The use of Sierra Club as the lead example is a good one because of the racialist motivations in the founding of the club.
The change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them.
But as a non-American who’s lived in the US a long time, seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”, or, yes, “US citizen, so not applicable to me”. I am not offended when I see a headline, as I did this morning, saying “your passport will be delayed so apply early”. Just doesn’t apply to me so who cares?
It's like they want to abolish metaphors and want to become language prescriptive --which people and grammarians wanted to get away from in the 60s and later (not that that ever persuaded the French against prescriptive language). And I guess English lends itself to more demands like this because its vocabulary-rich. Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more and are not able to accommodate these demands.
> Other languages have to re-use and recycle words for different meanings a lot more
A rather extraordinary and unlikely claim. Not to mention that words in languages like Arabic have much deeper semantic ramification compared to a Germanic language like English.
I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's the horror of it: to be born as property.
Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it, and ipso facto that staying enslaved is the slave's problem. The appeal to a made-up brain process doesn't improve your case.
But the word is not about agency: it expresses a state. How that state was achieved, doesn't matter. Are we going to say "enprisoned people", "people who somehow and totally against their will caught COVID", "people who accidentally experience permanent, fully reduced hearing"? Do you still call people who once were, but not longer are, slaves, enslaved?
The assumption behind it all is that if someone can make a inference about your thoughts, no matter how far-fetched, those thoughts must contribute to an undesirable state, hence you are a bad person.
The problem with ”slave” (as an example) for me is, how do we know this is actually a problem for enslaved people? How do we know this isn’t just a ”white man burden” thing? Yes, it makes sense, but just because something makes sense doesn’t mean it’s inherently good or applicable. Lots of things make sense from a theoretical, conceptual perspective, but are not feasible in practice.
It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).
> seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”
Nitpick: synecdoche would be if someone called you "America". You can imagine a teasing "Hey America, get out of the way" toward a tourist who encapsulated their views of Americans. "American" is just a regular adjective.
Is not "equity language" just another form of neocolonialism? How can "rich educated people" rename entire ethnic group (latinx) without their consent? Also there is nothing offensive about being "poor"...
Equity language is just another tool to oppress people.
It's the new prescriptivists who want to set the rules for the commoners to follow -reminds me of the apocryphal story about a Spanish king of some sort who had a lisp and in turn, the population not wanting to offend him began speaking with a lisp so Spanish ended up with a "th" sound where other romance languages did not.
People want to recognize inequities and lived experiences and choose to do something about it that is within their power, change their language. As the article embraces, this is a morally driven impulse that is unimpeachable in its intent, but in aggregate, fails and sometimes, even oppresses. Interesting article.
I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?
If I have an experience-- such as walking through the park, this afternoon and picking a blackberry... What is a "lived experience" version of that same experience?
“lived experience” was generally first used to differentiate between a person saying “I have experience with x issue” who could be saying “I’ve studied it; I’ve worked with the population” but “lived experience” makes it specific to being an individual’s own life.
It's still used that way. I'm always confused why people criticize this one in particular. The distinction makes perfect sense. There's an enormous amount of stuff that I've read a bunch about or watched a lot of media about or talked about with people, but is nonetheless outside my lived experience.
The idea of having direct first-hand contact with a thing is part of the understanding of the word "experience." Second hand contact or learning is generally some other noun or verb, depending on what we're talking about.
The word "experience" encompasses many kinds of contact, which is why it is often modified in various ways. It is not redundant to say "first-hand experience" or "direct experience". These are commonly used and broadly understood. There is no reason "lived experience" should be any different, and indeed I think it is more of an anti-woke shibboleth to make fun of this than it is a woke shibboleth to use it. Normal people with no skin on either side of that game understand it perfectly well.
My family members have experience with deafness. They've had direct first-hand contact with someone who is deaf in one ear, and have learned how to interact with that person successfully. They are familiar with the challenges of being deaf (in one ear, least), both from having interacted with the person, and because the person in question has explained the challenges they have faced.
I have lived experience with deafness. I've been deaf in one ear for decades now. However well I explain myself to my family members, there is a degree to which their experience will never be the same as mine, despite their first-hand contact with me.
We can either reserve the word "experience" for me, and try to police it so that nobody can say they have experience without being prepared to demonstrate the first-hand nature of their experience, or we can understand that people will use the word to mean "prolonged exposure" or similar, and add a qualifier when important to people like me: e.g. I have lived experience as a deaf person.
No it isn't, it's just a different form of experience. People seem to want the word "experience" to have some narrow single-purpose definition that it just doesn't have in practice. Do you go around telling people saying "direct experience" or "first hand experience" that actually they're being redundant because that's the only kind of experience there is?
> I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?
It's a shibboleth that indicates adherence to a certain world view. The speaker is communicating that they are a Good Person and thus you should give their experiences greater weight.
As our societies functional literacy has declined we have lost words that gave us nuanced shades of meaning.
"Experience with" meaning, "Have dealt with this personally, first hand" gradually became, "has been near or studied and feels comfortable claiming authority on that basis." So the new compound word "Lived experience" was created to allow us to still use the first definition reliably.
Many times people who have "experience with" a topic have really "studied" it.
> As our societies functional literacy has declined
[Citation badly needed]
Words change. That doesn't mean everyone is getting stupider. In fact the more literate people are, the faster words are likely to change, since the more situations they'll be put to use in.
Functional literacy means more than simply knowing specific vocabulary words. It includes the shared knowledge to use and understand idioms and cultural references.
Needing to coin a new expression to replace a word we already have a perfectly good word for seems to be a symptom of poor literacy. I suppose the chronic dishonesty and doublespeak involved in corporate jargon could be the source of this phenomenon instead.
The term latinx didn't come out of "rich educated people" - certainly a lot of educated folk have been pushing it in the last decade (self-identifying grad students and recent college grads, for instance) - but there's a weird sort of prejudice going on in assuming everything can only come out of "rich educated [non-latino, based on your use of "their" there] people"
1) anyone who studies in US university, is "rich educated" for South American standards
2) Quote from article bellow:
> a queer Latina ... mostly from white, right-wing Latino men.
> “When you’re a white Latino ... Black Latino ... transgender Latino, next to a queer Latino, next to an Indigenous Latino
> understand the diversity of our community
Those three paragraphs paint picture that "Latino" is some sort of community. And you can be in-group or out-group (by being right-wing-white-Latino). There is also somebody who speaks on behalf of "our community".
But that is simply not true. It is an ethnic group. Its name may change over a few decades, if new name gains use in South America. Not in a few years, because some US citizens said so, and decided to rename "their community"!
There's literally no one in the actual Latin American countries that call themselves Latinos outside the USA (and perhaps some other rich countries).
I would be called a Latino in the USA, being a Brazilian of brown skin. That amuses me as I have literally never thought of myself or my fellow Brazilians as Latinos... we're simply Brazilian (we may be region-specific, like carioca - from Rio, or Paulista, from Sao Paulo... but still Brazilian, obviously) and I am pretty sure Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians and others are the same... just like white Americans do the same: are you ever a white person when presenting yourself to another American, or e.g. Texan, Californian or whatever??
In the US there's two forces at work, the racist side calling all Spanish speakers Mexican (or various slurs) and the various communities attempting to get larger power by uniting on their commonality. The polite racist (government) side chose Hispanic and the grass roots represented by La Raza and others promulgated Latin American/Latino. Meanwhile I've come across younger non-activist second-generation people referring to themselves as Spanish.
It pays a lot to actually participate in the community to know what to do. I find that people don't like being labelled in any community, but that they may use terms of art to describe their membership in different groups.
Where the term originated matters to some extent, but also where it comes from & is being used also matters. And the drive for 'Latinx' is coming from rich educated people.
they have no qualms in oppressing and showing intolerance towards cultures that won't play ball with those linguistic impositions, especially when they cannot just ignore them as foreign
they will impose actual systemic intolerance and litmus tests to force their cultural supremacy
the people who say disagreement is invalidating someone's existence will actually deny the existence of the culture they spun from, violently so if necessary
I love reading this stuff to figure out what new words elite white people have for me. Apparently I’m not a “minority” or a “naturalized citizen” anymore, and my kids aren’t “second generation Americans.”
I'm involved in local politics in Oak Park, IL, also known as the People's Republic of Oak Park, 85.5% Clinton in '16, 72% college educated, median income about $15k higher than Evanston, and I have never heard any of these words in the elite white conversations I am continually dragged into.
These guides get published to give The Groups something to do. Very few people in the real world --- yes, even the elite whites --- take them seriously. The only durable change I've noticed in the last few years is capitalizing Black, which is something our mutual fave John McWhorter has been advocating for some time.
I'm sorry I can't point you to a public online source. My comment is anecdotal; relying on my own observations across family and friends with kids at the HS level. It is pretty obvious speaking to them that their advisors and administrators expect all written pieces to comply with DEI principles. I have asked if there is a formal style-book and no one has pointed me to one yet. But there is a powerful group think. Not complying is asking for censure or excommunication.
There's a sign in the assistant principles offices at my local high school which defines what critical race theory is, including the "critique of liberalism" part.
I would ban public high schools from encouraging a "critique of liberalism". Being a critic takes no skill and doesn't help the world. Critical theory, and critical thinking are extremely overrated skills. We need constructive thinking and constructive communication.
It is not in fact the case that you can work out what Critical Theory, Critical Legal Theory, and Critical Race Theory (3 distinct concepts originating at 3 different points in the 20th century) axiomatically from the the word "critic".
I'm in academia, just underwent this sort of training this week. Not interested in risking self identifying so I'll only go so far as to say that the Sierra Club's language is fairly close to how we are expected to talk with students, faculty, and staff. It is of course a "learning process" and so there is room for "growth and critical conversations", but the die has been cast, so to speak.
The parent comment is referring to high schools. I'm not surprised, and don't think anyone else is either, that there might be a university that has gone fully up its own butt this way. I'm curious to hear stories about high schools that have formalized it in some way, though. Do you have a story like that?
Couldn't say, they don't let me near the schools any more, not since I argued that sometimes breaking into the school with thermite could be justified.
More seriously, as much of a bastion of progressivism as these hallowed halls are, I'm 100% certain we are behind the curve of most blue state schools when it comes to how up to date we are on the appropriate ritual goat sacrifices.
I know you were responding to the "elite white people" bit, but is there an age element at play with this? If there are people that have absorbed the idea that you unquestioningly adjust your speaking/writing to be a perfectly respectful person, I'd guess they were 20-30yo?
He started hedging when the NYT adopted it as their house style (understandably, because the NYT's rationale was silly, overreaching, and a little incoherent), but he's talked about this on Lexicon Valley before: it's proper noun describing a specific set of people for whom "African" is an imprecise descriptor.
>How can "rich educated people" rename entire ethnic group (latinx) without their consent
I mean someone named them in the first place. The people of Latin America didn't ask to be called Latinos, it was assigned to them, purportedly by a French man.
"The American Cancer Society advises that Latinx, along with the equally gender-neutral Latine, Latin@, and Latinu, “may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.”
Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection.
Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it.
Just don't be racist, we don't need all these made up rules created by our betters.
In that first paragraph, you can also read it as a society for the study of the American Cancer, and it also makes sense. Unfortunately, it metastasized and any connected tissue gets infected as well.
I guess most immigrants don't need to learn the shibboleths, unless they suddenly get into money and want to join the upper class. It's about discriminating between the commoners and the rulers, that's why it constantly evolves, too. Need to regularly release new ciphers if you're communicating in the open with a trivial cryptography.
It’s about class. Not in the usual American sense of how much money you make, but in the older sense of people thinking they are better sorts of people because they have the correct diction, education, religious views, professions, and so on.
Indeed, and someone with money and a desire to prevent actual class conflict can get a lot of mileage out of encouraging tensions in the narrow, purely expressive sense you describe
That’s the Marxist analysis and there might be something to it, but I think the main driver is just human nature.
People like to feel superior. In one era that was “I’m a devout Christian from a good family unlike those other whores and sodomites,” in another it was “I’m a hard working industrialist unlike those lazy, old money playboys,” and now it’s “I’m a social worker dealing with the problems of BIPOC folx, unlike those finance bros that only care about money.”
Right, this is not a new phenomenon. Whether it's meaningful to pin it on human nature, I'm not sure; we consider ourselves unique as a species largely for our ability to recursively adapt the environment to ourselves, and then ourselves to the new state of affairs, and so on. We do generally prefer to think we're smart and good and well-informed and justified in our decisions, no doubt. We also usually prefer to keep what we have, which could be taken to support the traditional Marxist line.
All I'm saying is in an attention economy, one does well to reflect and ask who benefits from one's beliefs and their mode of expression. Substitute money for power, reputation, or any scarce social resource, and I think the analysis still tends to work, whether or not it echoes Marx.
I wonder how much if this is a result of corporate power fighting for ever-increasing economic inequality.
Class discussions about material wealth are excluded from the zeitgeist because they make the ultrarich people who control things uncomfortable and they don't want any discussion that could lead to change.
The war over language could perhaps be viewed as a way to enjoy the privileges of classism without the material requirements. It doesn't threaten capital, so it is amplified to drown out dissent.
> It doesn't threaten capital, so it is amplified to drown out dissent.
Wedge issues have been political footballs since the Reagan Era. Keep everyone riled up about something essentially trivial and no real economic changes happen.
A ~20 year old punk song goes "we are the queer / we are the whore / the ammunition / of the class war"
A good friend of mine is a Spanish translator for a social services agency. She was telling me that the "latinx" thing is a real problem, because for people -- particularly older people -- who are not strong on their reading in the first place, they hit "LatinX" and genuinely have zero idea what that's supposed to mean.
So then time, energy, and goodwill gets wasted by having to explain to people what they "should" be calling themselves. The people she's talking to thinks the whole thing is just stupid, and is a thing that only white people care about.
But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.
There's an extra layer of post-colonialism in this situation, but it's otherwise almost identical to the discussion happening in English about gendered pronouns. I think the following can both be true:
1. It's bad to tell people that they're using their native language badly if you're not a native speaker (especially in a scenario where there's a social power dynamic at play, like Spanish speakers trying to navigate discrimination in the US). People making things harder for immigrants without compassion for their challenges are probably making a mistake.
2. It's bad to say "this whole thing is just stupid" about a radical shift in language that's being deliberately embraced by younger people to break down discriminatory gender traditions, just because it's new and you're mildly confused about it. People making things harder for gender-nonconforming people are probably making a mistake.
Replace “younger people” with “a few younger people from a particular socioeconomic class” to be more accurate.
The eternal outraged youth will always find a few hobby horses to ride. Sometimes they lead to good things. This is a particularly smelly one, unfortunately.
It’s not bad to say “this whole thing is just stupid”. It’s just incomplete to say…it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts) and culturally insulting. The intent is understandable, the linguistic implementation ridiculous. How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective? Why continue to ride this malodorous hobby horse their elders forced between their legs? (I think that image is acceptably gender-nonconforming, and oddly appropriate.)
Anyway, according to la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española
the body responsible for the preservation of the Spanish language across the Spanish-speaking world, it isn’t a Spanish word (not acknowledged in the official dictionary)
BTW your phrase “mildly confused” is demeaning and insulting to readers who would genuinely struggle with incorporating this in their normal Spanish speech after decades of surviving without it. Bit ironic for someone concerned with “sensitivity” to write.
> The eternal outraged youth will always find a few hobby horses to ride. Sometimes they lead to good things. This is a particularly smelly one, unfortunately.
Nonbinary people face real discrimination, including but not limited to the dismissal of that fight as pointless outrage.
> it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts)
This is ridiculous. Ugly-sounding words will always exist.
> and culturally insulting ... How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective
What does any of this even mean? Real Spanish-speaking nonbinary young people did come up with a working solution. If you think it's too ugly sounding, fine, you get to have an opinion. If you think it shouldn't exist because it's too ugly sounding to you, honestly, fuck off. That's not a valid complaint.
I am aware of La Asociación. I understand that they literally make the rules. I need you to understand that they do not actually make the rules. Language is how people communicate. New words happen.
So on the one hand:
1. You don't like the sound of the word
2. An intrinsically conservative body hasn't yet recognized the word
On the other hand:
1. Nonbinary would simply like a word to refer to themselves because one doesn't exist.
But, I will concede that it was pretty rude of me to write "mildly confused". I shouldn't have been so uncharitable.
Nonbinary claim to exist, but no human to date has been able to produce viable sperm and eggs simultaneously.
There is a gender spectrum, agreed, but that doesn't mean we can't classify people into a singular description, and it surely doesn't mean we need to change entire languages to appease made up oppression.
Gay? Makes sense and no issues. No demand for language changes.
Nonbinary,trans? Totally made up because they want to 1. Signal their oppression status and therefore be part of the proletariat, or 2. A true mental issue is at foot. Neither are justifications for removing gendered language, and plastic surgery doesn't remove the biological differences between men and women.
The way I see it, this is going to have to go up to the Supreme Court, where it will be determined that either there is no difference between men and women for legal purposes, and therefore any separation is discrimination (goodbye gendered bathrooms, women's sports, women in engineering clubs, etc.), or we will in fact determine there are biological differences which justify separation in specific circumstances (sports, locker rooms), and no amount of plastic surgery will allow one to change their classification. Of course, that is only insofar as anyone else in those environments could tell (aka having your penis out in a women's locker room would be the tell).
This word is also an issue for screen readers that some visually impaired people rely on. The use of "x" in the end of words to signal gender neutering is a very debated topic in Portuguese-speaking forums and nowadays, most people tend to agree that it's not optimal because it's not universally intelligible.
Latin person, person from a Latin-heritage background, and such, although more verbose, are preferred.
so its "LA-TEEN-EK-EES" if we are respecting the Spanish language.
but in reality such silly butchering of a language isnt respecting the Spanish language in the first place. its merely more communism attempts to disrupt tradition & reform societies towards some immature high school wanna-be communist ends by people who've never lived in communist society.
The most amusing part about this is that literally the entire Spanish language is gendered, so we should probably change all words to 'x' replacements as well.
No more "los gatos"!
Lxs gatxs has so much more of a latin ring to it. (/s)
Spanish is being obliterated by lXs que lo hablan peor.
I think you have finally hit upon the solution to the pronoun problem.
In almost no case till I care about the express sexuality of the person for whom I am using a pronoun and I resent having to be forced to care about their self-centered nature, being self-centered myself.
However, instead of saying "he is wearing a weird hat", I can say "that cat is wearing a weird hat"
> But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.
As someone who's interacted extensively with the Hispanic community in the United States, I just want to point out that the younger generation generally are not completely fluent in Spanish. They often can understand their parents perfectly well but have trouble actually speaking the language.
With that in mind, I'm still suspicious that preferring LatinX correlates primarily with fluency in Spanish rather than age.
As a Hispanic American, I very regularly tell people I am Latino and that Latinx is incredibly offensive to my heritage. I'm in my 30s and the younger people I know also find it offensive.
But why is it so offensive? All I see is knee-jerk reactions giving supposed racist motives to the term, when it's been established that this term originated with native Spanish speakers!
I personally think that choosing 'x' was a poor choice, and it's basically unpronounceable by everyone in both Spanish and English. But making up supposed racist origins is a bit much.
> All I see is knee-jerk reactions giving supposed racist motives to the term, when it's been established that this term originated with native Spanish speakers!
Do you have a credible source for this claim? All I’ve ever seen are vague assertions it originated “organically” in the early 2000s.
How would you feel if people of another race, especially one that has historically oppressed yours decided they knew better than you and decided to change the rules as to how you were referred and if you objected told you it was for your protection?
Latine and LatinX don't come from “people of a different race” than those it applies to (even without considering the artificial race/ethnicity distinction.)
Far from it, the term disregards the history and linguistic heritage of my mother tongue for the sensibilities of white people, who for whatever reason have problems accepting feminine and masculine word pronunciations.
Just because white people like rewriting their history and language doesn't mean they have a right to rewrite mine.
If you find that inflammatory or offensive, now you know how I feel.
> Far from it, the term disregards the history and linguistic heritage of my mother tongue for the sensibilities of white people
It was created by native apeakers of your mother tongue, as a conscious rejection of the way they saw it—their mother tongue—as erasing, or at least obstructing communication of, their gender identity.
> Who said these people represented the general Spanish-speaking population?
That's a very good question. Since you appear to be arguing against that strawman, tell us, who said that?
EDIT: My point is, if we can acknowledge that, like Hispanic and Latino and Latino/Latina (each of which are strongly objected to by some in the community, preferred by others, and tolerated but neither preferred nor objected to by others when talking about the broader group inclusively) these are preferred identity labels of part of the community which is being addressed, we can then talk about how to address a community with internal divisions over preferred identity label, when one specifically wants to address the whole group and not just those who favor a particular label. But we can’t even get to that point as long as we pretend that this is just an external imposition unconnected to preferences expressed within the population described.
I'm asking because I genuinely don't know who decided that this group should make the call regarding how the general population is referred to, especially that the general population is disregarded in this matter in favour of the mentioned group?
EDIT: to elaborate: I take issue to the fact that this word is used to describe not just people who wanted to be referred to like that, but the general population.
> I take issue to the fact that this word is used to describe not just people who wanted to be referred to like that, but the general population.
This I agree with. This is a problem. And, in fact, we’ve been through and addressed almost this exact same problem with the inherently gendered nature (and default-male gender) of Spanish-derived demonyms and how that conflicts with some people’s gender identity before – and the problem of conflicts of preferred identity label for reasons other than gender – before. And mostly, what was done when addressing a group of mixed demonym preference with no single mutually-acceptable one was use multiple, joined with a slash (or, sometimes, here they differed only by a suffix, to separate the alternate suffixes with a slash.)
Actual, rather than performative, inclusion means not imposing a shared label just because you view the group as one for your purposes.
> I swear you linguistic imperialists are insufferable.
The funny thing is that I haven’t even mentioned my preference for a label the group in question in this discussion.
> Leave your hands off of my language and butcher up your own mother tongue.
While at least some of the labels under discussion originate in your language and its community of speakers, the discussion is about use in English. So unless your mother tongue is English, no one's hands are, metaphorically, on it in this discussion.
So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
[citation needed]
We have no idea where the term originated from. Stop lying and posting this BS because your incessent need to belabor your otherwise incorrect point proves otherwise.
> So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
From what I've found there is no definite proof of it's origin. Saying whites or Latinos created it has equal validity. Can you provide your source? Not attempting a gotcha here, just curious
Our language doesn't need fixing, that's just the way it is. This whole latinx is literal cultural imperialism. It's not about not understanding the meaning of using these terms, it's the fact that it suggests that our entire language should be changed to be more "inclusive".
You clearly don't understand how the language works. Let me give you an example. "The latinx" "La/El latinx", where La(F) -> '-a' and El(M) for '-o', how do you replace that? Everything is gendered and this is not restricted to just Spanish.
Americans can continue to use latinx, fine, but don't impose that onto natives because that just doesn't make sense in their native language. And saying, "we need to educate the older generation" is arrogant and disrespectful, we understand it quite well.
maybe instead of arguing about what non-gendered term we should call this group of people we should instead admit that 'latino' is a projection onto a wide variety of people that have different cultural backgrounds but roughly share a language and sometimes a skin tone.
Or maybe we should tell people who started latinx garbage and started the arguing to fuck off and
> we should instead admit that 'latino' is a projection onto a wide variety of people that have different cultural backgrounds but roughly share a language and sometimes a skin tone.
instead of inventing more names to divide people by, just... not ?
I guess I should go back to referring to all people from SE Asia as Chinese since my American friends are just too lazy and dismissive to bother with people's actual nationality and prefer broad and vague terms for the other.
If it's blissful ignorance where someone doesn't know the how gendered pronouns work, that's not a problem.
If it's someone who is intentionally adding an X to the end because of some perceived gender nonsense, then that's offensive.
> Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it.
Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.
Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While there’s legitimate debates about their use, the “created by white English-speaking academics and imposed on the people labelled by them” narrative is itself White-centering myth.
(OTOH, the anglicized, instead of mixed, pronunciation of LatinX is probably a White anglophone invention, the original is like latino/a with the final vowel removed, and with the english name of the letter “X” in its place.)
> Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.
This is disputed, both sides have evidence for them and no one really knows.
