I’m more inclined to follow your approach all the time. Appeasement doesn’t work. Of couse, there’s no risk you’ll get banned for disbelieving in god…
I presume you’re against it? 
We can use words to reflect actual objective things in the world without requiring that the meanings of all words must never change or evolve.
We can use the word “woman” to include female-identifying transgender people while still being able to state actual objective facts about those people’s biological sex and the gender they were assigned at birth. Just as we can use the word “mother” to include adoptive mothers while still being able to state actual objective facts about who came out of whose uterus.
AFAICT, there’s nothing about changing laws that inherently requires us to abandon politeness, no matter which side of the law-changing issue we’re on. We can agree that transgender women are women without agreeing about the extent to which transgender women and cisgender women should be considered identical.
Who did I misgender?
What did I say that’s insulting?
I once boycotted my parent’s place for several months because she refused to let me leave the room when they did a group prayer. (You know, the type where somebody is like, “Dear god, we [the assembled] thank you…”)
Eventually she relented and I started going over there again. Good times.
Ooh, you do not want to start that in here. You thought this thread was hijacked before…
We could, except that all the words we might use to do that have also been declared verboten, replaced with Orwellian euphemisms like ‘assigned at birth’. It’s the ideas that are being attacked; ultimately no form of words will be acceptable.
It is fundamentally dishonest to ask people to change the definition of a word for the sake of politeness, and then demand laws be changed on the basis of that changed definition, without regard to the material facts or the interests of different groups. Additionally, the changed definition serves to obscure what is really happening, taking away our vocabulary to describe it - exactly as newspeak was intended to.
I’ve bought almost every new book in the last decade from a local store, either in person, or using their ISBN(?) look up tool to find a zillion books, or just call them and ask them to order a title.
I’m really unclear on how precisely Amazon is preventing me from accessing published media I want to buy.
The problem with this statement is that this particular thread is about a single individual poster. @MrDibble was responding to a specific person, someone we all know makes TERF arguments. And who was, once again, engaging in a disingenuous manner on the topic.
@DemonTree keeps on arguing that trans women are a threat to cis women, in general. She may bring up those more legitimate issues that haven’t been solved yet, but then she uses them as a bludgeon* when we’re talking about more mundane things like using the right pronouns, recognizing that trans people aren’t sexual deviants, and so on.
Plus, well, the post you were talking about wasn’t only talking about the trans issue. @DemonTree is one of those posters who argues that any consequences for speech amounts to censorship, even if that speech is hateful speech and the consequences are that a platform doesn’t want to support that.
As for “cancel culture,” I’d argue that the examples you are citing are not that. Cancel culture is about public figures and people in power. There’s a reason why it uses the word “cancel”–as in what you do to a TV show. The whole concept came from public figures who were upset that they were facing consequences for their actions.
That’s not to say no decent person has been harmed by it. But, as stated, it really is the exact same thing that has been going on for the entirety of the existence of pop culture. It very much is the same process that was used to go after those who supported people of color, women, gay people, and so on. The difference is that society is now applying it to the very people who used to do that, pointing out their actual bad actions. #MeToo happened, and people get canceled for being sexual predators, doing things we all know are wrong. People get canceled for saying hateful, horrible things and refusing to apologize, or as a last straw.
Some innocent people may get caught in the crosshairs. But the thing about innocent people is that they tend to be willing to apologize. They hate that they’ve caused the trouble they have. They may call out the hate/harassment/etc, but they accept that they’ve actually hurt actual people.
Oh, and JK Rowling is 100% a TERF and is 100% transphobic. She said specifically she refuses to call trans women women, and has publicly made essays pushing TERF beliefs while making the whole thing about her. Not a single moment of empathy for trans people occurred. She didn’t talk to a single one. She made a public post defending people who were arguing that they were just standing up for sex being real. She pushes the narrative that “trans regret” is a huge phenomenon. And she talks like her having been sexually attacked makes it okay for her to see trans women as a threat.
No one has misunderstood her—the trans community in general rejects her. They say, quite rightly, that if you’re willing to ignore them and their explanations of why this is bad, that you really don’t care about trans rights. The last thing you can do when helping an oppressed people is to tell them they’re wrong about their oppression. That’s the whole problem.
Once people accepted Rowling’s transphobia, people stopped making excuses for a lot of her other hateful stuff, like constantly creating fat people to be vain bad guys, having a slave race in her books and then having the character who tried to free them be wrong, because they enjoy being slaves and being treated as inferior due to their race. Dey wanna help massuh.
