I would never hurt anyone intentionally. It’s not who I am.
A good friend of mine, cis-female, was seriously offended when someone in her field (book arts) referred to her as “they” in an article or review. This shocked me somewhat, and she explained that, in that field, white men, especially white men with money, get a lot of recognition for comparatively little effort, while women have to struggle for a lot less recognition and respect, and she has built up her reputation in the field diligently as a woman (this is all her view of the situation). I think she might be mistaken and suffering from confirmation bias, but I was no longer shocked. She also said that the author of the piece “should know” that she is and wants to be recognized as a woman, which I thought was pushing the meaning of “should” rather beyond recognition. But I did understand where she was coming from.
I guess the lesson I took from this was that “they” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for carelessness, and can be considered mis-gendering in some cases in the wide world.
I see that it might have appeared so, but I can honestly say that I didn’t intend to call Beck a bigot and insult her. I would better have said “I don’t think you’re a bigot, but check your opinions because they are bigoted”. Which she seems to have done as stated in this thread. So @Beckdawrek, if you felt insulted, I apologize.
I’m used to it by now, but it creates some very real issues in clarity in the English language, in certain contexts. I had a friend write one chapter with their character using they/them pronouns in which that person was engaging with another person, and I barely understood it. It was not clear at all when the narrative was referring to person A or when it was referring to Person A and Person B. Sometimes I do think there would be some advantages to e/es/em over the singular they, for people who identify as non-binary.
No one said you would. What we are talking about here is precisely the opposite: ways in which assumptions we make without thinking about it at all can cause harm to the vulnerable among us.
I think you might. Your condescending dismissal of your friend’s experience, an experience shared by many women, is depressing.
I don’t quite agree. Because that same “quacks like duck” argument would apply to what you said here:
To me there is very little question that @Beckdawrek honestly does not consider her statements as showing any bigotry at all and that they very clearly emerge from a bigoted mindset.
The main difference is not what was said, but the fact that your comment is part of a longer post with a reconciliatory tone, while their post is terse and conveys an angry tone (similar to your “I don’t believe I asked you a question.”)
It’s why I tend to make longer posts when conveying negativity. I know that short posts tend to come off as angry, even if you avoid using any specifically angry words.
Pronouns in general are a black hole of potential confusion. I daresay a lot more people misunderstand the author’s / speaker’s intent than we all realize. The referent is clear in the speaker’s mind as they substitute in “they”, “he”, “she”, “them” or whatever for the entity(s) they’re thinking of. But that’s not a reliably reversible substitution and some fraction of audience members goof on every pronoun that goes by. Certainly some pronouns in some situations are riskier for misunderstanding than others.
Story time:
Years ago I ran a small business. I was the only male worker (no, not that kind of business; this was ordinary office work). Anyhow I had a female secretary, a female office manager, and a bunch of female clerk workers. Whose work was mostly talking on the phone with, and resolving problems for, almost entirely female office workers at our customer companies.
Very often the secretary would come to me and report some problem using the word “she” to represent every one of the 4 participants in the problem: herself, our OM, our worker, and the customer’s worker. She knew what she meant but I sure didn’t.
It was surprisingly hard to get her first to recognize that I couldn’t tell who was who in “she said that she said [whatever] and then she said that she said that she said [whatever] and now we’ve got a problem.”
We eventually settled the business on “he/his/she/her” being mostly-prohibited words. So now we had “So Sally came to me with a problem where Sally and Kate had been on the phone with Susan and Susan said that earlier Lucy had assured Susan that …”.
Pretty quickly they got on board with the idea. As they recognized how often they’d been guessing unnoticed at what the hell somebody else was talking about. Yes, it sounded a bit stilted if taken out of context. But it worked.
But it takes real effort to make the transition.
The only pronoun I tend to address a person with is “you.”
Maybe if I knew what “Afab” means, I’d be less confused.
That’s a nasty and totally unjustified sentiment unsupported by any evidence. OTOH, there’s lots of evidence that you are at best a useless poster specializing in drive-by snark exactly like this, and quite possibly an asshole.
I agree.
I agree. I realize that some posters are trying to be helpful, but there’s a fine line between trying to enlighten someone’s perceived moral shortcomings and being a meddling jerk.
As for Beck being a decent person, there’s an old saying that the true measure of character is how you treat those from whom you have nothing to gain. Beck’s love and compassion for all animals makes her a veritable St. Francis.
It’s why it doesn’t pay to label someone as bigoted. I cannot be a bigot, “I would never hurt anyone intentionally. It’s not who I am.” And it sometimes is hard to appreciate that we are privileged, it comes off as devaluing what we have worked hard to accomplish.
I am privileged. White cis male raised in a stable family in a solidly middle class suburban community that had good schools low crime, a family that pushed educational achievement (at least for the boys), the opportunity to get as much education as I wanted if I got the grades and test scores with minimal debt afterwards.
None of that means that I did not work hard for my accomplishments in life, I did, very hard, but without those privileges maybe the same effort would not have led to the same results, or maybe even my circumstances would not have making those efforts the default state it was?
Currently I passively participate in structures that have classist and racist impacts. The impacts of the structure of healthcare in America, especially the megacorporatization of it, has justifiably been the subject of threads before. I am aware of my role as a cog in and beneficiary of that machine. And I have worn out of fighting to change it. (Good luck younger docs with ideals, those who exist.)
