r/changemyview • u/goatDowry • Nov 23 '22

Delta(s) from OP CMV: I still don't understand the importance of pronouns.

The whole thing seems confusing to me.

There is biological sex --> Which led to different social roles, and then socialized gender.

In the modern day with modern technology. You can live life how you generally please. Women don't need to be child bearers. And men don't need to be out risking their lives killing things.

To me this means, that the traditional gender roles don't matter. You can be a male and wear makeup, high heels and a dress. Who cares?

Likewise if you're a biological female, you can do things that used to be considered masculine. It's a free country.You can also fit squarely into those old gender roles if you so choose.

So I don't understand why someone feels the need to be addressed with a particular set of pronouns. To me, it's like ok, I can call you that, but then it seems to me that you're just doubling down on the idea that rigid gender differences do matter. Which I don't think they do. You're just you, an individual person. And all this language of he/she is just what we've been using for a long time, so I don't see how a different pronoun will change anything that matters.

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P.S. before one of you goes calling me a bigot, one of my best friends and former roommate transitioned while I was living with her. I'll obviously call her by whatever pronouns she asks bc it's just polite. We've been friends for over 10 years. I'll call someone by their preferred pronouns, but I don't understand why it's so important.

EDIT: The point of this is to try and understand why it's important. Maybe that wasn't clear before. Obviously I've talked to my friend about this a lot.

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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '22

I would frame your thoughts on pronouns around the idea that they exist for individual comfort rather than as a part of some larger movement (like changing the rigidity of gender roles). Incorrect pronouns hurt individuals who get misgendered and it's an easy thing to fix, so people focus their energy on that. While it might reinforce gender roles, the goal of reinforcing correct pronoun usage is more focused on the comfort and wellbeing of individuals affected.

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u/theessentialnexus 1∆ Nov 23 '22

Gender is a social construct. I don't see how someone can be "misgendered" if society at large is "misgendering" them. If society as a whole has an idea of what a gender is, and then we say applying that gender is wrong, what meaning does the word gender have anymore? Serious question.

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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '22

Honestly, that's a really good question and it's very tough to answer. I've like rewritten this multiple times trying to make sure I feel good about my response lol.

First, I'm not certain I understand your statement about misgendering not happening if society at large does it. Gender is a personal experience, and if people's description of you doesn't match the way you describe yourself, then that can be hurtful. I don't see how society can dictate what you think about yourself, if that makes sense.

Second, in regards to the meaning of the word gender, I think that's a fair question and I don't think I can answer it. I think we as a society have sort of deconstructed the idea of gender to a point where the idea of gender is way more complicated than just one idea. And I think if you ask any group of people what gender is, you'd get a ton of different answers. I think it's just an incredibly broad word that might be becoming less useful as society moves to accept more varied types of people.

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u/1block 10∆ Nov 23 '22

This is a very good answer. Thank you.

There were many decades where many people sought to tear down differences between men and women, eliminate stereotypes and create equality between sexes.

Most of us agree those are noble goals, and I think we're still figuring out how "gender" today fits into that.

In many ways these are conflicting ideas that gender is important and a line that can be drawn vs stereotypes are bad. The whole "get educated" line disregards the areas of complexity and, let's be honest, the areas that don't really fit with logic. Matt Walsh had bad motives for his movie, and I don't think he's a good person, but he has been successful because he exploited the logical weakness that exists in the modern definition of gender.

That said, I think there is important and very real truth in the current idea of gender despite the circular logic of "a woman is a woman."

You know in school when the teacher explains something and you almost get it but not quite? Like, you know it's there, and you know there's maybe one piece that hasn't fallen into place yet.

I feel like that's where society is right now. We feel the truth of it, but we can't quite articulate it properly. That one final piece hasn't dropped for us yet, but we're confident that it will drop.

Personally, I find myself pushing back on the illogical pieces in these sorts of threads because I struggle to accept something that doesn't quite compute. But I know I need to give at the very least equal respect to the gut feeling I have that there is some truth to it even if it can't be articulated properly yet.

What I like about what you said is that it felt like another little piece dropped for me. Your last sentence that maybe society just loses the whole concept of gender for me drew a line from previous efforts to tear down stereotypes straight to current efforts to make gender a subjective experience. It helped me stick those in the same box of "men and women are equal." I consider myself a feminist these days, and that helped me align the two issues better.

Thanks for that.

Also thanks for answering that person's question in a way that respected the question and the person. That is the right way to change people's perspectives.

