[rspeele]

The "gone too far" wokeism stuff seems to be openly mocked, almost everywhere, all the time.

Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream. Those posts get shared 100x more by people mocking them than by people agreeing with them.

Maybe you could give an example of something specific?

[humanistbot]

> Just because I can find people expressing goofy ideas like "saying 'my concerns fell on deaf ears' is ableist language" or "deadnaming a trans person is violence" on Twitter, doesn't mean that's mainstream.

Do a thought experiment: Your company is a player in a certain language/framework ecosystem (python, react, whatever). As part of that, many of your employees attend and sometimes host meetups for that ecosystem. A fellow highly-involved meetup organizer from another company announces that they are transitioning gender, and that they would like to be called by a new name. Almost everyone does. A few people make mistakes, but are sincere and apologize -- they want to do better, but memory pathways are hard. But one employee at your company objects to using their new name and pronouns on moral grounds. They keep using the organizer's dead name and old pronouns, and when they are asked to use their new name, they refuse.

Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

[rspeele]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

No, that is rude. Calling it violence remains ridiculous hyperbole.

[thelopa]

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/violent

I would describe that experience for the trans person as a “vehement feeling or expression”, and inflicting a violent state on someone qualifies as “an instance of violent treatment or procedure”.

[rspeele]

I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. Sure, words can be used in less literal context, like "an ocean of thoughts swirled violently in his head". But simply declaring "deadnaming is violence" because it causes "vehement feeling or expression", would make millions of things violence. Your partner breaking up with you is violence. Your boss giving you a bad performance review is violence. Etc.

[civilized]

These are good illustrations of the problem with the popular "NYT op-ed" type arguments for the claim "speech that upsets someone is violence".

These folks argue (with scientific citations!) that words can cause physical pain and stress, and that actions that cause such things are basically tantamount to violence. What's the difference, right? If I feel bad, what does it matter whether you said mean words to me or you punched me?

The problem is, words can cause stress in all sorts of situations because social interactions can be inherently stressful. There is no non-stressful way to end a relationship or deliver a bad performance review. But sometimes it needs to be done.

Punching someone is extremely different. It's not at all something that normally has to be done, unless perhaps you were just punched first. Physical violence is fundamentally different from speech because speech has an absolutely vital dual purpose of communication, which physical violence doesn't have.

To avoid calling a huge variety of legitimate speech acts violence, we'd have to redefine violence in some tortured way, like "stuff that causes harm and stress unless it was necessary/justified".

I don't think we should redefine the most emotionally salient words in the English language just so that activists' favorite slogans can be retroactively deemed logical.

[overgard]

The problem is, when you start referring to things that used to simply be considered "rude" as "violence", then there's no sense of scale to everything, and the people using that terminology tend to come across as hyper sensitive.

[bradlys]

Violence has scale to it too. We have people smashing their keyboards on the desk - which is a violent action yet relatively harmless… all the way to whatever scene you’d like to pluck out of Game of Thrones. It’s all violence and there’s a wide spectrum on it.

Being rude is pretty narrow in comparison.

[spiznnx]

It's not professional, it's abusive and it's harassment. But it is literally not violence by the common definition. Slogans like "silence is violence" are designed to provoke attention to an issue by intentionally shifting semantics from where they are normally understood.

[civilized]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

No, but if something is bad, it doesn't follow that it is every kind and degree of bad thing. Something can be impolite without being immoral, something can be immoral without being violence, something can be violence without being murder.

Personally in this case I would say it's disrespectful, and it's against my own moral code, but I know how people like this think. For the most part they're not evil or trying to hurt. They are taking principled stands at great personal risk. They have their own moral compass and it's not the same as yours or mine.

If it were up to me, I would stop interactions between the two, then do my best to educate and persuade the offending party, and professional sanction would be a last resort.

Why are we being pushed to flatten all moral distinctions? I don't understand. Flattening all distinctions makes our thoughts crude and unwieldy. Who thinks this is a good idea and why?

Could it be that redefining our moral vocabulary dissolves the signposts of our moral world, and allows illiberal, extreme positions to masquerade as liberalism?

[zozbot234]

> Do you think that is the way that a professional should act towards others in their profession?

That's beside the point, since not being rude to others for no reason is very much part of mainstream professional norms. The question you might ask yourself is rather: "is this one person acting violently towards the meetup organizer by not using their preferred pronouns and updated name". There are people who would answer this in the affirmative, but this implies a pretty loose understanding of what qualifies as "violence" in the first place, which leads to all sorts of unforeseen implications. There's a very good reason why etiquette is generally regarded as trivial when compared with more tangible ethical challenges, and "use the correct pronouns, styles and honorifics when addressing So-and-so" is the quintessential example of etiquette.

[Animats]

deadnaming a trans person

The other side of that being "gender fraud".[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/well/mind/is-sex-by-decep...

[betwixthewires]

Yes.