I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce it, and inserting the English pronunciation of the letter 'x' is an odd choice for someone who's paying attention to identity politics—you would think they'd try to find an alternative that feels less anglo.
> I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce
There's no good English wsy to pronounce it either. Its a deliberate linguistic transgression. (Aesthetically, its why I personally like Latine better for the specific purpose of explicit inclusion of non-binary identities, but, being neither Latin nor non-binary, I don't weight my aesthetic preferences heavily on the issue.)
EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
It's still a deliberate linguistic transgression that borrows from English. Its English pronunciation ("Latin-eks") is awkward but not completely foreign.
It's a word designed to convey an inclusive Spanish-speaking identity. Why would a native Spanish speaker choose to invent a word that is far easier to pronounce in English than in Spanish?
> EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
No, the origin stories are very much part and parcel with the issue you're discussing. Either the Spanish community itself decided that it needed non-gendered words, or a bunch of white Americans decided the Spanish community needed non-gendered words.
If the drive to change Spanish did not originate with Spanish speakers, that is very much a concern, and grandstanding about including subgroups doesn't make it less of an imperialistic affair; it just comes off as "civilizing the savages".
> Either the Spanish community itself decided that it needed non-gendered words, or a bunch of white Americans decided the Spanish community needed non-gendered words.
Pretty sure that whatever identifier is right for the community of interest here, its not “the Spanish community”, and, irrespective of any debate about the origin of the terms, a subset of the community of interests has decided they need gender neutral terms and expressed preference for one or more of them. The question then is how to refer to the community as a whole, given the existence of a diversity of preferences.
>Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language
I doubt it. Having lived in Latin America, Latin American social norms are influenced by Catholicism and their societies are more conservative & traditionalist than the US and Europe.
The vast majority of people in Latin American countries (outside of Costa Rica & Chile) struggle with academic achievement (including literacy levels), adequate n utrition, enviornmental pollution.
To claim that they would put neo-marxist language changes before actual human needs (literacy, nutrition, environment) is a paltry claim and demonstrates a lack of experience with such societies.
> The vast majority of people in Latin American countries (outside of Costa Rica & Chile) struggle with academic achievement (including literacy levels), adequate n utrition, enviornmental pollution.
Do they?
• Literacy rate:
The average for 2020 based on 7 countries was 93.91 percent.The highest value was in Colombia: 95.64 percent and the lowest value was in El Salvador: 89.98 percent.
During 2019, 7.4% of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lived with hunger
In 2019, almost a third of the population, 191 million people, were affected by moderate or severe food insecurity. Of these, 57.7 million, approximately 10% of the region's population, was severely food insecure
Between 2000 and 2018, higher education gross enrollment rates in the region more than doubled (increasing from 21 percent to 52 percent), making LAC the region with the third-highest average higher education enrollment rate in the world after North America with 86 percent, and Europe and Central Asia with 70 percent.
I was wondering... Have you lived in Latin America?
I've lived in Mexico, and visited Panama and Colombia.
I met very few educated citizens of those countries. The educated ones I did meet I felt were my equals, in terms of education. It was fantastic. The problem is that they're few and far between.
This article is from 2005, but may highlight the problem:
"Despite having three times the population of Argentina, Mexico produces about 2,000 fewer titles each year.
There are roughly 500 bookstores in Mexico, which translates into one for every 200,000 Mexicans, compared to a ratio of one to 35,000 in the US and one to 12,000 in Spain, according to the Mexican Booksellers Association.
A recent UNESCO study revealed that Mexicans read on average just over two books per year, while Swedes finish that many every month.""
These idiots should just use the word "Latin", which has been a normal word for centuries, instead of creating newspeak. Cultural Marxism doesn't even attempt to fix anything; it simply complicates and distorts pedestrian matters in the ivory towers it has penetrated, confusing the very people they're trying to "help".
So, this is a linguistic trojan horse. There's no proper use case for the term "LatinX" except to normalize the pronoun/trans agenda in the Spanish-speaking world.
Spanish-speaking non-binary people are hopefully not so stupid as to conflate a lack of appetite to rewrite the entirety of Spanish grammar with a refusal to acknowledge someone's existence.
You will actually find that the vast majority of Spanish grammar is untouched by this change. The only change, actually, is that it will now be possible to acknowledge the existence of nonbinary people. Or do you think that binary gendered pronouns already do that job?
There are new terms added to the lexicon every day for each persons individual experience. They can refer to themselves however they wish. Yet, it is not reasonable to think that unlimited possibilities can be assumed to be known and forced into the grammatical structure of language. It begins to drift into much broader domain of identify expression of simply how I wish to be known. Not every concept of how I want the world to see me could be expressed in a single grammatical construct of language and it is a futile effort to do so.
I think the only sensible way to resist this is to poke fun at it. Humor did a great job at whittling away the absurdities of the Soviet Union, and it can do the same with this dystopian diversity nonsense.
I am so sorry if this pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction to make.
Both Hispanic and Latino are not races but rather an ethnic group. The race of people who belong to the Hispanic and Latino ethnic groups varies by country and even at the individual. One can have predominately African ancestry, predominately European ancestry, or predominately indigenous ancestry, while all belong to the same ethnic group of Hispanic or Latino.
I do not bring up this point to try and detract from the legitimate discrimination and oppression that many individuals and groups in the Hispanic and Latino community face.
People of Jewish heritage belong to what is known as an ethno-religious group. The idea that "Jews are a race" was either first proposed, or at least heavily perpetuated by the Nazis, and it is still considered offensive to refer to people of Jewish heritage as belonging to a different race.
Regardless, the idea of race is a social construct with absolutely zero biological or scientific basis behind it. There is only one "race", and it's the "Human Race."
In an ideal world, we would not even need to make these distinctions because we are all Homo Sapiens -- we have no subspecies. Maybe one day we can achieve this world if we stop the pathetic, needless, and disgusting hatred for our fellow man.
As I understand it, Middle Eastern (including Egypt). people are considered "white" by the US Census (for those unaware).
If natively from Morocco/Egypt/Perhaps more, would you not be considered Mizrahi or are you talking like European ancestory? Not like any of this matters in the absolute slightest at the end of the day.
I, myself, have 0% < x < 25% Sephardi with another 0% < x < 25% Ashkenazi heritage. My other half is pure Wonderbread levels of European whiteness.
Apparently, I'm a mutt because my ancestors liked to travel and liked to bang whatever population was there when they arrived (I am kidding, this goes for most people).
My great grandparents fled Russia to South Africa during the pogroms. Ancestry wise I'm 99% Ashkenazi Jew (not a lot of mixing going on in my background I guess) and 1% (I can't remember what the test said, it's been years since I looked but it was a couple different ones). I kind of ended that by marrying into an Irish family and having kids that look like leprechauns :)
I can't tell if you're intentionally misconstruing here, but assuming you're not - you would not be in a position of explaining to Spanish people why they are wrong and are really one thing or another (Also I assume you mean hispanic people, or Spanish-speaking people?) You'd be explaining the reasoning behind the modern use of the term, and allowing them to decide for themselves how to engage with it.
The idea isn't to design a new armband that you require people of a particular group to wear each week - the idea is to ask those people what they want, and then respect them when they answer you.
If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's not about the enforcement of identity, *it's about the deconstruction of traditionally enforced identities in the first place*, it's about exploring the creation of new identities outside of the bounds of conservative tradition.
“may or may not be fully embraced by older generations and may need additional explanation.”
I directly quoted the article that specifically said additional explanation had to be made.
"If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx" except that's not what the article says. It discussed how LatinX is often used as the default in progressive language.
The semantic turn of the Left is one of the worst signs of intellectual decay. There's approximately zero evidence that linguistic changes influence thought: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is rejected by linguists except perhaps in some very narrow situations. The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color. And none of them are better or worse than the other (though the 2020 innovation "bodies of color" managed to find a way to be more degrading than the worst that Stormfront could come up with).
Why? We feel powerless to fix the problems that plague our society, so instead we turn to things we have agency over. Maybe we can't prevent group X from suffering from social discrimination, but if everything is just a matter of what words we use, we can just choose to use those words, stridently denounce everyone who hasn't gotten with the program, and pat ourselves on the back and call it a day.
Including it would distract from the main point (though IIRC there was no point at which it wasn't a slur; replacing non-slurs with novel non-slurs is a different category).
That said, I think it supports my point. How effective has tabooing that slur been at eliminating racism in the USA?
I'm the furthest thing from N-word apologist, but it's pronounced the same as the Latin word meaning "black" (modulo vowel pronunciation shifts), and spelled nearly the same. It's clearly derived from a word which did not originally have any meaning as a slur, and I bet you could find early usages in English which were merely descriptive.
There's no reason to use it now, but understanding the fact that was originally a descriptive word is useful for the history of it.
There have been a few kerfuffles in soccer where a Spanish speaking person used the Spanish word for black person in an English speaking country…and were charged with making a racial slur.
Why does a taboo have to "eliminate racism" to be considered useful or effective instead of just "reduce the amount of times people have to put up with hearing others call them that"?
Do you have an estimate for how much tabooing that word decreased the racial wealth gap or increased the number of black children with access to healthcare?
Well it's american site and people get itchy when you mention it, because apparently having voldemort words that are simultaneously used by people supposedely offended by it in their culture is "good" thing to do
Can you provide sources for "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is more or less rejected by linguists"? I took a university course in "Philosophy of Language" around 2008 and I was taught in no uncertain terms that language structures thought.
The wikipedia article for Linguistic Relativity[0] states:
> Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.
That quote is a relatively recent addition (17 Jan 2023) and isn't well-cited. A longer standing and more objective statement from the article:
> Many different, often contradictory variations of the hypothesis have existed throughout its history.[4] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This hypothesis was held by some of the early linguists before World War II.[3] This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[2]
You say it's both "intellectual decay" and "feeling powerless" but I see no reason that the two are connected, causal, or both happening. Hand people victimized by the past few centuries of American history the ability to fix, say, the generational wealth gap that resulted from denied opportunities and seizure of property, and see if they still only focus on words.
Alternatively, there’s a theory of change at play here that follows a relatively long path of inquiry through politics, sociology, and neuroscience to identify in-group/out-group dynamics and mental shortcuts as central blockers to attempts to increase cross-group empathy and drive social change.
Even if that were true, I'd still not put any faith in the empathy skills of people who use e.g. "incel" as a slur, who claim "it's okay to be white" is hate speech and who call arson, vandalism and looting "mostly peaceful protests" because the in-group did it.
It's not a caricature if it's taught at supposedly elite institutions of education, into which admission is contingent on a declaration of adherence to said ways of thinking.
I don't dispute that there's a theory of change here: "if we explore the linguistic landscape, we can discover a set of signifiers that will help us to destroy racism/sexism/etc."
I just reject that. We don't live in a Harry Potter book where the correct series of incantations affect the material world.
I can say that right now, and nothing happens. The words aren't the causal elements here changing the world; it's the referants and power hierarchies that do.
The proper analogy would be thinking that requiring saying "Officer, detain-in-an-official-capacity that man!" instead would somehow fix police violence.
> I can say that right now, and nothing happens. The words aren't the causal elements here changing the world; it's the referants and power hierarchies that do.
And you think this is something that’s not understood among those pushing for linguistics changes?
It's "theirsxn of sholor". Please respect this and stop the violation and violence against theirsxns of sholor which is incurred when you use othering phrases.
(not thereson-- because it has the word "son" in it, which is offensive to non-sons. sholor because it's closer to shalom which means peace.)
The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.
Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.
This what people do to distract from the fact that they don't want to give up housing as a lucrative investment if it means more housing, as that would infringe upon their lifestyle.
It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes. When I was younger, I used to feel like I could keep up with all the new taboo words, but it seems like it is happening faster and faster these days.
You can unintentionally say something that turns out to be taboo, and you're done for. Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake. We used to toss that one around all the time back in the 80s and 90s, felt kind of like a jerk when you used it in the early 2000s, but in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata. We learn the hard way from these experiences, but it does feel like a growing minefield.
Worse, when something innocent we write/say today becomes a slur in 2040, future people will dig back in time and judge us by the words we wrote in 2020. Do you know what will be a slur in 20 years? I don't.
> I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it
You casually called someone a "retard" (I assume that's the word) and someone took that wrongly? Of course they did! Even when "retard" was an acceptable put-down, it was still a put-down.
Maybe the way to avoid the "minefield" you speak of is to not put others down? Even deservedly! Just try to be nicer to everyone, even if they are not, themselves, nice.
I've never thought of retarded as a putdown, it was just the sound used to describe a certain group of people. Be careful assuming you are in possession of the one true way.
> Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake.
Doug Stanhope has a great skit in which he explains that the word "retarded" was originally the sensitive way to refer to this group, because at the time they were called directly derogatory terms.
But, like with every such attempt it was quickly adopted as an insult.
My not particularly original take is that policing language addresses only the effect, not the cause. Question remains: should the world learn of our peaceful ways by force?
Yeah, there's no word to describe something negative that can't be turned into an insult. Whatever words we use to describe people on the fringes of society will be turn against those we don't like to treat them as if they are on the fringes of society.
If it somehow became popular to describe people of a certain type using the phrase "people on the fringes of society," then within a generation or two kids would taunt each other in schoolyards with "No, you're on the fringes of society," and "No, you are!"
Just like Special Education students in schools, students who require one-on-one teaching from trained teachers. It was abbreviated as sp.ed., and where I grew up, "sped" was a common insult, as in "you're such a sped", or "that sped is so retarded".
I once got into a debate with someone on Reddit where they claimed "Middle East" is an offensive term, which was news to me. They preferred "West Asia and Northern Africa", or something. I claimed that this is just taking the same path that "oriental" took, which is now taboo in some countries, even though it literally means "from the east" and is the opposite of "occidental".
>in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata*
I thought it was the 2020s.
But it's too good not to use, and it's the last good insult we have. Mental ableism is the last bastion. I make my stand here.
The slippery slope we're being forced down on leads to "don't be mean to anyone ever", and I, as a product of the era of https://youtu.be/C4dnCZSYmbY, fundamentally refuse to accept that.
Negative words can change meaning or severity over time, in both directions, but if you aim for clear expression and avoid insults, it is unlikely anything you say or write will be judged badly in the future.
It's pretty simple: you have freedom to say whatever you want, but if you're worried about how you'll be judged, now or in the future, then you will curtail your worst impulses. Alternatively, you can lean into your freedom, say whatever you want, and then deal with the fallout when it eventually comes.
Look at the comment to which I replied, and then tell me my reply doesn't fit.
> It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes.
It gets new mines because when a word becomes a widely used derogatory term for a group of people we need a non-derogatory word to use instead when when we are trying to talk about people in that group and aren't trying to be derogatory.
So when a word that starts out as a neutral term to describe some condition or collection of people gets adopted over time by the general public as a slur or derogatory term, and that's how it is used 99.9% of the time, we should assume when we hear it out of context it is the 0.1% case?
Also for many of these words most the general public has complete forgotten the non-slur/non-derogatory meaning (or has never known it). No amount of tone will fix that.
Imagine an unmarried couple with a child who gets a copy of the child's medical records from their pediatrician and see the child described as a "retarded bastard". The chances that they will know that "retarded" was once a medical term for someone who is behind on mental development and that "bastard" means a person born out of wedlock are pretty low. At best they are going to be greatly puzzled by the doctor using those words.
It's meant a lot of different things in the past. The initial version (the "strong" hypothesis) has been roundly rejected. Claims associated with it are what people usually think of ("the Ancient Greeks couldn't see the color blue!") when they think of Sapir-Whorf.
Weaker versions with much more narrow claims are debated and controversial, but even for those, it's the most flashy (and least supported) claims that get the most popular press.
I received a letter in the mail from official sources, ordering me to use:
"skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000"
(pseudo-mammals is important so as not to exclude platypus & echidna identifying peoples)
It's ok though-- I will let it slide this time.
Next time though, it will be reported to the Commissar. And they will listen to me-- Because I am half skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000 (anything more than a quarter is considered full validated and verified via the official channels)
I welcome "The semantic turn of the Left". It shows the emperor has no clothes.
By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."
It's a shame. Many people who call themselves left instead have views similar to violent communism (as opposed to social democracy or Marxism) and fascism of the hard right in terms of inflexibility, harsh punishment, mercilessness, and aggressive intellectual and social domination. Gen X and older tend to have more of an idea of the spirit of left liberalism and what it means socially, life outlook, and pragmatically.
Furthermore, there are nonzero people in groups who object to victim monikers like Latinx and over-sensitive terminology as demeaning. If it were me, since I can only speak for myself, I would want to be treated as equal without ceremony, pity, or unfair advantages. Alterations of language where there is little or no offense (asking the targets rather than the busy bodies) seem like token thoughts and prayers and inconvenience to the many rather than direct, positive help to anyone. Solve real concerns rather than pearl clutch the next unfashionable word.
> The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”
The reason people first language fails is because there's some subjects of this language that find the original wording insulting and there's some subjects of this language that find the new words insulting.
I have back issues. Major ones that pinch my sciatic nerve due to a fractured column that healed improperly. They've gotten to the point a few times in my life where I could not walk much less feel (at all) my leg for prolonged periods of time. If someone called me a "person experiencing a disability" it sounds like you're trying to remove the hurdle that the disability puts in my life. I already had to grapple with the idea that I am not bound to that disability. I have found ways to climb small mountains, to hike, pack, move/lift heavy things, sit, and work out all with abundances of caution and very proper form.
That's to say, codifying this language just does what the first correction set out to correct: it institutionalized language some people don't like. In a world with a big variety of perspectives and experiences, the best resolution to these problems isn't some authoritarian document telling people how to talk. It's gracefully correcting people on the way that you'd like to be spoken about and people respecting that. Nobody needs to walk on eggshells around how I'd like to be referred, they just need to meet me where I am when I make a choice.
The tenet assumes that people are in the large just dense. Following it, you have no airline pilots, mothers, mentors, judges, felons, idiots, and maybe not even proper names. Just "person who is female and has borne living children", "person who judges others in court", "person named Judy", etc.
There might be a worthwhile transition to a new framing that makes sense. I've heard people rip on using the metric system because supposedly its proponents wanted 10-hour days and 10 days a week, etc, which was taking tenets to ridiculous points. The problem now is trying to frame some changes in grander terms because you might well get ridiculous outcomes ( and in current society definitely will).
I had sort of a similar reaction to the piece — reading through it really clarified for me some impressions that had been sitting in the back of my mind.
Language at some level is really about the speaker, in terms of their background, knowledge or lack thereof, what they want to communicate and so forth. Sometimes I think what this equity language betrays is some desire to convey moral or intellectual status, or even some assertion of social power, but sometimes it reflects a genuine attempt to respect the wishes of the subjects of what they're saying.
The problem as you point out is different groups might see things in different ways, and maybe even want to be seen in different ways in different settings or at different moments. Maybe they want to be seen as strong or resilient in one setting, and maybe in another they want to discuss the injustices they have to be resilient against. I think this is only a natural part of human nature.
So it makes sense that these edicts about proper language aren't just morally problematic because they reflect some power motive on the part of the speaker, at the expense of the subject of the speech, but because in doing that, they deny some flexibility in how certain topics and persons can be portrayed or portray themselves.
The example of the passage from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is compelling in how it illustrates how equity language can be disenfranchising and therefore counter to its own stated purposes. The passage works because it is meant to convey something about the parents' perspective and to cause us to wrestle with that. The author is channeling the parents' language. In a different context, maybe the same situation might be described differently, more positively. It's not just that the language in the second version is intellectualized and distanced, it's that it denies choice of language from those who potentially are in the best position to say something about it.
I think it's much easier to just see it as in-group out-group signaling. You're in the in-group if you comply with the new arbitrary language and you're a slew of bad words if you're in the out-group using the old language. The stuff about being nice to low status people is fake, the purpose is to identify low status people (the people who don't know/use the new made up language).
This is great advice for one-on-one groups and small discussions, but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback. Which is where I think that Stanford guide, and other such guides, come into play, whether I agree with them or not.
> but provides little help if you're writing for a broad audience and want to minimize blowback
Does writing a guide or policing language that causes blowback provide help? If you're speaking to a room full of people and half favor this language and half don't then you've only shifted the grievances from one side of the room to the other.
There's no easy answers here, but I don't think writing language guides or policing peoples language actually accomplishes much.
All it takes is one or two very angry people to start a mob online and destroy someone's entire career. I'm not surprised that authors, especially in a field as precarious as writing, are more than willing to follow what is deemed to be "safe" language, though it's definitely a loss for society as a whole and indirectly works to undermine writing as an art.
If it's truly 50-50, then no. But I don't see any way that a whole 50% of your audience is going to freak out if you change from "homeless" to "person experiencing homelessness," for example.
The guides are probably banking on most of the changes being accepted, however grudgingly. Of course, they may be wrong, and even if there's pushback, they may be convinced enough of the righteousness of their cause to press ahead anyway.
if people don't want certain words associated with them, i'll do my best not to do that. I may not know, or i may fail, but i will attempt to do that which is asked of me. Because it's not a problem for me to try.
That's the thing, most of the people described by these changes are not requesting them. Small self appointed experts are coming up with the rules and attempting to force them on society.
None of society wanted most of this. They were convinced it was necessary for promotion of moral good. Essentially an elite language of virtue signaling making it easier to identify with others in the club.
I'm happy to read these things, as it exposes me to ideas that i might not have thought about. It will make me more sensitive to situations where words may affect people in ways i didn't see, but should have. It is no offense to me to take these ideas on board. It costs me nothing, and potentially makes other people feel more included. So win-win, from my point of view.
Given time, “woke” will evolve into its own dialect completely incomprehensible to common language.
Every persons unique experience becomes new terms to be added to the lexicon. A burden of irrelevant knowledge for the rest of society to navigate in order to communicate.
ADnD called these kinds of dialects, "Alignment Languages." They're a larger form of Shibboleth that provide a filter of if someone is in a particular in-group, and the rulebook actually explicitly calls out speaking an Alignment Language in public as seen as very rude.
Being able to code switch between them, or simply avoid jargon from your own Alignment Language and understand the jargon from others is a critical communication skill when you need to work with people who have radically different values than your own.
These values didn't originate naturally. It is a side effect that creates division.
Cyberpunk RPG 1995 rule book NeoTribes ...
"It is now accepted among historical scholars that in the decades before the Collapse, America suffered from the sicknesses of racism and "cultural identity'.
Everyone wanted to be seen as special. Every group had to be "equal" to or preferably better than its neighbors, and fought to protect its "special" rights. If anyone had something that someone else wanted, they were painted as racist, sexist, elitist or worse.
This divisive "me first" attitude eventually tore the fabric of American culture apart and caused it to self-destruct in a fireball of competing ideologies, none of which truly recognized each other's validity. Diversity led inexorably to anarchy."
>When Latinx began to be used in advanced milieus, a poll found that a large majority of Latinos and Hispanics continued to go by the familiar terms and hadn’t heard of the newly coined, nearly unpronounceable one.
There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your own team has become more important than relating your views to others and pursuading them to join your side.
> It's crazy that this label is still being pushed.
This is a great example of how intellectually bankrupt some of the social mis-movements towards redefinition truly are.
First they come up with a term that is clearly not a term used by the native speakers of that group. Then they utilize that term in order to collectively identify them. Then they push it across media, education, and many other avenues to make it "a thing".
This term which originates in English, and doesn't truly relate to Latin* derived cultures but instead to a smaller subset of cultures from a specific geography, and is difficult to speak for a native speaker, and violates the grammar, is then hoisted upon them like a label to which they'd actually subscribe. As many of these cultures self-identify as uniquely distinct from one another, and are competitive, this type of collectivist label is all the more rude.
My guess is an English speaker was forced to take French or Spanish in college and struggled to remember the gender for a word like “bicycle” and decided the whole notion of gendered language was silly and should be abolished.
People argue about how much of this comes from the internet/twitter; in the case of latinx it's clearly an internet phenomenon. The word is entirely unpronounceable, it could only have developed in writing.
The "pronouns" thing went nowhere in France. It was considered damaging to the French language.
> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color.
Also, the shift from moron to mentally defective to retarded to whatever.
