The "Black Hole" of woke....

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I would not like it but if a person was calling me by my name instead of my pronoun for whatever reason I would be unaware it was happening.

Trans people can get quite angry if a person misattributes their gender

Who are heavily represented on this website

Those saying it is rare to know somebody who prefers a different pronoun are not members of Gen Z or know many of them.
Companies Can’t Ignore Shifting Gender Norms

The Gen Z person I know of is my cousin. The assigned male goes now by her and changed to a female name. Just one person and when I think of her my mind automatically starts with "he" before I correct myself. But imagine you are a business or a school that deals with that demographic you have fit the preferred pronoun with dozens of people. From what I understand there are 72 different pronouns making it more complicated. And how are you supposed to deal with genderfluid people whose preffered pronouns change?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 30 Aug 2022, 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

If you have met one trans person you have met one trans person.

All people can get quite angry if they are purposely bullied, disrespected, or invalidated.

Misgendering isn't always malicious, though.

That woman could have PTSD of being grabbed and assaulted. The autistic man was oblivious and didn't know you shouldnt touch a stranger you don't know. A tragic misunderstanding.

It took me a while to remember I was a girl when I was 4 and 5 and I used to ask my mom if my best friends were boy or girls and I did the same about TV characters too. It took me a while to remember Christopher Robin is a boy. It was 1992 when I finally figured out what a girl looks like and a boy and I didn't need to ask anymore if someone is a boy or a girl.

I remember Temple Grandin told a similar story. Couldn't tell between a dog and a cat. Then she figured out it was with sizes but wait, some dogs are small so she finally figured out they all have different noses. For me it was with gender. I thought long hair indicated girl so anyone with short hair was a boy so I thought my uncle's wife was a boy because she had short hair. Then I eventually figured out clothes and colors to tell gender and I remember I mistook a girl in my Sunday class as a boy but to be fair, adults made the same mistake too and it's impossible to tell if a child is a boy and a girl until puberty. We only know by what they are wearing so if a girl is wearing boy clothes, she will be mistaken as a boy.

Then this girl in my Sunday class started wearing dresses and I was finally able to remember she is a girl. She had very short hair and didn't wear feminine colors or flowers on her clothes like I did.

I think that human life should be preserved instead of destroyed. Mothering is a proud profession and I would hate to see that tradition fade because third wave feminists are fuming mad right now.

Exactly, It works both ways. The right wing claims of cancel culture is one-sided and of course it's all about them.

None of that is "infringing on their identity", at worst it's rude, at best it's refusing to humor unreasonable impositions.

Wokeness means always defaulting to the worst assumptions about others; it's not that you have a bad memory or another disability, you must be a bigot, or so insensitive that you may as well be. I'm hearing a lot of people relate occasions when they've been unfairly accused of bigotry, which is exactly what wokeness promotes, the idea that these misunderstandings are always intentional and the product of a racist/sexist/homophobic culture, and they will attempt to destroy your life over them. There are many examples, from the truck driver fired for idly letting his hand form an "ok" sign that was mistaken for a white power gesture (the man was Hispanic...) to the museum director fired for reassuring an audience that they would still collect art from white artists to the authors who have their work preemptively canceled because they wrote about cultures they didn't belong to, it's real and it's bad.

Intent is important, but also not always obvious, which creates a conundrum.

I am of the belief it is always best to hold judgement and ask open ended questions instead.

I have also observed, however, that people who have experienced a lot of negative attention based simply on who they are will build up defensive walls and will instinctively start from the assumption they are being attacked again. I don't blame them. But what do you do if you are the person they are reacting unfairly to? You have to establish some trust if the interaction is going to resolve without bad feeling on both sides, but that takes some careful thought and isn't where instinct takes most people.

My recommendation is that when any interaction starts to go south you take a deep breath, calm yourself, and then try to re-engage through open ended questions that hopefully get the other person to share their perspective. The comedy of errors occurs when assumptions pile on top of assumptions and interact with reactions born of assumptions.

When you exhibit a sincere interest in the other person's perspective, it goes a long way towards showing that your own intentions are positive.

If they want to cause an inevitable conflict then they're infringing on my rights. They're the ones who expect me and others to behave differently so the onus is on them behave.

See, I just don't think that (the first sentence) is true, that A has to mean B. It isn't what the concept was trying to get at. I agree that people instinctively run that way which messes everything up, but it isn't a requirement of the concept.

Clearly, people who want to increase inclusiveness need to do a better job of trying to understand the actual intentions of people they see as being racist/sexist/homophobic. I'm not going to argue they don't; I've seen too many examples of overly judgemental reach in real life. But attacking them back and being harshly judgemental isn't going to move the dialogue forward.

Shouldn't the default assumption about how anyone should behave is kindness and consideration? Which means you should always be interested in another person's perspective, how they wish to be called, and how they wish to be treated. That isn't behaving differently, that is behaving the way we've always wanted other humans to behave. The only thing that has changed is preferred terminology. If you insist on pushing that back onto the person potentially hurt by your choice of words, and you know that potential exists, you are being inconsiderate. You're just basically saying you don't have time to give a fig about anyone's perspective but your own, which is something society has long considered socially inappropriate. So who is the one insisting on behaving differently, you or them?

Times of changing norms are always a little rough. It used to be standard business practice to head up letters "dear sir or madam," but enough women said "hey, I don't run a whorehouse!" for the practice to be dropped. No one got ostracized for using it, just reminded how strange it came across. Yeah, I'm old enough for that to have been a thing.