Jarhyn
Wizard
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2010
- Messages
- 15,310
- Gender
- Androgyne; they/them
- Basic Beliefs
- Natural Philosophy, Game Theoretic Ethicist
Well, we should be careful about saying fears founded in reality are not reasons to declare a thing not to be a right...No, but they are a disadvantaged class that white women were afraid to see in their changing room. Like trans folks. The racists of your childhood didn't say "I hate blacks and that's why I want to discriminate against them". They said things like "I have nothing against Ne---s personally. We all know that racial admixture is dangerous and leads to violent incidents; I'm just trying to protect everyone, blacks included."Sure sure, because black women are totally men, right? And men have been so incredibly oppressed throughout history, what with those uppity women not wanting to share their showers with them and all...You think you have the right to tell good women that they have to accept colored women in their restrooms.FIFY.I guess answering one cheap shot with another is fair enough, but I assure you that my ingroup's liberty, democratic rule, and individual franchise sit at the very center of my political philosophy. No one has a right to tell someone else what they are... They are free to do as they like within their congregations or in their kitchens, but not in a public sociology class.
You evidently think you have a right to tell Emily and women who think like her what they are -- that they're 19th century schoolmarms and that they're a faith group. And so you do -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but your outgroup have free speech rights too. As painful as it must be for you, everyone has a right to tell someone else what they are -- that goes with the whole First Amendment thing too. And, while it's apparently offensive to the mindset of progressives who want academia to be their wholly-owned church, your outgroup are even allowed to openly disagree with you in a public sociology class. Progressives are a faith group; you are correct that faith groups should not be allowed to conduct the affairs of others.
Liberty-for-me-but-not-for-thee is a view that isn't "actually" liberal. Theocrats are not liberals and are rarely competent to recognize liberal views. "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
At least when the cameras were rolling.
But we cannot strip minority demographics of rights just because the demographic majority is afraid of them, even if those fears were founded in reality rather than ghost stories.
It's just the case here (and in general) that these fears are much like the fears of Reefer Madness: they are based on the lie that some random case study (that they still haven't been able to really produce) is evidence of trend despite the rarity of the cases they wish to make case study of.
Because "I" is more clear than "we" since all of me is still me, but "we" does produce a vexing parse when I'm with people who aren't me. It's rare enough that people identify as quantity-ambiguous that there just hasn't been much of a will to generate a useful convention.What concensus? There are literally billions of Englishes, one for each register a speaker employs in one situation or other. Shaming people for their dialect is a big red flag for linguists.Bomb: In English, at least among the communities I run in, "they" is the pronoun that applies. "They/them/their" is what the consensus has landed on among those who wish to be able to express the idea of ambiguity.
You consistently use "I"/"me" to refer to yourself. Whatever sense you consider yourself quantity-ambiguous obviously doesn't reflect in your grammar. Why would you expect others to reflect it in theirs?I have discussed several times and places why the singular isn't even strictly appropriate. I am quantity-ambiguous as much as I am gender-ambiguous.
This is different for the anodyne they, in that there IS a consensus on that convention at least in general/common usage: "they" will be understood by whoever I say it to, in the way that I say it, outside the desire to be willfully obtuse as to the intent*.
The exception here seems to be that I won't be able to be understood in as quantity-ambiguous a way as I might like, in that people will assume a singular they from the context, when this singularity is not intended in the first place, though the ambiguity does help to avoid situations wherein I don't want to discuss quite how flexible my sense of "self" actually is, and what "we" I would be referring to when outright expressing a concept of plural identity would require explication that I would rather not.
Frankly, people tend to be more uncomfortable when those around them express a less recognizable concept of "self", and "they" has always struck me the least obtrusive option and the least likely to stand out and generate "targets".