This is such a sideshow. First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. If only we had a center with a clue. Nobody wants to tackle the hard but solveable problems. We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
> We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
That's because we can't fire the bottom 10% of cops. Who gets to decide who the bottom 10% are? There are deeply engrained cultural issues, systemic perverse incentives, in most police departments in the country. If you ask them to fire 10% of their forces, it's more likely to be the people who speak out against the Clan Police than it is the "bad apples" you're thinking of.
Besides, while maybe only a small minority would brutally murder a man by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while he cries for his mother, almost every single police officer on the force would stand there next to him and protect him while he did it. If you ran up and pushed the murderer off the man he's killing, trying to save his life, the other cops would beat you, possibly to death. Not 10% of them. 90% of them. You would be beaten and arrested. It's 90%. At least.
Whereas we can reduce funding to police departments; that is within the power of elected officials that the "defund" movement can help get elected.
which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained that the fish who swim in it can't even recognize it. Today there is such a poverty of the imagination that the left can't imagine anything else.
"Defund Planned Parenthood" has been a Republican rallying cry for abolishing PP for almost two decades and is but one of many "Defund" bills they've introduced going back years:
• Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act (2023)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2021
• Defund Federal Vaccine Mandates Act (2021)
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2021
• Defund Davos Act (2022)
• Defund Putin Act (2022)
• Defund the Ministry of Truth Act of 2022
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act (2021)
• Defund de Blasio’s Injection Sites Act of 2021
• Defunding Abortion Transportation Act (2022)
• Defund the People’s Liberation Army Act
• Defund the Wuhan Institute of Virology Act
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2020
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2019
• Defund Executive Orders that Suppress Free Speech Act
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2019
• Defunding United Nations Act of 2017
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2018
• Defunding the Corrupt and Incompetent United Nations Act
(2017)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2017
• Defund the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program Act of 2015
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015
• Defund Amnesty Act of 2015
• Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
• Defund United States Assistance to Pakistan Act of 2011
> We get “defund the police”, rather than “fire the bottom 10% of cops”.
Even if there was an objective way to measure the bottom 10% of cops that wasn’t subject to the same structural/institutional biases that are the main problem that “defund” is about, that would be a temporary solution that wouldn’t address the fundamental problems.
As it is, the structural problems means that any “Fire the bottom 10%” initiative in practice would reinforce, rather than mitigate, the problems, since the structural biases would factor into the evaluation.
Could you help me, I have a question: who should define how group of persons should be called?
* Group that outside of the group
* Majority of the group
* Minority of the group
* Any of the above when they think its for inclusion
?
Seriously though, you are pressed about other people using a term you don't use even though you're free to say Latino or Hispanic as much as you want.
The context matters immensely: The Sierra Club, a lobbyist group, conducts their work with politicians and government officials who are not pressed by inclusive language.
What I've learned from history is that every utopian dream realized is a dystopia. "In theory, theory is no different from in practice..." as the saying goes.
But how can we logically separate "trying to offend" and "not trying to offend" stances here, on a social platform, by reading two or three sentences comment written by some anonymous?
Assume good intent and interpret as generously as possible. I believe some version of these common sense notions are even in the site guidelines for Hacker News.
They're right to drop "American" but not for the reasons outlined.
An "American" is by definition is someone from the American continents (North and South America). Further a "North American" is someone from Mexico, USA, and Canada.
It gets worse when people have "Black Americans", "Italian Americans", "Asian Americans" because that means that "Americans" is only referring to one group of people from the USA.
It makes sense though, cause it's the United States of America. It's usually obvious from the context. Mexico and Canada are already single word countries, so you can easily say Asian Canadian or whatever.
South Africa would pose a similar conundrum, where people are called South Africans, but they aren't the only people living in Southern Africa.
Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. It's just not a label that's useful for much of anything.
"North or South American" isn't a particularly meaningful or relevant concept at all. In contrast with e.g. "Latin American" which is very useful/meaningful.
And if people from the United Mexican States are Mexican for short, it's an easy shorthand to similarly call people from the United States of America, well, American.
> Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group.
That's the thing: for many people, it's a single continent, called just "America", which can be further subdivided into "North America", "Central America", and "South America" (but these three are not continents, they're subdivisions within a single continent; another common subdivision is "Latin America", which corresponds to the countries colonized by Spain or Portugal).
> Do these people also believe in a single continent called “Eurasia”?
It's the traditional six-continent model (America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, Antarctica), which according to https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente is the model taught in school in many places, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, and all over Latin America. So no, "these people" (which includes nearly all of America outside the USA and Canada) have learned about Europe and Asia as two separate continents.
On the other hand, the seven‐continent model is dominant in the Anglosphere. So it seems the sensible thing to do is what in fact is already normally done: in Spanish and other such languages, use “América” to refer to North and South America, and in English, use “America” to refer to the USA and “the Americas” to refer to North and South America.
That's fine, but it still doesn't change the fact that there isn't really a need for a word to refer to its inhabitants collectively.
The same way Oceania is often considered a continent, but nobody ever refers to people there as "Oceanians" in a way that includes both modern Australians and Polynesians, for example.
I'm just saying that calling people in the USA "Americans" isn't taking away from an otherwise useful/important modern-day usage. Regardless of whether you consider it to be two continents or one.
These wholesale moves to prescribe new language in the interest of social justice are the reductio ad absurdum result of the whole menagerie of post-modern identity theories and movements, from critical race theory to post colonial theory to queer theory. It's all in service to the notion that you can create truth, particularly about identity, by modifying language and usage.
Ironically, it's also deeply counterproductive to the goals of identity theories, because it draws overt attention to language and sensitivity about language, in a way that makes identities appear, and to some extent actually become, fragile and dependent on the language. Where a word is owned and deployed by a group to suppress and control some other group (ni**, e.g.), taking the word away, anathematizing it, can indeed be of value. But most of the targets in modern social justice language correction have very little such power, and are not deployed as tools of suppression or oppression by most people. Take a broad enough run at them though, and you can give them that power, at lead in the mind of those to whom the refer.
The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far.
People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. People are so far up their own asses on victimhood culture that the people of high education and privilege driving these initiatives are looking for literally any reason to feign offense on behalf of other peoples' identities and disabilities.
With the prioritization of equity also comes erasure of identity. For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech".
The recently reported bowdlerization of Roald Dahl by 'sensitivity readers' is another symptom of this illness. The whole equity language sterilization process forgets that words which are synonyms are not interchangeable because to the writer each word is chosen with intention for the flavor it provides, its connotations and rhythm, the image it creates in the mind. People should be able to communicate using whatever words they wish. Otherwise we're just deleting colors from the artists' palette.
This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.
An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing.
The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.
It's not just academia, it's the modern "meritocracy" more broadly. When getting into a campus club at a top college requires four rounds of interviews, you look for easy ways to signal your eliteness and being hip to the new verbal trends is a great way for the well-heeled to extend their advantage over the less-enlightened.
This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.
All social structures survive through their self-perpetuation...it's a general critique with a lot of explanatory power that I've had on my mind.
Any kind of senseless decorum or self-defeating policy comes down to the intersection of self-perpetuating framings of reality with actors who either promote it out of self-interest, or take it upon themselves to become footsoldiers on faithful behalf of that idea, extending it to unreasonable, totalizing lengths in the process of protecting it like a child.
And that can manifest as "my way is right behavior and that is wrong behavior", or "we are good because they are bad", or any number of other illogical defenses. It's just automatic once you decide some thought has to be defended, and when it forms a really persistent, robust structure you end up with a religion, national mythos, economic norm etc. The structure is looking out for itself first, and the current elites hold the most gravity in deciding whether to further perpetuate or not. But elites aren't immune to being true believers either - they have to be able to let go and examine what they want to accomplish, and if the belief they have is too firmly tied to their immediate self-interest, they can't do it.
My reading here is derived somewhat from Heather Marsh's writings, but with different focus and phrasing.
> As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving for
In fact, proponents can’t even define this equilibrium, despite stating that it is the end goal. This proves that the goal is a lie.
It’s pure power seeking, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, because that is precisely what they assert determines truth and shapew society. Not some natural order, but people who held power over others. They complain about it but if you watch, it’s exactly what they’re doing themselves. Pure projection.
I came to realize that this is the case with advocacy groups. These groups will never want to say, "Hey, things aren't that bad anymore. We're working on some small problems, but honestly, we solved most of the stuff we were concerned about." Everything always needs to be in perpetual crisis. Wikipedia always needs to be in danger of shutting down. Political enemies are always supposed to be one step away from destroying the country forever. That's what drives the donations and prestige that keeps these groups going.
As groups become more successful, they're more likely to shift from reasonable goals to extreme goals.
Yeah. Over time this has killed my interest in charitable organizations, sad to say. I just don't trust them anymore because I think if I donate to an apparently well defined cause it'll actually just be embezzled and put to use hiring hard left activists who spend all their time harassing normal people in pursuit of their deranged ideology. The prevalence of dumb language purity guides amongst these organizations just reinforces that feeling. Nowadays I'm much now likely to donate to crowdfunders for the victims legal fees.
Organizations tend to be self-perpetuating. People whose power is derived from the organization and people who make money from the organization will want to keep the racket going.
The fact that you can only name a handful of people who survived full frontal attacks (for now) indicates that this is more than merely annoying. The ranks of the cancelled far outnumber them and we should recognize the disturbing historical parallels too. This type of language editing was a key plot point in 1984 because it is the habit of extremely dangerous far left regimes. I feel like the west is in danger of experiencing a communist revolution at some point.
Now a lot of readers will feel like that's absurd, extreme, maybe even trolling. But it was only a handful of years ago that I was posting here warning people that they should refuse to rename git master branches to main because accepting this for short term convenience or out of ideological sympathy would lead to an endless spiral of power games, used to purge anyone not on the far left. And here we are, not so long after, with lists of banned words so long nobody even bothers enumerating them all, any one of which can be used to build a case for getting rid of you.
There's a clear pattern here in which people are repeatedly not taking wokeness seriously enough. This isn't a game and they spend every waking hour taking over every institution. A communist revolution doesn't require capturing the seat of government permanently, if you can capture every institution that surrounds it and essentially eliminate all ability for a non revolutionary government to operate.
The fix is simple enough though: do a DHH and get rid of all woke people in your organisation. It's quite easy as given a hostile environment they tend to leave en masse and they weren't doing much work for the organisation anyway. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
There’s a cute story I read the other day about an “Offensiveness consultant” who teaches companies how to be just offensive enough on Twitter to make sure woke people don’t want to work at your company. The story is written for comedy - but the more I think about it, the more I wonder might be something people actively do, for all the reasons you’re talking about.
You don't even have to be offensive. Just give an all hands where the leadership publicly commits to merit-based promotion/hiring, tell people the org is now "mission focussed", stick a few rugs around the place that say "Meritocracy" on them and then get rid of anyone who complains. No offense will be taken by anyone who you don't want to be offended.
Beliefs, yes. But which part of the Inquisition was specifically about banning long lists of specific words, replacing them with semantically identical equivalents? Perhaps they did it, my history isn't that good, but the wiki page doesn't seem to discuss it much if so.
I certainly agree with you, and I do believe this is a very active fight where both sides are going strong. I'm not sure yet that they are losing, but it does feel like it's a worth fight. Of course, whoever is fighting against must also be sharply aware of not letting the fight itself get completely derailed by the opportunist bigots on the other side.
> Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular.
I think to some extent this is largely because Rowling was kept at arm's length. If Rowling was the mouthpiece for the game's story, showing up in interviews, etc., then I think more of the backlash against Rowling's personal actions would be impacting the game.
See also how Disney happily sells Pirates of the Carribean while maintaining they will never work with Johnny Depp again.
This phenomenon is known as a purity spiral, and here's a great story about one tearing an online knitting community to shreds.
In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…
I’m going to start using this terminology. It’s good to have simple phrases for this. It’s so much easier to say “I’m not going to engage in perpetuating a purity spiral” or “your not helping anyone by continuing the purity spiral long past the point of helping anyone who was genuinely affected by this”
It’s short and pithy, and it can sort of cover the core concept without needing deep academic understanding of the social dynamics involved.
> This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.
Not at all. Academia is about the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. What you are describing is happening in academia, but that is not its purpose or its main role. Academia is as much about the mating habits of the spotted fizzbuzz up in the Andes or the design of advanced composite materials or developing vaccines for malaria than the understanding of how humans behave in society.
The ridiculous extremes are not confined to academia, this is just an anti-intellectual talking point. Nobody is running around panicking that the purpose of elections is to produce fascists.
> An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement.
Again this weird focus on academia. Journalists, politicians, and random blokes on the internet do it. Most of academics don’t. The problem is humans in general, your scapegoat is meaningless. By ascribing your issues to an immaterial Other entity out to get you, you absolve the rest of society, which is really where the problem lies.
I will concede to you that I was too general in my comment. As an academic myself (with nearly a decade on the senior circles of higher education in a highly developed country), I absolutely agree with you that the main goal of academic work is the pursuit of knowledge. To be honest, I wanted to use the term "academic issue" more as a way to express that the issue is disconnected from the more practical issues of the real world, rather than to mean only the formal, academic world. I was inaccurate in that. You can pursue academic interests and discuss academic issues outside of the university; I think of it as an interchangeable term with "philosophical", for example.
I also agree with you that these issues happen outside of academia. It just so happens that I perceive this specific problem as being academic. The fact that I argue that this is an academic problem does not imply that this only happens in academia (one example does not necessarily generalize to the whole).
And yes, obviously, running towards extremes is not confined to academia; however, my point was that it is more-or-less ok to do it in academic work as long as you do not try to force your extreme views back down to the rest of society (which most academics don't, or if they do, fail). Actually, I'd argue that there is no better way to do it. Research often means pushing things to extreme, and most of its results die gracefully and are replaced with something else that is more reasonable for the current times (or simply gets forgotten). Don't take this wrong, as if I believe that research is useless. In the same way that a startup dies (and must die) if it cannot offer a feasible, interesting, useful product, research also dies (and must die) if its results make sense but are not applicable. No problem there.
The problem begins when the academic issues (whether they are discussed in the university or not) which are being pushed to the extreme in order to test the waters are then being pushed down society's throat aggressively like this, without regards to whoever they trample over on the way. These academic issues are being forcefully, steadily introduced into public and private institutions that have a very real, concrete power over how many people act, behave, work, and communicate. These are (in one way or another) governing agencies that, while they are not the police so to speak, still have under their belt lots of different means and tools to enforce certain things over large groups of people. This is extremely irresponsible of those who think of themselves as drivers in this movement.
Thank you, I swear half the time I can’t figure out if people are genuinely confused by inclusive language or if they confuse it on purpose just to get riled up.
It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.
No — people are just aware that humans are sexually dimorphic and don’t appreciate people demanding they not use language that accurately describes the peaks of a bimodal distribution because there’s a small percentage of outliers. Mammals in general are sexually dimorphic.
Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.
We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.
Girl you gotta get off the internet. No one is demanding you use this language. It’s actually the opposite where people have a visceral reaction to someone voluntarily choosing to use inclusive language. Style guides like these are for awareness, everyone has had the moment where they discover a word they picked up is actually offensive. One that happened for me was “gypped.” A lot of the guides do contain silly substitutions but that’s because they’re wrong about the history of the words and their usage not because the idea or intent is bad.
I am almost certain the person who told you that was offensive was not someone from the group allegedly being offended, but by some person from a highly educated privileged background deciding to be offended on that group’s behalf.
“Hey by the way that word is offensive” isn’t really the same as being offended. It was a 5 second interaction where they were like “that word is like jewed or welshed but for the Roma” and I was like, “my bad didn’t know that.” That was it. Despite what the internet told me I wasn’t immediately canceled. Like what is the point you’re trying to make, that it’s not offensive or that someone who isn’t Roma isn’t allowed to recognize that using an ethnicity’s name as a verb in a disparaging way is offensive?
Part of the reason rule based language processing failed, is because language does not fall into hard and fast categories with no exceptions.
Normal people instinctively understand this, and “woman” and “mother” are completely understandable and useful terms, even if there are a handful of exceptions out of millions are exceptions to the strict definition.
That is fake news from a convicted fraudster. It was claimed but never supported by evidence [0].
"Fertility clinician Cecil Jacobson claimed to have transplanted a fertilized egg from a female baboon to the omentum in the abdominal cavity of a male baboon in the mid-1960s, which then carried the fetus for four months; however, Jacobson did not publish his claims in a scientific journal, and was subsequently convicted on several unrelated counts of fraud for ethical misconduct."
Should everyone take care to account for the most improbable interpretations, even unintended ones? Thanks for providing a good sample of equity language. Feels like being dictated by an elite to the masses.
> your statement is incorrect because trans men exist and they can get pregnant
So that’s an edge case. They can call themselves a mother or father or birthing person or pink elephant. That shouldn’t mean someone else can’t identify as a mother or father or whatnot.
This isn’t even a novel delineation; adoption and surrogacy have long dealt with the separation of parenting and reproductive roles. Besides, history’s foremost feminists would cringe at womanhood and motherhood being reduced to a biological function.
The person you replied to (shrimp_emoji) was responding to the statement "a pregnant person is a woman".
"A pregnant person is a woman" doesn't say anything about what people are allowed to call themselves, but rather makes an absolute statement that all pregnant people can be called "women". It doesn't take into account the edge cases you mentioned, and that's what shrimp_emoji took offense to.
I think that highlight my main gripe about what I'd call excessive inclusion. Sure there are some people who identify as male, who will go on to become pregnant, but they have to understand that they are not representative of anything. The number of trans-men who also become pregnant is so tiny that it's beyond an edge case, it's not something that needs to be accounted for everywhere. That's not to say that they shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else, or that we should tolerate actions taken against them. It's just that some groups are so tiny that having special language or accommodation for them makes little sense.
If they are successful in have a pregnant trans-woman in Unicode, you just know that, depending on the depiction, it will be used as "The fat guy"-icon.
Personally I use it for "I ate too much" too. Half the fun of emojis is the new unofficial uses that evolve (I wonder what the fruit peach folks' thoughts are).
I don't see the problem of including small groups - they are the ones who are most invisible and marginalized and therefore in need of recognition. You say it makes little sense, but to me it not only makes sense but is self-evident. Even if you're right, I can scroll through my emoji map and see many that are even more niche, yet none of them receive the angry flak GNC emoji do. (Not to even mention the even more obscure items in the rest of Unicode.)
Can we not use the word car because motorcycles only have two wheels? Why do we need to change language for a few hundred people worldwide? Why do trans men get pregnant since it is the least masculine thing possible?
It seems to me that one of the issues is that the (more extreme) woke culture has put the entire burden of communication on the speakers rather than the listeners. Is not enough that you intend to offend, or that you say something that offends someone, is whether something that you say could possibly offend someone, even if you didn't have the slightest intentions. On the other say the listeners are free to interpret the message in the most uncharitable way possible, and blame you for it.
Eh, that’s just internet discourse in general. Once you put down Twitter this stops being an issue. I would love for someone to deconstruct what about social media, regardless of leaning of the platform, the people, or the subject being discussed causes these bad faith takes.
The issue is when you didn't say it on twitter, or even intend it for public consumption and it's posted as receipts on twitter as examples of your badness - often out of context. Then there are some knock on second and third order effects on your life.
It's one thing if communities on twitter would like to define their own use of the language - it's another when it's imposed on others without their consent.
I describe these scenarios to my young children as concentric circles. One person can be acting reasonably (small circle around them) or very badly (larger circle). A person nearby can be very resilient (small circle) or fragile (larger circle). Where the circles overlap, is when there is tension and there are fights, tears or anything else that requires me to intervene.
Obviously very bad behaviour (large circle) is going to overlap with a nearby resilient child. Or a very tired and fractious child is going to sulk by their sibling doing just about anything. But the more resilient and better behaved the combinations, the better.
If the children are fighting, I've taken to just calling out "Circles!"
Unfortunately, a polarised society and social media seem to make everyone treat interaction as war, which is pretty tedious.
I personally believe that 2 things have greatly affected P2P communications. Anonymity and attempting to hold meaningful conversation strictly through text. When we communicate with text we cut off non-verbal communications that are a major source of interpreting the intent of the speaker and the receptiveness of the listener. In-person conversations are constantly adjusting what and how things are said depending on non-verbal cues. This becomes impossible in text only communications so the words have to convey everything and word choice the dominant replacement for non-verbal cues. The fact that we are communicating primarily via text these days has spilled over into in person communication. IMHO
But interpreting someone's words in the most uncharitable way possible is an ancient sport, intended to slight and annoy the opponent, when finding reasonable, material objections fails. It's just an ancient hold of wresting in the (verbal) mud. It sort of gives the party who successfully pulled it an upper hand.
Now that these wrestlers found out that they can persuade the public that the most uncharitable interpretation is actually harmful to some third party (nobody from the audience usually says that they personally are offended), this approach became immensely popular.
Since simple reason would usually dispel much of the effect, leaving only the small and easily correctable issue, it is common to excite a large amount of reason-eclipsing emotions over such issues, preferably the righteous rage.
But it may feel fun to express a strong and righteous emotion, especially in a crowd of other people doing the same. It does not take thinking, it does not take making a difficult decision (because everybody around can't be wrong), so it feels good. A big echo chamber like a popular Twitter thread make it feel epic in scale.
This makes that kind of righteous rage a very convenient tool of manipulation, for fun, profit, and any other purposes.
And to be clear, these uncharitable interpretations go far beyond word policing.
The one that actually annoys me the most is “analogy policing”. If I say “would you be ok if i stole your bike”. And then your response is “now you’re equating me to a bike thief!” Or “ you’re trivializing This to bike theft?!”
We can’t have discussions because every phrase is taken as a way to win an argument. IMO this is far worse than language policing as there is not even the intention of trying to protect a disadvantaged group.
> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people"
Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language.
"Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out the door it goes.
There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. To the extent that it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"
Yeah, it's like a competition between the worst of two groups of people as to who can change them more and skew the language, or lack of it, in their ideological direction.
> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment.
This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity.
I've been somewhat worried about there not being much of place in the world for my sons when they grow up. Now I'm imagining needing to explain to my daughter that there's no point having any sporting aspirations unless they are in a sport where biological women have an advantage.
Edit: on reflection, perhaps it was completely foreseeable. Modern feminism spent a lot of time dismantling masculinity; it makes some sense that femininity would be next against the wall.
You do realize that the terminology is meant for transmen right? It's weird you're complaining about terminology used for transmen, and then linking it to transwomen in sports.
I am still opposed to them because they're driving a moral panic that hurts trans people in other ways, because it's part of a wider drive / overton window shift to making life as a trans person impossible in these states (including declaring our existence as "sexual", banning us from most public places children could be), because there are still some trans people affected (or their ambitions are quelled) and, here's a reason you, who has given me no indication of asking in good faith, should care about: Because cis girls that anyone suspects of being trans are subjected to actual, and i can't believe i'm writing these words, genital inspections. What a stupid question to ask.
And please, stop pretending like trans women and cis men are a 1:1 comparison. We have trans athletes. Use them - in aggregate and not with an anecdote - to make your comparisons and you'll see it's pretty much a normal distribution of performance. In fact, you're making my point for me, because even the most salient of examples still get beaten by cis women. That wouldn't happen if we had this immense disparity.
It's not just muscle mass. Men have thicker bones and in general are obviously larger. Lia Thomas is 6'1".
Laurel Hubbard (MtF) was on New Zealand's Olympic weightlifting team. An Indigenous Maori girl missed out because of that.
There's countless examples of athletes who were totally uncompetitive as males, suddenly becoming elite-level after transitioning. If that doesn't say male advantage I don't know what does.
But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.
>But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.
Ah yes, the penises and their unashamed wielders, large 6'1" men, exposing their meat to the elements. It reminds me of homophobes being uncomfortable sharing the looker room with an openly gay person.
Should we also concern ourselves with the women still uncomfortable sharing a changing room with "colored" people?
If there are so many countless examples, why don't you name a single one of them. Or even better, anything that's not an anecdote.
(You named two, but you forgot to mention Lia is still very regularly beaten and Laurel placed last in her group at those Olympics, in a weight class that had most countries not even send a competitor.)
These people have higher than baseline testosterone in their system. Trans women usually have close to none. This is not comparing the same, or even similar situations.
