But yes, I would be interested in studies of kids who played contact sports and their longterm health if they stopped after school.

132

Actually, your article isn’t about people “condemning those who aren’t sexually attracted to people of other races”. It’s about people condemning those who arbitrarily rule out possible partners based on a very broad racial-identity category without even having any idea of what those people look like.

Nobody’s saying you have to be equally turned on by everybody’s appearance. What they’re saying is that it’s racist to be turned off merely by a racial label irrespective of appearance.

[QUOTE=astorian]
I do not find it at ALL preposterous that, before long, straight men will be similarly condemned for refusing to sleep with “women” who still have male genitalia.
[/QUOTE]

You are evidently not very good at figuring out what people are actually being condemned for, so I’ll just give you a heads-up that you are much less likely to be condemned for not being sexually attracted to transgender women than for your offensive and disrespectful habit of referring to them as “women” in scare quotes.

Really, nobody cares who you sleep with. But a lot of people care who you insult. If you want your personal preferences to be respected, being offensive and rude about people you don’t happen to prefer is not a good way to go about it.

133

You seem to be implying that there will someday be no transgender people. Only men and women. Which makes sense I guess.

134

Uh, no, what I’m saying is simply that politeness requires referring to transgender women as women. Not “women” in scare quotes, not “so-called women”, not “chicks with dicks”, not any other derogatory expression or nickname. Women.

If you want to distinguish between transgender women and other women, you can call them transgender women. If you want to reference their birth-assigned gender, you can call them Male-Assigned-At-Birth women. But calling them “women” in scare quotes, so you can sneeringly deny their gender identity while pretending to respect it, is just plain rude.

(And yes, of course there are transgender people who are non-binary or gender-nonconforming, and probably always will be. And some of them prefer to be referred to in non-typical-gender-binary terms. Some of them may even want to be called “women” in scare quotes, for all I know. But when astorian refers to transgender women as “women” in scare quotes, he’s doing it to deliberately disrespect the gender identity of all transgender women, and that is not cool.)

135

That’s putting terminology over reality though. Either transgender women are women or they are not women. If they are women, they should just be called women. No quotes, no transgender, just women.

136

In social terms, that’s exactly right. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be people who are transgendered, though. It’s still a medical condition. The doctor’s got to write something on the chart when he’s prescribing hormones.

137

No it isn’t. The gender categories called women and men are applied socioculturally to a lot of people who identify as women and men, respectively, but who may vary quite a bit biologically within their group.

To take another example, XY-chromosome people with androgen insensitivity syndrome and female-bodied external anatomy, who were identified at birth as female and who self-identify as female, are women, even though they have a Y chromosome. Men with partial androgen insensitivity syndrome who self-identify as male are men, even though they may have feminine-looking breasts or undescended or underdeveloped testes due to their condition.

Note, by the way, that none of this insistence on respect for people’s individual gender identity is in any way stifling medical clarity or scientific precision or anything like that. In circumstances where people need to distinguish between details of anatomical or genetic characteristics, they are allowed to talk about them.

But in ordinary social circumstances, it is the height of rudeness to put unsolicited gender-identity labels on people who aren’t already using them. If somebody self-identifies as a woman, it is impolite for you to speculate on what “kind” of woman she is, biologically, and it’s even more impolite to state or insinuate that you don’t consider her “kind” of woman to be a “real” woman. (And the same for men, natch.)

[QUOTE=adaher]
Either transgender women are women or they are not women. If they are women, they should just be called women. No quotes, no transgender, just women.
[/QUOTE]

In ordinary social interactions, as I said (ETA: and Miller before me), that is correct. But in general discussion of populations overall, there is no need to pretend that various distinguishing characteristics don’t exist, as long as you don’t use rude or disrespectful ways of describing them.

It is not rude to acknowledge that some women are mothers, and some women are infertile, and some women are postmenopausal, and some women are transgender, and some women are asexual, etc. What is rude is insinuating that any such characteristic somehow invalidates that group’s gender identity as women.

138

We never know. Every age has unfree societies in which some speech is forbidden. We do not know what will be treated as heresy in the future.

In any case, Political Correctness is a form of censorship.

139

If Libertarians get upper hand that may happen.

If the flow of information is not controlled by major companies, then enforcing Political Correctness may become impossible.

140

Excellent point.

Moreover, political correctness is a means of one activist group trying to establish a boundary. I think that in a lot of cases, the boundaries make sense, like when a person of Chinese descent would rather be called an Asian American than a ‘Chinaman,’ or when someone wants to be called a member of the Cherokee Nation or a Native American rather than an Indian. But when someone says that the term ‘Indigenous’ is offensive…um, no. That’s an example of an activist trying to give their cause a ‘rason d’etre’ and trying to establish arbitrary boundaries for other students and faculty by claiming to be offended, or merely that they could be offended.