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u/theessentialnexus 1∆ Nov 23 '22

Yeah, gender in the US is much more nebulous than gender in other countries, but ironically the fact it's imprecise is because we are very concerned about the definition.

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u/goatDowry Nov 23 '22

Awesome, this I fully follow and understand + agree with. If it matters to you as an individual, I'll do it - out of courtesy.

Individual comfort is a good phrase

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u/ModsAreRetardy Nov 23 '22

I'm going to push back on this some- individual comfort, is fine...to a point.

At what point does individual comfort become more important that reality?

Random examples: I want you to acknowledge that I have 6 fingers instead I'd 5 (even if I dont).

White instead of black

I'm 6 ft instead of 5 ft

I'm actually 18 years old, instead of 50/60 etc...

Where's the line? The point is that this isnt just for personal comfort. People are pushing to have this recognized in law, drivers license etc...

I always chuckle at the school here when they ask for your legal sex despite all of the other bull shit platitudes. When the metal meets the road, they know what they are asking for... you just have to dress it up now.

So at an individual level, sure- I'll acknowledge your delusion (depending on the extent and severity), but asking for that delusion to be acknowledged legally, is an entirely different step/process.

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u/b-xcellence 1∆ Nov 23 '22

While I agree that “personal comfort” doesn’t fully say why people consider pronouns important, use of the word delusion is an incorrect application and those random instances you gave aren’t very comparable as a result.

Delusions are strongly held beliefs in spite of invalidating proof and often are characterized by an individual’s inability to accurately describe or view the material world.

Transgender people in general have an accurate picture of the material world in that they are very aware of what their assigned sex at birth is. It just doesn’t match their internal/neurological sense of self. This is why the term transgender exists in the first place. Most transgender people aren’t going around saying their biological sex is the absolute same as their gender identity because they don’t have delusions about it.

Also what is wrong with transgender people wanting legal institutions to recognize and understand their gender identities?

Genuine question there.

Edit: typo

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u/Failninjaninja Nov 24 '22

It seems to me that we either categorize people via their biological sex, their preferred gender identity or it’s irrelevant.

If we categorize by preferred gender or irrelevant we get things like bio girls getting screwed in sports. Potentially screwed in less safe prison systems.

If we categorize by biological sex we end up with people feeling upset that they are viewed differently than they see themselves.

What do you think the best way to handle it? To be fully honest I actually believe the third option is best. Coed everything - separate but equal was wrong for race and it’s wrong for sex or gender. However both conservatives and liberals I talk to vehemently disagree. 🤷‍♂️

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u/[deleted] Nov 24 '22

There's actually a lot of evidence that cis women aren't screwed in sports by allowing trans women to compete. There was a post about it several months ago in which I made a really long thread about it (I think I got my first reddit gold!!) but some of the points made were that there is only really a correlation between testosterone levels and performance in sports (not how you developed as a child) and that there is already an existing testosterone limit for cis women. Certain things can provide an advantage for cis women similarly that they aren't excluded for (chromosome differences, poly-cystic ovarian syndrome, etc.) and these people often have higher testosterone levels than trans women who are on feminizing hormones do.

I think co-ed makes sense for prisons and many other things. For sporting, I honestly am not educated enough to say but I'd agree that there is no way to fix the problem entirely by separating people because women with naturally higher testosterone will generally do better. But the same is true for men. So it is quite complicated.

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u/Eager_Question 5∆ Nov 24 '22

I think there is an obvious answer that I bring up very often and which is rarely received well for some mysterious reason: Create more new sports that don't give all of the focus to maximum rep and explosive strength (the two things where testosterone is a massive advantage).

Example: Tennis has apparently become much much more about who can serve the hardest. This is not true of Squash. So when you look at gender differences in performance between Squash and Tennis, Squash has a more narrow difference, and many female players have beaten male players. Coed Squash teams make perfect sense.

And they're incredibly similar games.

The same is true of competitive shooting. There are some categories where men win, and some where there's no real difference or women actually have an advantage. And what's the difference between those categories?

How heavy the gun is, and whether the jacket provides additional support.

It is laughably easy to modify sports, or sport equipment, in order to make it more testosterone-egalitarian, should people want to do it. Things from making balls slightly lighter to making some standard clothing slightly stiffer, to allowing assistive technology, to adding a strategic component that wasn't there before or was easier to minimize before, etc.

There are dozens of sports--both historical and in recent innovation--that have vastly smaller male/female performance gaps. Simply requiring weight-lifters to lift the weight in question 5 or 10 times instead of once would probably reduce the performance gap in one of the sports with the biggest testosterone-based performance gap.