Indeed this seems like a refutation of the whole thesis that trans athletes are somehow cheating. Intersex conditions are natural (as in no surgery of hormone treatments are involved), yet they confer a competitive advantage - just like genes for bigger lungs or longer limbs confer an advantage to some athletes - so why should a trans person be treated as uniquely advantaged?
The claim isn't that trans athletes are cheating. The claim is they should not be allowed to participate in women's sports.
The intersex athletes support this claim because, although their condition is "natural" in your sense, they are in fact being banned from participation in women's sports. For example, the various individuals mentioned above are restricted from participating in distances from 400m to a mile, including in particular 800m! (Thus they have switched to other distances, but the bans are likely to extend there too.)
>The single biggest genetic difference among humans is the presence of a Y chromosome.
That is actually incorrect. You can be born with a Y chromosome and zero functional testosterone[1]. There are a lot of moving parts in between having a Y chromosome and getting testosterone expression. The later of which is a much better discriminator.
And also, these deviations aren't rare. Though they are usually unknown, when they don't cause obvious developmental deviation (and thus labeled DSDs). They also are more common in some populations.
>Some states that introduced trans sports bans couldn't even cite a single person the bill would affect. Tenesee introduced their bill to ban a single person. Who wasn't even close to the top of her discipline. It's all political posturing.
This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.
There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.
"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists. That's misreading gender as social construction. Social construction doesn't automatically advocate for abolishment, it merely points out that these things are not universal constants. Money is such a construct too, and I don't even have to be anticapitalist to point that out.
Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.
Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.
>"Throw out the idea is gender" sounds like you have a very specific view of trans people as gender abolitionists.
I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.
These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.
The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.
>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?
You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances. Not disallowing trans people to compete is not an accomodation, it's the opposite. These are not actions of equal value.
It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.
The reason we have women's sports in the first place is essentially a different form of "you have to be below 2m" in order to promote diversity in sports, so disallowing trans people doesn't seem like a much bigger step than disallowing 50% of the population.
Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
> Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.
> You're talking about making exclusion an intervention, not a result of circumstances.
That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.
An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).
> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...
This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.
Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.
I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.
I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.
I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.
That's a lot of moral panic about a very small group of people that don't generally win more often
Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.
Even if you had this data point, transitioning usually comes with higher functioning. I'm not sure how you'd quantify this data.
What I will say is that I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers is mostly driven by those that can gain political capital from it.
I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers
If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.
I disagree, because I do not consider being trans a factor that is usually malleable and the relative increase in performance would not displace anyone with a shot at winning.
You wouldn't make this point about most other unchanging factors (i.e. genetics) that affect performance either. "Fairness" in high end sports is extremely subjective, and hard work is only a small part of how successful you can be, with time (which usually equals to wealth; poor people can't afford to not work) and genetics being the most important. It's simply not a meritocracy in the first place.
There is no reason to selectively care about it being unfair. The controversy only exists in the first place because it is a great way for republicans and right wing figureheads to have queer people turned into an existential threat to rally support and perhaps distract from issues more materially relevant to voters. Voters that would never care about fairness in women's sports if it didn't involve queer people to hate. You simply have to acknowledge this. Even if you were not the intended audience and now have an interest in the theoretical question through proximity, the number of people that are actually personally impacted by this is near zero and all the attention originates in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.
I refuse to acknowledge this as controvercy that requires this kind of addressing.
Voters that would never care about fairness in women's sports if it didn't involve queer people to hate.
That's certainly a large percentage of the motivation, granted. I do think a salient point is that there's nobody lobbying to make it unfair in some other way. If there were groups successfully lobbying to, say, abolish weight classes or allow the use of some expensive performance enhancement like a heads-up display, people would also oppose it.
> That's a lot of moral panic about a very small group of people that don't generally win more often (and even your typical examples like Lia Thomas also regularly get beaten by cis women, so the advantage could not be that extradordinary) and mostly compete in college-level sports.
I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.
Only recently has it become clear that about 2 years of HRT eliminates competitive advantage for endurance sports, but that no amount of HRT seems to erase the competitive advantage in power sports of trans women who have gone through male puberty (MMA, power lifting, etc.).
> I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.
There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special? I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU
> There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special?
Yes, testosterone is special because it's a huge advantage. Like, the next closest factor doesn't even come close across most sports. Some women who were born female have naturally high testosterone levels and are barred from competing in women's categories.
Yes, I've seen it, and it does do a good job. Notice the argument being made:
1. Sports is entertainment.
2. Sports is entertaining to the extent that the outcome is unpredictable.
3. We keep it unpredictable by establishing fairness so no one has privileged knowledge of the outcome.
The extreme examples she cites of unfairness were not entertaining exactly because the outcome was predictable. Given sports is to be entertaining due to unpredictability, preserving fairness is critical.
I sometimes feel this is some nefarious plan to reconstruct a new masculinity. It won't be as "toxic" as the old version, but we'll be back on top.
I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are about to be sentenced to jail time.
But men are largely still men. I've never heard "penis havers", or "vertical urinators". Perhaps I would if I hung about in certain circles. No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
> No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport.
By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.
> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]
> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.
There's just very few sports in which the male body is not at an intrinsic mechanical advantage.
When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.
This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.
But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.
One plausible explanation I've heard for this is that while men and women have the same average mental capabilities, men have a higher standard deviation than women. There there are more outliers in both directions. Champions are found at the upper extreme.
Regarding toilets, it is because women's toilets have also traditionally served as a 'safe space' (i.e. without men). It is somewhere they can go without being subject to (for example) what is colloquially termed the 'male gaze'. Hence the disquiet over trans-women using such spaces, and the lack of disquiet over the reverse.
Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.
Sporting aspirations at the elite level is generally an illusion unless the parents are also at elite level. Last time I looked at studies, the average sport is around 75-99% determined by genetics when it comes to the top elite in those sports. World champions has to first win the genetic lottery, and then do the hard work to even have a chance to win. This is why its fairly common to see top elite sport players having parents, siblings or children that is also at similar elite level.
The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.
Feminism has always been about eradicating gender roles, and that's usually fine because the gender stereotypes that existed were almost all factually incorrect. It's definitely going in directions people never expected though.
An adult human is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien.
An adult human female is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien who belongs to the reproductive class that produces large, immobile gametes. The reproductive system of an individual may be actual, potential, historic or broken.
I'll play ball here. What do you classify intersex people as? Especially those born with either completely mixed gonadal representation or genitalia? Are they neither male nor female? These things are bimodal in distribution, but they are not perfectly binary.
But what do you classify an intersex person as when you see them, assuming you don't know this detail? Our social lens is focused to a binary, even if there isn't a definitive binary.
This is rapidly getting into "justified true belief" territory.
Let's say you have concrete definitions of man and woman (and as many additional categories as you please). You see a person and believe they fall into one category. As it turns out, you are wrong, and they are actually in another category.
That you miscategorized someone has no bearing on the validity (or lack thereof) of your definitions.
People keep trotting out this etymology, but it's always been entirely speculative and there's no attested premodern usage of anything resembling the phrase with that meaning. What there is attested usage of is a Cicero argument of the form "if there's an exception that makes it illegal, then the general rule must be that it's legal outside of the exception".
Its been a while but I seem to remember that its adoption as a maxim outside of law is itself fairly modern, and coincides with that usage, but, in any case, even if that were not the traditional meaning outside of law, the maxim is (outside of its use as a maxim of legal analysis) simply false and illogical in any other sense. Exceptions disprove rules, they don’t prove them.
The legal maxim only makes sense in its domain because it rests on the idea that law is written by people, and that calling out a specific case for one treatment reveals a pre-existing understanding that outside of that case, that treatment would not apply.
There are only two types of gametes, and two reproductive classes capable of producing them. Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other. There is no documented case of a true hermaphrodite capable of reproducing as both male and female.
> Everyone — even rare intersex individuals — can only belong to one reproduction class or the other.
In principle, this is not necessarily true in Ovotesticular DSD (formerly “True Hermaphroditism”), which is generally a symptom of tetragametic chimerism, though for both health and gender reasons it is apparently not uncommon for people who naturally have both functional ovarian and testicular tissue to have hormone therapy and/or surgery to align more with the sex traits stereotypical of a single preferred gender.
That taxonomy was developed approximately 140 years ago, before the development of modern genetics and endocrinology, is based on the existence of mere gonad tissue, is scientifically specious, and has fallen out of favor.
So-called “true hermaphrodites” do not have functional male and female reproductive systems.
It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts.
It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.
The person I was replying to said "every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts". I of expressed doubt about such a statement.
Then you popped into with a completely different reason. I'm still working on the original argument. We came up with more than two words to express the concept.
The claim you made: "there is no simple definition if you want to define man and woman."
Rayiner's response: "It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts."
"Two distinct words" plainly refers to the two sexes. Virtually every human society ("most of us") hit upon classifying humans into these two categories, with very rare exceptions that I'm sure you're itching to point out right now. You have tried to perform a sleigh-of-hand "gotcha" by pointing out that there are many words for women and many words for men, but you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can gaslight a dog like me into believing that is a rebuttal of Rayiner's point.
Woman isn't a sex, it's a gender. Female and Male are sexes. OH MY. We have Male, Female, Man, and Woman? I though virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts, not 4.
These words are fractals, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s alarming that we’re unable, as a matter of discourse, to accept this useful ambiguity anymore.
At its simplest, a woman is a person who identifies as such. At among its most complex, it’s an empowered expression of femininity. That there isn’t a single definition doesn’t make the word bad, it makes it human.
But I'm OK with this. One of the original people demanding "define a woman" was a law maker. If we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
> we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition
Not ex ante. That’s the strength of common law. If you have a problem with this, consider why we need laws which define womanhood. (Yes, I am an ERA proponent.)
> One of the original people demanding “define a woman” was a law maker. If we’re making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
We don’t (and, contrary to a sibling comment, this is not particular to common law, it applies in civil law jurisdictions as well, though it may be more true in the common law). If every word in law needed a “stringent definition”, the law would be so full of definitions you’d never be able to find the rules that actually apply them to the real world. Laws sometimes need stringent definitions, and they sometimes need disambiguation between plausible alternatives that don’t actually require a stringent definition, and sometimes they get by just fine with no definition at all.
This is circular an so, not a deninition. Not a problem as long as this is part of an internal personal model. It is a problem when reasoning about social structures.
It’s Cartesian, not circular. There’s a difference. We don’t need it rigorously defined for it to have meaning—that’s the point. (This does make it a word incompatible with precise endeavours like lawmaking.)
You did not define, rigorously or otherwise. As to needs, when we turn to conversations on how to structure a society, subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required.
> subjective meaning is not sufficent - definitions are required
This is the flaw. It isn’t. It is required if we will write rules with respect to it. But there is another way. Forcing everything into an objective definition is the source of our divides, not a solution to anything.
Statesmen, from Cicero to Hamilton to Obama, understood this. But there is an emerging tendency to treat every system as technical, and that is destructive.
Just came back from my son's Judo competition. The children are paired by age and weight - girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
> girls separately from the boys. What is your take on this arrangement?
That it’s irrelevant to the definition of a woman. That’s the strength of fuzzy definitions.
When separating the kids, did anyone formally define what a girl or a boy is? Did every parent in that room need to resolve every edge case to their implied definitions ex ante? Could you guarantee conflict by forcing a formal definition on that group, even if it results in the same practical outcome the implied, unsaid definition yielded and which was peacefully accepted by the group? No, no and, of course, yes.
Please stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition. It is to definition what "alternative fact" is to a fact.
Now, you are right that for the purposes of this event no one defined what a girl or a boy is. The reason it is so (as is the case with many other social conventions) is because neither the participants nor the organizers challenge the classification.
There is no doubt that had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal.
> stop calling "a woman is a person who identifies as such" a fuzzy definition
I didn’t. I called it a simple definition. It’s not generally correct because it’s too precise.
> had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal
For people without any civics background, yes. That we lack leaders who push back against overspecification, or people raising needless challenges out of, I don’t know, maladjustment, is a cultural failure, collectively, and an individual failing among those who don’t understand nuance.
Like a “race”, a “gender” is a social grouping of either identity or ascribed membership that is distinguished by being viewed as being exclusive with (though, in some models, admitting mixtures as their own unique possibilities), others in the same named group.
> By that definition, isn’t “emo” — or literally any other social category — a gender
No, “emo” is a social category that is not exclusive with genders, its in a different bucket.
But, yes, the distinction of social categories into groups like “gender”, “race”, etc., is, like the categories themselves, fundamentally an arbitrary social construct.
> Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?
Binary “sex” is just ascribed gender on the basis of a subset of sex traits. To the extent there is a valid basis for segregating services, it varies from service to service. Similarly, the motivations vary from service to service (and, generally differ from the legitimate justifications, if any.)
> The fact that 1 in a million people is neither a man or a women
the number you are looking for here (ie only ..
conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female
) is 180 in a million, or some 4,625 or so in a country such as Australia - which does have some real bearing on things such as national passports and why Australia has a three value gender field there ( M | F | X ).
Less strictly, the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7% or 17,000 in a million.
The previous definition was Adult Human Female, dropping the adult is weird because you wouldn't consider an 11 year old experiencing their menarche to be a woman right? I think the tropey phrase would be "becoming a woman".
But okay you would like to define a woman as a human female, "an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))", if a prepubescent takes hormone blockers for their entire life does that interrupt your definition of woman? What about if an XY Swyer Syndrone individual has a functional uterus and ovaries? What if a female with hypogonadism takes hormone therapy to prevent infertility?
Well, the word "woman" can mean both "human adult female" and "human female", but I think anyone accepting one of these definitions would accept both, so that's not controversial IMO.
Probably we should look at potential over one's life, likely at (or even before) birth, otherwise the same could be argued for "what if a child dies before they're fertile"?
The distinction between sex and gender wasn’t really made until the 1940s and 1950s in parts of academia. The idea of them as separate ideas is sort of a modern invention.
Maybe in a general sense, but not in the way we use the word “gender” today. This distinction was made by academics studying this in the 1940s and 1950s, really becoming widespread in academia in the 1960s.
Isn't that mostly a result of how much you want to focus on the outliers? XX male syndrome is estimated to exists in 1:20000 - 1:30000 people. It's so rare that we have a name for it. Somewhat like rebutting to what a car is by arguing that a handful of cars through history actually had two wheels. And yes, I'm aware that XX syndrome isn't the only outlier but the point still stands.
Eventually you'll realise that all labels have exceptions. Unless you come to terms with that, every definition will just be diluted to the extend that it loses all meaning.
If there are outliers you don't get to change the definition of the established binary and force the outliers into them. The outliers are just that, outliers, a 3rd, 4th, etc option.
If you argument is that there are more than 2 genders, that's fine, Man, Woman and whatever else.
They are outliers that have their own names.
Certain things are constant though
Man: Adult Human with XY sex Chromosomes
Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
Everything else and I mean no disrespect with this term, are mutations that fall outside of the norm.
Surgery and hormones though do not change your sex chromosomes. You are still sex you were born as. You can be a trans woman, but sex wise you are still a man and vice versa for trans men.
I wish trans people all the happiness in the world but if you paint stripes on a horse its still a horse, not a zebra.
OK so the definition is that a human has 2 arms. What happens when they don't have two arms? Are they a new thing? Or are they still a human that we should treat with the same respect we grant to everyone?
They are still human, just missing (or have extra) arms. We should treat them with the same respect and dignity as anyone else that have 2 arms. What we don't say is we don't know how many arms humans have just because some people have more or less than 2.
It's ironic because the entire concept of online language policing was invented by arch rivals the radical feminists in the 2010s (anyone remember donglegate?), but the pendulum has swung so far back in the other direction that now the very concept of women is being erased. Geez!
Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.
It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.
However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.
> Gender suffixes have always had a gender connotation, because it is plainly what they mean.
no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.
it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.
None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.
I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."
I was kind of with you, birthing person does sound pretty obstruse. But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.
There are some uses radfems get super upset about that I find useful, though. Like "people with cervixes" if you are asking for cervical cancer screenings. Because increasingly, that affects people who do not feel spoken to if you use the word woman and this adds clarity to who the audience is.
> But then you threw in the (self-described!) theocratic fascist dogwhistle.
Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.
And since nobody has asked that question before that well known rhetorical work we know everyone who mentions the same question is just dog whistling a reference to it.
to Matt Walsh is pretty clear. The entire documentenary is based on the premise that it's now controversial to ask this, because the answer must inevitably be "adult human female". It's treated as if these are magic words that dispel gender ideology instantly. Meanwhile in reality, nobody finds this question controversial, only that Matt Walsh puports to know the one and only, extremely obvious answer. That many people disagree with.
What do you mean that nobody finds the question controversial? I remember it being a huge controversy when the US congress asked it during Kentanji Brown Jackson's interview.
You got the order of events wrong. That was after it became a dogwhistle for bioessentialism. As a consequence of Matt Walsh.
I guess if you want to be exact, I will correct to "nobody found this question controversial before it became a dogwhistle". But the question itself is still not controversial, it's all context.
If you explain to me the purpose of the question - that not being invoking the dogwhistle - I'll let you know. Otherwise I'm not interested in playing this game with a bad faith actor.
The purpose is that in the law we have clearly determined concepts such as Women's Rights. Thus, the justice system needs to be able to determine who is or not a woman in order to do its job properly. For instance, in the UK wolf-whistling can be considered a hate-crime if and only if the receiver is a woman.
Why not just make wolf-whistling a hate crime regardless of the receiver's identity? From the responses I've gotten around here a woman is an adult. Now we're legally OK with young girls being wolf-whistled at?
Aside that we are in agreement that laws should not be gendered if we want equality (not examining whether wolf-whistling should be a hate-crime - imho it’s ridiculous it is in any context) since we live in reality and there ARE gendered laws I’ll reply to the second part of your comment.
It does exactly make the point, you are somehow trying to define what a woman is, and asking if the definition only encompasses adult human females or underage as well.
It's amazing that some are seemingly convinced a conservative man came up with a problem that feminists (so-called "radfems") have highlighted for years. Goes to show how little attention many pay to women's issues.
"What is a woman" is a perfectly reasonable question to ask a legislator who refuses to acknowledge that women exist. I certainly would never vote for someone who believes that women are defined as "whatever I feel right now." I'm disappointed you think it's the people demanding acknowledgement which should be labelled "theocratic fascists" rather than the misogynists refusing to acknowledge women exist.
I didn't label anyone a theocratic fascist. That's just Matt Walsh's twitter bio. Though radfems seem not too uncomfortable with Walsh, considering JKR praised the man for his "documentary" and received little backlash from her loyal following.
It absolutely does not add clarity. Enough people do not even know what a cervix is, or whether they have one, that it's an obfuscation. One which harms women disproportionately, like most other things radfems get upset about.
Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.
But... that's absolutely a thing? Is this the same selective perception that brings radfems to proclaim that trans lesbians don't date each other?
(That being said, the likelyhood of getting prostate cancer on HRT is pretty low. Not quite the level of cis men getting breast cancer, but it's down there. It's a very androgen dependent cancer.)
If it only takes a simple sentence to set you off. You should be careful how much you’re reading into peoples language. The worlds not filled with facists in disguise. Look at people that way and you’ll see it everywhere. It will drive you mad.
I would be pissed if anyone referred to my wife as some kind of breeding vessel. These DEI bureaucrats have lost their minds, and companies have lost their minds for allowing this layer to grow so large.
The utterly hilarious defense by the left for a movement that - above all others - is deeply patriarchal in its attempt to overwhelm and wipe out the very concept of "woman".
This is the idea behind TERFs, right? How can women have equal rights if “women” don’t even exist? I’m honestly surprised more feminists don’t have strong anti-transgender sentiment.
I'm trans myself and this language policing game is insane. The most surreal part about it is it's rarely anyone allegedly impacted by it who is actually asking for these things.
Yep, same with disabilities, or children playing/costuming as cowboy and indian, or cultural appropriation where certain people are now not allowed wear a rasta haircut, or, or, or... Most ""affected"" people actually don't give a shit AND don't want this shit. But sjws can scapegoat any doubt to this holy mission and make one look like a Nazi.
Usually never is also the intention or context taken into account.. You will always find someone who will say he feels insulted for anything, but we won't find a common denominator if we need to account for every salty person on earth. True respect, equality and no discrimination for everybody is what should count... but it feels today more and more that this is actually alienating, and also excluding people more than what it helps, the contrary! How to stop? Intention is good, but taken to the extreme, this is todays discrimination and exclusion..
Realistically I think what has happened is the puritanical culture has donned new clothes. Blind subservience and self-flagellations to ever increasing standards of a sacrificial victim sky man who never asked for these things in the words they twisted, replaced with blind subservience to sacrificial victims in the present who one again, never asked for these things in the words they twisted.
It makes me feel like a pawn in their own self-actualization, not someone they remotely ever gave a thought or care about.
I agree - it's basically a new strain of puritan thinking. The problem is that unlike established religions - where you can step away and say "I don't recognise your moralising" with pretty much no repercussions, the line between "progressive left" ideology and wider society is much less clear - and so fighting this type of thinking can have real repercussions for your career or social life. It's not really worth rocking the boat.
How do you deal with it? The trans people I know tend to grit their teeth at risk of making an already awkward social interaction worse. But that surely must result in a lot of bottled up resentment.
I think the “people-first language” is actually kind of dumb in a lot of cases. Because the idea behind it is not really sound.
Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.
Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.
> People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me
Why is that? I’m genuinely curious. Who should be offended by the word slave? Is it I, the Slav? The etymology of the word concerns my heritage, and yet I’m not offended. It’s not as though people toying with language today is going to bring back my relatives who died as slaves, nor will it undo the suffering they endured.
I doubt slaves care so much about being called slaves or enslaved people, but having their freedom and autonomy stripped from them and treated horribly with no avenue for recompense.
I agree, and personally found it upsetting once when someone who was from a relatively well off family tried shaming me for using the term slave in my code. I'm of Ukrainian descent, and my grandfather was separated from his family at the age of 12 and sent to a forced labor camp, never to see them again. No human should ever have to experience that, and we must remember that even now there are still humans being treated like literal tools, as our computers are also nothing but tools. If seeing the word slave makes you uncomfortable, then good, it should make you uncomfortable that there are humans who have been treated no better than your computer, potentially even in the supply chain of making it.
Slavery doesn’t imply any particular race. Some people hold the belief that it does, or that one needs to be of a particular race to take a position on or claim victimhood of slavery, but this, quite frankly, is racist.
> People-first language (“enslaved people” not “slaves”)
“enslaved people” is not people/person-first language.
“People who are enslaved” is people-first language.
“enslaved people” is “situation first” (more commonly “identity first” or “disability first”, but neither strictly applies to “being enslaved”) language, just as “slaves” is. (In the disability context, “the disabled” and “disabled people” are textbook examples of “disability first” language, to which “people first” or “person first” language is contrasted.)
EDIT: Yes, I realize that this is an example of "people-first" language given near the opening of this opinion piece. It says something that in this rant about "equity language", the example given of the application of a particular form ("people-first language") of equity language is basically a textbook example of what that form seeks to avoid rather than what it prescribes.
> For example, it seems like we can’t say “mother” anymore in medical settings.
You can absolutely use “mother” to describe a specific person who, in fact, is a mother in medical settings. Because people of non-feminine gender identity can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth.
> I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother
Literally no one has a problem with your mother being described as a mother.
> At work, a “women in engineering” group got renamed to something bland like “gender minorities in tech”.
Presumably, it got renamed that because whoever made decisions for it decided the mission was broader than women. “Gender minorities” isn’t a bland alternative to “women”, it has a broader scope.
Close to a disability, I don't give a shit, and reading that I don't even understand til now what is better, for what reason... disability first, person first, what first, wtf?? Can we just communicate?
> can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth
Realize that smartassing someone with that excourse is alienating andor insulting andor exclusionary to other people the same, for whatever reason, may it be a different level of education or just disagreement.
> the mission was broader
It is good that you call it like that what it is, a mission for the new missionaries, almost just a religion of a strange minority that usually even is not affected at all. Please also try to understand a little the other side.
I take any equity language guides with a grain of salt, but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are. Obviously there are problems with it. It's largely performative, it can distract from bigger advocacy work, and it's often a lazy attempt by a large organization or corporation to avoid having to make meaningful changes. The thing is, when you add terms like "victimhood culture" to your response, it makes it extremely clear that you're not taking issue with awkward terminology, but with the entire concept of equity itself.
