You're describing sex, not gender, if you want to go back to basic science. All throughout history many people fulfilled the social role associated with the opposite sex despite having different chromosomes from the norm.
Sex is a cluster of traits with multidimensional variation and bimodal clustering distribution.
Gender identity is, arguably, one of many sex traits, or a product of the interaction of such a trait with the social milieu.
Ascribed gender is a social trait whose relation to sex traits, including gender identity, varies by time, place, and social context (though in the West, it is converging toward being aligned with gender identity where the latter is known.)
Up front - I don't think that the concept of "gender identity" is required in order to have basic courtesy and respect toward people, which is what this discussion about TikTok is about.
However, I'm not at all convinced by the concept of "gender identity" and I think it warrants open debate. Unfortunately, voicing such an opinion is liable to get one lumped in with the more loudmouth transphobic crowd, and so it makes such discussion very difficult. I know from private conversations that many people you would not expect have their doubts as well, but they keep it to themselves. I think it's therefore all the more important for people who aren't loudmouth transphobes to weigh in on it.
My issue with it is this: is the concept of "gender identity" separable from gender stereotypes? What does it mean to "identify" with this or that? If men and women are both permitted to wear whatever they like, date whoever they like, arrange flowers or race dirtbikes as they see fit - then what does "identity" capture? Doesn't it privilege some kind of essentialist view - that there is some fundamental, immutable characteristic that is not captured by personality or preference, that girls are girls and boys are boys regardless of how tomboyish or flamboyant they are? Isn't this basically self-contradictory, or at the very least regressive?
This isn't neccesarily to say that "gender identity", as a preference, isn't real in some sense - we should always be careful to distinguish the inconvenient from the untrue, and some people (certainly not everyone) feels a powerful sense of "gender identity". But it may simply describe a strong preference for how society views you, given the stereotypes that society has, rather than any kind of essential characteristic. And perhaps - just perhaps - we shouldn't be regarding it as a reflection of a healthy and accepting society, but as a hint that society still discriminates heavily on the basis of sex.
> I'm not at all convinced by the concept of "gender identity"
Gender identity is a readily observable fact. It’s sources and influences may be a subject of factual debate, and how society ought to respond to it might be a subject of normative debate, but the fact that people have an internal concept about where they belong relative to the social construct of gender (including beliefs that align fully with ascribe gender, views that diverge from ascribed gender but align with another popularly ascribed gender, and views that go beyond the categories typically ascribed in their social context) is, I mean, the whole reason any of those other things are hotly debated.
> My issue with it is this: is the concept of "gender identity" separable from gender stereotypes?
That's a question of sources and influences, not existence. Also, not relevant to any real current society, since gender stereotypes are omnipresent.
> Doesn't it privilege some kind of essentialist view
No, it doesn't (the popular conception that whether something is innate has very strong relevance to whether it is Constitutionally and/or should be protected legally from discrimination overly centers debate around essentialist concepts of the sources and influences of gender identity, but the concept of gender identity itself is orthogonal to essentialism.)
It seems that we more or less agree on what gender identity is.
The trouble is that that's not how gender identity is treated in the mainstream. It's treated as an intrinsic property, not a mere social construction or preference. That is, if you "identify" as a particular sex, then you "really are" that sex, in some essential sense. The idea entered the mainstream as a framework into which transgender people could fit alongside cisgender people so that nobody would have to be "abnormal". After all, if a man is "really" a woman "on the inside", then why wouldn't you treat them as one? This essentialist usage is different from the purely descriptive usage that we agree on, and it's not so much a descriptive tool as a political one - an intuition pump designed to get people to treat transgender people in line with their preferences. While this is a worthy cause, I question the collateral damage to the larger discourse about sexism.
> That is, if you "identify" as a particular sex, then you "really are" that sex, in some essential sense.
I think you critically misunderstand, the view is not primarily that gender identity is an essential fact (that's not uncommon, but not central), but that ascribed gender (including “sex” categories, but not the multidimensional variety of combinations of sex traits) is not essential, just a socially constructed designation tied to gender stereotypes, thar, when it is not based on gender identity of the subject (no matter where gender identity comes from), is an intolerable hostile imposition.
