The idea that if twitter had a rule against misgendering means Twitter's rules are heavily ideological is... pretty ideological itself.
For one thing, I don't seem to see that rule here:
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules
For another, even if I missed it or it's implicit in another rule, while I suppose there's an argument that identifiers have political implications... there's plenty of social space for them to be about being polite in the same way that usually, you should use the names people give you for themselves.
Maybe most of all, though, how many of the other rules would you characterize as heavily ideologically driven? Perhaps the one about not threatening violence against an individual or class? Promoting terrorism? Child sexual exploitation? Suicide? Doxing?
Personally, I can think of a pretty wide latitude of discourse ranging over a variety of ideologies that's allowed me even if I'm forbidding those forms of engagement AND have to be careful to use someone's preferred pronouns.
Most of them. It doesn't mean I always disagree with that ideology, but I do recognize them as ideology with political implications.
> Doxing?
The US has the sex offender register. Germany has the right to be forgotten, including sex offenders. Should a twitter bot in the US be allowed to write about sex offenders or is that doxing?
> Promoting terrorism
Terrorism has sadly become a very muddy word. The recent Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria see a lot of disagreement on who is a terrorists. In the past we had US policy of counting any dead male in a conflict zone under the age of 15 as a killed terrorist. To me that is the typical examples of a heavily politically driven definition.
> Child sexual exploitation
Combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age... with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_law#/media/File:P... as sets and what we get is a bunch of intersections and symmetric differences. Yes, pre-puberty child sexual exploitation is universally wrong on the planet. The exact line however is heavily ideologically driven with plenty of people with the view that all prostitution is exploitation and any person under the age of 20 is a child.
> Suicide
Are we including physician-assisted suicide? It is a common point that get brought up when suicide discussions get banned.
While I don't really have any issues with it being prohibited, I wouldn't put misgendering or deadnaming in the same category as inciting violence or advocating for child exploitation.
We had someone clearly trying to have a constructive discussion on a topic and he was treated as if he had written the manifesto for the Fourth Reich and was demanding all women be sent back to the kitchen.
These are hard lessons that everyone who works at a big corporation at a level above janitor has learned within the first year of working there, so to me arguments along the lines of "but they said it would be different this time, they promise" just seem ill-advised to me. As if you are sticking your head in the sand and proceeding as if you can't depend on your own good thinking.
I'd agree with you if he wasn't discussing it in direct reference to how Google approached things like hiring from a strategic perspective. However what he discussed was in the context of how google approaches something.
Secondly from what I've heard Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Even if what he said was wrong, wrong, wrong, it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith and people didn't respond to it in good faith at all
There is a reason people who make actual strategic decisions speak as if they are eels covered in oil and it is to avoid situations like the one this person found themselves in.
> Google provided a space for precisely these kinds of discussions, so suggesting he should have known better than to discuss seems pretty unfair to me.
Yes, corporations embellish the truth (or lie, if you want to be that way). At this point, you need to understand this - especially if you work for a corporation that does as many questionable things as Google does. Everyone should be free to make their own decisions of course, this person decided to make an ill-advised argument at work and the consequence was that he cannot work there anymore.
> it really seems to me like he was trying to engage in good faith
Regardless of whether or not I believe this is true, "engaging in good faith" is not a shield against poor decisions.
I feel like 90% of people didn't read the drivel he wrote; I'd have fired him purely for the fact anyone that bad at stats (and proud of it) shouldn't be anywhere near a machine learning team.
(Thanks for the text under the subheading, comment above edited with link to it.)
It's disingenuous to lump these together as equivalent to misgendering. Child exploitation and violence are against the law of pretty much all nations in the world, and there is a clear consensus. As well as harm caused.
That line hasn't been drawn yet for gender. For one it's not clear how many genders exist. Are they fluid day by day, can people change in and out of them at will. Do I misgender someone if I fail to keep up. Is this a biologically supported concept, should we really open the Pandoras box of forced speech, etc.. etc..
