Sorry, I just realized I sent this to the wrong list. It was for -vote actually.
Gerardo Il giorno gio 12 dic 2019 alle ore 11:22 Gerardo Ballabio <[email protected]> ha scritto: > > Sam, thank you very much for raising this issue and for recognizing > that there's more than one angle to it. > > I tend to agree with Scott. It is well known, at least since George > Orwell wrote his books, that controlling how people speak means > controlling how they think. So I believe that this issue is very > important. > > And indeed, in the last decades, redefining language has been a major > part of the political debate at large, with every group trying to > "hijack words for their own ends". For example, the pro- and > contra-abortion parties label themselves as "pro-choice" and > "pro-life" respectively, that is, they both try to frame the debate by > presenting themselves as "pushing for a good thing" while the other > party is pushing against. When you choose which language you use, you > effectively already take a side. And when you agree to use the other > party's language, you've already nearly lost the fight. > > So this is also inevitably a political issue. It's not just about > "being polite" (or "welcoming" or "excellent" or whatever). I believe > that I absolutely have the right to "being impolite" if "being polite" > means that I must use a language that conveys a political position > that I oppose. > > For example (forgive me if this might seem off-topic, but I think that > working out the details of an actual example is necessary to make my > point clear), I do not feel that I should acknowledge people's > requests to refer to them by their "preferred pronouns". That is > because I believe that people's sexual identities are determined by > objective facts, such as which chromosomes are there in their DNA, and > not by how they subjectively "perceive themselves". So when I refuse > to refer to a person with XY chromosomes as "she", or to abuse the > English language by calling an individual "they", in fact I am > defending my world view, and you must not deprive me of that right. > (May I remember that the incident that led to Norbert Preining's > temporary suspension from Debian started with him using "the wrong > pronoun" in a blog post!) > > And while Debian isn't a government, neither it is an island somewhere > out of the "real world". So we can't pretend that we can leave that > out. > > Gerardo
