Genus and pronouns have many regular uses, but my point is another. I'll try an analogy to help you understand my point.
Imagine seeing someone who has "white, german, non-jewish heritage". Does this come off as creepy? Why do they think these properties are important? I'd be wary af of that person, if not ghost them outright.
This is approximately also what i feel when i see the pronouns in someones bio. Gender used to be your pronouns and your nomen's declination class, and now we got people insisting that its something more, and that its something important. That its something personal. Its creeping me out.
What exactly is that that make people feel the need to point out their pronouns?
I'll assume you're asking in good faith, so let me answer why I put my pronouns.
I'm mostly cis, mostly straight. I round up to a typical "straight white guy". I don't have to deal with the things trans people or gay people or women have to deal with.
But I am sympathetic to the fact that they lack a lot of the privilege that I have. So one way I try to show solidarity is by doing my part to normalize the idea that it's impossible to infer someone's gender from their appearance.
I list my pronouns to make it normal to list pronouns, because that makes life better for transgender people.
> What exactly is that that make people feel the need to point out their pronouns?
Well simply put they want people to use those pronouns when referring to them
What is it in particular that creeps you out bio wise? Are you creeped out by bios that indicate other things too? Preferred tech stacks, "Father, dog owner, CEO"?
You clicked on the profile presumably looking for more information about the person and you found the information most (publicly) important to them. Instead of being satisfied having found the information you're giving it the ol' Roger Ebert for some reason
For lack of a better phrasing.. why do you care so much what other people put in their bio? Can you not just close the tab or hit back or something?
> What is it in particular that creeps you out bio wise?
Didn't i just tried to explain that? That people take gender so seriously. Is it more than just the pronoun and declination class? Because i think, its nothing more, but other people seem to think, gender is more than that. How else could "misgendering" someone even be any kind of offense?
> How else could "misgendering" someone even be any kind of offense?
There's a big oppression angle to this that can't really be ignored or separated out from trans experiences, but I'm going to try to ignore it for just a second.
In a world with no transgender discrimination at all, I empathize with not really caring that much? I'm male, I use he/him pronouns, but if someone called me "they" or "she", I really don't think that would register in my brain as a negative thing. I think I'd be pretty OK with that.
But what I have found out is that this is very atypical even among most cisgender people I know. And (again, ignoring the oppression angle, which can't be ignored, it is intrinsically tied to how people's identities and preferences form, but...) I have just kind of learned to tolerate that not only do a lot of transgender people care about this, but a lot of people in general seemingly across the entire world seem to care about this. I strongly suspect (and in fact know, because I pay some attention to UK politics and the debates happening there) that a lot of people in Europe who are cisgender appear to care a heck of a lot about what pronouns people use to describe them.
I don't think being as agnostic about it as I am is the norm for most people, and I don't think that's wrong or broken, I have things that I care about too. So if someone does want me to use a pronoun that reflects them better, I don't think it's bad that they care about that pronoun being used accurately. It appears to be just kind of an intrinsic thing for many people.
You said you were creeped out but as far as I can see you didn't say why it creeped you out, no. Maybe I just have a stronger definition of creeped out than you
As for the rest, not everyone is you? Different people have different things that they consider a major part of their being
You must have something you'd consider a part of your personality or existence that you'd be offended if someone outright denied. Maybe if a colleague or someone said you weren't a real {whatever your career is}? No reasoning it out, no explanation. You're just not one of them.
Start with how that would make you feel and consider a person may feel that way about being misgendered
Presumably you're a biologist or doctor, someone with the knowledge and certification to make the claim they're deluded? Psychologist maybe?
Personally I think you're just trying to be offensive on your newly green account but if there's anything in there that actually wants to understand please do try to meet with and talk to the people you are diagnosing, it's really hard to hate a person when you know their story
If nothing else consider it doesn't cost you a damn thing to be nice to someone. What's the point in tearing someone down? Is this really the person you want to be? It seems so tragic honestly
In a world where animals are born with two heads, all sorts of fun diseases and deformities can happen, not to mention the whole range of mental issues a person can have.. is it not at least possible in your mind that sometimes there's a scenario that could cause a rift between the mind's software and the biological hardware?
