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Comment by CocaKoala | Hacker News Reader

Well, you said that people don't get to choose the pronouns that other people refer to them by, and the reason that people can do this with names but not pronouns is because pronouns are a syntactic construct.

Thus, when people misgendered me as a child because they mistook me for a girl, it seems to follow that you're asserting that I shouldn't have corrected them because a pronoun is a syntactic construct and I don't get to choose what pronoun they use to refer to me by, regardless of how I personally identify. I can correct them if they mispronounce my name, but not if they mistake me for a girl.

If that's not what you're saying, then I guess I don't understand your position.

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I was just spitballing, I'm not committing to any hard and fast rule here. Someone referred to you with the wrong gender because they mistook you for a girl, and probably appreciated the correction.

This is way different than the transgender case in that no deep-seated & conflicting beliefs came into play. Language is deep-seated, syntax more than names. Beliefs about gender are also obviously deep-seated.

I would say that I'm undecided on transgender issues, so mostly my position is that you shouldn't assume that skepticism is equivalent to bigotry.

> This is way different than the transgender case in that no deep-seated & conflicting beliefs came into play.

What deep-seated and conflicting beliefs come into play here? This doesn't need to be about transgender issues, that's just where it comes up a lot (for obvious reasons).

If I get to say that I want people to use masculine pronouns and correct people when they refer to me as "her" or "she", that seems reasonable to me. And it sounds like it seems reasonable to you too.

That seems like a solid case for saying "people should get to choose their pronouns". I choose masculine ones. Somebody else might make a different choice, but it doesn't become "special treatment" just because they're making a different choice.

Transgender or not, the pertinent issue is not whether people have a right to choose their pronouns (they don't), but what gender the speaker believes the referent to be.

If you're using third person pronouns, you're generally not speaking to the person in question anyway.

So if somebody _mistakes_ me for a girl, I can correct them, but if they deliberately decide to refer to me as "she", I have to accept it?

I really don't think my opinion is so complicated. Your reaction should depend a great deal on whether they were being straightforward (doubtful in your case) or malicious. In neither case will you get very far by trying to control their speech or acting indignant about it, but that doesn't mean the only alternative is accepting it.

Wait, have I mischaracterized your argument in any way? Because I'm honestly not trying to do that, I'm just trying to follow your position to its logical conclusion.

If somebody says about me, "She's been really busy this week" and I overhear them and say "Excuse me, I prefer masculine pronouns", somebody following your line of argument can respond by saying "Sorry, but a pronoun is a syntactic construction, you don't have the right to choose which one refers to you."

What about that doesn't follow from your position here?

I don't think you've mischaracterized me, but you've given undue attention to statements that I consider tangental and would be okay with discarding. Let me restate my position, which I think I can do more clearly now:

1. The general rule that English speakers use to choose a gendered pronoun depends on what the speaker believes a person's gender is, not what the referent prefers or believes. You don't get to choose their words for them.

2. You should clearly be offended if someone uses the opposite gender that they believe you to be. (If someone thinks you're male but refers to you as female).

3. It's not at all clear whether or not you should be offended when someone uses the opposite gender that you believe yourself to be, even if they know what you prefer. (If you believe you're male, but they believe you're female). The fact that I'm neutral or uncertain in this case might be why you couldn't pin down my argument.

So if I say that I'm a man and somebody doesn't believe me, what can I do? Wouldn't it be easier to say "An individual is the ultimate authority on what pronouns are correct, and their word should be taken over that of everybody else because everybody else might be mistaken"?

Specifically, you've stated that people _don't have the right_ to choose their pronouns, and that's where you lose me. What does it mean to "choose" a pronoun, and what harm does allowing people to confidently assert "This is how I am properly referred to, all other ways are incorrect"?

This just happens to be where pronouns clash with free speech, which I consider a sacred value.

You don't get to choose the words that other people speak. It's invasive and destructive to a person's integrity, and potentially dangerous to do even with good intentions.