I think if I find myself in a profession that is overly concerned with things other than the work of that profession then it is time to find a new profession, or at least find new circles within the profession to associate with.

[tyuiopp]

They probably shouldn't use the old name of the person, as people can change their names for all sorts of reasons, and there's not really any good argument for refusing to use a person's updated name at their request.

However, pronouns are rather different, as there is an established usage of using 'he' for males and 'she' for females, i.e. in reference to the immutable quality of a person's sex. If you don't believe in the ideology of gender identity, it's more honest to keep using a person's sex-based pronouns, regardless of their preferences to the contrary.

[lubesGordi]

Openly mocked? Definitely not.

I know someone who knows someone who ran an art gallery on the west coast. Most of the artists were black and the gallerist was a white man. At one point he made some offhanded remark that "don't worry, the white artists have an area over there..." Guess what happened to his career after?

These stories are everywhere, and are why people think things have gone too far.

[inglor_cz]

Isn't deadnaming a trans person literally a bannable offense on Twitter?

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/27/18113344/twitter-trans-u...

[jkubicek]

Twitter (rightfully, imho) banned target harassment campaigns, not some coworker accidentally using the wrong pronoun.

[ncmncm]

Is there anything not a bannable offense on Twitter? I pre-banned myself just for existing, and am happy to have done it.

[paulpauper]

employers have much more power than individuals. even if the public is mostly opposed to wokeism , companies, fed. govt., and universities still seem intent on pushing it.

[zozbot234]

That still doesn't disprove wokeism's influence on the whole "things you can't say" dynamic. Leo Strauss has famously pointed out that censored ideas often end up being conveyed in a disguised manner, generally involving some kind of reverse psychology where a purposely clumsy or hyperbolic argument for X is used as a signal of believing not-X. So it may be that these seemingly "extreme woke" ideas are being purposely targeted to an unsuspecting Twitter audience as a broader challenge to wokeism itself, and that much of the mockery simply misses the point.

[VirusNewbie]

Sure. There have been numerous mainstream articles as well as a recent segment on John Oliver that liken teaching CRT to teaching about the fact racism exists. This is becoming a mainstream viewpoint, that "banning CRT" in classrooms is banning talk of racism.

None of these articles mention any of the more controversial CRT viewpoints that you can find by...reading the wikipedia article. It isn't exactly a hidden secret that CRT purports that any racial disparities must be due to systemic racism, though we can use some logic to quickly falsify some its main beliefs.

[commandlinefan]

That’s like saying “I tried to kill you, but you survived, so what are you complaining about?”

The Twitter mob has ruined lives and is doing everything they can to ruin the ones they target.

[bob34]

“Transwomen are women” is a religious precept on the left yet the overwhelming majority of people can see the obvious truth that they are in fact men in dresses with a serious disturbing sexual fetish.

[rspeele]

The overwhelming majority of people just don't care at all. What does it matter to me if you want to dress as a woman and be called "she"? It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. Life is very short and if somebody finds that way of living theirs to be fulfilling, I see no reason to waste mine being agitated by it.

[ManuelKiessling]

There are two comments above mine, one by a person who has learned some very important life lessons and is at peace with himself and the world, and one by – someone else.

[ncmncm]

Is there any adult alive who does not have a potentially disturbing sexual fetish? Even "asexuals" get tarred that way. So, you cannot distinguish them on that basis, even where it is true. (I know a trans person who is also a furry. Figure that one out!) It is of course possible that some subset of trans people are as you say. Is it your business to sort out which are and which are not?

What will you say about a trans person who is also "ace"? It is far from uncommon for people to come out as trans in their 70s, long after fetishes have lost their grip on most people.

So, if you are among that "overwhelming majority", you are just obviously wrong, on several counts.

[drewbeck]

Your “obvious truth” displays the standard ignorance around this topic. If you were intellectually curious and not pre-judging based on an emotional response you might find yourself digging in and learning the science and lived experiences of trans folks. Alas.

30 years ago people still said the same kind of uninformed stuff around gay people. Do you feel similarly about gay people?

[zzzap]

Perhaps the commenter you are replying to hasn't, but I've looked into this extensively, listening to the lived experiences of transgender-identifying people, reading their forums, poring over the scientific research into gender dysphoria, and listening to the arguments on the gender critical side too.

From this, I can only conclude that transwomen, being of the male sex, are not actually women, but are simply men who want to be women, to the extent that they attempt to masquerade as such in everyday life.

Most of them will wear attire more typical of women, and many seem to be driven by a deep-seated sexual desire of themselves as a woman. So while it was put rather crassly, I don't see how what this commenter said was particularly inaccurate.

[gc_hn]

Not all on the left share that belief, there's plenty of us gender critical leftists around, who still understand the material reality of who are the women and who are the men.

It boggles my mind how this has become the cause célèbre amongst certain other factions of the left in recent years. Particularly given how it relies on misogynistic stereotypes and is effectively erasing homosexuality.