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Comment by CocaKoala | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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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