Can someone please help me out with pronouns

[Lollygaggles]

So how do I stand in terms of the current legislation, if I refer to a person by the pronouns of their birth, rather than their preferred pronouns?

Would it be compelled speech to be forced to collude with a belief that I do not accept? Also, how does my freedom not to be discriminated against because of my beliefs ( ie that people can't change sex) play out against the protections of Gender Reassignment and the trans person's rights as a legal member of the opposite sex ( though not a biological one.)

Would I be acting in a discriminatory way under the EA by referring to a person as their birth sex, when they have transitioned?

I want to be able to articulate my position very clearly, with reference to the law, but I don't actually know where we are as the law stands on competing rights.

Can anyone help me unpick it please?

Why not? Well normally I call people by their name when I can remember it

And I call people by other tags such as pronouns to make for easy clear communication with the person I am talking to.

Having to learn a pronoun with every name increases the mental burden and could lead to less clear communication with others

Further I find it bloody rude that I am treated worse than others because of my sex , no one face to face ever thinks I am male , yet people think that that tags that identify Male from female are choices that we make not something forced upon us and used to further the oppression of women

”And why should I, and all women, be the ones to be polite? Let the onus of that fall equally upon the shoulders of all trans individuals and their allies.”

Exactly, @CuriousaboutSamphire. Same goes for respect - where is the ‘respect for people you disagree with’ from the trans activists who talk about ‘bashing a TERF’ or say all TERFs should die in grease fires/be raped, or who intimidate women who want to meet and talk about their own issues? They don’t want mutual respect - they just want us to shut up, and hand over womanhood to penis-havers.

Not. Fucking. Happening.

Better yet, why not just call them by their preferred pronouns? Why is it so difficult?

Spoken form a position of unconscious privilege eh?

What about...

People with learning difficulties
People with memory disorders
Non- neurotypical people (eg ASD)
people who don’t speak English as a first language
People who have conditions like face blindness.

Your lovely new world order relies on being able to reliably recognise a person, remember their pronouns, and then applying the correct ones. That is actually a hell of a lot of mental processing. Yeah, fuck those who can’t manage that. Not like they will have anything worth saying anyway.

Better yet, why not just call them by their preferred pronouns? Why is it so difficult?

Because when I see a man with makeup and a dress on I still see a man. When I see a group of men dressed as such, I will still describe them as men.

I am not about to gaslight myself into pretending men are women.

And no, in those cases I don't know what pronouns or nouns those people use themselves, that's not how nouns or pronouns work.

I am not going to lie to children that it's possible to change sex and I am not going to pretend that girl is really a boy.

I will use whatever name a person requests me to use, that's how names work.

It's like going back to X-Factor, when I used to watch it Simon Cowell was the person people wanted to impress because he told them the truth. Nobody is actually comforted by forced lies.

Can we turn it around

Why is it so difficult to accept that the English language uses sex based pronouns?

Why wouldn’t you just call them what they want to be called? They’re not trying to invade the ladies changing room or anything (not that I’m sure that would really bother me either in 99% of cases).

If I introduced myself as Flo, I’d hate somebody to keep calling me Florence even though factually the latter is my name.

I will call them what they want to be called ie their name

It is a lot harder to expect me to call them something which I can tolerate if it's accepted in society as a sex based indicator but causes me great distress if it's meant to be an indicator about your innate identity.

Because me calling a Male person her or she is saying that a pronoun is telling me things about that person that is not related to their biology.

other people call me she, refer to me as her
But I utterly reject that as representing in me any concept of female and feminine that is beyond basic biology

But there is no way on earth people would call me anything but her and she no matter what cosmetic changes I could make to my appearance

Yet as a male they are used to getting what they want at the expense of females

My innate gender identify if it exists is none binary or Male, my body is an aberration , a foul thing , but it is nevertheless my body, it has helped frame who I am and how others see me, and it is healthy which is beyond wealth

Jesus. It’s always the same. Waffling walls of self-involved text justifying why you can’t just be polite to a stranger. They’re not asking you to do a makeover for them, just telling you what they want to be called.

But I suspect we won’t agree so no point arguing further tbh.

God forbid you ever meet a bloke called Kim!

Iill keep it short, if they insist on gender based pronouns, I will only call them by their preference when they call me they or he first and treat me like one of the boys not one of the girls

They have privileges, they give first

Or , another simple way

Either 5heir feelings get hurt or my feelings get hurt

Why should I put their feelings first, why can't they put mine first

Well, that’s fair enough. Quid pro quo. But personally I struggle with this manner of conflating the general with the personal in individual cases. It’s what I hate about identity politics.

My brother is morbidly obese and has a raft of health issues because of it. One of the biggest problems is that he normalises it and says it’s not too bad because he doesn’t smoke, walks to work etc. It makes me not want to play along as I can see he’s killing himself.

Yet I’d never say at work “you need to speak with Karen....she’s the fat one over there”. I feel like we shouldn’t pussyfoot around it, and whilst we don’t need to be mean, we shouldn’t pretend fat people aren’t hurting themselves. But I know when to put my views aside and just be professional, despite the above statement being inarguably true and unbiased.

Most trans people just want to live quietly.

This is statistically incorrect.
The vast majority of males who identify as women are AGP.
The persistent switching from males to people in these discussions is become so transparent that it rarely tricks anyone any more.

