Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.

I am somewhat sympathetic to the idea that if you need active filtering not to say awful things then you should fix that or be socially punished for it. Think "white people trying very hard and very obviously not to look racist".

I don't think you said anything particularly horrible. You are clearly underinformed about transsexuality (e.g. your equal oppression assumption), and the less-than-nice things you said most likely stem from that. I will now alienate the social justice blogosphere by saying that you do not have a duty to drop everything else until you are adequately informed. I do believe that you should learn the 30-second version:

"Tranny" is, as Alicorn said, a (somewhat mild) slur. I'm not sure how much filtering it requires to stop using it, but I'd be surprised it it were an unreasonable demand.
Other slurs include "shemale" (extreme slur), "hermaphrodite", and any pronoun or combination of pronouns other that those used by the person.
For your purposes, a trans woman is and has always been completely a woman from the moment of conception, and her life as a boy was due to parental error (ditto for men and non-binaries). Failure to completely alieve that is a faulty intuition on your part.
There are a lot of stereotypes about transpeople. You cannot be reasonably expected to never propagate them. It is considered good form to say "Whoops, sorry" when they're pointed out to you.

Hey, is that a Japanese cross-sex-reincarnation compersion song? Awesome.

I don't think you said anything particularly horrible.

Quoth Gwern:

yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific techniques, and the other is a weird fruit

How is that anything other than premeditated and malicious, deliberate bigotry? Gwern's said he knows he has issues with trans people, so the idea that he just didn't get the connotations here or how it would sound to someone who doesn't share his feelings doesn't apply. And he said it in a public venue without even bothering t... (read more)

38Zack_M_Davis14y

This seems to me like an empirical question open to serious doubt. I certainly agree that people should be referred to by their preferred pronouns, that failing to do so is considered extremely rude, and that this social norm still seems like a good idea after thinking about it carefully, such that we shouldn't hesitate to shame people who willfully violate it. But to insist on editing our descriptions of the past in order to fit the categories people belong to now just seems inaccurate, unless it's actually the case that gender identity is innate and immutable in almost all instances, and I just don't think that's true. For example, I don't think we actually know what the demand curve for sex changes looks like: there are at least some people who frequently or occasionally fantasize about being the other sex, or non-binary, but don't want it desperately enough to actually do anything about it given the constraints of currently existing medical technology and social norms, but who might consider doing something were those constraints to change. (Just---don't ask me how I know this, and I won't tell you.) Telling a closeted transvestite that he's actually in fact been a woman this entire time by virtue of what he'd like to be in a glorious transhumanist possible future just seems untrue, for the same reason it seems untrue to say that an accomplished physicist was always a physicist, even before they learned how to read.

17Douglas_Knight14y

I find this comment much more damaging than anything else I've seen on LW this month. Probably ever. It is one thing to create a tolerant environment. It is quite another to demand that people rewrite their aliefs. I do have purposes and I refuse to subjugate them to yours.