[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.