You can absolutely ask questions about the concept of gender identity without misgendering, deadnaming, or promoting conversion therapy. You ALSO don't have to wait for the comments section of the next post you see with "gender" in the title. There's a lot of information out there.
I am not asking a question, though I do invite commentary or rebuttal. I am making a point, based on my own observations. I am also not making this point because the post has "gender" in the title, but because the discussion has rapidly converged on this topic already. Do I detect some suspicion towards my motives? I took some care to make it clear that I do not endorse any of the disrespectful practices that TikTok has banned.
> My issue with it is this: is the concept of "gender identity" separable from gender stereotypes? What does it mean to "identify" with this or that?
This section right here is the start of a paragraph of almost exclusively questions. I suppose I did assume you wanted at least some of these questions answered. It seems kinda strange that you didn't.
> Fair enough, but that is not my point. My point is that saying that a man will always be a man because of maxillofacial bone structure, five o'clock shadow, etc, no matter how much you pump him full or hormones, is pure genetics, basic science, and common sense.
It's not, for a couple of reasons. First and most critically, thinking “macillofacial bone structure” and/or “five o’ clock shadow” define “man” is not “basic science”, it's gender essentialist ideology.
Second, it's factually wrong in the second case if reconstructed into a factual claim that “people who are assigned male at birth will always have stereotypical masculine traits in the named dimensions”, because “five o’ clock shadow” is a product of behavior (shaving) and hair growth, the latter of which is a product of biochemistry, largely hormones, so hormone treatments will affect it, and people who are assigned female at birth with no intervention may have the same hair growth pattern you find typical of men (and people assigned male at birth may not) because of hormone variations.
Third, it's factually wrong in even the first case, with the same factual interpretation, because bone structure itself is a product of biochemistry including hormones, and thus both natural hormone variations and the timing of hormonal transition interventions can affect it.
Fourth, it's arguably even more factually wrong with the same factual interpretation because facial feminization/masculinization surgery is a thing.
No matter which words you use to describe it, there is inarguably a social role that is bimodally distributed and imperfectly correlated with sex that determines which pronouns we use for people, amongst other things.
Even if you don't want to call that gender for some odd reason, that doesn't change the fact that this social construct is separate from sex.
I don't think people are making mistakes. It's a social construct. If I want to consider these people women, there is nothing stopping me, and I don't need to care about people's chromosomes.
No one is telling people to transition because they're trans.
There is some tension between the two positions, but they are reconciliable. As far as we have gender as a social construct, and we will for the foreseeable future, gender identity is inevitable.
As much as I want to insult, cajole, harass, and harp on you about this comment, I cannot because this is a moderated forum. Sounds like TikTok is doing something similar. Is that going too far?
> The new “right-think” on gender and sex seems to directly contradict basic common sense. You’re born with a set of parts and chopping them off doesn’t change who you are.
But no one thinks chopping of parts changes who you are.
The reactionary view on gender thinks the parts determine who you are and continue to do so after you chop them off, while the nonreactionary view is that the parts don't determine who you so chopping them off doesn't change that.
"Gender" is just a word. Words have meanings, and meanings can change over time. As with gender and sex, you seem to be confusing your stubbornness with common sense.
While I think that everybody should be treated with respect, policing this via censorship is dangerous. You can't legislate away hate, as I found out when I realised that the USA is still a racist in many, many places even though the Civil Rights Act was passed over 50 years ago.
This isn't legislation, though. It's a private company deciding they don't want to facilitate some speech. Now I agree that there should be some level of compelled speech from private platforms, but I don't think we need to force them to amplify such things.
I'm personally of the opinion that if a private social platform bills itself as a digital town square and has ambitions of becoming a monopoly (or a part of an oligopoly), then it should be treated exactly as if it was state-owned.