You're totally free to refer to other people however you want; no one's debating that. But everyone else has the same right to free speech, and many people will use it to call out the act of ignoring someone's preferred pronouns. It's a two-way street.

Free speech aside, I'm confused as to why you're pushing back so hard on this. You've used "they" as a singular third-person gender-neutral pronoun multiple times in ancestor posts ("Someone referred to you with the wrong gender because they mistook you for a girl") so clearly this isn't a principle in which you're particularly invested.

Well the principle isn't to avoid singular they at all costs. Although there are contexts that call for a gendered pronoun and where it's difficult to interpret they in the singular ("Alice isn't here, they are over there").

Part of my problem with the way I've seen people get corrected "with free speech" is that there seems to be no tolerance for making mistakes, and no time allowed for people to think. You're assumed to be a bigot if you're not already 100% on board the PC train. It seems quite unreasonable given that most peoples' experiences with transfolk can be measured in seconds.

As somebody who has misgendered people on accident and been accidentally misgendered, I've never seen anything other than gentle, polite correction when it occurs.

When it occurs more than once, it starts to move from the realm of "accident" to "deliberate", and I can easily imagine that in such a scenario, the corrections would become less gentle and less polite. That doesn't strike me as unreasonable, nor does it strike me as a free speech issue.

But notably, you're giving rather more power to free speech than is usually ascribed, which I find interesting. You're asserting that your right to free speech trumps my right to self-definition; if you want to call me a woman, you have that right under free speech, and if I want to correct you by explaining that actually, I'm a cisgender male, I can't do that because you have the right to free speech.

This seems patently ridiculous to me, and hopefully it does to you too. I don't see a way to reconcile your desire for free speech with my desire for bodily autonomy and self-definition. Can you clarify how allowing other people to choose the proper referential terms for me doesn't erase my ability to define who I am?

Why exactly can't you explain that you're male? Why would you be defined by other people? I don't see how these points follow from mine in the slightest. And how did bodily autonomy enter into the conversation?

EDIT: At least one of my comments about this was regarding strategy rather than rights. Think about the scenarios like this: If someone misgenders you as a mistake, then a polite correction is appropriate. But if they do it as an insult, than a correction is probably not the best response.

If they do it because they don't even believe you're the gender that you claim to be, then a correction is a terrible tool for changing their mind. Both sides will only dig their heels in and come away feeling hostility for each other.

> Why exactly can't you explain that you're male?

What would an explanation provide that saying "I prefer masculine pronouns" doesn't?

> If they do it because they don't even believe you're the gender that you claim to be, then a correction is a terrible tool for changing their mind. Both sides will only dig their heels in and come away feeling hostility for each other.

I agree with you! That's why I think the social standard should be "Everybody chooses their own pronouns", because then there's no external interpretation needed and it doesn't matter whether or not somebody believes something, the only key thing is whatever the stated preference is.

Expecting people to say things they don't believe strikes me as a bad idea.

Why am I not the ultimate authority on what pronoun best refers to me? Why do I need to try and _convince_ somebody that no, despite whatever you might think, the appropriate pronoun is "he"?

Imagine a dialogue where Marcus introduces his colleague Sam to somebody.

Marcus says, "This is Sam, he's a real hard worker." Sam says, "Excuse me, I'm a woman and prefer female pronouns". Marcus says, "Uh, yeah right. I don't believe you."

Who's the unreasonable party, here? Is it Sam, who's stated their identity and preference? Or is it Marcus, who feels like Sam needs to do something to convince him of her femininity? Why is Marcus's belief about Sam's identity the record as opposed to the statement from the primary source?

You've said that your issue here is that people get corrected in impolite ways, but if people just _believed everybody when somebody stated a pronoun preference_, that problem would go away.

> Who's the unreasonable party, here?

I don't know; that has to be negotiated through dialogue.