People who care about trans people will at least do the basics. They will accept that trans women are in fact women. They won’t treat trying to stop discrimination against a minority as some sort of threat. When they bring up potential conflicts, they’ll actually be interested in helping trans people get what they want, too.
*Completely off-topic, but I’ve apparently coined the word “bludgel” in my head, combining bludgeon and cudgel into a portmanteau, and not realizing it wasn’t a proper word. I then had trouble deciding which one was best.
Wow, I wouldn’t care. I don’t generally argue with people about religion in real life. Last time was a group who believed in some kind of soul, but not in God. I was too convincing and I felt bad about it.
I don’t believe in it either, so we will choose not to have the argument. 
You’re a liar BigT, and you obviously haven’t read her essay.
And you’re lying about me, too, but what else is new? You completely dismiss the important issues and pretend it’s all about pronouns and toilets. 
…JK Rowling is 100% a TERF and is 100% transphobic.
DemonTree is 100% a TERF and is 100% transphobic.
And I forgot to say, you have about as much empathy as the Sun journalists who dug up her ex-husband to say he doesn’t regret beating her.
? There’s nothing “Orwellian” about the phrase “assigned at birth”: it is absolutely factual to say that a newborn’s official gender category is assigned to it at birth. That assignment is based on available information about the newborn’s biological sex characteristics. Everybody who uses phrases like “AMAB” or “AFAB” knows that that’s what the term means; it doesn’t seem to me misleading in any way.
I don’t see that it’s in any way “dishonest” to ask people to use a modified definition of a word to be polite in acknowledging people’s identity. It’s not dishonest, for example, to ask people to call same-sex spouses “married”, or to call adoptive mothers “mothers”. Asking people to call transgender women “women” is likewise not dishonest.
ISTM that the change in law and the change in definition are both responding to the same societal choice to recognize that identity, rather than the former being “on the basis of” the latter.
And again, there is nothing about changing either definitions or laws that inherently requires us to disregard “material facts” or “the interests of different groups”. People can disagree about whether a particular law should be changed, but that doesn’t mean that it’s in any way “dishonest” to seek to change it.
It’s a term appropriated from intersex people who really were assigned a sex by doctors as a conscious decision. Frequently this was based on which genitals were easier to create. It’s intended to convey the idea that sex is not a fundamental and unchangeable part of our existence, but merely a box on a form arbitrarily chosen by a doctor. Orwellian.
I’m not saying it’s dishonest to seek to change laws. The dishonest part is asking people to use a word differently as a courtesy, then using the changed definition of the word to argue the law must be changed. For example, we used to have sports for people with female bodies, because we are at a large competitive disadvantage due to being female. We used to call these people women, so we called them women’s sports. Now we have redefined the word ‘women’ the honest thing to do is to rename the sports. But instead we get people demanding we let individuals with male bodies play because we have agreed to call them women, and insisting we must never mention the word ‘male’ in order to conceal what is really happening.
Yeah! Like calling a single woman with kids Mrs.Y until she says “No, I’m Miss Y”. So dishonest and hurtful to…?
Why am I just so certain that this complaint is identical to the folks that complain about the, slightly, more recent sensitivity to racism?
EG
“I can’t say what I want because of all the radical anti-racist censors threatin’ me with bein culture canceled!”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Well, I can’t call niggers ‘porch monkeys’ anymore.”
IOW list the words you can’t use or some of us will have no choice but to have, very negative, assumptions.
Also, WHAT THE FUCK? Why can’t you people be bothered to provide examples of these things without being asked? Is it because you’re too stupid to realize that without examples there’s nothing to discus? Or is it because, as we’ve seen you do at least twice, your examples are easily shown to be bullshit?
That’s a bit of a strawman. You folks even think ok is some sort of nazi bat signal or something.
Yes, when Nazi racists use it as a bat signal we should just pretend it isn’t there. Like Dr Deth and, apparently, you do?
Also, look at the big brain on octopus! Calling out a logical fallacy like he doesn’t use them as the basis of his ‘’‘world-view’’’
Can someone help me out here? How often has this happened? I get the impression from RW folks that is a very common occurrence and soon boys will get gender reassignment for the sole purpose of beating the girls at the track meet.
Almost had a buzzword bingo with that post!
List the ‘’‘buzzwords’’’.