If 20% of your potential audience can be taken away by the flip of a switch (or worse, an automated algorithm with no real oversight), then it really doesn't matter who's doing the taking away. The harm is the same.
Does tiktok even bill itself as a digital town square?
Also, if you've ever had the misfortune of helping run a forum, you would know that this isn't really workable. Without proactive moderation that goes above and beyond the bare legal minimum, a tiny minority of individuals will just take over the space and completely ruin it for everyone.
There has to be some moderation beyond that the government does to public spaces. At the same time, I don't want people to be functionally excluded from society purely for their political opinions not least of which because I believe people can change. There has to be an equilibrium, and I think that purposefully harassing minorities should be outside of that equilibrium.
> Also, if you've ever had the misfortune of helping run a forum, you would know that this isn't really workable. (...) a tiny minority of individuals will just take over the space and completely ruin it for everyone.
I've seen this happen, but forums never had the universal user base that modern social media companies do. If you get banned from a forum, you get cut off from maybe 500 members of your target audience. If the same happens with a social media platform, you lose access to hundreds of thousands or even millions of members. The impact of the ban is disproportionate, except in the cases of the most extreme speech (like calling for literal heads to roll, for instance).
Kicking off 20% of your userbase doesn't sound like a terribly effective strategy to attaining a monopoly. But, I'm interested in this notion that it should be "treated exactly as if it was state-owned." For HN, this sounds like a bracingly anticapitalist stance. Should companies beyond a certain size be subject to imminent domain? Do we seize Bezos's stock?
Apologies, I should have qualified this as "treated exactly as if state-owned for the purposes of establishing what kinds of speech should be allowed". I am not advocating for nationalisation of private enterprise, but merely for ensuring that they are bound by the same standards when they reach the same size.
You can still get kicked out of a public library for yelling at other patrons. Or, say, following people around and muttering racial slurs. Should we treat it like the postal service, where breaking the rules is a felony?
I think it's more about the pseudonymity of internet culture and the interactions it tends to fosters. eg: I am responding to you without knowing you personally and the only relationship I have with you is your username and the broader HN message board; the freedom to be critical without human 1:1 feedback.
There is a lot of space in between Tiktok's current policy and allowing literally anything that's legal. It doesn't have to be a binary choice between chaos and strict policing.
Ironically, Parler is extremely heavily censored, far more than Twitter - it is verbatim the censorship regime that conservatives pretend exists elsewhere, only actually existing yet in their favor
When someone/something gets associated with Parler, 4chan or Gab, it loses a lot of legitimacy with the mainstream. That's why conservatives are fighting to not be relegated to such corners of the internet, but instead allow to eat off the legitimacy and reach of mainstream platforms like TikTok and Youtube.
Why would anyone consider Tiktok or YouTube to be legitimate or illegitimate in any measure? They are literally just places where all kinds of people upload all kinds of content. That the platform carries a certain video, doesn't mean it has some stamp of approval.
Because they are well known platforms that plenty of media personalities have careers on. When a person sees that a podcast is hosted on www.1776GeneralLeeDidNothingWrong.com, they are going to automatically turn up their noses and walk away. Youtube and TikTok don't incur such baggage. There is a reason that conservative personalities screech everytime they are given the boot from these platforms.
And yet you could only get real data re: the potential COVID Lab leak from 4Chan for quite awhile. It was deemed misinformation and bad for our health to read. Maybe censorship is what is actually "problematic"..
Just a small anecdote, one of the first times Reddit did a mass banning of subreddits there was a public outcry that to me, uninformed at the time, seemed reasonable. The creators of Voat assured they'd never adopt such a policy. If you know anything about Voat's history, you know how it ended up. I couldn't just ignore the slurs on the front page of the website. Back on Reddit, the mythical day where they came for the things I love would never come. Ever since, I've found free speech is much easier for websites than people pretend. By removing bad posts, the only lasting implication is discouraging more bad posts. Easy.
"You can't legislate away hate" does not imply "you shouldn't try". The Civil Rights Act was a positive development, despite failing to "solve" racism.