It is clear to many of us that there are two genders. Particularly to those of us that have studied biology.
Biology addresses sex, not gender (whether ascribed gender or gender identity), and there are vastly more than two ways in which the various biological attributes grouped under “sex” line up; which is why when (as is, to be sure, quite common) binary sex distinctions in biology and medicine are used they are drawn differently in different contexts.
I mean, there's documented cases of non-chimeric fertile females (in the sense of “people who produce ova and can reproduce with people who produce sperm”, which isn't the only biological definition of sex but is the one most relevant to fertility and reproduction) with 46,XY karyotype and normal male coding sequences in SRY and other genes associated with sex determination. Simplistic generalizations about sex and biology, aside from having dubious relevance to gender discussions, are pretty invariably factually wrong.
When you say "studied biology" do you mean took a few general biology classes in college or did a PhD program in the relevant sub-field of biology?
There are animals for example that have 2 sexes but more "genders" (to the extent that it is correct to apply this terminology) - e.g. Ruffs (a european bird) have several male forms that differ in size, plumage and sexual behavior ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruff#Biology_of_variation_amon...).
Even if no similar mechanism exists in humans, there are social constructs that may serve similar roles - there are communities of "3rd gender" people in India for example, for thousands of years now.
Toward your comment, can't we establish harm is caused by targeted misgendering/deadnaming by asking the transgender people who have been harassed by it how they feel about it? Doesn't that seem not even necessary? What line on harm needs to be drawn exactly before we can make a rule "don't deliberately harass transgender people on our platform via their dead identities."
Just the same as it would be extremely annoying to work with someone that refused to use your name (and not at all forced speech to demand that they get it right; for many trans folx the old name is literally not their legal name anymore). Pronouns are a form of self expression, gender identity is real, and you only need to look at the stats for violence against trans people to the see the active harm in pretending otherwise.
Rules enforcing some level of decency have a place on public forums (even if it's not as cut and dry as pedophilia or violent activity); that's why you're here being transphobic rather than /b/.
Could you reference some of these stats? This argument comes up very often in discussions about trans peoples issues. But, not once have I seen or read someone citing a particular statistic or even pull up a number out of thin air. It is always claimed, there are stats showing increased violence against trans people. Where are the statistics?
As for sources, hard stats can be difficult for any hate crime (compounded by the fact homicide against trans individuals isn't often recorded as violence against their actual gender) and especially considering that the total trans population is small (and thus vulnerable to effects of small numbers) but the FBI hate crime database [0] and the NCAVP reports [1] are good places to start. Transequality center also collects good resources.
Somehow, I don't believe you've really wondered about this too much...
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2017/tables/table-1.xls
Sadly, this is a point that is lost on many people.
You call that ideological, but presumably wouldn’t call Twitter prohibiting calls for genocide ideological. They’re obviously excessively far apart on a continuum, but I’m curious how you’ve decided where to draw your line? Racial slurs? Calls to murder doctors who perform abortion? Promotion of cannibalism? Incitement of violence against the LGBT community? How have you decided misgendering is ideological and (I’d hope) decided that the others are obviously unacceptable?
So, I have some questions about Twitter's rules and about the process that applies them.
No it didn’t
Making up your own category, then forcing other people to name you by that category on pain of committing a "verbal assault" is still a pretty contended topic.
(I'm interpreting "made up category" as "relatively novel category"; all categories are "made up".)
Then it wasn’t purposefully doing it, so I’m not sure how it’s relevant to my question
> Maybe they don’t accept the idea that
Plenty of people don’t accept the idea that men and women should be accepted equally, or that you can’t ban black people from living in your apartment, or that men who have sex with other men need to be put to death. That you’ve drawn an arbitrary line doesn’t privilege your line.
I mean in your country, sure, but let’s not pretend these are universal. Feels like your distinction between ideology and “wrong” is that’s just like, your opinion, man?
Twitters rules are heavily ideologically driven, for instance misgendering is against their rules. That already eliminates a bunch of politicians.