A lot of people do take issue with the concept of equity itself. Because it's unattainable, a fantasy to keep the "movement" going. No amount of language puritanism will ever be enough for the kinds of people that write these guides, because no human society will ever exist - or has ever existed - where everyone is some sterile, "equitable" copy of each other.
> but how people respond to them speaks volumes about who they are
Does that mean they are bad, immoral people? I think equity is faulty concept. Seems like an attempt to create equality of outcome by policing language. But I'll defer to arguments made by the likes of Sam Harris, Julia Galef and Coleman Hughes. Or the Atlantic author of this article.
It’s an exercise of power by a wealthy ($30k/yr is rich in most world), western, educated, native English speaking elite over the unprivileged. Someone who studied English in high school in rural India does not have access to the latest equity terminology nor the western cultural context to understand it.
Changing language is a great tool to privilege the non working academic class with access and time to study the latest fad over the global working class who build the consumer products these elites type their screeds on.
Hell, most of it originates in the US, where we practice our cultural imperialism and force everyone else to bow to our ever evolving norms and sensibilities based upon our own country's fucked up history.
> Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion.
Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":
> Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Further: Literally everyone has limited financial resources.
If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.
The "justice-involved person" one is especially gross and disingenuous depending on context: Through repetition it strengthens the assertion that a conviction is justice, and it erases the power imbalance between convict and court employees/cops. Plus, it's a transparent euphemism - Nobody will refer to a judge as a JAP for example
I largely agree with your first paragraph, but I do think the term “birthing parent” is important in contexts such as parental leave policies.
“Mother” could be inadequately specific in situations involving same-sex relationships, surrogacies, and/or adoption. For example, Washington state offers up to 6 weeks of medical leave to the birthing parent, in addition to the 12 weeks of bonding leave that are offered to both parents.
Policy language needs to be specific and able to accommodate minority or edge cases.
>For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.
The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
> now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
Which is partly right, to be fair. It’s a fundamental human right issue about who can force things on your body. The consequences also affect whole families, not all men are arseholes who vanish when their girlfriend gets pregnant. Framing this as only women’s issue is part of a dangerous tribal war.
It is also part of a pattern of subjugation of a social group on religious grounds, and as such part of a broader attack on secular, liberal societies.
1. the embryo/fetus inside the mother's body is not the mother's body.
2. it is not the mother's body, but it's completely dependent on it to live.
3. parents have and have to have natural responsibility over their offspring.
4. the society establishment (both secular and religious) are there to protect society's norm.
5. not killing innocent humans is a social norm.
6. the embryo/fetus is a human.
7. saying that someones on "religious grounds" want to subjugate "secular, liberal societies" by opposing to killing innocent humans is no more that projecting USA's domestic radicated bipolar politics to the global level.
8. "religious grounds" are nothing mystical, nothing like "things which only unreasonalbe superstitious are afraid of", but a core attribute of the human nature: just »don't kill humans who are annoying to you even if they don't have social security ID yet, even if they don't pay taxes yet, even if they are your own children«
9. "abortion rights" group also stands on religious grounds, except it worships Moloch.
10. "abortion rights" people often comes from the pre-assumption that they are entitled to enjoy sex without consequences and without any responsibility. gain without pain.
11. "abortion rights" is an other level of productionalization of people. our life is already mostly a product of soulless companies. now they are turning babies into commodity which you can return if you changed your mind or not satisfied with it. wondering how much does it differ from the menacing "slavery".
I'd say 9 is more fun to pick apart. Looks like there's only two kinds of religions in the world, those that worship the Right Deity and those that worship Moloch.
needless to go on theology grounds to argue against unborn killing. you don't need to accept any particular theology to come to the conclusion.
btw it is sorted in a list not because of any argumentation structure.
i don't think (and don't see what indicated it to you) that there are only these 2 options in terms of worship targets. but phrasing the other option the "only" "right" one, paints me an intolerant blind-faithed, which i reject.
yea, i thought that referring to a supernatural being by a name which is also found in books associated with religion may indeed turn the reader dismissive. however i hoped a slight chance to draw maybe a few reader's attention to the point that fetus-killing arguments often are as religion-based as the oppotent is represented to be. the difference which hides this similarity is that religions which are not public, visible, inquireable, are not called "religion".
This angle works in the other direction as well: Is a newborn a human? If yes, is a baby in the process of being born a human? If yes, is a baby who will be born in a week a human?
My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.
most of the times they don't argue about killing single cells, but an undisputedly multicellular fetus with human DNA.
the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human? if no, when this "growing clump of cells" become an organization separate from its host? i don't know other event of a pregnancy which more clearly shows that here is something new which was not there before.
"Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …
yes, miscarriage is a real death of a human. is it killing? yes, it can be a result of an intentional act. can it be caused by neglect? yes, then it's the unintentional taking of a human life.
why we usually threat neglecting the born and unborn differently? because they need different level and kind of care: eg. smoking hurts unborn differently than born. did the mother eat honey which happened to be infected and caused her embryo to die? it was not considered neglect until this honey-effect was discovered.
> the conceived egg cell is already a new member of the given species. why? has it to be of a species? if yes, which one other than human?
A cell being of a species does not make it an instance of that species, in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.
> "Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …
If a single cell is not an instance of a human, it follows that there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously. Mostly the disagreement is about where this line is.
> in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.
IMO, there is a substantial difference between a conceived egg and any other cells: an egg turns into a human being over time (provided it's left doing its businnes normally), other kind of cells don't operate this way AFAIK.
> there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously
completely agree. IMO we can even extend it by omitting the "If a single cell is not an instance of a human" condition: even if we qualify a specific single cell to be a human, there must be a point when it became a human.
> For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth.
I completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.
Why does it become purely biological and not social in this case? Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.
> Applying this definition strictly means woman who aren't able to bear children are not women.
Not quite sure what the commentor you are replying to means by the social part but they didn't state that giving birth => woman is a 2 way implication.
No. What GP is saying is merely that being capable of childbearing obviously requires female biological sex. But the implication doesn't have to go in the opposite direction for it to be true.
Another example: the only vertebrates that can fly are birds(ignoring squirrels and weird fish). That's not equivalent to saying that the ostrich is not a bird.
> Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins.
That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom.
English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech company, and the working language is English, which I'm perfectly fine with. But when we get subjected to DEI training material which was very obviously made for an American audience, even though nobody in this office is a native English speaker, I think it goes too far and ironically becomes slightly insensitive in its own way.
I briefly worked for Facebook in Singapore. I felt a similar disconnect with their concern about African-Americans. (I think it might have been 'black history month' or perhaps the 'black lives matter' riots were ongoing. I can't remember.)
Singapore has its own problems and groups of people that aren't doing so well. A focus on African-Americans felt extremely tone-deaf to me. Almost like it was designed to mock the whole DEI enterprise.
I'm probably be downvoted to death for that but, while I have nothing against transgenderism - do whatever you want people, I don't care - it baffles me that the subject takes so much space in the political discourse. It's like 1.6% of the population by applying the broadest critieria available.
Sometimes I wonder if some interests are not all too happy to see people fight about who they might have to share a public bathroom one day in their entire life rather than issues actually affecting them.
> equity language censors took this way way too far.
In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.
Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.
Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.
Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.
These may sound funny white north american people's problems, but imagine when your AI app is is trying to explain european history to your children without referencing slavery racism or war.
"Avoid metaphors, which can introduce unneeded baggage." This is my favorite one from UC Irvine's language guide. Nothing better encapsulates the irony and lack of self-awareness most of these guides display.
This is clearly not actually about morality - no one in their right mind would argue that someone is racist just because they didn't know the etymology of "cakewalk". And a complete racist could follow these rules easily enough.
This seems to me that these are a set of moral grounds to punish people for having a low EQ.
None of these rules or guides are even internally consistent. What it will and has always come down to is understanding how to read a room and follow imposed social etiquette (aka, EQ - something that we know is not equally distributed!)
Whether people promoting this stuff understand it or not (I think some of them are very aware), they are going to be roping of sections of society just on the grounds of being "too impolite".
Writers always see the perceived misuse of words in apocalyptic terms, and The Atlantic is itself invested in a kind of elite moral panic over "woke culture," so I tend to look at articles like this with some skepticism.
One thing is that Packer himself fails to analyze the language under consideration with precision; the examples he lays out all fall, roughly, under a few different categories, which should be considered separately:
- Branding and inclusivity: Much of what he proffers as examples are not unfamiliar to anyone who's had to work with corporate style guides, where terms are favored or disfavored partially in relation to branding tone and voice, and partially to maximize clarity (idiosyncratic style being a frequent source of confusion). No one's harmed by a press release avoiding terms like "blind to" in favor of "refusing to see what's happening;" as a personal matter I prefer the concision of the former, but the latter is more plainspoken if also somewhat dull. Plodding and dull is often exactly what you're looking for in official communiques.
- Specificity and Precision: Again, while using "Americans" to refer to US residents is reasonable in casual contexts, or where American citizens are under discussion (e.g., political contexts), it's also reasonable to refer to "US residents" or the like. The biggest problem is that there isn't a concise term that covers "US citizens and legal permanent residents" that doesn't make you sound like a DHS circular or a legal opinion. (An additional complication is when you're working with Mexican and LATAM entities, where "American" is strongly disfavored unless you're literally talking about the Americas broadly. Same problem when people use "North American" to refer to US-Candada exclusively.) Slicing your terms finely to clearly delineate what you're discussing, and what you're not discussing, is again a perfectly reasonable goal in organizational communications, if anathema to a talented writer who is used to bending words to the context, rather than straightjacketing terms within specific contexts.
Both inclusivity and specificity are goals of most guides, particularly in journalism. (I'm not sure what style guide The Atlantic hews to, but rest assured their editors adhere to something.) Packer can argue that the Sierra Club's guide tends towards creating uninspired, workmanlike prose, but making a moral panic of that seems unwarranted.
- Instrumentalism: Instrumental terms are the ones that do have a real-world impact, because they're designed to either defuse or infuse a term with emotional valence. Instrumental terms contain arguments within themselves: using the term "slave" robs the person in question of their agency, which distances policy or analytic questions from those very people; "enslaved person" changes the context to slavery as an imposition on an agentive person; likewise, my preferred term (for Black slaves in US history), "enslaved American" goes evern further, being a deliberate and implicit argument against the legality of slavery even prior to the 13th Amendment. The term "justice-involved person" instead of "felon" is risible even to me, but the negative emotional valence of the latter term has a real effect on policy and the perception of policy, which is why terms like "ex-offender" are becoming more commonly used. Instrumentalist terms can be used for good or for evil; to make arguments, defuse emotional responses, or to invoke high dudgeon (Gingrich's famed GOPAC memo is a masterclass on using instrumentalist terms to whip up public emotion).
Whereas the worst you can say about branding and precision terms is that they're frequently clumsy and bland, instrumentalist language can affect the real world in often direct ways, and it's well worth interrogating the use of thos...
While some of the things referenced are ridiculous, the author is really misinterpreting many of the guides here, to a point where it feels like willful misinterpretation. For instance.
> If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat.
If anything, using the term “structural” helps associate much more context about racism, its causes, and its ugliness, not less.
Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. They mostly meant for situations where you don’t want to evoke emotion in your writing.
Considering the news that Roald Dahl's books are now being altered in precisely some of the ways described, we are very, very clearly seeing literature start to be targeted.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 429 ms ] threadThe change of usage to “enslaved people” is an important one because of the lack of agency in being enslaved (!). It’s easy for the brain to make the connection that a term like “slave” is an inherent property of the person so described, like “brown-haired” rather than something imposed upon them.
But as a non-American who’s lived in the US a long time, seeing the term “American” used generally doesn’t bother me: it’s trivial and automatic to see when it’s simply synecdoche for “resident”, “taxpayer”, or, yes, “US citizen, so not applicable to me”. I am not offended when I see a headline, as I did this morning, saying “your passport will be delayed so apply early”. Just doesn’t apply to me so who cares?
A rather extraordinary and unlikely claim. Not to mention that words in languages like Arabic have much deeper semantic ramification compared to a Germanic language like English.
I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's the horror of it: to be born as property.
Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it, and ipso facto that staying enslaved is the slave's problem. The appeal to a made-up brain process doesn't improve your case.
That was the point of my referring to it: the agency lies with the enslaver, not the enslaved.
The assumption behind it all is that if someone can make a inference about your thoughts, no matter how far-fetched, those thoughts must contribute to an undesirable state, hence you are a bad person.
It seems to me that enslaved people have much bigger problems than to worry about this, and if they don’t anymore, then the wording doesn’t matter. They are either ”former slaves”, which emphasizes the severity of the situation they were put through, or they are still slaves, which again——emphasis. I could argue that the new wording diminishes the seriousness of the predicament (but I won’t as I don’t believe that, given the horrors of slavery, the word matters at all here).
Nitpick: synecdoche would be if someone called you "America". You can imagine a teasing "Hey America, get out of the way" toward a tourist who encapsulated their views of Americans. "American" is just a regular adjective.
Equity language is just another tool to oppress people.
If I have an experience-- such as walking through the park, this afternoon and picking a blackberry... What is a "lived experience" version of that same experience?
I have lived experience with deafness. I've been deaf in one ear for decades now. However well I explain myself to my family members, there is a degree to which their experience will never be the same as mine, despite their first-hand contact with me.
We can either reserve the word "experience" for me, and try to police it so that nobody can say they have experience without being prepared to demonstrate the first-hand nature of their experience, or we can understand that people will use the word to mean "prolonged exposure" or similar, and add a qualifier when important to people like me: e.g. I have lived experience as a deaf person.
It's a shibboleth that indicates adherence to a certain world view. The speaker is communicating that they are a Good Person and thus you should give their experiences greater weight.
"Experience with" meaning, "Have dealt with this personally, first hand" gradually became, "has been near or studied and feels comfortable claiming authority on that basis." So the new compound word "Lived experience" was created to allow us to still use the first definition reliably.
Many times people who have "experience with" a topic have really "studied" it.
Words change. That doesn't mean everyone is getting stupider. In fact the more literate people are, the faster words are likely to change, since the more situations they'll be put to use in.
Functional literacy means more than simply knowing specific vocabulary words. It includes the shared knowledge to use and understand idioms and cultural references.
Needing to coin a new expression to replace a word we already have a perfectly good word for seems to be a symptom of poor literacy. I suppose the chronic dishonesty and doublespeak involved in corporate jargon could be the source of this phenomenon instead.
Some discussion here: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-01-27/op-ed-latin...
1) anyone who studies in US university, is "rich educated" for South American standards
2) Quote from article bellow:
> a queer Latina ... mostly from white, right-wing Latino men.
> “When you’re a white Latino ... Black Latino ... transgender Latino, next to a queer Latino, next to an Indigenous Latino
> understand the diversity of our community
Those three paragraphs paint picture that "Latino" is some sort of community. And you can be in-group or out-group (by being right-wing-white-Latino). There is also somebody who speaks on behalf of "our community".
But that is simply not true. It is an ethnic group. Its name may change over a few decades, if new name gains use in South America. Not in a few years, because some US citizens said so, and decided to rename "their community"!
I would be called a Latino in the USA, being a Brazilian of brown skin. That amuses me as I have literally never thought of myself or my fellow Brazilians as Latinos... we're simply Brazilian (we may be region-specific, like carioca - from Rio, or Paulista, from Sao Paulo... but still Brazilian, obviously) and I am pretty sure Mexicans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Colombians and others are the same... just like white Americans do the same: are you ever a white person when presenting yourself to another American, or e.g. Texan, Californian or whatever??
It pays a lot to actually participate in the community to know what to do. I find that people don't like being labelled in any community, but that they may use terms of art to describe their membership in different groups.
I know no one from these groups that uses this term.
> And the drive for 'Latinx' is coming from rich educated people.
rich educated people, or rich uneducated people pushing a narrative and inventing words that are patently offensive to the speakers of said language?
they have no qualms in oppressing and showing intolerance towards cultures that won't play ball with those linguistic impositions, especially when they cannot just ignore them as foreign
they will impose actual systemic intolerance and litmus tests to force their cultural supremacy
the people who say disagreement is invalidating someone's existence will actually deny the existence of the culture they spun from, violently so if necessary
These guides get published to give The Groups something to do. Very few people in the real world --- yes, even the elite whites --- take them seriously. The only durable change I've noticed in the last few years is capitalizing Black, which is something our mutual fave John McWhorter has been advocating for some time.
I would ban public high schools from encouraging a "critique of liberalism". Being a critic takes no skill and doesn't help the world. Critical theory, and critical thinking are extremely overrated skills. We need constructive thinking and constructive communication.
More seriously, as much of a bastion of progressivism as these hallowed halls are, I'm 100% certain we are behind the curve of most blue state schools when it comes to how up to date we are on the appropriate ritual goat sacrifices.
Is this sarcasm? I am not quite sure what this is supposed to convey.
I mean someone named them in the first place. The people of Latin America didn't ask to be called Latinos, it was assigned to them, purportedly by a French man.
And absolutely everything in this World should be about someone oppressing someone else.
Cool cool, I look forward as a white guy to explaining to a group of Spanish people why they are wrong and are really LatinX and I'm doing it for their protection.
Imagine being an immigrant and having to learn both English and then a made up filter created by well paid academics on top of it.
Just don't be racist, we don't need all these made up rules created by our betters.
It's all so tiresome.
"Latin" already includes "la" at the beginning of the word-- which is the feminine infinitive. Therefore, LatinA and LatinX are redundant.
Or, perhaps we as arbitors of global culture, should enforce our new inventin:
ElTin and LaTin ...and maybe a LeTin. or LxTin
Actually let's go with all of the above. And any other creations as well. because who cares-- throw in the kitchen sink!
/more silliness
I guess most immigrants don't need to learn the shibboleths, unless they suddenly get into money and want to join the upper class. It's about discriminating between the commoners and the rulers, that's why it constantly evolves, too. Need to regularly release new ciphers if you're communicating in the open with a trivial cryptography.
People like to feel superior. In one era that was “I’m a devout Christian from a good family unlike those other whores and sodomites,” in another it was “I’m a hard working industrialist unlike those lazy, old money playboys,” and now it’s “I’m a social worker dealing with the problems of BIPOC folx, unlike those finance bros that only care about money.”
All I'm saying is in an attention economy, one does well to reflect and ask who benefits from one's beliefs and their mode of expression. Substitute money for power, reputation, or any scarce social resource, and I think the analysis still tends to work, whether or not it echoes Marx.
And there is nothing wrong with it. Respect is the only thing needed.
Class discussions about material wealth are excluded from the zeitgeist because they make the ultrarich people who control things uncomfortable and they don't want any discussion that could lead to change.
The war over language could perhaps be viewed as a way to enjoy the privileges of classism without the material requirements. It doesn't threaten capital, so it is amplified to drown out dissent.
Wedge issues have been political footballs since the Reagan Era. Keep everyone riled up about something essentially trivial and no real economic changes happen.
A ~20 year old punk song goes "we are the queer / we are the whore / the ammunition / of the class war"
So then time, energy, and goodwill gets wasted by having to explain to people what they "should" be calling themselves. The people she's talking to thinks the whole thing is just stupid, and is a thing that only white people care about.
But she also mentions that the younger generation of LatinX people do care, and often prefer the term. It's all a big mess and makes compassionate communication more difficult.
1. It's bad to tell people that they're using their native language badly if you're not a native speaker (especially in a scenario where there's a social power dynamic at play, like Spanish speakers trying to navigate discrimination in the US). People making things harder for immigrants without compassion for their challenges are probably making a mistake.
2. It's bad to say "this whole thing is just stupid" about a radical shift in language that's being deliberately embraced by younger people to break down discriminatory gender traditions, just because it's new and you're mildly confused about it. People making things harder for gender-nonconforming people are probably making a mistake.
The eternal outraged youth will always find a few hobby horses to ride. Sometimes they lead to good things. This is a particularly smelly one, unfortunately.
It’s not bad to say “this whole thing is just stupid”. It’s just incomplete to say…it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts) and culturally insulting. The intent is understandable, the linguistic implementation ridiculous. How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective? Why continue to ride this malodorous hobby horse their elders forced between their legs? (I think that image is acceptably gender-nonconforming, and oddly appropriate.)
Anyway, according to la Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española
https://www.asale.org/la-asociacion
the body responsible for the preservation of the Spanish language across the Spanish-speaking world, it isn’t a Spanish word (not acknowledged in the official dictionary)
https://dle.rae.es/Latinx
Santiago!
BTW your phrase “mildly confused” is demeaning and insulting to readers who would genuinely struggle with incorporating this in their normal Spanish speech after decades of surviving without it. Bit ironic for someone concerned with “sensitivity” to write.
Nonbinary people face real discrimination, including but not limited to the dismissal of that fight as pointless outrage.
> it’s also musically ugly (language is a song of sorts)
This is ridiculous. Ugly-sounding words will always exist.
> and culturally insulting ... How about actual younger people developing another, more beautiful, culturally acceptable, word to achieve the same objective
What does any of this even mean? Real Spanish-speaking nonbinary young people did come up with a working solution. If you think it's too ugly sounding, fine, you get to have an opinion. If you think it shouldn't exist because it's too ugly sounding to you, honestly, fuck off. That's not a valid complaint.
> https://www.asale.org/la-asociacion
I am aware of La Asociación. I understand that they literally make the rules. I need you to understand that they do not actually make the rules. Language is how people communicate. New words happen.
So on the one hand: 1. You don't like the sound of the word 2. An intrinsically conservative body hasn't yet recognized the word
On the other hand: 1. Nonbinary would simply like a word to refer to themselves because one doesn't exist.
But, I will concede that it was pretty rude of me to write "mildly confused". I shouldn't have been so uncharitable.
straight people exist, gay people exist, queer people exist. trans people exist. NB people exist.
it must be so tiring to be so full of hatred.
There is a gender spectrum, agreed, but that doesn't mean we can't classify people into a singular description, and it surely doesn't mean we need to change entire languages to appease made up oppression.
Gay? Makes sense and no issues. No demand for language changes.
Nonbinary,trans? Totally made up because they want to 1. Signal their oppression status and therefore be part of the proletariat, or 2. A true mental issue is at foot. Neither are justifications for removing gendered language, and plastic surgery doesn't remove the biological differences between men and women.
The way I see it, this is going to have to go up to the Supreme Court, where it will be determined that either there is no difference between men and women for legal purposes, and therefore any separation is discrimination (goodbye gendered bathrooms, women's sports, women in engineering clubs, etc.), or we will in fact determine there are biological differences which justify separation in specific circumstances (sports, locker rooms), and no amount of plastic surgery will allow one to change their classification. Of course, that is only insofar as anyone else in those environments could tell (aka having your penis out in a women's locker room would be the tell).
Latin person, person from a Latin-heritage background, and such, although more verbose, are preferred.
How is such a word pronounced? Is it "Latin" + "ex" or is it "La" + "tinx" (-inx like in Sphinx)?
so its "LA-TEEN-EK-EES" if we are respecting the Spanish language.
but in reality such silly butchering of a language isnt respecting the Spanish language in the first place. its merely more communism attempts to disrupt tradition & reform societies towards some immature high school wanna-be communist ends by people who've never lived in communist society.
The article/this discussion is my first exposure to the word.
No more "los gatos"!
Lxs gatxs has so much more of a latin ring to it. (/s)
Spanish is being obliterated by lXs que lo hablan peor.
Do you often use “cats” to describe a particular group of humans, whise gender identity you are concerned about including?
In almost no case till I care about the express sexuality of the person for whom I am using a pronoun and I resent having to be forced to care about their self-centered nature, being self-centered myself.
However, instead of saying "he is wearing a weird hat", I can say "that cat is wearing a weird hat"
And I don't have to worry about it.
Gracias.
Latinx is form a handful of non-binary latin activists in the US, and co-opted by left-wingers who think they're doing the right thing.
Spanish is being obliterated by a very small minority of politically biased and likely neo-marxist-propaganda-influenced young people.
As someone who's interacted extensively with the Hispanic community in the United States, I just want to point out that the younger generation generally are not completely fluent in Spanish. They often can understand their parents perfectly well but have trouble actually speaking the language.