These are your opinions without scientific method. We can be nice and call them hypotheses if you want
I'm not denying that gender dysphoria is a diagnosable condition. Indeed, I referred to its existence twice in my earlier comment. It's clearly a disorder that affects some people, even if the aetiology is currently unknown.
But consider what this diagnosis actually means: a strong desire to be the opposite sex. It's not the state of actually being the opposite sex, just a desire to be.
This remains the case even if the afflicted subject develops a belief that they are the opposite sex by way of a 'gender identity'.
What a gender dysphoria diagnosis actually means is they met 2 of 6 criteria.[1] A strong desire to be the opposite sex is just 1 of them. 2 if you believe gender just means sex.
The gender and sex distinction is common even if you think it shouldn't be. It's hard to believe a biologist wouldn't know that. Don't misrepresent what trans people believe.
Nitpicking the diagnostic criteria doesn't refute my main point, which was that desires and beliefs are not the same thing as actually being.
When you get down to the biological reality of it, a male with gender dysphoria, or who claims a to have a female 'gender identity', is quite obviously not a woman.
Your comment was unclear to me though - exactly what parts of my comment were you referring to with your claim of "more hypotheses stated as results", and why? Please be specific.
So I'm semi-new to Hacker News, but from a quick google search apparently grayed out comments are due to downvotes. I'm confused as to why this comment is downvoted because this was completely reasonable???
> What exactly is that that make people feel the need to point out their pronouns?
Well, this part in particular is pretty easy, I'll go into more detail below, but it's shared struggle and/or solidarity, with a healthy side of pure convenience, since if you don't specify your pronouns online people often flat out just won't know them, and people tend to use pronouns in written text a lot, so it's useful to know them.
----
In more detail:
It's interesting to me often to see how perspectives about transgender identity differ inside of the particular trans communities I pay attention to and outside of them. Outside of those communities, people look at pronouns and think, "this person is signaling that they're important, they're trying to pick a fight, they're signaling that they belong to a tribe, they think this is their entire identity."
Inside of those communities, people are thinking:
- It would be nice if people didn't misgender me.
- It would be nice if I could find some other trans people online who have similar experiences to me.
- It would be nice if I didn't have to feel out of place when I asked people to use a pronoun.
To the extent that trans people have a communal goal, that goal is often centered around specific political oppression; oppression that, putting my joke above aside, is not US-centric. Europe legitimately does have a giant transphobia problem, it just tends to manifest slightly differently than the US's transphobia.
Trans people use community partially just as a friendly way to find other people like them, but also partially as a political tool to build solidarity in the face of very targeted, deliberate oppression. This is, again, something where I see huge differences outside of and inside of trans communities. People outside of transgender communities look in and think that people are mad about innocent mistakes or that they're trying to complicate the entire world. People inside of trans communities are dealing with coordinated efforts to take away their rights, and on top of that one of the highest suicide/assault rates of any group on the planet. That kind of stuff tends to make them want to stick together.
Because of that context of being hyper-aware that there are people who don't want you to exist, it also imbues coming out with a kind of power and self-actualization, because there's a statement there being made that the people who want to erase you aren't winning. A phrase I have heard multiple times about coming out is that you don't come out when you want everyone to know that you're gay/trans, you come out when you're unapologetic about being gay/trans. Everyone is different, that's not universal. But it is a thing for a lot of people.
And last but not least, there is a sense of solidarity there. I mentioned above that it's actually really annoying for trans people to have to specify pronouns everywhere and call attention to themselves, most trans people I interact with are not trying to be weird about anything. When a lot of people, even people who aren't trans, specify their pronouns, what that does is it kind of masks the trans community from feeling like they have a spotlight on them. Far from being a "standing out" thing, normalizing people specifying their pronouns allows trans people to draw less attention to their identity in situations where they don't want to.
Because yeah, sometimes trans people want to just go talk about sports or computers and not about gender, and it's awkward if every time they join a new community if the first thing that they have to do is out themselves as trans or feel like they're the only ones using pronouns or asking about this. It's another isolating experience. So sometimes people use pronouns as just a way to make everyone else feel more comfortable and to make trans people feel like they're standing out less. Sometimes there's really no conspiracy beyond that.