This problem can't be limited only to pronouns, unless you're okay with people saying things like "she's a man". Otherwise you're expecting people to falsify their opinions.

EDIT: It may be that trans individuals will simply always encounter friction on this issue, since transgenderism presents such big challenges to entrenched ideas on both sides of the political spectrum. (If it's not obvious where the friction is on the left, consider that the legitimacy of transgenderism depends on gender having a biological basis. If gender is socially constructed then conservatives have a straightforward case against transgenderism, along the same lines as "just choose not to be gay.")

>falsify their opinions

How am I making them falsify their opinions? My identity is not an opinion-based phenomena; you can refer to me by female pronouns and be incorrect, or you can refer to me by male pronouns and be correct. Your opinion on whether or not I'm male or female seems entirely beside the point.

> How am I making them falsify their opinions?

If I believe you're female, but call you male because that's what you prefer, in what way is that not speaking contrary to my beliefs (i.e. lying)?

Why do you believe I'm female, when I've explicitly told you that I'm not?

And again, why does your opinion have anything to do with my gender? You can call me a female, and you'd be incorrect; whether or not you think I'm a woman has nothing to do with whether or not it's correct to refer to me as such.

To be clear, if I met a transgender person I wouldn't know what to make of their gender. So if they told me which pronouns to use I would just use them. (Well, provided they weren't made up words...)

But what if someone strongly believes that biological sex and gender are inseparable? I suspect that the majority of the planet believes there is only male and female, and that it's fixed at birth. That doesn't seem so hateful to me.

The whole point of this is that you (or codes of conduct, or communication guidelines) cannot both insist on accepting other peoples' pronouns and also claim not to discriminate on the basis of personal beliefs. You have to choose one or the other, and I think it's more reasonable to choose the latter in most cases.

But here's the thing. I am not transgender, and if somebody misgendered me, it would both offensive and wrong. Somebody can believe that I'm a woman with their whole heart and being, but that doesn't make it so; my identity isn't defined by their belief or their opinion. There _have_ been people who honestly, truly, legitimately believed I was a woman, and yet I wasn't.

It seems only intuitive that if I get to define my own gender identity, as I have and as the world lets me, then everybody else should get that same privilege. And yes, I would say that denying that privilege from some people while granting it to others is inherently hateful.

You can swing your fist all you like, but you can't punch me in the face and claim that I'm infringing on your right to swing freely. You can have all the personal beliefs you like, but as soon as you start imposing them on somebody else's identity, they're not personal beliefs anymore and you don't get to enforce them on other people. When you misgender somebody else, you're imposing your own personal beliefs on them, and that's wrong.

Correct me if I'm mischaracterizing you, but it seems like our deepest disagreement comes down to this:

You think of misgendering as someone imposing a false identity on you. This is an injustice because you have a right to determine your own identity.

I view the expectation to utter words I think are false to be the real imposition. I don't think people have total freedom to define themselves however they wish because they are constrained by the necessity to negotiate it with other people. I didn't choose my own gender identity and neither is anyone else entitled to.

I don't think these positions can be reconciled, but I would point out a disadvantage to your approach is that it leaves no possibility to foster peace between people who believe differently. Because if they don't accept your identity they should be written off as hateful.

EDIT: s/understanding/peace/

Well, one position is concerned with truth (e.g. "I'm a man") and one position is concerned with belief (e.g. "I believe you're a woman").

Being more concerned with what you believe about people over facts about them seems pretty selfish, but at this point if I haven't convinced you that perhaps people are a better judge of their identities than random strangers, I don't think I'm going to, and I agree that our positions are irreconcilable.

I'd point out, however, that your position doesn't really leave possibility to foster understanding between people who believe differently either; if I say I'm a man and somebody disagrees, they're ignoring the most primary of primary sources. That's not the position of somebody who's open to compromise; that's the position of somebody who's already made their decision and refuses to consider any other factor.

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