The point of gendered pronouns is that sentences very often have two nouns: a subject and object. If you have only a single pronoun, then any sentence can only use a pronoun to unambiguously refer to one of those. If you have two pronouns and you randomly and evenly distribute them across various subjects, then it's fairly likely that the subject and object will get difference ones and you can now unambiguously use pronouns for both.
Since a very large fraction of human speech pertains to other humans and since human sex is a roughly 50/50 distribution, it makes some sense that we used gender as our mostly arbitrary thing to assign a pair of pronouns too. We could have used, say handedness instead, but with only ~10% of people being left-handed, the odds of a sentence being about a righty and a lefty is much smaller.
Pronouns are basically like special variables in a REPL that let you refer to the most recent expression. It's nice if you can refer back to a couple of them.
Hence why forcing my team to learn Hungarian has really been a no brainer and will really start to pay dividends in the next decade when we finally reach a working professional proficiency
No, that's not the point. (Most languages do make subject/object fairly clear.)
The point of pronouns is to have a short alias to refer to a previously introduced noun.
Though now that I think about it age is also potent - you get the same rough division w.r.t relative age (younger vs older than the speaker), and you can divide the population roughly into quarters with ease and accuracy. Do miss and ma'am count as pronouns here? They code for age as well as gender
Hair color and height dont really have the same sort of dividing power broadly speaking.
Still, your line of thought there about what a pronoun should capture is intriguing.
Some people may prefer a different name but I think they’ll understand once we explain the cognitive load.
> cynical user of a tool of coercive soft-power
> weapon masquerading as a new morality
Take with a grain of salt, but I feel like you have stronger emotions on this issue than the trans and non-binary people I know.
This has got to be peak hacker news
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What? I agree that for my tastes a lot of people take gender very seriously. But it seems wild to me to think this is somehow a new phenomenon.
For millennia in many societies one's society-assigned gender determined a great deal about one's status, including what work you could do, what work you could do, and what sort of violence against you was acceptable. And in a lot of times and places, misgendering somebody was used as a deliberate insult and could even be seen as "fighting words", legitimate legal cause for violence.
The only thing that has changed lately is a bit of individual freedom in picking that role for one's self. For those people, many consider it rude to ignore their choices, partly because of the history of gender, but partly because those people are targets of bigotry and violence. There's a whole list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_bein...
All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them, just like all legal codes do. If you're going to be rude, people may, gasp, say something about it. You trying to establish a different coercive moral code against that isn't somehow better. And getting all het up about it in this specific case, instead of all the other codes of politeness, suggests it's not really "coercive" morality you care about.
Personally, it seems to me that trans folks have a pretty hard role in life. They always did, but now at least they're getting to be open about it. I'm glad to support them in that; calling them how they want to be called seems like literally the least I could do. Indeed, as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Ah yes, censorship is good when it is an opinion you do not share, right? That I was flagged is wrong on the part of hacker news, and whoever got that ball rolling.
>All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them
Coercion is good too. Are you sure you're not the baddie here? Are you really sure?
>as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Another popular strawman. I stated explicitly "live how you want" and yet you assert that I'm against difference or outcasts. You lied.
>trans folks have a pretty hard role in life
I'm speaking specifically of custom pronouns. If you cut off your junk and wear a dress, I think its rude not to call you "she". It is a shitty kind of idea that encourages people to introduce new error modes into their relationships, and the bitter irony is you think you're doing people a favor by doing that.
You only see dead posts if you have showdead=yes in your settings.
So you may have seen their comment before it was killed, or you may have showdead=yes in your settings.
>Anyone who doesn't have the capacity to accept being called any pronoun has a mental health problem.
By this metric the vast majority of humanity has a mental health problem, and you're an exception. Most cis, het men do not like to be called she or a girl.
Gender identity is an essential part of what makes us human. Some people have a stronger sense of it than others. To the extent that mental illness describes an actual objective thing, having a gender identity does not make someone mentally ill, because it doesn't by itself disrupt one's healthy functioning in society. It is when that gender identity is invalidated by others that it can affect people's mental health (just like calling someone a slur or insulting them can affect their mental health). It is still not an illness, though.
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>At least it got flagged!
Ah yes, censorship is good when it is an opinion you do not share, right? That I was flagged is wrong on the part of hacker news, and whoever got that ball rolling.
>All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them
Coercion is good too. Are you sure you're not the baddie here? Are you really sure?
>as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.
Another popular strawman. I stated explicitly "live how you want" and yet you assert that I'm against difference or outcasts. You lied.
>trans folks have a pretty hard role in life
I'm speaking specifically of custom pronouns. If you cut off your junk and wear a dress, I think its rude not to call you "she". It is a shitty kind of idea that encourages people to introduce new error modes into their relationships, and the bitter irony is you think you're doing people a favor by doing that.
Trans and nonbinary people are using this as a shibboleth to determine whether they can feel safe around you. You are not someone who wishes nonbinary or trans people harm, but unfortunately, there is a large segment of the population that does. The act of using someone's preferred pronouns is an act of saying "you are safe with me, I do not wish you harm." This is not a default or automatic assumption they can make, as it likely is for you.
Many trans and nonbinary people, through no fault of their own, have PTSD from how they've been treated by others. Even those that have not experienced hatred or violence directly are no doubt aware of the statistics.[0] You're correct that, in many cases, this is a mental health problem. It's an accommodation for a colleague or friend that needs your help, for now.