I’m sorry you think so very little of yourself RabidChinchilla that you are proud of giving up your autonomy and boundaries at the drop of a male-privileged demand, but it doesn’t give you any right to expect other women to do the same.

Some of us are connected to reality and have a decent level of self esteem. It does make one see things rather differently.

It’s always the same. Waffling walls of self-involved text justifying why you can’t just be polite to a stranger.

If they are a stranger why would anyone have occasion to be talking about them to others?
Pronouns cannot function as correction fluid for those who are dissatisfied with reality.

It is a question of conditioning obedience, when it comes right down to it. I believe it is called the thin edge of the wedge, and it is always framed as a cost free courtesy. And when the cost is counted we are told that nobody could have predicted that this is where we would end up. Except the people who were dismissed as "self involved".

The persistent switching from males to people in these discussions is become so transparent that it rarely tricks anyone any more.

It’s one of the many devious little tricks that TRA argument is full of, isn’t it, TehBewilderness. See also conflating segregation by sex with segregation by race, which I see has already been done on here, along with the crassly predictable #bekind, aka you must always put the feelings of male people ahead of your own.

You have to ask yourself why anyone would rely on these transparently dishonest excuses for an argument, and repeatedly, continually drag them out. The only answer I can find is that they don’t have any real, honest, rational, demonstrably true arguments to work with. None at all.

"Prissy" is an interesting word, isn't it? Carries so many underlying assumptions that tell you so much about the person using it.

Pronouns cannot function as correction fluid for those who are dissatisfied with reality.

Maybe I misunderstand as I’m not great on all the trans stuff.

But if a MTF individual believes they’re born in the wrong body, they’re clearly acknowledging they have a male body, surely? So there is no disagreement there.

The ambiguity is whether there is something in their brain that genuinely makes them feel this way (science is not yet conclusive on this I think) and the question is how we react to it. Certainly some of the TRAs are bonkers, but I feel like I’d be inclined to go along with somebody’s pronouns if they seemed genuine and not on a power trip/manipulative.

The brother of my friend from school has pretty bad learning difficulties and ironically thinks he’s quite intelligent and that he’s a really good DJ as people always play along. I’m not going to sit there and shoot down his sense of identity because ‘reality’. If somebody is that troubled that they genuinely think they’re in the wrong body and possibly have a mental disorder, I’m not making it all about me. I’m the lucky one!

And what’s AGP? I thought it was all about sexual fetishes. Is that really the driving force between the teens who decide they want to live as the other sex? I regularly see the son of one of our clients when I visit (pretty sure he identifies as a girl but not asked) and he’s an absolute sweetheart. Of course it’s only one example and anecdotal, but he doesn’t strike me as some dodgy pervert. Just a possibly confused kid who certainly seems much less intimidating than some of the other chavvy lads his age you see hanging around smoking weed and throwing Maltesers at people on the bus, etc.

Yet I’d never say at work “you need to speak with Karen....she’s the fat one over there”.

What if the woman wanted to be called "the slim woman". Would you be fine with that?

We aren't being asked to not mention something which is true, but to actively state an untruth.

What if the woman wanted to be called "the slim woman". Would you be fine with that?

I can’t realistically see any situation where I wouldn’t just call her “Karen”. But we’ve all had a friend who thinks they’re gods gift to men when they’re really not all that. Fat women who squeeze into really unflattering outfits and think they’ve ‘got it’. Most people just roll their eyes and play along. I think this is because most people are fairly comfortable with their own identity.

If someone you suspect is a man is wearing womens clothes and make up they probably want to be referred to as she

Having spent a great deal of time around goths, I know some men who wear what you'd probably think of as women's clothes who don't want to be referred to as "she". Should everyone do it anyway, because there's only one set of feelings that matter?

Which also brings us to, what are women's or men's clothes anyway? I'm currently wearing jeans and a tshirt. Men's clothes or women's clothes? Does it matter that the tshirt is red? My DH also owns red tshirts.

Given that this followed directly after a discussion about coronavirus...

Better yet, why not just call them by their preferred pronouns? Why is it so difficult?

Because in this case biological sex seems to have an impact on who's more likely to die, and we need accurate statistics for that. Now, if you'd like to add information, ie record deaths as "male, taking estrogen" or "female, taking testosterone" then I'd have no objections to that other than wondering if it would be workable for the people collecting and collating the statistics. But recording the sex inaccurately is corrupting the data, which is really not a responsible thing to suggest during a pandemic.

Chinchilla you can babble on about their pronouns but the pronouns are not part of their speech. If I use pronouns about someone I'll be talking to another person. So they are my pronouns and I'll always correctly sex someone.
The only way that pronouns are an integral part of a person's speech is if they are a person that speaks about themselves in the third person.
Surely no one is so self involved that they speak about themselves in the third person......................

Maybe I misunderstand as I’m not great on all the trans stuff.

But if a MTF individual believes they’re born in the wrong body, they’re clearly acknowledging they have a male body, surely?

Not to be rude, but your second statement proves that your first is correct. If you did know a bit more you'd know that we've spent the last 5 or so years under a deluge of "my penis is female" and "well if people won't accept that my penis and testicles having body is female then my counterargument is that biological sex doesn't exist, so there!"