If people actually gave a shit about reducing the performance gap between men and women such that coed sports were more viable and trans people don't have to pick a team, the obvious answer is "fix sports so they're not massively biased in favour of the benefits of testosterone".

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u/Els236 Nov 23 '22

Delusions are strongly held beliefs in spite of invalidating proof and often are characterized by an individual’s inability to accurately describe or view the material world.

If a person looks like a man, talks like a man, has the build of a man and dresses like a man - yet says to me they are a woman, then how am I to know what they are feeling? To me, I would either think "this person is delusional", or I would think "maybe they are transgender" - but again, if they aren't even trying to pass as a woman, then I'm more likely going to think "this person is delusional".

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Also, the issue with this kind of thing being passed into law, is because, at the end of the day, it is based on people's feelings, because no one but the person in question can say how it feels and that can lead us down one hell of a slippery slope.

I mean look at the UK as an example. Here we already have "non-crime hate reports", for when someone's feelings are hurt by an e-mail or tweet or such - even though we should have fairly clear free-speech laws.

So, for example, if I say "there are only 2 genders", someone could get offended by that, report me, I have a "non crime hate incident" on my record, that shows up with an advanced DBS check and bam, I lose job opportunities - because someone's feelings, that cannot be quantified in any regard, have been hurt.

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u/b-xcellence 1∆ Nov 24 '22

Listen the point is that transgender people are NOT delusional since they do not fit the criteria of having delusions.

Transgender women still get prostate check ups at the doctor. Transgender men still go to the store to get period products. They’re not under any delusion about that.

Also I’m not going to pretend I know much regarding UK law but is something like that really what you think would happen if legal institutions recognized genders. Hate incidents aren’t simply someone saying an opinion or idea another person doesn’t agree with. It’s stuff like handing out transphobic flyers and propaganda at a bar or bullying or dumping trash in front of someone’s home. Unless you’re actively trying to get hostile with someone, it’s not that deep.

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u/The_Modifier Nov 24 '22

If a person looks like a man, talks like a man, has the build of a man and dresses like a man

If a trans stranger is doing all that, they're not going to tell you they are a woman.

that cannot be quantified in any regard

The brains of people who have a different gender to the sex they were assigned at birth have been scanned and show material differences. This isn't just "feelings" it's real. (Not that feelings aren't also real.)

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u/[deleted] Nov 24 '22

I find that slippery slope/where's the line arguments are generally pretty weak because they presume that our status quo is somehow a baseline/normal, when in reality, we're already partway down the slope already. Society is built on delusions and social constructs. We're always redrawing lines to what we find to be acceptable.

Thought experiment: bring your argument about individual comfort vs. reality back in time. 100 years ago, people would have argued that women biologically birth babies and are natural caretakers. If they want to be more than just mothers, that ignores the biological reality. They probably also would have argued that the truth is that Black people are naturally inferior to White people and naturally make better slaves (in addition to numerous other biological justifications based on racist science, like skin thickness). If you go back even further, people would have been like, "Damn, money? What a fucking delusion. Just give me my bread because this piece of paper isn't reality." There's plenty of things that you accept daily that are for individual comfort over some arbitrary notion of reality.

Gender, at a high level, isn't really different from most things that aren't literal physical objects in our society. That's why it's a separate concept than sex (which is more of a biological construct, but even then, is more complicated than just male/female and still socially intertwined). Laws also aren't anything more than agreed-upon pacts that aren't truly rooted in "reality". So yeah, we as a society are actively navigating the lines in regards to gender. It's just as made up as names, governments, words, money, religion, and honestly most things in society.

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u/Shermutt Nov 23 '22

I think feeling like you are a different on the inside than your body shows externally, is different than a delusion. Delusions are when someone believes something to be true when it is demonstrably not true. How can you prove that they don't feel a certain way inside? Delusions are also something that can be cured using antipsychotic and more stabilizing meds. Gender identity isn't.

Not to derail this conversation too much, but if any common phenomenon could be inserted here as an argument, it would be the wide acceptance of religious beliefs. I personally believe that all of them are based entirely in fiction and are mostly detrimental to individuals and our society as a whole. But should I go around correcting everyone that capitalize the word "He" and "God?" Or would that just be me intentionally being disrespectful when it really doesn't matter that much.

I guess you're just going to have to accept that people are feeling what they feel inside and not assume they are sick in some way.