> While I think that everybody should be treated with respect, policing this via censorship is dangerous. You can't legislate away hate
Private actors implementing policies for what they will use their resources to relay isn't legislation, so what you can and cannot legislate is immaterial (except as indication that to succeed, non-legislative approaches like this are necessary.) Nor is it necessarily targeting (at least as the immediate goal, though for some actors it might be part of a broader strategy with that as the ultimate goal) eliminating hate, it is targeting not being (or, more cynically, not being seen as) an active collaborator in it.
How to avoid deadnaming in some contexts isn't really clear. How do you talk about historical events where a trans person's original name was recorded?
For instance, nobody is retroactively editing a movie's credits to use their new name. Nobody is re-engraving trophies that had their original name engraved.
The policy seems to universally be "you're evil if you deadname in any context, period", which seems logically impossible to satisfy in some contexts.
Always use their new name. Consider if you were talking about someone who recently got married - would you refer to them as "Miss XYZ" when talking about a month ago but when talking in the present use their current name "Mrs. ABC"? Same thing.
> Did Bruce Jenner win gold medals, or did Caitlyn Jenner win them?
Same person, different name, mu. The menu is not the meal, the map is not the territory, the name is not the person.
> are we deadnaming when referring to actual events that took place while Bruce Jenner was competing in the Olympics?
You just deadnamed Caitlyn Jenner in that question. Compare with "are we deadnaming when referring to actual events that took place while Caitlyn Jenner was competing in the Olympics under the name Bruce?"
In any event the answer is yes, if you're calling Caitlyn Bruce, but no if you're describing events that happened in the past.
I.e. Elliot Page will be starring in the upcoming season three of Umbrella Academy, I'm eager to see how the show will handle his character now that he's no longer Ellen Page.
>You just deadnamed Caitlyn Jenner in that question.
No I didn't, I cited the actual record books. Besides, can't we conclude that Caitlyn Jenner would never have been able to win a gold medal in a male Olympic sport since no woman has ever done that, or even qualified for a male Olympic sport for that matter.
I don't see how acknowledging reality is problematic. I would argue the opposite.
Sure you did. You called her Bruce instead of Caitlyn, that's "deadnaming".
> I cited the actual record books.
Old records have old data in them. I don't think you get shamed for referring to old records' data, I think that's going a little too far, but that's also different than calling a person a "dead" name in the present.
> can't we conclude that Caitlyn Jenner...
I don't really know anything about Caitlyn Jenner or sports for that matter, and couldn't care less about athletic awards. I think they're pretty silly actually, but that's me. I don't go around calling people silly for thinking that jumping really high or throwing a ball really well are so cool, so in practice my views on the matter aren't a problem.
> I don't see how acknowledging reality is problematic. I would argue the opposite.
The problem with that is that people have different views on "reality".
>Sure you did. You called her Bruce instead of Caitlyn, that's "deadnaming".
No I didn't. I said Bruce Jenner won Olympic gold medals. That is a fact. We know that Caitlyn Jenner never won gold medals because no woman has ever won Olympic gold in men's events. In fact no woman has ever qualified to even compete in men's events in the Olympics. That is a fact that nobody disputes. Since that is a fact, how can Caitlyn Jenner have possibly won those gold medals?
Really the question of whether that particular sentence "The record books are clear[1], so then are we deadnaming when referring to actual events that took place while Bruce Jenner was competing in the Olympics?" is or is not "deadnaming" turns on the tense or temporal sense of the name "Bruce".
> We know that Caitlyn Jenner never won gold medals...
No, that's wrong. We know she did win medals when she was still a man going by the name Bruce. Changing gender didn't unwin those medals, eh? Likewise "no woman has ever won Olympic gold in men's events." is true, but she wasn't a woman when she won the medals.
> how can Caitlyn Jenner have possibly won those gold medals?
A man named Bruce won some medals and then became a woman named Caitlyn.
It really seems like you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Is this a problem you have run into in real life? "Caitlyn" and "Bruce" aren't two different humans beings, both names refer to the same person just at different times in their life. Just as a child grows into an adult and then into a old person, there is a change, but we don't consider these to be different entities, eh?
