[Banana699]

>To normalize people being open and explicit about their gender identity so that people with non-obvious gender identities can feel less conspicuous sharing theirs.

This oft-repeated stance is a very naive way of thinking in my view, if you're different from 99% of the population, then you're going to stand out no matter how much other people try simulating your superficial markers (while being obviously baseline themselves). If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, no amount of people saying "Quack!" when introducing themselves will prevent me from noticing you're different in a fundamental way from all those people pretending to be like you, all those people are managing to do is a semi-mockery of what they supposedly support. There are deeper patterns than language, humans aren't GPT-3 to be fooled by simplistic imitation games of speech patterns.

It's usually immediately obvious if a She/Her or a They/Them is matching the traditional features of the declared pronouns, it's literally millennia upon millennia of pattern-matching processes deeply hardwired into my mammalian brain and always running in the background, I couldn't stop it if I wanted to. I suspect most people are the same. You don't change reality by changing words, conspicuous things are conspicuous.

Not to mention the whole flawed framework of "Normalizing" and "Validating" things as worthy moral goals in the first place, why do things have to be common in order to be accepted ? So nakedly hive minded.

>They and them have been neutral-gender pronouns forever.

Common misconception, they are not gender-neutral in the modern sense, they refer to those of unkown gender. The gender is still one of the perfectly defined binary we all know, it's just not known or relevant to the speaker. There is no quantum wave function of genders waiting to collapse behind 17th century uses of 'They'. This misunderstanding manifests itself as soon as you encounter monstrosities like "They is looking for a new car to buy".

>Because most of it is thinly veiled transphobia.

Ah yes, transphobia, the cardinal sin, the unspeakable horror, the one thing you're not supposed to say[1]. Let's ban all mention of this atrocity, let's shun and exile All Who Dare Transgress.

This surely won't backfire at all, supressing dissent has a very good track record of eliminating it entirely.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

[andrepd]

I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns. Don't you think it's at least a bit weird that you're so obsessed and irate about such a minor detail?

Also, it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios, yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform (by all means wealth inequality is one of the major problems of the modern age).

EDIT: About the singular "they" thing: that whole paragraph is hilarious (quantum what?) but it's a pet peeve of mine to correct those misconceptions. Your sentence is grammatically incorrect, even when the function is singular, the agreement in number is still plural, e.g. "someone wrote their name here" -> "they have written their name", not "they has written their name".

Plus, singular they has been attested since the 14th century. Plural they...? Since the 13th.

[Banana699]

>I'm positive you've put more thought into this pair of comments than I ever did in my life about this issue of pronouns.

Eh, not really. I don't even live in a country where that's a common practice (thankfully), my comments naturally tend to be long whatever their subject are, you can verify this yourself by looking at my post history.

>it's very funny that you're so taken up in arms against the world-ending catastrophe of people writing "they/them" in their twitter bios

So, first off, I'm not 'up in arms', it's just that as a man with a certain propensity towards heresies, it's second nature for me to look at a social web and immediately notice the conformists, and I'm not a big fan of conformists. Secondly, I never implied those people are doing anything 'world-ending', although they are participating in their fair share of censorship-defense and general internet poisoning, but really they are just engaging in a pitiful and obvious illusion. I'm bringing that up, half-ridiculing it, and half-pointing-out it's counter-productive to what they actually want.

>yet see no issue with a multi-hundred-billionaire dictating what is and isn't allowed on a major internet platform

Where exactly did I mention that I support or even care about Musk's attempted takeover of Twitter :) ? and who do you think controls facebook, youtube or reddit, the progressive spaces who ban you when you look funnily in their general direction? or are billionaires only bad when they hold opinions you don't like ?

>Your sentence is grammatically incorrect

Congratulations on noticing the obvious, that's kinda the whole point of the example. 'They' doesn't make sense for a known person of a definite gender, your examples are all assuming the default usage of it as a placeholder for somebody of an unknown general gender, but the moment you start using it to refer to a specific person you start running into issues like whether to use "is" or "are".

>singular they has been attested since the 14th century

OK ? how is this relevant ? where did I express problems with the fact that 'they' can be used to refer to a single unknown person ?

[MatteoFrigo]

The truth remains that if you use "they" as singular you sound like a moron.

"Someone" has indefinite number and is not singular. Implicitly plural antecedents ("anyone", "everyone", "each ...") are not singular either.

[andrepd]

>The truth remains that if you use "they" as singular you sound like a moron.

Bind this in a nice cover and you'll be sure to get your linguistics doctorate summa cum laude.

[urdumbaf]

MatteoFrigo sounds like they are a moron

[rrose]

what does your last point even mean? are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad? Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia. I didn't even say i agreed with censoring anything. I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation and is explicitly argued in bad faith.

[Banana699]

>are you objecting to the idea that transphobia is bad?

Well, considering this word can be basically JIT-redefined to mean anything on the fly, I wouldn't say this question is necessarily meaningful without some shared state. What I can say is that I would never like or support making fun of people for things they can't change, if your meaning of 'transphobia' includes that, sure that's bad.

But you know what else is bad? religious authority. The existence of a vague and ill-defined sin that a select class of people can arbitarily expand and contract it's definition to include and exclude anything and anyone they like or dislike, and civil authorities and institutions bending over backward to please that class. Transphobia is the modern day heresy, it's something you can throw at someone without the slightest understanding what they have said and get a mob to descend on them if you get your timing right. Lgbt 'acceptance' groups are strikingly similar to the fanatically religous, down to the particular language used to redirect criticism and pretend they are open to dissent.

>Nobody is suggesting not talking about transphobia.

In order for this to be a real 'talk', and not just a one-directional sermon between identical replicas, you have to allow people who are hostile to the artificially-dominant stance. Those who think transphobia isn't a real problem, or those who think it's a real but exaggerated, and so on and so forth. I'm not seeing any of that on any trans conversation I have ever seen on social media, all I see is an incredibly aritifical and incredibly religious "As We All Know Tran Lives Matter, Much More Than The Rest Of Us Actually", it reminds me of when dictators invite themselves to staged talkshows and pretend that the conversations aren't scripted.

>I'm just pointing out that a lot of the stuff that does get censored is stuff that isn't adding anything meaningful to the conversation

Considering the amount of censoring and manipulation that happens on social media, I think that's not convincing argument for censorship. If you kill 90% of humans you're going to eradicate an aweful lot of diseases, if you imprison 70% of people you're going to catch a lot of criminals, etc... Any strategy where you do the same thing to a significant percentage of the population is going to work more or less like random guessing aka a 50% coin flip, unless you're really unlucky or the population is really skewed. You're better off measuring ratios of where it works and where it doesn't work.