A judge in the UK had something to say in respect of these attitudes yesterday:
“She will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2019/dec/18/judge-rules-against-charity-worker-who-lost-job-over-transgender-tweets On 12 December 2019 07:22:48 GMT-03:00, Gerardo Ballabio <[email protected]> wrote: >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 -- Martina Ferrari (Tina/mobile)