----
Stepping back from the oppression angle again, there is also a sense of fascination and exploration. I'll speak for myself on this front, I have ADHD and I am asexual. I have been very fortunate not to have experienced much if any discrimination over this, I am an extremely privileged person. However, even though I don't have discrimination forcing me into solidarity with people:
- I like finding other asexual people online because it's interesting and cool to see how people are different from each other. It's honestly just kind of fun to find out that something you thought was universal wasn't. I always thought people were joking about their experiences with stuff like puberty. It's just... cool to find out that people are diverse.
- Similarly, I sometimes try to seek out ADHD communities because it's nice to have people who understand what you're thinking about. I spend 100% of my time in public masking and figuring out how to communicate with people, and it's exhausting, and sometimes I run into people who understand something about me where I don't have to spend a bunch of time explaining it or suppressing it, and that shared understanding feels really good.
----
We can also kind of back up and apply this overall logic to your question about "White Germans". The part that makes that creepy to me is what communities they're signaling to and what I read into what they're trying to do. It's hard to think of innocent reasons for that kind of signaling. In the US, it is very hard to feel isolated over being white. It is very hard to feel isolated over not being Jewish. I don't feel like that captures any of the stuff I'm talking about above, I don't think that white people are surprised to learn there are other people like them in the world, and I don't think they have a legitimate sense of solidarity over real oppression.
However, rephrase that same question just slightly differently, and suddenly the entire thing changes. I do know people who are extremely into parts of their heritage like being Pennsylvania Dutch or tracing their family trees. They're going around making traditional German dishes or talking about sauerkraut, and I don't think there's a single racist thing about that. It's great, and it brings them a lot of joy, and if they put it in their Twitter profile than good for them. And obviously there's not the oppression/solidarity angle for those people, which is a big part of trans community, but there is a really fun personal angle of baking foods and learning old slang terms and finding other people who had similar childhoods, and finding out that a word or pronunciation that you thought was universal was actually really localized to your childhood.
So it's not really identity or community that's the problem, the problem is that if we see someone say "White German with no Jewish Heritage", we all kind of know what community they're talking about and who they're signaling to. We all kind of know that they're not talking about baking sauerkraut. So context/phrasing matters.
I think you nailed it on a lot of these points! But I feel like one big point in putting pronouns in bios is that on the Internet, you often don't have any signifiers of one's gender, even if the person is cis and presents as their gender (hell, in Hacker News' case we don't have profile pictures at all). A lot of people don't use their real photos in their avatars, so if you wanted to assume based on appearances you couldn't. Therefore, it's convenient for everyone, not just trans folks.
> Stepping back from the oppression angle again, there is also a sense of fascination and exploration. I'll speak for myself on this front, I have ADHD and I am asexual. I have been very fortunate not to have experienced much if any discrimination over this, I am an extremely privileged person. However, even though I don't have discrimination forcing me into solidarity with people...
Case in point: I also have ADHD and I'm also asexual, and reading that part of your comment made me really happy! I feel the exact same way about it!
> lot of people don't use their real photos in their avatars, so if you wanted to assume based on appearances you couldn't.
That's a great point. Certainly on HN where there are no pictures and everyone is using usernames, but also your avatar/photo point is completely accurate. If you get really deep into indie/hacker spaces on Twitter, you hit a point where 3/4ths of the profile pictures you run into are either an abstract icon or a fursona, and trying to correctly guess everyone's pronouns in that situation isn't really feasible regardless of whether or not anyone is cis/trans.
And we should be encouraging that kind of behavior; it's good that people can go exclusively by a username online, and it's good that people don't need to have everything constantly tied back to the physical world. And pronouns end up being just kind of convenient information to give in a world where people have that kind of control over how/what they present about themselves at any given moment.
> Case in point: I also have ADHD and I'm also asexual, and reading that part of your comment made me really happy
I'm so glad, it always makes me happy when I run into other people in those circles. If you ever want to talk more about anything, feel free to reach out, but it's always just nice to see other ace/ADHD people show up on HN :)
Imagine seeing someone who has "white, german, non-jewish heritage". Does this come off as creepy? Why do they think these properties are important? I'd be wary af of that person, if not ghost them outright.
This is approximately also what i feel when i see the pronouns in someones bio. Gender used to be your pronouns and your nomen's declination class, and now we got people insisting that its something more, and that its something important. That its something personal. Its creeping me out.
What exactly is that that make people feel the need to point out their pronouns?