I’m not quitting my job to work exclusively with underserved marginalized populations. I’m not donating my retirement portfolio to just causes.
Of course demonizing me for my privileged existence is not a great tactic. I didn’t ask for my privileges.
But the request for me to at least do my best to do my fair share to help others, to be sensitive to the perspectives of those less privileged, to try to be aware of my actions that are implicitly driven by bigoted assumptions, and to at least stop and consider that such might be the case before knee jerk denial of it?
Not unreasonable. Hard to do even though it shouldn’t be.
Assigned female at birth.
And yeah, i tend to use “you” when talking to a person, but a place like here tends to encourage posters to talk about each other, often using pronouns. And posters care SO MUCH, in contradictory ways.
Ah. Thanks (although all caps might have been more clear)!
As for “addressing,” for me the connotation is “talking (or writing) to,” rather than “referring to.”
I mostly post from my phone, and i swype my entries, and I’m way too lazy to use capital letters in all the places they are traditionally used.
But sorry to be unclear.
It’s all good.
(P.S. I wish I could swype. Too much arthritis and hand tremors.)
Sometimes it needs to float around in the back of one’s head for a while, after attention’s been drawn to it.
If the thread hadn’t been locked, I might have reported that post.
There are ways to word what was apparently the intended meaning that don’t carry so much risk of its being taken as an accusation.
– which I see, later in thread, that EinsteinsHund has recognized:
This. None of us are ever going to be done with it.
And on some days, some people just don’t have the spoons for more work than they have to do otherwise. Doesn’t mean new information can’t be simmering in the back of the head, though.
I was arguing with Beck because I think Beck can hear arguments. I didn’t bother arguing with that other character, I just reported them (on the first post, thread was locked by the time I saw the others.)
I had no idea how strongly I identify as (cis) female until I started thinking about trans issues. I just took it for granted. I think – I hope – that it helped me understand such issues when I realized that all my life I’ve been absolutely sure I’m female. Even when I’m doing things coded male. Even when I’m utterly bored by many of the things coded female. And even when I thought everybody had the same genitals, which I did until I was around 7 or 8 (1950’s, no brothers, all the dogs were female, neutered cats aren’t obvious.) And then I thought – if I can be so certain I’m female no matter what else is going on and without looking in my pants: probably somebody else can be equally certain that they’re female even if what’s in the pants doesn’t appear to match.
I’ve also spent a lot of my life doing male-coded things in a society that kept insisting ‘women can’t/don’t do that!’; which has given me an allergy to the default-male. That’s why I correct people who misgender me male – my head is saying damnit women do this too! I don’t feel any need to correct anybody who calls me by gender-neutral pronouns, because by the very act of doing so they’re telling me they don’t want to use the default male. But I can understand why some people want the gendered pronouns used for themselves.
Yeah. She’s saying “damn it, women do this too.” And I can see why, in someone else’s published paper, she doesn’t want to accept the concealing “they”.
Yeah. I’m reading a book. I don’t visualize precisely, but I do get some sense of what the characters look like. And – I default visualize them as white unless the author explicitly tells me otherwise; and occasionally even if the author does. It’s very far in the back of my head and I need to make the front of my head pay attention to it in order to not do it – and I need to do that in each specific case, because that seems to be as much learning as the back of my head has been able to absorb on that subject. At least so far.
Some of them are.
The trick, of course, is telling which ones.
I start a lot of posts on this board that I don’t ever post. I suspect that despite that sometimes I go ahead and hit “reply” when I shouldn’t have.
Most of the time, when I google a reference I didn’t understand, I get a whole mess of different types of options (and/or three thousand hits for the name of a band or something of the sort.) Sometimes I can rapidly figure out what’s meant; sometimes I can’t.
So while I do generally try that first, in an attempt to avoid getting snarky answers like yours, it’s often actually more useful to just ask the person who used the term.
Agreeing.
This seems to be the crux of the confirmation bias bit and rings of the op the thread who took offense at being referred to as “they”:
Maybe it was intentional, maybe the writer knew she was a she who felt strongly that her pronoun was she. That would be offensive misgendering.
Or maybe they thought default to gender neutral is what they should be doing, even when they know the gender.
Maybe assuming ill intent is less productive than assuming ignorance and communicating to reduce actions born of ignorance in the future?
Now in this discussion across the threads I have learned that there are quite a few women who when their accomplishments are being discussed want it to be very clear that they are women and the reasons why have been made understandable to me as well. I was ignorant of that before.
I get that you prefer long form as a stylistic choice. Fair that. I personally prefer brevity and give myself demerits when I get long winded. I am sometimes too lazy to write less though. [Insert obligatory Twain quote.]
I can certainly endorse that; at the same time, I’m uncomfortable characterizing such beliefs with a term carrying connotations of “like unto the David Dukes among us.”
Which is exactly how I understand the idea of “recognizing your privilege”. I’m a white, Anglophone, able-bodied cishet man; I won the privilege Powerball. I grew up in a community, and time, when racial, ethnic, and especially homophobic and misogynistic slurs were casually bandied about. And while I learned as an adult not to use the words that hurt other people, it’s taken me a lifetime to identify, isolate, and try to modify the attitudes that underlay those words. I don’t think I’ll ever not be a little bit racist; so it’s incumbent on me to make sure that never informs my words or actions.