With that in mind, I'm still suspicious that preferring LatinX correlates primarily with fluency in Spanish rather than age.
https://www.newsweek.com/call-latinx-what-it-lexical-imperia...
sorry, newsweek's a bit of rag these days, but it's where i happened to find the essay republished.
I personally think that choosing 'x' was a poor choice, and it's basically unpronounceable by everyone in both Spanish and English. But making up supposed racist origins is a bit much.
Do you have a credible source for this claim? All I’ve ever seen are vague assertions it originated “organically” in the early 2000s.
Insofar as people are repeating the false origin as if it matters, apparently.
Either way I have never seen it used by anyone besides DEI types and academic white people
Just because white people like rewriting their history and language doesn't mean they have a right to rewrite mine.
If you find that inflammatory or offensive, now you know how I feel.
It was created by native apeakers of your mother tongue, as a conscious rejection of the way they saw it—their mother tongue—as erasing, or at least obstructing communication of, their gender identity.
That's a very good question. Since you appear to be arguing against that strawman, tell us, who said that?
EDIT: My point is, if we can acknowledge that, like Hispanic and Latino and Latino/Latina (each of which are strongly objected to by some in the community, preferred by others, and tolerated but neither preferred nor objected to by others when talking about the broader group inclusively) these are preferred identity labels of part of the community which is being addressed, we can then talk about how to address a community with internal divisions over preferred identity label, when one specifically wants to address the whole group and not just those who favor a particular label. But we can’t even get to that point as long as we pretend that this is just an external imposition unconnected to preferences expressed within the population described.
EDIT: to elaborate: I take issue to the fact that this word is used to describe not just people who wanted to be referred to like that, but the general population.
This I agree with. This is a problem. And, in fact, we’ve been through and addressed almost this exact same problem with the inherently gendered nature (and default-male gender) of Spanish-derived demonyms and how that conflicts with some people’s gender identity before – and the problem of conflicts of preferred identity label for reasons other than gender – before. And mostly, what was done when addressing a group of mixed demonym preference with no single mutually-acceptable one was use multiple, joined with a slash (or, sometimes, here they differed only by a suffix, to separate the alternate suffixes with a slash.)
Actual, rather than performative, inclusion means not imposing a shared label just because you view the group as one for your purposes.
New terms arise all the time. There's no 'native-spanish-speaker referendum' for each new term that is created.
And even if for a moment it is true, since when do those few represent the whole?
I swear you linguistic imperialists are insufferable. Leave your hands off of my language and butcher up your own mother tongue.
The funny thing is that I haven’t even mentioned my preference for a label the group in question in this discussion.
> Leave your hands off of my language and butcher up your own mother tongue.
While at least some of the labels under discussion originate in your language and its community of speakers, the discussion is about use in English. So unless your mother tongue is English, no one's hands are, metaphorically, on it in this discussion.
So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
> So, I guess to be consistent, keep your “linguistic imperialism” to yourself...
Right back at ya pendejo.
And even if for a moment it is true, since when do those few represent the whole?
I swear you linguistic imperialists are insufferable. Leave your hands off of my language.
Americans can continue to use latinx, fine, but don't impose that onto natives because that just doesn't make sense in their native language. And saying, "we need to educate the older generation" is arrogant and disrespectful, we understand it quite well.
> we should instead admit that 'latino' is a projection onto a wide variety of people that have different cultural backgrounds but roughly share a language and sometimes a skin tone.
instead of inventing more names to divide people by, just... not ?
There is nothing wrong with using more generic term if you don't know exact nationality of the person.
Latine and LatinX both originate in (different geographical parts of) the spanish-first-language non-binary community, originally for use in Spanish, neither (AFAIK) by “well-paid academics”.
Latinu and Latin@ I’m less sure about, but wouldn’t be surprised if they are the same. While there’s legitimate debates about their use, the “created by white English-speaking academics and imposed on the people labelled by them” narrative is itself White-centering myth.
(OTOH, the anglicized, instead of mixed, pronunciation of LatinX is probably a White anglophone invention, the original is like latino/a with the final vowel removed, and with the english name of the letter “X” in its place.)
This is disputed, both sides have evidence for them and no one really knows.
I'm fluent in Spanish and have a hard time seeing a native Spanish speaker inventing LatinX. There's no good Spanish way to pronounce it, and inserting the English pronunciation of the letter 'x' is an odd choice for someone who's paying attention to identity politics—you would think they'd try to find an alternative that feels less anglo.
There's no good English wsy to pronounce it either. Its a deliberate linguistic transgression. (Aesthetically, its why I personally like Latine better for the specific purpose of explicit inclusion of non-binary identities, but, being neither Latin nor non-binary, I don't weight my aesthetic preferences heavily on the issue.)
EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
It's a word designed to convey an inclusive Spanish-speaking identity. Why would a native Spanish speaker choose to invent a word that is far easier to pronounce in English than in Spanish?
> EDIT: Really, the problem of how to identify a group in a way inclusive of a subgroup to whose existence the broader group is at best, as s whole, ambivalent is the real issue, and the origin stories, and more to the point the attempt to impute malign motives based on particular origin stories, is a way to avoid reaching the issue.
No, the origin stories are very much part and parcel with the issue you're discussing. Either the Spanish community itself decided that it needed non-gendered words, or a bunch of white Americans decided the Spanish community needed non-gendered words.
If the drive to change Spanish did not originate with Spanish speakers, that is very much a concern, and grandstanding about including subgroups doesn't make it less of an imperialistic affair; it just comes off as "civilizing the savages".
Pretty sure that whatever identifier is right for the community of interest here, its not “the Spanish community”, and, irrespective of any debate about the origin of the terms, a subset of the community of interests has decided they need gender neutral terms and expressed preference for one or more of them. The question then is how to refer to the community as a whole, given the existence of a diversity of preferences.
I doubt it. Having lived in Latin America, Latin American social norms are influenced by Catholicism and their societies are more conservative & traditionalist than the US and Europe.
The vast majority of people in Latin American countries (outside of Costa Rica & Chile) struggle with academic achievement (including literacy levels), adequate n utrition, enviornmental pollution.
To claim that they would put neo-marxist language changes before actual human needs (literacy, nutrition, environment) is a paltry claim and demonstrates a lack of experience with such societies.
I’m struggling to follow your reasoning. What does communism have to do with anything?
Do they?
• Literacy rate:
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/literacy_rate/Lati...• Food security:
https://www.fao.org/americas/publicaciones-audio-video/panor...• Tertiary education:
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/738931611934489480-0090...• Environmental pollution
You're probably right about this one, but it's not worse than most of the rest of the world, including very rich countries such as the UK and Germany.
https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/738931611934489480-0090...
> they would put neo-marxist language changes
This is just nonsensical gibberish. I'll call it neo-misesist language.
I've lived in Mexico, and visited Panama and Colombia.
I met very few educated citizens of those countries. The educated ones I did meet I felt were my equals, in terms of education. It was fantastic. The problem is that they're few and far between.
This article is from 2005, but may highlight the problem:
"Despite having three times the population of Argentina, Mexico produces about 2,000 fewer titles each year.
There are roughly 500 bookstores in Mexico, which translates into one for every 200,000 Mexicans, compared to a ratio of one to 35,000 in the US and one to 12,000 in Spain, according to the Mexican Booksellers Association.
A recent UNESCO study revealed that Mexicans read on average just over two books per year, while Swedes finish that many every month.""
https://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0216/p01s04-woam.html
So, this is a linguistic trojan horse. There's no proper use case for the term "LatinX" except to normalize the pronoun/trans agenda in the Spanish-speaking world.
This is an excellent summary of the entire discussion on the topic of the silly, childish, politically-motivated concept of "LatinX"
Obviously sarcasm but that's pretty much the argument.
Like many other things in politics.
Oh, no, how did we get back here...?
There's already a centuries-old gender-neutral word for Latino/Latina that is, surprise, "Latin". Or "Latin person" if you will.
I was born in South America, and I really reject being called a "Latinx". It sounds dehumanizing.
I am so sorry if this pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction to make.
Both Hispanic and Latino are not races but rather an ethnic group. The race of people who belong to the Hispanic and Latino ethnic groups varies by country and even at the individual. One can have predominately African ancestry, predominately European ancestry, or predominately indigenous ancestry, while all belong to the same ethnic group of Hispanic or Latino.
I do not bring up this point to try and detract from the legitimate discrimination and oppression that many individuals and groups in the Hispanic and Latino community face.
People of Jewish heritage belong to what is known as an ethno-religious group. The idea that "Jews are a race" was either first proposed, or at least heavily perpetuated by the Nazis, and it is still considered offensive to refer to people of Jewish heritage as belonging to a different race.
Regardless, the idea of race is a social construct with absolutely zero biological or scientific basis behind it. There is only one "race", and it's the "Human Race."
In an ideal world, we would not even need to make these distinctions because we are all Homo Sapiens -- we have no subspecies. Maybe one day we can achieve this world if we stop the pathetic, needless, and disgusting hatred for our fellow man.
So race wise I'm either Jewish, White, African or maybe African American now that I live in America.
Joking aside, I agree with your point
What did I just say? ;)
Which part of Africa?
As I understand it, Middle Eastern (including Egypt). people are considered "white" by the US Census (for those unaware).
If natively from Morocco/Egypt/Perhaps more, would you not be considered Mizrahi or are you talking like European ancestory? Not like any of this matters in the absolute slightest at the end of the day.
I, myself, have 0% < x < 25% Sephardi with another 0% < x < 25% Ashkenazi heritage. My other half is pure Wonderbread levels of European whiteness.
Apparently, I'm a mutt because my ancestors liked to travel and liked to bang whatever population was there when they arrived (I am kidding, this goes for most people).
Hispanic means from a Spanish-speaking country.
Spanish people are Hispanic, but not Latino.
The idea isn't to design a new armband that you require people of a particular group to wear each week - the idea is to ask those people what they want, and then respect them when they answer you.
If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. It's not about the enforcement of identity, *it's about the deconstruction of traditionally enforced identities in the first place*, it's about exploring the creation of new identities outside of the bounds of conservative tradition.
I directly quoted the article that specifically said additional explanation had to be made.
"If someone says they identify as Latinx, then you identify them as Latinx" except that's not what the article says. It discussed how LatinX is often used as the default in progressive language.
In contrast, I think the highlighted excerpt really summed up the article well.
> Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.
Writing poetry, songs, fiction, and impactfull writing with equity language will always feel hollow.
Why? We feel powerless to fix the problems that plague our society, so instead we turn to things we have agency over. Maybe we can't prevent group X from suffering from social discrimination, but if everything is just a matter of what words we use, we can just choose to use those words, stridently denounce everyone who hasn't gotten with the program, and pat ourselves on the back and call it a day.
You missed a couple at the beginning of your list. A really significant one in particular.
That said, I think it supports my point. How effective has tabooing that slur been at eliminating racism in the USA?
There's no reason to use it now, but understanding the fact that was originally a descriptive word is useful for the history of it.
The wikipedia article for Linguistic Relativity[0] states:
> Research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting linguistic relativity, and this hypothesis is provisionally accepted by many modern linguists.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
> Many different, often contradictory variations of the hypothesis have existed throughout its history.[4] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This hypothesis was held by some of the early linguists before World War II.[3] This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[2]
You can read a reasonable discussion of it here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/6aqsex/how_muc...
I just reject that. We don't live in a Harry Potter book where the correct series of incantations affect the material world.
As to the rest of it: "Officer, arrest that man" is a series of incantations that affect the material world.
The proper analogy would be thinking that requiring saying "Officer, detain-in-an-official-capacity that man!" instead would somehow fix police violence.
And you think this is something that’s not understood among those pushing for linguistics changes?
I think those people distract and soothe themselves from their inability to enact change with linguistic games.
It's "theirsxn of sholor". Please respect this and stop the violation and violence against theirsxns of sholor which is incurred when you use othering phrases.
(not thereson-- because it has the word "son" in it, which is offensive to non-sons. sholor because it's closer to shalom which means peace.)
/le jokes
The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real.
Though I wonder if this diagnosis is actually too optimistic, in that it assumes people are 1) aware and care about the real problems and 2) willing to put in effort to enact meaningful change. Perhaps this is too cynical, but I think most people who adopt this sort of symbolic gesturing are pretty detached from the root issues of power and wealth inequality. "Virtue signaling" is a product of vanity, not pessimism/powerlessness.
It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes. When I was younger, I used to feel like I could keep up with all the new taboo words, but it seems like it is happening faster and faster these days.
You can unintentionally say something that turns out to be taboo, and you're done for. Some years ago, I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it, and blam! big mistake. We used to toss that one around all the time back in the 80s and 90s, felt kind of like a jerk when you used it in the early 2000s, but in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata. We learn the hard way from these experiences, but it does feel like a growing minefield.
Worse, when something innocent we write/say today becomes a slur in 2040, future people will dig back in time and judge us by the words we wrote in 2020. Do you know what will be a slur in 20 years? I don't.
You casually called someone a "retard" (I assume that's the word) and someone took that wrongly? Of course they did! Even when "retard" was an acceptable put-down, it was still a put-down.
Maybe the way to avoid the "minefield" you speak of is to not put others down? Even deservedly! Just try to be nicer to everyone, even if they are not, themselves, nice.
You may be one of the few, in that case. Good! Other people might not understand that about you if you used that word around them.
Doug Stanhope has a great skit in which he explains that the word "retarded" was originally the sensitive way to refer to this group, because at the time they were called directly derogatory terms.
But, like with every such attempt it was quickly adopted as an insult.
My not particularly original take is that policing language addresses only the effect, not the cause. Question remains: should the world learn of our peaceful ways by force?
If it somehow became popular to describe people of a certain type using the phrase "people on the fringes of society," then within a generation or two kids would taunt each other in schoolyards with "No, you're on the fringes of society," and "No, you are!"
I once got into a debate with someone on Reddit where they claimed "Middle East" is an offensive term, which was news to me. They preferred "West Asia and Northern Africa", or something. I claimed that this is just taking the same path that "oriental" took, which is now taboo in some countries, even though it literally means "from the east" and is the opposite of "occidental".
I thought it was the 2020s.
But it's too good not to use, and it's the last good insult we have. Mental ableism is the last bastion. I make my stand here.
The slippery slope we're being forced down on leads to "don't be mean to anyone ever", and I, as a product of the era of https://youtu.be/C4dnCZSYmbY, fundamentally refuse to accept that.
Also I'm bringing back "special".
Negative words can change meaning or severity over time, in both directions, but if you aim for clear expression and avoid insults, it is unlikely anything you say or write will be judged badly in the future.
This might be the most British comment ive ever replied to
You got a license for that joke!?
It's pretty simple: you have freedom to say whatever you want, but if you're worried about how you'll be judged, now or in the future, then you will curtail your worst impulses. Alternatively, you can lean into your freedom, say whatever you want, and then deal with the fallout when it eventually comes.
Look at the comment to which I replied, and then tell me my reply doesn't fit.
It gets new mines because when a word becomes a widely used derogatory term for a group of people we need a non-derogatory word to use instead when when we are trying to talk about people in that group and aren't trying to be derogatory.
Also for many of these words most the general public has complete forgotten the non-slur/non-derogatory meaning (or has never known it). No amount of tone will fix that.
Imagine an unmarried couple with a child who gets a copy of the child's medical records from their pediatrician and see the child described as a "retarded bastard". The chances that they will know that "retarded" was once a medical term for someone who is behind on mental development and that "bastard" means a person born out of wedlock are pretty low. At best they are going to be greatly puzzled by the doctor using those words.
What do you mean by this? Hasn't linguistic relativity been studied and demonstrated quite extensively?
I don't disagree with your overall point, but found this surprising.
Weaker versions with much more narrow claims are debated and controversial, but even for those, it's the most flashy (and least supported) claims that get the most popular press.
I received a letter in the mail from official sources, ordering me to use:
"skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000"
(pseudo-mammals is important so as not to exclude platypus & echidna identifying peoples)
It's ok though-- I will let it slide this time.
Next time though, it will be reported to the Commissar. And they will listen to me-- Because I am half skin appropriating mammals & pseudo-mammals of complexions including greyscale shades from #FFFFFE to #000000 (anything more than a quarter is considered full validated and verified via the official channels)
By increasing the silliness, more and more people observe "Wow these folks are ignorant lunatics, unaware that they're driving the perception of themselves as immature, ignorant hypocrites whose identity is built upon political trends."
Furthermore, there are nonzero people in groups who object to victim monikers like Latinx and over-sensitive terminology as demeaning. If it were me, since I can only speak for myself, I would want to be treated as equal without ceremony, pity, or unfair advantages. Alterations of language where there is little or no offense (asking the targets rather than the busy bodies) seem like token thoughts and prayers and inconvenience to the many rather than direct, positive help to anyone. Solve real concerns rather than pearl clutch the next unfashionable word.
The reason people first language fails is because there's some subjects of this language that find the original wording insulting and there's some subjects of this language that find the new words insulting.
I have back issues. Major ones that pinch my sciatic nerve due to a fractured column that healed improperly. They've gotten to the point a few times in my life where I could not walk much less feel (at all) my leg for prolonged periods of time. If someone called me a "person experiencing a disability" it sounds like you're trying to remove the hurdle that the disability puts in my life. I already had to grapple with the idea that I am not bound to that disability. I have found ways to climb small mountains, to hike, pack, move/lift heavy things, sit, and work out all with abundances of caution and very proper form.
That's to say, codifying this language just does what the first correction set out to correct: it institutionalized language some people don't like. In a world with a big variety of perspectives and experiences, the best resolution to these problems isn't some authoritarian document telling people how to talk. It's gracefully correcting people on the way that you'd like to be spoken about and people respecting that. Nobody needs to walk on eggshells around how I'd like to be referred, they just need to meet me where I am when I make a choice.
There might be a worthwhile transition to a new framing that makes sense. I've heard people rip on using the metric system because supposedly its proponents wanted 10-hour days and 10 days a week, etc, which was taking tenets to ridiculous points. The problem now is trying to frame some changes in grander terms because you might well get ridiculous outcomes ( and in current society definitely will).
Language at some level is really about the speaker, in terms of their background, knowledge or lack thereof, what they want to communicate and so forth. Sometimes I think what this equity language betrays is some desire to convey moral or intellectual status, or even some assertion of social power, but sometimes it reflects a genuine attempt to respect the wishes of the subjects of what they're saying.
The problem as you point out is different groups might see things in different ways, and maybe even want to be seen in different ways in different settings or at different moments. Maybe they want to be seen as strong or resilient in one setting, and maybe in another they want to discuss the injustices they have to be resilient against. I think this is only a natural part of human nature.
So it makes sense that these edicts about proper language aren't just morally problematic because they reflect some power motive on the part of the speaker, at the expense of the subject of the speech, but because in doing that, they deny some flexibility in how certain topics and persons can be portrayed or portray themselves.
The example of the passage from Behind the Beautiful Forevers is compelling in how it illustrates how equity language can be disenfranchising and therefore counter to its own stated purposes. The passage works because it is meant to convey something about the parents' perspective and to cause us to wrestle with that. The author is channeling the parents' language. In a different context, maybe the same situation might be described differently, more positively. It's not just that the language in the second version is intellectualized and distanced, it's that it denies choice of language from those who potentially are in the best position to say something about it.
Does writing a guide or policing language that causes blowback provide help? If you're speaking to a room full of people and half favor this language and half don't then you've only shifted the grievances from one side of the room to the other.
There's no easy answers here, but I don't think writing language guides or policing peoples language actually accomplishes much.
Of course, it’s probably much more difficult for those who aren’t already successful and famous.
The guides are probably banking on most of the changes being accepted, however grudgingly. Of course, they may be wrong, and even if there's pushback, they may be convinced enough of the righteousness of their cause to press ahead anyway.
Every persons unique experience becomes new terms to be added to the lexicon. A burden of irrelevant knowledge for the rest of society to navigate in order to communicate.
Being able to code switch between them, or simply avoid jargon from your own Alignment Language and understand the jargon from others is a critical communication skill when you need to work with people who have radically different values than your own.
These values didn't originate naturally. It is a side effect that creates division.
Cyberpunk RPG 1995 rule book NeoTribes ...
"It is now accepted among historical scholars that in the decades before the Collapse, America suffered from the sicknesses of racism and "cultural identity'. Everyone wanted to be seen as special. Every group had to be "equal" to or preferably better than its neighbors, and fought to protect its "special" rights. If anyone had something that someone else wanted, they were painted as racist, sexist, elitist or worse. This divisive "me first" attitude eventually tore the fabric of American culture apart and caused it to self-destruct in a fireball of competing ideologies, none of which truly recognized each other's validity. Diversity led inexorably to anarchy."
There's also a practical case: these terms make you sound like a damn space alien. Unless your audience already agrees completely with you, you lose credibility by using this language. Posturing for your own team has become more important than relating your views to others and pursuading them to join your side.
https://thinknow.com/newsite/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/thin...
It is not that large, but the tiny number of respondents who identify as Latinx has been stable. It's crazy that this label is still being pushed.
This is a great example of how intellectually bankrupt some of the social mis-movements towards redefinition truly are.
First they come up with a term that is clearly not a term used by the native speakers of that group. Then they utilize that term in order to collectively identify them. Then they push it across media, education, and many other avenues to make it "a thing".
This term which originates in English, and doesn't truly relate to Latin* derived cultures but instead to a smaller subset of cultures from a specific geography, and is difficult to speak for a native speaker, and violates the grammar, is then hoisted upon them like a label to which they'd actually subscribe. As many of these cultures self-identify as uniquely distinct from one another, and are competitive, this type of collectivist label is all the more rude.
What Chutzpah!
That's part of the point: it's a costly signal that demonstrates that you're a true ally. See also: gang tattoos.
The "pronouns" thing went nowhere in France. It was considered damaging to the French language.
> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, from negro, to black, to African American, to Black, to person of color.
Also, the shift from moron to mentally defective to retarded to whatever.
This is such a sideshow. First, conservatism lost its way. Then liberalism lost its way. If only we had a center with a clue. Nobody wants to tackle the hard but solveable problems. We get "defund the police", rather than "fire the bottom 10% of cops".
It's almost as if the underlying issue is independent of political leanings.
That's because we can't fire the bottom 10% of cops. Who gets to decide who the bottom 10% are? There are deeply engrained cultural issues, systemic perverse incentives, in most police departments in the country. If you ask them to fire 10% of their forces, it's more likely to be the people who speak out against the Clan Police than it is the "bad apples" you're thinking of.
Besides, while maybe only a small minority would brutally murder a man by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 43 seconds while he cries for his mother, almost every single police officer on the force would stand there next to him and protect him while he did it. If you ran up and pushed the murderer off the man he's killing, trying to save his life, the other cops would beat you, possibly to death. Not 10% of them. 90% of them. You would be beaten and arrested. It's 90%. At least.
Whereas we can reduce funding to police departments; that is within the power of elected officials that the "defund" movement can help get elected.
As for "defund the police" I think I'm the only one who remembers the Reaganite "defund the left" slogan
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/11/opinion/defund-the-left.h...
which "defund the police" seems to be modeled after. Thatcherism (the British strain of Reaganism that was just a bit meaner) became so ingrained that the fish who swim in it can't even recognize it. Today there is such a poverty of the imagination that the left can't imagine anything else.
I think that's probably a coincidence. I didn't get the sense at the time that the genesis of that phrase was a sly historical reference.
• Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act (2023)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2023
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2021
• Defund Federal Vaccine Mandates Act (2021)
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2021
• Defund Davos Act (2022)
• Defund Putin Act (2022)
• Defund the Ministry of Truth Act of 2022
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act (2021)
• Defund de Blasio’s Injection Sites Act of 2021
• Defunding Abortion Transportation Act (2022)
• Defund the People’s Liberation Army Act
• Defund the Wuhan Institute of Virology Act
• Defund Cities that Defund the Police Act of 2020
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2019
• Defund Executive Orders that Suppress Free Speech Act
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2019
• Defunding United Nations Act of 2017
• Defund National Endowment for the Humanities Act of 2018
• Defunding the Corrupt and Incompetent United Nations Act (2017)
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2017
• Defund the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Program Act of 2015
• Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015
• Defund Amnesty Act of 2015
• Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
• Defund United States Assistance to Pakistan Act of 2011
• Defund Libya Act (2011)
• Defund the Individual Mandate Act (2011)
• Defund the Crooks Act (2010)
• Defund ACORN Act (2010)
All of these introduced by Republicans.
