The pattern here is not the internet but these people being severely autistic and so they are probably forced to thrive online where they aren't having to deal with eye contact or other social queues that they can't really process. Not even sure what this was meant to be, but it should probably be rewritten to "I don't want to be an autistic person" and it would have read the exact same way. Even down to the preferred drug use being a straight up dissociative...
I found the author's pointed lack of bothering to ask about pronouns when the subject of their investigation posts under different ly gendered pseudonyms; use of the words "normal people" and infiltrating a group only to neg them to be more problematic than anything.
The subject of the article might be a real shitheel. But the author doesnt do us any favours by cloaking themselves in being a Voice of the Normal while being themselves a shitheel.
> Because no body actually cares, no body will use your made up pronouns.
This is why some transgender and nonbinary people have stopped trying to reason with their friends and family about their gender identity, and have resorted to clicker-training them like dogs to use the appropriate pronouns and pay them basic human respect and dignity.
It's a video of a girl who demands to be referred to as "they" for whatever fashionable reason, and has decided to use a dog-training clicker to remind her family members of this imposition whenever they use "she" as they normally would.
I meant actual clicker training, with the clickers they use to train dogs. It's ridiculous, but so is the lack of respect shown when people stubbornly refuse to use the correct pronouns.
There are probably more genderqueer people out there whose families wish them dead, than there are ones who try to manipulate their families by "childishly threatening to kill themselves".
I'm reminded of the fragilely masculine fulminating about false rape accusations when so many actual rapists never even get reported.
Refusing to play ridiculous pronoun games is not hurting your respect and dignity. It is not anybody else's problem or responsibility to participate in this.
There is a difference between the usage of 'xer' by an edgy teenager who identifies as something incomprehensible vs, for instance, using 'she/her' to refer to a biological male that made a conscious, adult decision to transition to female.
If one decides to change their first name, they have every right for their friends and family to respect that. If I wanted to be called, for instance, Vladimir instead of Richard, it would be really bloody rich if my mom insisted on the name _she_ thinks fits me better. Same with sex/gender transition (I am not up to date on terminology here, but you know what I mean) - there is nothing more than showing basic respect for choices an individual does for themselves.
How are peoples' names less made up than their pronouns? It seems just as rude to refuse to use someone's preferred name as you would their preferred pronouns.
Outside of a small set of Twitter/Tumblr/TikTok bubbles (which overlap in userbase), pronouns are fixed: he/she/they (rarely they). Xe/Xir is not something average people will honor or use.
I mostly agree with that: if someone is a participant or a potential participant in the conversation then we should refer to them in a way they find acceptable, provided their demands are reasonable and in good faith. On the other hand, if someone is speaking or writing about me in a language I don't understand then it's hardly my job to tell them what pronouns to use and I can't even reasonably tell them how to pronounce, and perhaps decline, my name. (Try looking up some internationally famous people in the Latvian or Lithuanian Wikipedias. Obviously I'm not famous enough to be in there, but if I were, would I have any right to be treated differently from Rišī Sūneks?)
A journalist writing about someone they've interviewed ... as part of doing the best they can for the people they serve, the readers, perhaps in some cases it's reasonable for them to ignore the preferences of the interviewee?
My problem is the author deliberately states they didnt bother to ask, and does so in a way that is almost bragging about it.
Through the article, this happens in various forms.
If the point of the article is to criticise someone's behaviour for being an "internet cool person"; opening by your opinion piece by stating you were too cool to bother to do something; and later stating that you as the writer are a normal person, and that you feel sick after infilitrating a group, there is a level of hypocrisy there.
I agree with you there are legitimate cases for ignoring someone's preferences to improve the quality of information imparted. However, the author doesnt state any apart from "didnt bother".
Outside a college campus in California, nowhere else in the world do people ask for pronouns when they meet a person. It's not a normal human interaction.
You might not do it when you meet someone. But think about the sheer number of web forms, systems or standards that are about to have to go down a rabbit hole of whether they are modeling biological sex (medical systems), terms of address (people focused systems), etc.
Would you turn away 5% of your customer base because you didnt add a third option (ie: i prefer another term) when capturing someone's details?
...isn't 5% almost exactly the Lizardman Constant? (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...) [Edit: my point being that the percent of people with strong non-standard gender preferences might well be less than 5%, so I doubt you'd be turning 5% of your user base away.]
Also, just to play devil's advocate, there are some people from the other side who could theoretically be annoyed by new pronouns as options and refuse to use your service because of it
There's a fun game I like to play with people who talk about Language Rules: they tell me the construction they think is "ungrammatical", and I show them a well-respected author who uses that construction.
Starting sentences with conjunctions, splitting infinitives, and the Oxford Comma Debate are easy mode; I can normally find an example in any given book. It's a bit harder with pronoun use – that's a per-work thing, not a per-paragraph one; and it's single words, so I can't cheat with a search engine – but I haven't lost yet. Want to play?
