[ouid]

Do you really find language like "chest feeding" to be a non-degrading way of talking about women? I can't imagine successfully defending that language to anyone, say 10 years ago. I think you just missed the point where it became insane, instead of progressive, because the line was blurry.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I want to ask, please read this question in good faith: why is chest feeding insane now, verses other polite terms established decades ago? What difference is it to cease making differentiations between ms/mrs(mz), or to call someone Chinese instead of chinaman, or calling someone African American instead of colored? Yeah it seems new, and therefore unusual/weird, but I don’t know if I can identify a clear and rational rubric as to what makes new progressive terminology insane and older progressive terminology sane.

(Also, I don’t personally agree with “chest feeding” since breasts don’t necessarily have anything to do with gender, men can have breasts. But like, if someone else wants to call their own child feeding activity chest feeding, what do I care? Also, I’m not feeding any kids witth mammary glands so I don’t really know if I even get to be an arbiter of sane/insane terminology to refer to those activities.)

[ouid]

I think you will find that hyperfixation on calling people by the "correct term" for their race is also insane, but less insane, which is why I described the line as blurry.

The benefit of changing the terms by which we express our fixation on race is that the old terms were largely associated with hateful speech, and the hope is that the new term might be less inflammatory. If you actually feel comfortable using someone's race as an adjective when referring to them, regardless of what form that adjective takes. I would suggest that you consider that more thoughtfully.

in the case if removing the word woman from the lexicon, the people who are being appeased have a problem with whether or not they get/have to be identified as women. Not that woman is a hateful word, but that you might exclude someone from the category.

This is different. It is true that arbitrary exclusion from categories is occasionally hateful, but it is not the case that people have been using breast feeding as a slur, and trying to retcon that to be so is obviously degrading to women who have not used it vitriolically, and do not consider it hate speech.

In good faith, can you really not imagine the difference between telling someone not to use the word chinaman to refer to someone who doesnt want to be called a chinaman, and telling them not to refer to thenselves as a woman, because someone else doesn't want you to?

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I’m going to be honest I have never seen the case where somone calling themselves a woman was considered a slur by peers and told not to do it, so I think you and I are in radically different social circles or are going off of niche social media drama that doesn’t actually occur to any degree offline. I’ve at least heard of the notion of chest feeding, but I’ve never heard of “telling them not to refer to thenselves as a woman”.

I think you might be conflating “chest feeding” with womanhood, but I’ve never seen the case where someone was not allowed to refer to themselves as a woman and/or not allowed to refer to using one’s own lactation to feed a child as breast feeding either. Can you point to, I dunno, pregnancy tracker blogs or pregnancy communities or something where this is happening? Maybe a spokesperson for a hospital requesting patients no longer refer to their bodies with the above? I simply struggle to believe you that this occurs to any significant degree in the relevant community.

[ouid]

The thing that set the whole JK rowling controversy off was the idea that using the phrase "people who menstruate" was an acceptable way to refer to women.

If you are commenting in a thread about the Rowling controversy, it is dishonest to say that you do not participate in the part of the internet in which the word woman is considered a slur, when used to refer exclusively to those who have predominantly female anatomy. The people who get pregnant and menstruate, are exclusively in this category. And arguing that this is not what woman means "anymore" is equivalent to asserting that it is hateful to use it.

The ongoing linguistic castration is an assertion that the biological reality of sex is a immoral thing to take part in, because it is traumatic to those who do not wish to. However, note that among the consequences of the biological reality of sex is the notion of sexual attraction. Is it hate speech to assert that you are attracted only to women? What if you are a woman?

[SamoyedFurFluff]

I think this comes off as kind of unhinged. I’ve never heard of someone claiming language that includes other categories must therefore be calling sub categories hateful. This is like the logic of saying “object oriented languages” means that “java sucks” or something. I’ve literally never heard of someone call women a slur except from you, except you’re claiming other people are saying it just by saying they call their own thing something else.

This is all weird and still doesn’t give a real, rational rubric as to insane or sane progressive language. Lgbtq doesn’t mean bi is a slur lol