Even if there was an objective way to measure the bottom 10% of cops that wasn’t subject to the same structural/institutional biases that are the main problem that “defund” is about, that would be a temporary solution that wouldn’t address the fundamental problems.
As it is, the structural problems means that any “Fire the bottom 10%” initiative in practice would reinforce, rather than mitigate, the problems, since the structural biases would factor into the evaluation.
Seriously though, you are pressed about other people using a term you don't use even though you're free to say Latino or Hispanic as much as you want.
The context matters immensely: The Sierra Club, a lobbyist group, conducts their work with politicians and government officials who are not pressed by inclusive language.
What I've learned from history is that every utopian dream realized is a dystopia. "In theory, theory is no different from in practice..." as the saying goes.
Do away with all these rules that serve no purpose other than to slot each other into buckets of enlightened and evil.
It's a sign that we have things way too good.
That is not the case though.
An "American" is by definition is someone from the American continents (North and South America). Further a "North American" is someone from Mexico, USA, and Canada.
It gets worse when people have "Black Americans", "Italian Americans", "Asian Americans" because that means that "Americans" is only referring to one group of people from the USA.
South Africa would pose a similar conundrum, where people are called South Africans, but they aren't the only people living in Southern Africa.
Particularly because I'm not sure I've ever come across a case in my life when a speaker or writer wanted to include people from both continents as a single group. It's just not a label that's useful for much of anything.
"North or South American" isn't a particularly meaningful or relevant concept at all. In contrast with e.g. "Latin American" which is very useful/meaningful.
And if people from the United Mexican States are Mexican for short, it's an easy shorthand to similarly call people from the United States of America, well, American.
That's the thing: for many people, it's a single continent, called just "America", which can be further subdivided into "North America", "Central America", and "South America" (but these three are not continents, they're subdivisions within a single continent; another common subdivision is "Latin America", which corresponds to the countries colonized by Spain or Portugal).
It's the traditional six-continent model (America, Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, Antarctica), which according to https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continente is the model taught in school in many places, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, and all over Latin America. So no, "these people" (which includes nearly all of America outside the USA and Canada) have learned about Europe and Asia as two separate continents.
The same way Oceania is often considered a continent, but nobody ever refers to people there as "Oceanians" in a way that includes both modern Australians and Polynesians, for example.
I'm just saying that calling people in the USA "Americans" isn't taking away from an otherwise useful/important modern-day usage. Regardless of whether you consider it to be two continents or one.
Ironically, it's also deeply counterproductive to the goals of identity theories, because it draws overt attention to language and sensitivity about language, in a way that makes identities appear, and to some extent actually become, fragile and dependent on the language. Where a word is owned and deployed by a group to suppress and control some other group (ni**, e.g.), taking the word away, anathematizing it, can indeed be of value. But most of the targets in modern social justice language correction have very little such power, and are not deployed as tools of suppression or oppression by most people. Take a broad enough run at them though, and you can give them that power, at lead in the mind of those to whom the refer.
People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep diving on etymology to discover the racist origins. People are so far up their own asses on victimhood culture that the people of high education and privilege driving these initiatives are looking for literally any reason to feign offense on behalf of other peoples' identities and disabilities.
With the prioritization of equity also comes erasure of identity. For example, it seems like we can't say "mother" anymore in medical settings. For my partner's entire pregnancy, our providers only referred to "birthing people" because of some tiny number of trans men that exist and also want to give birth. I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother, goddammit, not a "birthing person", and I don't appreciate anyone implying that this word and identity are somehow offensive. At work, a "women in engineering" group got renamed to something bland like "gender minorities in tech".
The recently reported bowdlerization of Roald Dahl by 'sensitivity readers' is another symptom of this illness. The whole equity language sterilization process forgets that words which are synonyms are not interchangeable because to the writer each word is chosen with intention for the flavor it provides, its connotations and rhythm, the image it creates in the mind. People should be able to communicate using whatever words they wish. Otherwise we're just deleting colors from the artists' palette.
An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement. It’ll never end, because the movement itself needs its members to keep also pacing forward and motivated in order for itself to remain existing.
The exact same could be said of any academic movement; the difference is that, in most cases, it mostly does not spill into reality. Other than a bit of research funding money, meaningless academic ideas don’t hurt society much. In this case, however, the academic movement is dead set on spilling all over everything, using the most aggressive possible strategies of shaming and reputation murder in order to push down its opposition.
This also applies to jobs whose occupants need to justify their own existence, which they can do so be seeking to remake language in an organization and launch a few fun purges to boot. These new terms are basically a new form of arcane knowledge that allows those who chant these magical new incantations social and professional prestige in the modern meritocracy rat race.
Any kind of senseless decorum or self-defeating policy comes down to the intersection of self-perpetuating framings of reality with actors who either promote it out of self-interest, or take it upon themselves to become footsoldiers on faithful behalf of that idea, extending it to unreasonable, totalizing lengths in the process of protecting it like a child.
And that can manifest as "my way is right behavior and that is wrong behavior", or "we are good because they are bad", or any number of other illogical defenses. It's just automatic once you decide some thought has to be defended, and when it forms a really persistent, robust structure you end up with a religion, national mythos, economic norm etc. The structure is looking out for itself first, and the current elites hold the most gravity in deciding whether to further perpetuate or not. But elites aren't immune to being true believers either - they have to be able to let go and examine what they want to accomplish, and if the belief they have is too firmly tied to their immediate self-interest, they can't do it.
My reading here is derived somewhat from Heather Marsh's writings, but with different focus and phrasing.
In fact, proponents can’t even define this equilibrium, despite stating that it is the end goal. This proves that the goal is a lie.
It’s pure power seeking, and that shouldn’t be a surprise, because that is precisely what they assert determines truth and shapew society. Not some natural order, but people who held power over others. They complain about it but if you watch, it’s exactly what they’re doing themselves. Pure projection.
As groups become more successful, they're more likely to shift from reasonable goals to extreme goals.
Look at Dave Chappelle, who was the attempted target of cancellation and Netflix and people buying tickets to his shows completely ignored it.
Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular.
Twitter doesn’t reflect the real world.
Now a lot of readers will feel like that's absurd, extreme, maybe even trolling. But it was only a handful of years ago that I was posting here warning people that they should refuse to rename git master branches to main because accepting this for short term convenience or out of ideological sympathy would lead to an endless spiral of power games, used to purge anyone not on the far left. And here we are, not so long after, with lists of banned words so long nobody even bothers enumerating them all, any one of which can be used to build a case for getting rid of you.
There's a clear pattern here in which people are repeatedly not taking wokeness seriously enough. This isn't a game and they spend every waking hour taking over every institution. A communist revolution doesn't require capturing the seat of government permanently, if you can capture every institution that surrounds it and essentially eliminate all ability for a non revolutionary government to operate.
The fix is simple enough though: do a DHH and get rid of all woke people in your organisation. It's quite easy as given a hostile environment they tend to leave en masse and they weren't doing much work for the organisation anyway. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/even-more-bay-area-hou...
I think to some extent this is largely because Rowling was kept at arm's length. If Rowling was the mouthpiece for the game's story, showing up in interviews, etc., then I think more of the backlash against Rowling's personal actions would be impacting the game.
See also how Disney happily sells Pirates of the Carribean while maintaining they will never work with Johnny Depp again.
In game theory terms, objecting to something was now always a dominant strategy, and rejecting an allegation of racism was always a losing strategy. Inevitably, a ratchet effect took hold in which those with the most strident vision of what ‘diversity’ meant were effectively handed the keys to the castle. That is — until someone with a more strident vision turned up behind them…
https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a...
It’s short and pithy, and it can sort of cover the core concept without needing deep academic understanding of the social dynamics involved.
> This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes.
Not at all. Academia is about the pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment. What you are describing is happening in academia, but that is not its purpose or its main role. Academia is as much about the mating habits of the spotted fizzbuzz up in the Andes or the design of advanced composite materials or developing vaccines for malaria than the understanding of how humans behave in society.
The ridiculous extremes are not confined to academia, this is just an anti-intellectual talking point. Nobody is running around panicking that the purpose of elections is to produce fascists.
> An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. If they’re faced with a set vocabulary today, then tomorrow they’ll have to come up with an ”aha! Found a new offensive word” to position themselves as a relevant, meaningful part of this strange, ethereal movement.
Again this weird focus on academia. Journalists, politicians, and random blokes on the internet do it. Most of academics don’t. The problem is humans in general, your scapegoat is meaningless. By ascribing your issues to an immaterial Other entity out to get you, you absolve the rest of society, which is really where the problem lies.
I also agree with you that these issues happen outside of academia. It just so happens that I perceive this specific problem as being academic. The fact that I argue that this is an academic problem does not imply that this only happens in academia (one example does not necessarily generalize to the whole).
And yes, obviously, running towards extremes is not confined to academia; however, my point was that it is more-or-less ok to do it in academic work as long as you do not try to force your extreme views back down to the rest of society (which most academics don't, or if they do, fail). Actually, I'd argue that there is no better way to do it. Research often means pushing things to extreme, and most of its results die gracefully and are replaced with something else that is more reasonable for the current times (or simply gets forgotten). Don't take this wrong, as if I believe that research is useless. In the same way that a startup dies (and must die) if it cannot offer a feasible, interesting, useful product, research also dies (and must die) if its results make sense but are not applicable. No problem there.
The problem begins when the academic issues (whether they are discussed in the university or not) which are being pushed to the extreme in order to test the waters are then being pushed down society's throat aggressively like this, without regards to whoever they trample over on the way. These academic issues are being forcefully, steadily introduced into public and private institutions that have a very real, concrete power over how many people act, behave, work, and communicate. These are (in one way or another) governing agencies that, while they are not the police so to speak, still have under their belt lots of different means and tools to enforce certain things over large groups of people. This is extremely irresponsible of those who think of themselves as drivers in this movement.
I'd question the association between mother and woman, rather than mother and birth
It’s the same with people who menstruate — not only for trans men but for post menopausal women, women who’ve had hysterectomies, or are otherwise have amenorrhea.
Particularly when that language control is transparently used for power seeking.
We don’t need to shape every utterance around outliers — that’s pathological and stifles discussion.
Normal people instinctively understand this, and “woman” and “mother” are completely understandable and useful terms, even if there are a handful of exceptions out of millions are exceptions to the strict definition.
Is there an article or paper about this somewhere? I searched for it and can't find anything.
That is fake news from a convicted fraudster. It was claimed but never supported by evidence [0].
"Fertility clinician Cecil Jacobson claimed to have transplanted a fertilized egg from a female baboon to the omentum in the abdominal cavity of a male baboon in the mid-1960s, which then carried the fetus for four months; however, Jacobson did not publish his claims in a scientific journal, and was subsequently convicted on several unrelated counts of fraud for ethical misconduct."
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_pregnancy
I didn't.
As Cyphase said [0], I posted the non-mobile link which many people -- including myself -- appreciate.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35007189
Should everyone take care to account for the most improbable interpretations, even unintended ones? Thanks for providing a good sample of equity language. Feels like being dictated by an elite to the masses.
So that’s an edge case. They can call themselves a mother or father or birthing person or pink elephant. That shouldn’t mean someone else can’t identify as a mother or father or whatnot.
This isn’t even a novel delineation; adoption and surrogacy have long dealt with the separation of parenting and reproductive roles. Besides, history’s foremost feminists would cringe at womanhood and motherhood being reduced to a biological function.
"A pregnant person is a woman" doesn't say anything about what people are allowed to call themselves, but rather makes an absolute statement that all pregnant people can be called "women". It doesn't take into account the edge cases you mentioned, and that's what shrimp_emoji took offense to.
If they are successful in have a pregnant trans-woman in Unicode, you just know that, depending on the depiction, it will be used as "The fat guy"-icon.
I don't see the problem of including small groups - they are the ones who are most invisible and marginalized and therefore in need of recognition. You say it makes little sense, but to me it not only makes sense but is self-evident. Even if you're right, I can scroll through my emoji map and see many that are even more niche, yet none of them receive the angry flak GNC emoji do. (Not to even mention the even more obscure items in the rest of Unicode.)
It's one thing if communities on twitter would like to define their own use of the language - it's another when it's imposed on others without their consent.
Obviously very bad behaviour (large circle) is going to overlap with a nearby resilient child. Or a very tired and fractious child is going to sulk by their sibling doing just about anything. But the more resilient and better behaved the combinations, the better.
If the children are fighting, I've taken to just calling out "Circles!"
Unfortunately, a polarised society and social media seem to make everyone treat interaction as war, which is pretty tedious.
Now that these wrestlers found out that they can persuade the public that the most uncharitable interpretation is actually harmful to some third party (nobody from the audience usually says that they personally are offended), this approach became immensely popular.
Since simple reason would usually dispel much of the effect, leaving only the small and easily correctable issue, it is common to excite a large amount of reason-eclipsing emotions over such issues, preferably the righteous rage.
But it may feel fun to express a strong and righteous emotion, especially in a crowd of other people doing the same. It does not take thinking, it does not take making a difficult decision (because everybody around can't be wrong), so it feels good. A big echo chamber like a popular Twitter thread make it feel epic in scale.
This makes that kind of righteous rage a very convenient tool of manipulation, for fun, profit, and any other purposes.
The one that actually annoys me the most is “analogy policing”. If I say “would you be ok if i stole your bike”. And then your response is “now you’re equating me to a bike thief!” Or “ you’re trivializing This to bike theft?!”
We can’t have discussions because every phrase is taken as a way to win an argument. IMO this is far worse than language policing as there is not even the intention of trying to protect a disadvantaged group.
Much like bringing a knife to a gunfight, attempting to seek truth during a status-assertion contest is not very efficient.
Calling my wife a "birthing person" just made her feel like some gross vessel for having a baby. We purposefully chose providers that didn't use that language.
"Chestfeeding" is another one that's cropping up and makes zero sense. Men have breasts, so breastfeeding is already gender-neutral. But it's seen as female-centric so out the door it goes.
There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. To the extent that it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"
Mammals.
How can referring to the fact people have what our entire branch of the tree of life is named after be offensive?
This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity.
I've been somewhat worried about there not being much of place in the world for my sons when they grow up. Now I'm imagining needing to explain to my daughter that there's no point having any sporting aspirations unless they are in a sport where biological women have an advantage.
Edit: on reflection, perhaps it was completely foreseeable. Modern feminism spent a lot of time dismantling masculinity; it makes some sense that femininity would be next against the wall.
>the advantage could not be that extradordinary
Look up the world records or current ranking for male and female athletes for any sport
And please, stop pretending like trans women and cis men are a 1:1 comparison. We have trans athletes. Use them - in aggregate and not with an anecdote - to make your comparisons and you'll see it's pretty much a normal distribution of performance. In fact, you're making my point for me, because even the most salient of examples still get beaten by cis women. That wouldn't happen if we had this immense disparity.
Laurel Hubbard (MtF) was on New Zealand's Olympic weightlifting team. An Indigenous Maori girl missed out because of that.
There's countless examples of athletes who were totally uncompetitive as males, suddenly becoming elite-level after transitioning. If that doesn't say male advantage I don't know what does.
But it's not just the competitive aspect. It may be offensive to say, I know, but some women actually feel uncomfortable in a change room with large 6'1" men and their penises.
Ah yes, the penises and their unashamed wielders, large 6'1" men, exposing their meat to the elements. It reminds me of homophobes being uncomfortable sharing the looker room with an openly gay person. Should we also concern ourselves with the women still uncomfortable sharing a changing room with "colored" people?
(You named two, but you forgot to mention Lia is still very regularly beaten and Laurel placed last in her group at those Olympics, in a weight class that had most countries not even send a competitor.)
The silver medalist in the 200m race at the 2020 Olympics (who also holds the U20 WR for the 200m) has a Y chomosome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Mboma
(These participants are "intersex", rather than "trans".)
The intersex athletes support this claim because, although their condition is "natural" in your sense, they are in fact being banned from participation in women's sports. For example, the various individuals mentioned above are restricted from participating in distances from 400m to a mile, including in particular 800m! (Thus they have switched to other distances, but the bans are likely to extend there too.)
Let's be honest, that's what most of these bills are marketing themselves on.
The single biggest genetic difference among humans is the presence of a Y chromosome.
This single casual factor, not "testosterone levels" nor "height" nor "bone density" nor "muscle mass", is the best factor to split on.
Accordingly, the women's division at the Olympics should be based on this factor.
(There are potentially still edge cases, but neither trans people nor even the "46X,Y DSD" individuals mentioned above are the edge cases.)
That is actually incorrect. You can be born with a Y chromosome and zero functional testosterone[1]. There are a lot of moving parts in between having a Y chromosome and getting testosterone expression. The later of which is a much better discriminator.
And also, these deviations aren't rare. Though they are usually unknown, when they don't cause obvious developmental deviation (and thus labeled DSDs). They also are more common in some populations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivit...
This argument works in reverse as well though. People don't want to throw out the idea of gender to appease a select few.
There is a multitude of things that are simply unfair accidents of birth and there isn't a solid line where it's obvious something should be done. With gender issues there seems to be a lot of people with no dog in the fight who have extremely strong opinions but accomodations aren't always made on stuff like this because a few people are experiencing something unfair which they have no control over. It's not "hate", as many people would say, to want to have a conversation about it.
Also, I get your argument, but the entire premise of trans women stealing college sports trophies is false. It's a bit dependent on specific discipline and how well you manage to retain muscle (it's much harder, and once you lost it, it's gone for good), but generally HRT levels the playing field enough that the olympic comittee, who I trust much more on this than the local republican, does not object to participation.
Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
I find it entirely unconvincing that a trans person would solely transition to cheat at sports. The GDR tried something comparable to this hypothetical and the female athletes unknowingly exposed to androgens seemed pretty unhappy about the outcome. So I don't see why you don't see any theoretical advantage on the same spectrum of "unfair accidents of birth". These supposed advantages certainly aren't severe enough that trans women beat cis women consistently.
I am not describing myself. I just understand the position of people that feel that way and don't like to just dismiss them as bigots as most seem to.
These people are definitely making a slippery slope argument but they also feel like they're already halfway down the slope. They aren't out there seeing an A and concerned about B, they see it as A, B, C, D, E then F and wonder when G will come.
The trans sports thing is F. They're more worried about G, H and I.
>Also, I'd like to point out that the major parts in high end athlete performance are already down to "unfair accidents of birth", even if you don't introduce gender to the issue. A tall person will always have an edge playing basketball.
That's my point. If all I ever wanted to do was play basketball but I can't because of [accident of birth], which accidents require accomodations?
It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball so more people down the height distribution curve can compete at the higher levels. That would be, with the same logic as the exclusion of trans people, equitable. But we kind of instinctively know it's wrong.
Personally I don't have a strong opinion on this, especially since trans women taking over women's sports is not a problem yet anyway.
It is a problem - see https://shewon.org for an increasingly long list of actual women who have been pushed out of winning spots in their sports by men who identify as women.
That's a matter of perspective, a perspective that is the core of this issue. Everything you've said after that is all true if you agree with your priors but people aren't asking you to defend that part, they're asking you to defend your priors, that gender identity is what's important in the segregation of sports and not biological sex.
An enormous part of this discussion has to do with Title IX, generally considered a positive thing among women's rights advocates. It's language deals with sex, the biological term, of male and female (as do many laws).
> No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Behind all the people on both sides of this argument about what's a man and what's a woman there's the legal issue that it likely (I'm being generous is not saying definitely) violates Title IX to allow males into female sports (in the areas where T9 has authority).
> It would be like banning everyone over 2m from basketball...
This is another framing situation. I'd argue that the better analogy would be weight classes in wrestling. Classes work really well in individual sports to sort people into competitive groups and it works because it's an objective measure.
Unfortunately, team sports like basketball don't have enough players to form a different team for every "height class" so biological females, who tend to be shorter for the majority of the distribution curve, are basically guaranteed excluded by accident of birth. So team sports are segregated by biology because almost an entire sex, 50% of the population, is excluded by the distribution curves of their biology so we now have "sex classes" in most sports to serve the two major distribution curves of humans. Getting rid of sex segregation in basketball and doing so by height instead would make a lot of sense if height was the only factor but there's an equivalent set of distribution curves for things like strength, weight, speed, et al. that it's much simpler to take the thing that those curves have in common, sex, and segregate by them. And back to the previous paragraph, that's why wrestling is still also sex segregated.
I understand that argument and, I think, the sex segregation is a logical solution to the sexual dimorphism of humanity.
I also understand the argument that the social issue of a male/female sexes not being neatly segregated into gender identities, that people generally (also not always) want to segregate themselves, socially, with those people who share a common identity and that includes sports, especially lower levels, that are generally much more social functions than athletic. What I don't see coming from this side of the argument is a defined set of rules that can replace the language of Title IX. Which is totally understandable because gender is exponentially more complicated and diverse than sex. I'm onboard with doing something about this but I've yet to see an understandable replacement for something like Title IX that uses gender over sex.
I have a bit of curiosity about the idea of "identity" being something worthy of segregation considering that gender identity isn't the only type of identity categorization.
Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.
What I will say is that I know some trans athletes who are extremely average in their fields, and the focus on a few high performers is mostly driven by those that can gain political capital from it.
If we can look at the data and say that transitioning and playing against women doesn't result in a relative performance increase vs the average athlete in the field, that's a strong argument that it's not unfair to let trans athletes compete against women. If we look at the data and see that "men who perform at the 60th percentile level among men perform after their transition at the 80th percentile among women" that's an indicator there remains an unfair advantage and our medical technology for transition needs to improve before trans athletes can fairly compete against women.
You wouldn't make this point about most other unchanging factors (i.e. genetics) that affect performance either. "Fairness" in high end sports is extremely subjective, and hard work is only a small part of how successful you can be, with time (which usually equals to wealth; poor people can't afford to not work) and genetics being the most important. It's simply not a meritocracy in the first place.
"It's already unfair so there's no reason to care about it being unfair" is not a good argument.
the relative increase in performance would not displace anyone with a shot at winning.
Without data we have no way of knowing that. If that's true, we can prove it and put to rest the controversy.
I refuse to acknowledge this as controvercy that requires this kind of addressing.
That's certainly a large percentage of the motivation, granted. I do think a salient point is that there's nobody lobbying to make it unfair in some other way. If there were groups successfully lobbying to, say, abolish weight classes or allow the use of some expensive performance enhancement like a heads-up display, people would also oppose it.
I'm not sure why you think permission to compete should be the default position over denial until we have more robust studies for competitive advantage. We already know testosterone and male puberty conveys inherent advantage, so the default should be to prove no advantage exists before permitting competition.
Only recently has it become clear that about 2 years of HRT eliminates competitive advantage for endurance sports, but that no amount of HRT seems to erase the competitive advantage in power sports of trans women who have gone through male puberty (MMA, power lifting, etc.).
There are a lot of genetic factors that convey an inherent advantage. Do we control for all of them or is this one special? I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU
Yes, testosterone is special because it's a huge advantage. Like, the next closest factor doesn't even come close across most sports. Some women who were born female have naturally high testosterone levels and are barred from competing in women's categories.
> I think this video does a good job of highlighting the contradictions inherent in framing this as an issue of fairness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9YAFYIBOU
Yes, I've seen it, and it does do a good job. Notice the argument being made:
1. Sports is entertainment.
2. Sports is entertaining to the extent that the outcome is unpredictable.
3. We keep it unpredictable by establishing fairness so no one has privileged knowledge of the outcome.
The extreme examples she cites of unfairness were not entertaining exactly because the outcome was predictable. Given sports is to be entertaining due to unpredictability, preserving fairness is critical.
I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are about to be sentenced to jail time.
