| There is no debate, because this isn't about correctness. It's about respect. Let me throw out some hypotheticals here: My given name is Jonathan. I think this sounds childish, so I tell you that I go by Jack instead. But you've seen my birth certificate, so you keep calling me Jonathan. I got married and changed my last name to my husband's. You think it's confusing to change names, so you continue to write me using my maiden name. Although I'm married, I don't want to be defined by my marriage, so I go by Ms. You think that inaccurately reflects my relationship status, and introduce me as Mrs. instead. I have told you that the use of the male-gendered pronoun "he" makes me severely uncomfortable, and ask you to call me "she" instead. You flip up my skirt, take a good survey, and decide it would be dishonest to represent me as if I didn't have a penis. The issue in all of these scenarios is a moral one: Do I have the right to define my own linguistic identity, or am I stuck with the one I was assigned at birth? Are you going to be an agent of my liberation, or my oppression? You can make a good case that each of these blatantly disrespectful behaviors is, by some robotic standard, "correct". To paraphrase a great man, maybe you aren't wrong, but you're still an asshole. You can say this is something you would like to debate, but you don't respect me and I don't like to spend time around you, so go ahead and debate by yourself, thanks. |
If someone asked me to call them by a certain pronoun or salutation (names are different as they are completely arbitrary), I would do it, out of respect for them. But let's be clear about what's being asked: I am being asked to lie -- to misrepresent reality -- to that person, and possibly to other people for that person. That's a (small) favor being asked, and it is somewhat irritating to be asked a favor with the sort of sense of moral entitlement found in your last paragraph (especially when the favor being asked is a violation of my own morals).
Also, unfortunately, we don't have the right to define our own linguistic identities. I know it isn't fair, but this extends far beyond gender. I don't become "rich", "President", "Filipino", "Doctor", or "intelligent" just by willing it or even by asking other people to call me those adjectives. They are fuzzy categories, some people don't clearly fall inside or outside of them, but they do have non-arbitrary (i.e., outside your mind) meanings.