I'm telling you how to talk about trans people in your life, people who are your friends or coworkers. If you want to insist on being Rude, that's your right but you're doing it intentionally at this point, and you should expect that people won't appreciate it.
And yes you are absolutely correct, Caitlyn Jenner won some Olympic medals.
I am telling you, as a trans person, the way that trans people would like to be treated in conversation. You are certainly Free to be incredibly pedantic and Weird about it, and upset the people around you. Casual conversation is not a group exercise in mathematical proofs.
> Always use their new name. Consider if you were talking about someone who recently got married
So if I'm reading the text of a plaque awarded prior to a transition (or text from a history book describing a person prior to transition, etc.), you're saying that I should not read it verbatim but that I should be substituting in their new name on the fly?
Also, I don't see how it's the same thing as changing your name after getting married. Deadnaming has social consequences like getting you banned from Twitter, using a maiden name will not.
I mean yes, if you want to not be rude, that'd be nice! It's not a Law, just like repeatedly shouting in a movie theater and making cell phone calls isn't a Law, but people sure aren't gonna like it when you do it.
Thanks for explaining your view on the issue. I think it's unnecessarily confusing in some corner cases, but etiquette is rarely perfectly coherent or well defined in all cases. We muddle through all the same as long as we're all being charitable.
I wonder if China's FP plays into it at all. In the same way that Russia has tried to foment cultural unrest in the United states by promoting far left & far right groups.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 96.7 ms ] threadGender identity is, arguably, one of many sex traits, or a product of the interaction of such a trait with the social milieu.
Ascribed gender is a social trait whose relation to sex traits, including gender identity, varies by time, place, and social context (though in the West, it is converging toward being aligned with gender identity where the latter is known.)
However, I'm not at all convinced by the concept of "gender identity" and I think it warrants open debate. Unfortunately, voicing such an opinion is liable to get one lumped in with the more loudmouth transphobic crowd, and so it makes such discussion very difficult. I know from private conversations that many people you would not expect have their doubts as well, but they keep it to themselves. I think it's therefore all the more important for people who aren't loudmouth transphobes to weigh in on it.
My issue with it is this: is the concept of "gender identity" separable from gender stereotypes? What does it mean to "identify" with this or that? If men and women are both permitted to wear whatever they like, date whoever they like, arrange flowers or race dirtbikes as they see fit - then what does "identity" capture? Doesn't it privilege some kind of essentialist view - that there is some fundamental, immutable characteristic that is not captured by personality or preference, that girls are girls and boys are boys regardless of how tomboyish or flamboyant they are? Isn't this basically self-contradictory, or at the very least regressive?
This isn't neccesarily to say that "gender identity", as a preference, isn't real in some sense - we should always be careful to distinguish the inconvenient from the untrue, and some people (certainly not everyone) feels a powerful sense of "gender identity". But it may simply describe a strong preference for how society views you, given the stereotypes that society has, rather than any kind of essential characteristic. And perhaps - just perhaps - we shouldn't be regarding it as a reflection of a healthy and accepting society, but as a hint that society still discriminates heavily on the basis of sex.
Gender identity is a readily observable fact. It’s sources and influences may be a subject of factual debate, and how society ought to respond to it might be a subject of normative debate, but the fact that people have an internal concept about where they belong relative to the social construct of gender (including beliefs that align fully with ascribe gender, views that diverge from ascribed gender but align with another popularly ascribed gender, and views that go beyond the categories typically ascribed in their social context) is, I mean, the whole reason any of those other things are hotly debated.
> My issue with it is this: is the concept of "gender identity" separable from gender stereotypes?
That's a question of sources and influences, not existence. Also, not relevant to any real current society, since gender stereotypes are omnipresent.
> Doesn't it privilege some kind of essentialist view
No, it doesn't (the popular conception that whether something is innate has very strong relevance to whether it is Constitutionally and/or should be protected legally from discrimination overly centers debate around essentialist concepts of the sources and influences of gender identity, but the concept of gender identity itself is orthogonal to essentialism.)
