The "Black Hole" of woke....

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Just because something isnt a big issue to people doesn't somehow means they'll accept it with open arms.

Have you looked at YouTube for example with their likes and dislikes for videos related to trans subjects?

If it isn't a big issue than it just becomes a matter of normalization and it's hard to resist something that's just perceived as normal.

The fact that other trans issues might draw more attention, or that people troll YouTube to leave dislikes doesn't say much about this particular issue and you're reaching to insist that they do.

Time will tell but my money is on already existing pronouns not being a bridge too far even if neo-pronouns might be. They/their is not a neo-pronoun though.

In truth, I haven't met anybody---on both jobs---who use "they, their, them" as their pronouns. My first job is in a college library, where there's more possibility of meeting a person with the pronoun "they."

I don't often use pronouns, actually. I don't talk about an individual when an individual is around me; rather, I talk to the individual.

I feel like, if I make an honest mistake, that I should be informed of it, and not be subject to a lecture. Even if somebody called me "she" or "they," I would merely correct them, sort of make a joke out of it, and let it be known that I'm a "he." I don't really show any indication that I am anything but a "he"---but who knows? I certainly wouldn't have an extreme reaction.

So if you haven’t met anyone who uses they/their, I’m assuming you never made a faux pas and, thus, were never lectured on it.

People seem to worry about this and talk about it a lot but it doesn’t appear to happen that often in reality.

But someone might get snippy with me after I step on their toes! Isn't it all about me, my feelings and my reputation?

There was a transwoman who didn't look like a woman. Her name was "Jeffrey" on her library card; they hadn't changed her name in her files yet. I called her "sir" by mistake. For some reason, she thought I was laughing at her. This person wanted to be called "she/her," not "they/them."

This happened five years ago.

I've had some lectures when I held a door open for a woman. I find lectures in this instance to be ridiculous. It's only happened to me a couple of times in the past 40 years or so.

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 01 Sep 2022, 7:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I wouldn't lecture somebody; I wouldn't want somebody to lecture me. That's the way I feel.

If I stepped on somebody's toes, I would profusely apologize; it's rather painful to have your toes stepped on.

Okay…

But that’s really not what we were talking about.

The “not wanting to be lectured” theme has come up multiple times in this thread. It doesn’t feel very non-binary-friendly in my opinion.

If I was non-binary, I wouldn’t want people to constantly insinuate that I’d berate honest mistakes at the drop of a hat.

I've never actually been lectured by a non-binary person.

But I've been lectured by people misinterpreting a gesture (holding the door for somebody) as being, somehow, demeaning.

I wonder how often the woman in the first example had been treated in that manner. It's not fair to assume everyone is cruel and judgmental, but for someone who's experienced a lot of it a degree of paranoia starts to become a justified coping mechanism even if it also can have demonstrably maladaptive impacts.

I think you raise a good point in the second part, lectures are rare even when they do occur. Most people aren't looking to berate others for things that can be handled diplomatically, at least not most of the time.

I don’t want people to treat me differently because I’m a woman. That makes me feel uncomfortable. I hold the door open for people all the time, no matter their gender.

A guy bought me a cup of coffee this morning, and I was so flustered I backed my car into a telephone pole as I was leaving the convenience store parking lot. Ideally, people wouldn’t look at me, talk to me, or buy me coffee. Is that too much to ask? (I’m always polite, though.)

Really sorry about that.

Thanks, but I don’t really mind. It caused a bit of body damage to the car, but that’s it.

It's called the "euphemism treadmill", as no matter how much you sugar coat it, the underlying meaning of some terms is going to strike some people as mean or unflattering, so they keep coming up with new terms that eventually become insults, necessitating new terms, and so on. I have to laugh at "ret*d" in particular as a recently forbidden word, it's used in the technical sense in both of my professions, as in using a ret*d rise to develop flavor in dough, and gas ret*d blow back firearms.

As weird and annoying as that is, to my mind it has nothing on the contortions going on with racial labeling, "Latinx" is the most infamous as the people allegedly described by the term don't use it and can't even say it in their native language, but I've also never heard a black person refer to themself as a "PoC" in real life, they just say black.

I'm generally opposed to attempts to manipulate the language, but in this case my primary objection is the imposition, not preserving a particular word meaning.

IIRC, it was actually considered polite originally, like trying to relate to someone on their level, but it's pretty easy to see how it acquired its pejorative aura.