But men are largely still men. I've never heard "penis havers", or "vertical urinators". Perhaps I would if I hung about in certain circles. No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r
> Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weaker players, thus advancing the idea of a Women's World Champion.[16] However, from the beginning, László was against the idea that his daughters had to participate in female-only events. "Women are able to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to that of men," he wrote. "Chess is a form of intellectual activity, so this applies to chess. Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect."[17] This put the Polgárs in conflict with the Hungarian Chess Federation of the day, whose policy was for women to play in women-only tournaments. Polgár's older sister, Susan, first fought the bureaucracy by playing in men's tournaments and refusing to play in women's tournaments. In 1985, when she was a 15-year-old International Master, Susan said that it was due to this conflict that she had not been awarded the Grandmaster title despite having made the norm eleven times.[18]
> Or letting trans men into men's toilets or spaces ...
That one is interesting, because women's toilets are usually all cubicles, and men's toilets is the only place where you could actually see anything.. Btw, it's not just trans-men that get a free pass here, but cis-women also often go to men's toilets when the queue for the women's toilets is too long, and nobody bats an eyelid.
When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.
This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.
But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.
Yes. So it's interesting that even in something as cerebral as chess, men dominate.
(If that serves as an illustration of the other side of the bell curve.)
Of course in a fully enlightened society arguably women should not need such safe spaces, but I'm not sure we are quite there yet.
The big difference with gender is that we can easily those genetics. It is much harder to look at two women or two men and measure their blood oxygen maximums. It is generally trivial to get an idea of blood oxygen maximum if one person is a man and the other is a woman.
An adult human is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien.
An adult human female is a fully mature member of the species Homo sapien who belongs to the reproductive class that produces large, immobile gametes. The reproductive system of an individual may be actual, potential, historic or broken.
How do you define “woman”?
Let's say you have concrete definitions of man and woman (and as many additional categories as you please). You see a person and believe they fall into one category. As it turns out, you are wrong, and they are actually in another category.
That you miscategorized someone has no bearing on the validity (or lack thereof) of your definitions.
“Proves” in that saying means “tests”, not “establishes the validity of”.
The legal maxim only makes sense in its domain because it rests on the idea that law is written by people, and that calling out a specific case for one treatment reveals a pre-existing understanding that outside of that case, that treatment would not apply.
In principle, this is not necessarily true in Ovotesticular DSD (formerly “True Hermaphroditism”), which is generally a symptom of tetragametic chimerism, though for both health and gender reasons it is apparently not uncommon for people who naturally have both functional ovarian and testicular tissue to have hormone therapy and/or surgery to align more with the sex traits stereotypical of a single preferred gender.
So-called “true hermaphrodites” do not have functional male and female reproductive systems.
What is a reproductive class?
It’s only complicated if you start from the premise that language must accord the same importance to the experience of small minorities as to the experience of the overwhelming majority.
Do the words "dude" and "guy" demonstrate that males are actually more than one 'gender'? This is silly.
Then you popped into with a completely different reason. I'm still working on the original argument. We came up with more than two words to express the concept.
Rayiner's response: "It can’t be that complex if virtually every human society came up with two distinct words to express the concepts."
"Two distinct words" plainly refers to the two sexes. Virtually every human society ("most of us") hit upon classifying humans into these two categories, with very rare exceptions that I'm sure you're itching to point out right now. You have tried to perform a sleigh-of-hand "gotcha" by pointing out that there are many words for women and many words for men, but you're barking up the wrong tree if you think you can gaslight a dog like me into believing that is a rebuttal of Rayiner's point.
Define love. Define consciousness.
These words are fractals, simultaneously simple and complex. It’s alarming that we’re unable, as a matter of discourse, to accept this useful ambiguity anymore.
At its simplest, a woman is a person who identifies as such. At among its most complex, it’s an empowered expression of femininity. That there isn’t a single definition doesn’t make the word bad, it makes it human.
But I'm OK with this. One of the original people demanding "define a woman" was a law maker. If we're making laws that use the word woman we need to have a stringent definition.
Not ex ante. That’s the strength of common law. If you have a problem with this, consider why we need laws which define womanhood. (Yes, I am an ERA proponent.)
An ERA proponent is in reference to an Equal Rights Amendment?
I don’t. And I’m struggling to play devil’s advocate, which is uncommon.
> ERA proponent is in reference to an Equal Rights Amendment
Yes.
We don’t (and, contrary to a sibling comment, this is not particular to common law, it applies in civil law jurisdictions as well, though it may be more true in the common law). If every word in law needed a “stringent definition”, the law would be so full of definitions you’d never be able to find the rules that actually apply them to the real world. Laws sometimes need stringent definitions, and they sometimes need disambiguation between plausible alternatives that don’t actually require a stringent definition, and sometimes they get by just fine with no definition at all.
Is my gender identity invalid if I'm not someone who fits into the gender norms? Am I a woman if Customer Support thinks my voice is feminine?
This is circular an so, not a deninition. Not a problem as long as this is part of an internal personal model. It is a problem when reasoning about social structures.
It’s Cartesian, not circular. There’s a difference. We don’t need it rigorously defined for it to have meaning—that’s the point. (This does make it a word incompatible with precise endeavours like lawmaking.)
This is the flaw. It isn’t. It is required if we will write rules with respect to it. But there is another way. Forcing everything into an objective definition is the source of our divides, not a solution to anything.
Statesmen, from Cicero to Hamilton to Obama, understood this. But there is an emerging tendency to treat every system as technical, and that is destructive.
That it’s irrelevant to the definition of a woman. That’s the strength of fuzzy definitions.
When separating the kids, did anyone formally define what a girl or a boy is? Did every parent in that room need to resolve every edge case to their implied definitions ex ante? Could you guarantee conflict by forcing a formal definition on that group, even if it results in the same practical outcome the implied, unsaid definition yielded and which was peacefully accepted by the group? No, no and, of course, yes.
Now, you are right that for the purposes of this event no one defined what a girl or a boy is. The reason it is so (as is the case with many other social conventions) is because neither the participants nor the organizers challenge the classification.
There is no doubt that had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal.
I didn’t. I called it a simple definition. It’s not generally correct because it’s too precise.
> had it been challenged strongly and frequently enough, the implicit definitions would become explicit and formal
For people without any civics background, yes. That we lack leaders who push back against overspecification, or people raising needless challenges out of, I don’t know, maladjustment, is a cultural failure, collectively, and an individual failing among those who don’t understand nuance.
No, “emo” is a social category that is not exclusive with genders, its in a different bucket.
But, yes, the distinction of social categories into groups like “gender”, “race”, etc., is, like the categories themselves, fundamentally an arbitrary social construct.
> Do you believe that segregated services — sports, bathrooms, locker rooms, etc — were intended to be segregated by gender, as opposed to sex?
Binary “sex” is just ascribed gender on the basis of a subset of sex traits. To the extent there is a valid basis for segregating services, it varies from service to service. Similarly, the motivations vary from service to service (and, generally differ from the legitimate justifications, if any.)
However:
> The fact that 1 in a million people is neither a man or a women
the number you are looking for here (ie only ..
) is 180 in a million, or some 4,625 or so in a country such as Australia - which does have some real bearing on things such as national passports and why Australia has a three value gender field there ( M | F | X ).Less strictly, the prevalence of "nondimorphic sexual development" might be as high as 1.7% or 17,000 in a million.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex
Using the typical assignment of “sex” (really, a kind of gender ascribed based on a subset of sex traits at birth):
1 in 25,000 men is XX (approximately universally infertile, though chimerism might affect this, I guess)
1 in 15,000 women is XY (potentially fertile with HRT, and in at least one documented case, due to chimerism, without.)
And if you’re looking for a scientific definition of female, it’s
”an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))”
(Therefore, sex is binary. Also, there is no sensible, consistent definition of gender, making it nonsense.)
But okay you would like to define a woman as a human female, "an organism that in sexual maturity produces ova (large gametes (reproductive cells))", if a prepubescent takes hormone blockers for their entire life does that interrupt your definition of woman? What about if an XY Swyer Syndrone individual has a functional uterus and ovaries? What if a female with hypogonadism takes hormone therapy to prevent infertility?
Sex is not binary, gender is.
Probably we should look at potential over one's life, likely at (or even before) birth, otherwise the same could be argued for "what if a child dies before they're fertile"?
The idea of a person of one sex displaying common gender characteristics of the other sex is very old.
I don't want to focus on the outliers. I want to focus on the fact that we're enforcing a binary distinction when there are outliers.
If you argument is that there are more than 2 genders, that's fine, Man, Woman and whatever else.
They are outliers that have their own names.
Certain things are constant though Man: Adult Human with XY sex Chromosomes
Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
Everything else and I mean no disrespect with this term, are mutations that fall outside of the norm.
Surgery and hormones though do not change your sex chromosomes. You are still sex you were born as. You can be a trans woman, but sex wise you are still a man and vice versa for trans men.
I wish trans people all the happiness in the world but if you paint stripes on a horse its still a horse, not a zebra.
Why not? Why can't the outliers try and fit into the binary definition we enforce on society?
Woman: Adult Human with XX sex Chromosomes
And anyone that falls outside this binary definition... is neither man nor woman?
Man or woman?
Of course offline language policing is as old as time, but until the late 20th century it was the domain of religions or regimes - those with actual power.
It was only in the ~90s that people realised that you don't need a power structure backing your language policing, you can just apply it anyway, taking advantage of existing status-structured organisations such as universities. In any sizeable population there's enough authoritarians who will gleefully police your linguistic regulations, simply to have power over others.
However, without a serious religious movement backing any of this, the elites will eventually tire of the current linguistic fashion and move onto another cause celebre.
no, it isn't what they mean. you might say it's "equally" sexist, but "man" meant "mankind", it meant "person", and woman comes from "wifeman", person who is a wife. So mailman is "person who delivers mail". A good way to think of it is that language is actually neutral. Cultures have ideas and values, and those ideas and values suffuse communication, but the language is just a transport mechanism and will be bent and altered to communicate what people are thinking. But the language, always neutral.
it's similar to the names of native american tribes. There are so many examples of "the Sioux didn't call themselves the Sioux, they called themselves Lakota, their enemies called them the Sioux." What did Lakota mean in Lakotan? It means "the people". Everybody else? they weren't even people. Every native american tribe did that, and probably our own hunter gatherer ancestors did that too.
None of this is cause for concern, it's actually really interesting.
I think that one of my favorite jokes, "linguists like ambiguity more than most people." applies to your use of "language" here. The ambiguity is that some people say "language" to refer to the intended meaning of groups of words rather than the composition of words each with individual meanings. One can be neutral and the other can be highly biased. Furthermore, overall meaning is more than what is denoted, it is derived from culture and experience far more than it is from distant roots. eg: ask most people where "deadlines" come from and they will probably say "their boss."
There are some uses radfems get super upset about that I find useful, though. Like "people with cervixes" if you are asking for cervical cancer screenings. Because increasingly, that affects people who do not feel spoken to if you use the word woman and this adds clarity to who the audience is.
Huh? What fascist dog whistle? Sounds like the person was just describing their opinion and experience. The whole idea of dogwhistling sounds like a weird conspiracy theory. I’m sure it’s happened more than 0 times, but thinking dogwhistling is everywhere sounds just as unhinged to me as any of the wacky right wing conspiracies.
The beginning of this essay explains the phrase pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAMM3l156Oo
You left that part out.
>it's now controversial to ask "what is a woman?"
to Matt Walsh is pretty clear. The entire documentenary is based on the premise that it's now controversial to ask this, because the answer must inevitably be "adult human female". It's treated as if these are magic words that dispel gender ideology instantly. Meanwhile in reality, nobody finds this question controversial, only that Matt Walsh puports to know the one and only, extremely obvious answer. That many people disagree with.
I guess if you want to be exact, I will correct to "nobody found this question controversial before it became a dogwhistle". But the question itself is still not controversial, it's all context.
It does exactly make the point, you are somehow trying to define what a woman is, and asking if the definition only encompasses adult human females or underage as well.
Go measure the prevalence of "people with prostates" and compare. The word "man" is, strangely, not subject to this erasure.
(That being said, the likelyhood of getting prostate cancer on HRT is pretty low. Not quite the level of cis men getting breast cancer, but it's down there. It's a very androgen dependent cancer.)
Usually never is also the intention or context taken into account.. You will always find someone who will say he feels insulted for anything, but we won't find a common denominator if we need to account for every salty person on earth. True respect, equality and no discrimination for everybody is what should count... but it feels today more and more that this is actually alienating, and also excluding people more than what it helps, the contrary! How to stop? Intention is good, but taken to the extreme, this is todays discrimination and exclusion..
It makes me feel like a pawn in their own self-actualization, not someone they remotely ever gave a thought or care about.
Shall I now say I have to call a “person who performs plumbing work” to fix my drain because calling them a plumber indicates that they have no worth outside their job? No, that’s not how language has ever worked.
Basically for “people-first language” to exist, you have to create a problem that didn’t exist before to come up with it as a solution.
Why is that? I’m genuinely curious. Who should be offended by the word slave? Is it I, the Slav? The etymology of the word concerns my heritage, and yet I’m not offended. It’s not as though people toying with language today is going to bring back my relatives who died as slaves, nor will it undo the suffering they endured.
https://twitter.com/rexchapman/status/1437871709911195655?s=...
I doubt slaves care so much about being called slaves or enslaved people, but having their freedom and autonomy stripped from them and treated horribly with no avenue for recompense.
Well, that's entirely up to you and me isn't it?
I think what bothers me is not so much the word police (ignore them) but everyone else that allow them to set the agenda.
I talk the way I've talked my entire life and I don't care what people think about it.
The difference I suppose is that I don't think that words I use are dumb shit.
Someone wants to be the moral authoritarian over the language you use? Only if you let them. And why would you do that?
“enslaved people” is not people/person-first language.
“People who are enslaved” is people-first language.
“enslaved people” is “situation first” (more commonly “identity first” or “disability first”, but neither strictly applies to “being enslaved”) language, just as “slaves” is. (In the disability context, “the disabled” and “disabled people” are textbook examples of “disability first” language, to which “people first” or “person first” language is contrasted.)
EDIT: Yes, I realize that this is an example of "people-first" language given near the opening of this opinion piece. It says something that in this rant about "equity language", the example given of the application of a particular form ("people-first language") of equity language is basically a textbook example of what that form seeks to avoid rather than what it prescribes.
> For example, it seems like we can’t say “mother” anymore in medical settings.
You can absolutely use “mother” to describe a specific person who, in fact, is a mother in medical settings. Because people of non-feminine gender identity can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth.
> I support trans people living however they want, but my mother was a mother
Literally no one has a problem with your mother being described as a mother.
> At work, a “women in engineering” group got renamed to something bland like “gender minorities in tech”.
Presumably, it got renamed that because whoever made decisions for it decided the mission was broader than women. “Gender minorities” isn’t a bland alternative to “women”, it has a broader scope.
> can give birth, it is sub-optimal and exclusionary as a generic term for a person giving, or who has given, birth
Realize that smartassing someone with that excourse is alienating andor insulting andor exclusionary to other people the same, for whatever reason, may it be a different level of education or just disagreement.
> the mission was broader
It is good that you call it like that what it is, a mission for the new missionaries, almost just a religion of a strange minority that usually even is not affected at all. Please also try to understand a little the other side.
A lot of people do take issue with the concept of equity itself. Because it's unattainable, a fantasy to keep the "movement" going. No amount of language puritanism will ever be enough for the kinds of people that write these guides, because no human society will ever exist - or has ever existed - where everyone is some sterile, "equitable" copy of each other.
Does that mean they are bad, immoral people? I think equity is faulty concept. Seems like an attempt to create equality of outcome by policing language. But I'll defer to arguments made by the likes of Sam Harris, Julia Galef and Coleman Hughes. Or the Atlantic author of this article.
Changing language is a great tool to privilege the non working academic class with access and time to study the latest fad over the global working class who build the consumer products these elites type their screeds on.
The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.
> Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion.
Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":
> Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.
“Mother” could be inadequately specific in situations involving same-sex relationships, surrogacies, and/or adoption. For example, Washington state offers up to 6 weeks of medical leave to the birthing parent, in addition to the 12 weeks of bonding leave that are offered to both parents.
Policy language needs to be specific and able to accommodate minority or edge cases.
The troll argument here is: now that we're saying "birthing people" instead of "women", it's time to acknowledge that abortion is not actually a "women's issue".
Which is partly right, to be fair. It’s a fundamental human right issue about who can force things on your body. The consequences also affect whole families, not all men are arseholes who vanish when their girlfriend gets pregnant. Framing this as only women’s issue is part of a dangerous tribal war.
It is also part of a pattern of subjugation of a social group on religious grounds, and as such part of a broader attack on secular, liberal societies.
2. it is not the mother's body, but it's completely dependent on it to live.
3. parents have and have to have natural responsibility over their offspring.
4. the society establishment (both secular and religious) are there to protect society's norm.
5. not killing innocent humans is a social norm.
6. the embryo/fetus is a human.
7. saying that someones on "religious grounds" want to subjugate "secular, liberal societies" by opposing to killing innocent humans is no more that projecting USA's domestic radicated bipolar politics to the global level.
8. "religious grounds" are nothing mystical, nothing like "things which only unreasonalbe superstitious are afraid of", but a core attribute of the human nature: just »don't kill humans who are annoying to you even if they don't have social security ID yet, even if they don't pay taxes yet, even if they are your own children«
9. "abortion rights" group also stands on religious grounds, except it worships Moloch.
10. "abortion rights" people often comes from the pre-assumption that they are entitled to enjoy sex without consequences and without any responsibility. gain without pain.
11. "abortion rights" is an other level of productionalization of people. our life is already mostly a product of soulless companies. now they are turning babies into commodity which you can return if you changed your mind or not satisfied with it. wondering how much does it differ from the menacing "slavery".
btw it is sorted in a list not because of any argumentation structure.
i don't think (and don't see what indicated it to you) that there are only these 2 options in terms of worship targets. but phrasing the other option the "only" "right" one, paints me an intolerant blind-faithed, which i reject.
Btw, you might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_abortion and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_abortion interesting.
My understanding is that opinion polls show most people have a moderate opinion on abortion, which seems pretty reasonable given that "becoming human" is something that happens in a continuous manner over a 9-month period.
why we usually threat neglecting the born and unborn differently? because they need different level and kind of care: eg. smoking hurts unborn differently than born. did the mother eat honey which happened to be infected and caused her embryo to die? it was not considered neglect until this honey-effect was discovered.
A cell being of a species does not make it an instance of that species, in the same way that a skin cell is a human cell but is not itself a human.
> "Can a human be a single cell?" can it be 2? or 3? …
If a single cell is not an instance of a human, it follows that there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously. Mostly the disagreement is about where this line is.
IMO, there is a substantial difference between a conceived egg and any other cells: an egg turns into a human being over time (provided it's left doing its businnes normally), other kind of cells don't operate this way AFAIK.
> there is some point during pregnancy where an instance of a human exists where one did not previously
completely agree. IMO we can even extend it by omitting the "If a single cell is not an instance of a human" condition: even if we qualify a specific single cell to be a human, there must be a point when it became a human.
I completely understand the “gender is social and not biological” concept, and I believe it is true to a large degree. But this is not the case: if you are able to bear a child, then by definition you are female and a woman in the biological sense.
Not quite sure what the commentor you are replying to means by the social part but they didn't state that giving birth => woman is a 2 way implication.
Another example: the only vertebrates that can fly are birds(ignoring squirrels and weird fish). That's not equivalent to saying that the ostrich is not a bird.
Flying vertebrate => bird
Bird =/> flying vertebrate
I guess I can fix it easily enough:
Flight(not gliding or floating) implies wings.
Wings don't imply flight.
That one in particular, I was almost offended when I learnt during a DEI training that it could be construed as insensitive/racist of me to use that idiom.
English is not my native language, and is not an official language of my country. I work for a local branch of a large US tech company, and the working language is English, which I'm perfectly fine with. But when we get subjected to DEI training material which was very obviously made for an American audience, even though nobody in this office is a native English speaker, I think it goes too far and ironically becomes slightly insensitive in its own way.
Singapore has its own problems and groups of people that aren't doing so well. A focus on African-Americans felt extremely tone-deaf to me. Almost like it was designed to mock the whole DEI enterprise.
Sometimes I wonder if some interests are not all too happy to see people fight about who they might have to share a public bathroom one day in their entire life rather than issues actually affecting them.
In fact, they took it so far that it is now in the realm of fan fiction.
Language cannot be legislated, and meaningful change requires more than a new literay style of expression.
Social progress in real, measurable ways is possible and important. Workers' rights, pay equity, access to education, public health-care, affordable living, good care for our elderly... These are good things that measurably grow happiness in community.
Hurt-Feelings Fan Fiction is a section of the book store that I will never visit.
This is clearly not actually about morality - no one in their right mind would argue that someone is racist just because they didn't know the etymology of "cakewalk". And a complete racist could follow these rules easily enough.
This seems to me that these are a set of moral grounds to punish people for having a low EQ.
None of these rules or guides are even internally consistent. What it will and has always come down to is understanding how to read a room and follow imposed social etiquette (aka, EQ - something that we know is not equally distributed!)
Whether people promoting this stuff understand it or not (I think some of them are very aware), they are going to be roping of sections of society just on the grounds of being "too impolite".
One thing is that Packer himself fails to analyze the language under consideration with precision; the examples he lays out all fall, roughly, under a few different categories, which should be considered separately:
- Branding and inclusivity: Much of what he proffers as examples are not unfamiliar to anyone who's had to work with corporate style guides, where terms are favored or disfavored partially in relation to branding tone and voice, and partially to maximize clarity (idiosyncratic style being a frequent source of confusion). No one's harmed by a press release avoiding terms like "blind to" in favor of "refusing to see what's happening;" as a personal matter I prefer the concision of the former, but the latter is more plainspoken if also somewhat dull. Plodding and dull is often exactly what you're looking for in official communiques.
- Specificity and Precision: Again, while using "Americans" to refer to US residents is reasonable in casual contexts, or where American citizens are under discussion (e.g., political contexts), it's also reasonable to refer to "US residents" or the like. The biggest problem is that there isn't a concise term that covers "US citizens and legal permanent residents" that doesn't make you sound like a DHS circular or a legal opinion. (An additional complication is when you're working with Mexican and LATAM entities, where "American" is strongly disfavored unless you're literally talking about the Americas broadly. Same problem when people use "North American" to refer to US-Candada exclusively.) Slicing your terms finely to clearly delineate what you're discussing, and what you're not discussing, is again a perfectly reasonable goal in organizational communications, if anathema to a talented writer who is used to bending words to the context, rather than straightjacketing terms within specific contexts.
Both inclusivity and specificity are goals of most guides, particularly in journalism. (I'm not sure what style guide The Atlantic hews to, but rest assured their editors adhere to something.) Packer can argue that the Sierra Club's guide tends towards creating uninspired, workmanlike prose, but making a moral panic of that seems unwarranted.
- Instrumentalism: Instrumental terms are the ones that do have a real-world impact, because they're designed to either defuse or infuse a term with emotional valence. Instrumental terms contain arguments within themselves: using the term "slave" robs the person in question of their agency, which distances policy or analytic questions from those very people; "enslaved person" changes the context to slavery as an imposition on an agentive person; likewise, my preferred term (for Black slaves in US history), "enslaved American" goes evern further, being a deliberate and implicit argument against the legality of slavery even prior to the 13th Amendment. The term "justice-involved person" instead of "felon" is risible even to me, but the negative emotional valence of the latter term has a real effect on policy and the perception of policy, which is why terms like "ex-offender" are becoming more commonly used. Instrumentalist terms can be used for good or for evil; to make arguments, defuse emotional responses, or to invoke high dudgeon (Gingrich's famed GOPAC memo is a masterclass on using instrumentalist terms to whip up public emotion).
Whereas the worst you can say about branding and precision terms is that they're frequently clumsy and bland, instrumentalist language can affect the real world in often direct ways, and it's well worth interrogating the use of thos...
While some of the things referenced are ridiculous, the author is really misinterpreting many of the guides here, to a point where it feels like willful misinterpretation. For instance.
> If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat.
If anything, using the term “structural” helps associate much more context about racism, its causes, and its ugliness, not less.
Also, these guides aren’t targeting literature. They mostly meant for situations where you don’t want to evoke emotion in your writing.
Considering the news that Roald Dahl's books are now being altered in precisely some of the ways described, we are very, very clearly seeing literature start to be targeted.