The trouble is that that's not how gender identity is treated in the mainstream. It's treated as an intrinsic property, not a mere social construction or preference. That is, if you "identify" as a particular sex, then you "really are" that sex, in some essential sense. The idea entered the mainstream as a framework into which transgender people could fit alongside cisgender people so that nobody would have to be "abnormal". After all, if a man is "really" a woman "on the inside", then why wouldn't you treat them as one? This essentialist usage is different from the purely descriptive usage that we agree on, and it's not so much a descriptive tool as a political one - an intuition pump designed to get people to treat transgender people in line with their preferences. While this is a worthy cause, I question the collateral damage to the larger discourse about sexism.
I think you critically misunderstand, the view is not primarily that gender identity is an essential fact (that's not uncommon, but not central), but that ascribed gender (including “sex” categories, but not the multidimensional variety of combinations of sex traits) is not essential, just a socially constructed designation tied to gender stereotypes, thar, when it is not based on gender identity of the subject (no matter where gender identity comes from), is an intolerable hostile imposition.
This section right here is the start of a paragraph of almost exclusively questions. I suppose I did assume you wanted at least some of these questions answered. It seems kinda strange that you didn't.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It's not, for a couple of reasons. First and most critically, thinking “macillofacial bone structure” and/or “five o’ clock shadow” define “man” is not “basic science”, it's gender essentialist ideology.
Second, it's factually wrong in the second case if reconstructed into a factual claim that “people who are assigned male at birth will always have stereotypical masculine traits in the named dimensions”, because “five o’ clock shadow” is a product of behavior (shaving) and hair growth, the latter of which is a product of biochemistry, largely hormones, so hormone treatments will affect it, and people who are assigned female at birth with no intervention may have the same hair growth pattern you find typical of men (and people assigned male at birth may not) because of hormone variations.
Third, it's factually wrong in even the first case, with the same factual interpretation, because bone structure itself is a product of biochemistry including hormones, and thus both natural hormone variations and the timing of hormonal transition interventions can affect it.
Fourth, it's arguably even more factually wrong with the same factual interpretation because facial feminization/masculinization surgery is a thing.
Even if you don't want to call that gender for some odd reason, that doesn't change the fact that this social construct is separate from sex.
Now it’s “if you’re a girl and you like to play video games, maybe you were just born in the wrong body.”
Gender can’t be just a social construct and also a reason to transition, at least in my mind.
Like, i saw a meme on reddit with a person saying "People keep telling me to just be a butch lesbian instead of transitioning to a man :("
Presumably a butch lesbian can do anything a man can do except walking around without a shirt, so I don't think that's the issue.
There is some tension between the two positions, but they are reconciliable. As far as we have gender as a social construct, and we will for the foreseeable future, gender identity is inevitable.
But no one thinks chopping of parts changes who you are.
The reactionary view on gender thinks the parts determine who you are and continue to do so after you chop them off, while the nonreactionary view is that the parts don't determine who you so chopping them off doesn't change that.
If 20% of your potential audience can be taken away by the flip of a switch (or worse, an automated algorithm with no real oversight), then it really doesn't matter who's doing the taking away. The harm is the same.
Also, if you've ever had the misfortune of helping run a forum, you would know that this isn't really workable. Without proactive moderation that goes above and beyond the bare legal minimum, a tiny minority of individuals will just take over the space and completely ruin it for everyone.
There has to be some moderation beyond that the government does to public spaces. At the same time, I don't want people to be functionally excluded from society purely for their political opinions not least of which because I believe people can change. There has to be an equilibrium, and I think that purposefully harassing minorities should be outside of that equilibrium.
I've seen this happen, but forums never had the universal user base that modern social media companies do. If you get banned from a forum, you get cut off from maybe 500 members of your target audience. If the same happens with a social media platform, you lose access to hundreds of thousands or even millions of members. The impact of the ban is disproportionate, except in the cases of the most extreme speech (like calling for literal heads to roll, for instance).
