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MixedNuts comments on Transsexuals and otherkin - Less Wrong Discussion
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You aren't looking into the black box. It's good policy to say "Eh, people know best" and treating them as whatever they say they are. But how do I figure out what pronouns I want in the first place?
How is that relevant?
The actual answer is that I have a black box intuition that correlates with the black box in your head, neither of which are interesting enough to bother dissecting. It's classified as part of the English language.
So yea, I'm just pragmatic and not very curious on this one.
Jamie comes up to you and says: "Hey, I know people have been calling me 'she', but I have this feeling of repugnance to it and I'm happy when they call me 'he'. I think I'd like to be called 'he', but I'm not sure - and maybe gender-neutral is better after all. It's not like I can try each for six months, because in this society saying you want your pronouns changed is hard, gets you stared at, called slurs, and possibly killed. Plus, women categorize me as one of them and men don't, and it takes a long time to change this subconscious classification, so you can't do that all the time. So what pronouns should I pick?"
What do you tell Jamie? What if you are Jamie?
"Test it out for 6 months with those people who won't mind "flipfloping", such as me, your own inner monologue, your closest friends and family, etc. then if you like it you can do it openly for the rest of the world as well."
I can't imagine being Jamie well, unless I also imagine considering females inferior and repugnant and frame it as an insult, at which point the mindset would be so different from me that the question is pointless. (Also, even imagining such a thing as a hypothetical sets of very unpleasant anti-bigotry fail-safes and alarms.)