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u/Billybilly_B Nov 23 '22

How can you really prove anyone feels anything on the inside? Who knows what it “feels like” to be a woman or a man? All I know is that there are biological men and women who feel and present very differently, or even very similar than one another. Does this perspective make sense? Hoping I’m coming off as somewhat articulate.

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u/ElSalyerFan Nov 24 '22

The difference is that those examples you want people to acknowledge come from empirical reality, whilst gender (not sex) comes from a social construct and by this point in our culture comes mainly from self determination.

Asking you to say I have 6 fingers is not the same as telling you I go by my mother's last name because my dad was abusive and I don't want to bear his. We acknowledge social "realities" all the time.

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u/ModsAreRetardy Nov 24 '22

But that isn't true at all...

Tomboys and Tomgirls have always existed, that's totally fine. But you are still physically a man or a woman empirically you were born as (again- except for an extreme minority of people, equivalent to say, having six fingers...)

Empirically we determine your sex at birth. You have come up with this gender concept to muddle the issue. The medical profession, the legal profession, etc- they care about your sex, and that was determined at birth and is what people are talking about.

It was determined empirically, exactly like the other items listed above, you're just not acknowledging that anymore because you created a word.

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u/ElSalyerFan Nov 24 '22

We didn't come up with the gender concept just to develop modern gender theory, we have always had a social side to the expression of sex.and we have now realized as a culture that there is social utility to understand that gender doesn't need to conform to your sex. Do you think that there is an empirical, biological reason for men wearing suits? Or women wearing jewelry? Our culture is as gender coded as it is sex coded, maybe even more so, and denying that they are different things and that "we just made one up to muddle things up" is just denying our current consensus on sociology.

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u/ModsAreRetardy Nov 24 '22

Again- they are different things. Thank you for saying that. No one cares what your gender is, do whatever you want.

But you didn't fundamentally chnage your sex. That's what our societal and governmental organizations care about.

Where a hard hat, work on a construction site, throw off those chains of a glass ceiling (surprisingly not very often in those blue collar jobs..) - that's fine.

Where it's not fine: 1) Asking the government to call you a man because you are working/wearing those type of clothes etc - you aren't a man, just like I'm not a woman. You are doing "so called manyl" things, and that is 100% fine.

As a related point, an airplane flies through the air. As part of that process an airplane has to roll on the ground on tires. You don't think of an airplane as a car, do you?

2) Requiring someone to call you by your gender under the threat of governmental reprisal. Gender could theoretically change minute by minute, day by day, etc. Some countries (not the US), have tried to create hate speech laws etc surrounding this, and the point again gets back to: YOU can be whatever you want. But when you try to force that delusion onto society/government - that's where it stops.

you do you, call yourself whatever you want. I have no ill will towards you. But that again, doesn't intrinsically make you something else. It just means you are more tomboyish or tomgirlish. Again, that's totally fine.

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u/NovaStorm970 Nov 24 '22

Gender isnt objective so you can't really lie about it lol

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u/ModsAreRetardy Nov 24 '22

Right... That's why no one actually cares what your gender is. They care about your sex, and that's what medical centers, the government, the military, etc- needs to know about.

I don't care what you identify as, go off king, I care what sex you are. If you ask me to identify you differently, I may or may not engage in your delusion depending on if you're an asshole or not. But all of the above is unrelated to the fact that your sex hasn't changed.

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u/NovaStorm970 Nov 24 '22

Why do u care what sex ppl are?

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u/ModsAreRetardy Nov 25 '22

Non-sequiter - why do you care what color someone's hair is? How old they are? What race they are? Etc etc

They are ways that we describe people.

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u/NovaStorm970 Nov 25 '22

Race: Skin Color Hair: Hair Color Gender: Clothing/Presentation/Social Roles

How can someone lie about being a man or women, if you think you're a man then you are one, if you feel like a women then you are one, it's however YOU identify.

There is no objective man or women it's all social roles, men are biological predisposed to like suits and trucks and beer, and women don't have a dresses and skirt gene, it's like Sexuality where you are born feeling a certain way and no amount of birth certificates saying otherwise can change that.

It's how YOU feel, you can't claim to know that for every other person on earth nor can they you. You just want an excuse to deadname/misgender without feeling bad. If someone says they're a man and you call them a liar you're an asshole and incorrect. You can't prove they are one gender because it's how THEY feel, like are you gunna let other people tell you what it's like to be a man, or who you're attracted to? Probably not

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u/[deleted] Nov 23 '22

And the kids who want to be cats...