Is it a private company? How much control does the CCP need to have over it before it's recognized as an arm of the state.
Interesting choice of words..
Private actors implementing policies for what they will use their resources to relay isn't legislation, so what you can and cannot legislate is immaterial (except as indication that to succeed, non-legislative approaches like this are necessary.) Nor is it necessarily targeting (at least as the immediate goal, though for some actors it might be part of a broader strategy with that as the ultimate goal) eliminating hate, it is targeting not being (or, more cynically, not being seen as) an active collaborator in it.
For instance, nobody is retroactively editing a movie's credits to use their new name. Nobody is re-engraving trophies that had their original name engraved.
The policy seems to universally be "you're evil if you deadname in any context, period", which seems logically impossible to satisfy in some contexts.
It reminds me of a few years ago when some would cry to be the first to scream they dont see color.
Same person, different name, mu. The menu is not the meal, the map is not the territory, the name is not the person.
> are we deadnaming when referring to actual events that took place while Bruce Jenner was competing in the Olympics?
You just deadnamed Caitlyn Jenner in that question. Compare with "are we deadnaming when referring to actual events that took place while Caitlyn Jenner was competing in the Olympics under the name Bruce?"
In any event the answer is yes, if you're calling Caitlyn Bruce, but no if you're describing events that happened in the past.
I.e. Elliot Page will be starring in the upcoming season three of Umbrella Academy, I'm eager to see how the show will handle his character now that he's no longer Ellen Page.
No I didn't, I cited the actual record books. Besides, can't we conclude that Caitlyn Jenner would never have been able to win a gold medal in a male Olympic sport since no woman has ever done that, or even qualified for a male Olympic sport for that matter.
I don't see how acknowledging reality is problematic. I would argue the opposite.
Sure you did. You called her Bruce instead of Caitlyn, that's "deadnaming".
> I cited the actual record books.
Old records have old data in them. I don't think you get shamed for referring to old records' data, I think that's going a little too far, but that's also different than calling a person a "dead" name in the present.
> can't we conclude that Caitlyn Jenner...
I don't really know anything about Caitlyn Jenner or sports for that matter, and couldn't care less about athletic awards. I think they're pretty silly actually, but that's me. I don't go around calling people silly for thinking that jumping really high or throwing a ball really well are so cool, so in practice my views on the matter aren't a problem.
> I don't see how acknowledging reality is problematic. I would argue the opposite.
The problem with that is that people have different views on "reality".
No I didn't. I said Bruce Jenner won Olympic gold medals. That is a fact. We know that Caitlyn Jenner never won gold medals because no woman has ever won Olympic gold in men's events. In fact no woman has ever qualified to even compete in men's events in the Olympics. That is a fact that nobody disputes. Since that is a fact, how can Caitlyn Jenner have possibly won those gold medals?
> We know that Caitlyn Jenner never won gold medals...
No, that's wrong. We know she did win medals when she was still a man going by the name Bruce. Changing gender didn't unwin those medals, eh? Likewise "no woman has ever won Olympic gold in men's events." is true, but she wasn't a woman when she won the medals.
> how can Caitlyn Jenner have possibly won those gold medals?
A man named Bruce won some medals and then became a woman named Caitlyn.
It really seems like you're making a mountain out of a molehill. Is this a problem you have run into in real life? "Caitlyn" and "Bruce" aren't two different humans beings, both names refer to the same person just at different times in their life. Just as a child grows into an adult and then into a old person, there is a change, but we don't consider these to be different entities, eh?
This is exactly what I said, so I guess I don't understand the argument.
And yes you are absolutely correct, Caitlyn Jenner won some Olympic medals.
So if I'm reading the text of a plaque awarded prior to a transition (or text from a history book describing a person prior to transition, etc.), you're saying that I should not read it verbatim but that I should be substituting in their new name on the fly?
Also, I don't see how it's the same thing as changing your name after getting married. Deadnaming has social consequences like getting you banned from Twitter, using a maiden name will not.