The reason liberal kids give their name and pronouns is to give cover for kids whose genders aren’t immediately obvious.
If you’re a tomboy, a butch woman, a man with long hair, or someone with a first name that doesn’t typically match your gender, you might appreciate being addressed correctly.
It also helps everyone with social or neurological issues who find it hard to determine someone’s gender on first glance.
>give cover for kids whose genders aren’t immediately obvious.
...By explicitly invoking gender in the conversation? How do closeted trans people feel about their nontrans peers establishing social norms where you have to explicitly out your own gender? If they want to remain closeted, should they lie? Should they uncloset themselves for the sake of social conformity?
Hardly anybody who adopts pronoun introductions does so because they have reliable empirical evidence of pronoun introductions working towards their intended purpose. They're just happy to fit in with their ingroup.
> How do closeted trans people feel about their nontrans peers establishing social norms where you have to explicitly out your own gender?
They don't like it, for sure. That's why a good introduction atmosphere is one where pronouns are optional. But if 14 of 15 people in a room are cis or comfortably out trans people giving their pronouns, and the last one doesn't give their pronouns, they stick out. Are they anti-trans? A cis person who just doesn't like giving out pronouns? A closeted trans person? Who knows. It's very hard to get that balance right. There are uncomfortable situations for all sorts of social norms.
> Hardly anybody who adopts pronoun introductions does so because they have reliable empirical evidence of pronoun introductions working towards their intended purpose.
Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work. I know that the community dropped the triple pronoun format as the practice went mainstream. The original version was e.g. "he/him/his" instead of "he/him".
As for "hardly anybody," why not find out? You could ask trans people how they feel about the practice nowadays and report back.
> Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work.
This is not credible, but maybe it's your first day on the Internet. BB alluded to an obvious reason people would do this apart from comforting /covering for any trans people in the room: to demonstrate that they are on board with the progressive program, or at least too cowed to publicly dissent. It's the progressive version of "it's ok to be white", an irresistible provocation designed to engage and expose anyone who might disagree with community norms.
>That's why a good introduction atmosphere is one where pronouns are optional. But if 14 of 15 people in a room are cis or comfortably out trans people giving their pronouns, and the last one doesn't give their pronouns, they stick out. Are they anti-trans? A cis person who just doesn't like giving out pronouns? A closeted trans person? Who knows. It's very hard to get that balance right. There are uncomfortable situations for all sorts of social norms.
In other words, this is a terrible social practice because it doesn't function as advertised. If there are antitrans members present in the social context looking to hatecrime or insult or stalk or make fun of trans people, pronoun introductions fully expose trans people's identities to them, whereas in social contexts in which pronoun introductions aren't practiced, anybody directing the group attention to gender would be seen as the odd one out. Not only that, but increasingly many social interactions today are recorded, broadcast online, present on social media, etc, which makes it even easier to harass trans people.
>Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work.
People on the progressive left will typically take the viewpoint that our social norms and institutions are overflowing with racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, colonization, and so on. They've also supported social faux pas before like the "Ban Bossy" campaign or "Yes all men" hashtags, and in general they will shut down any criticism of their tactics by calling their criticizers racist, sexist, oppressors, etc. I have essentially 0 credence that social practices like pronoun introductions and the people who are happy to go along with them are capable of self-correction or self-policing. For example,
>I know that the community dropped the triple pronoun format as the practice went mainstream. The original version was e.g. "he/him/his" instead of "he/him".
Where do genderqueer people fit in this? Are xenopronouns allowed for people with xenogenders? What verification methods are there to rule out people making fun of the movement vs true believers who call themselves dogself? Are she/he pronouns valid?
Pretty much every single one of these questions is going to be answered arbitrarily because there's nothing like a systematic investigation into which social norms are good vs bad going on that informs pronoun-introduction-supporters' views. They just get painted a pretty picture in their minds - "Oh saying you 'have' pronouns helps transgender people, and you surely aren't an evil bigot right?" - and they uncritically reproduce the social practice without considering cases where e.g. the trans person gets forcibly outed by the social practice, the people involved don't know what it means for a person to 'have' pronouns (especially foreigners and older people), where they would be the minority political group and their opponents force them to recite the majority political group's platitudes, where more pronoun-opposers are made unhappy than transgender people are made happy (the situation is net-negative utility under a crude and simple utilitarian account where everybody's happiness and unhappiness is worth the same amount), where this causes other political groups to form their own shibboleths in opposition ("You will never be a real woman," "My pronouns are U/S/A"), etc.
>As for "hardly anybody," why not find out? You could ask trans people how they feel about the practice nowadays and report back.
For the record this would be a terrible way to measure the effect. "Do you agree with x social practice that y social group does purely to pander to you and gain your support?" Nearly everybody would say yes just due to tribal reasons; transgender people's personal experiences don't translate to a representative sample of what occurs in pronoun introductions; asking for people's approval of a topic is generally an unreliable indicator that it is in fact a good thing (see polls on whether inflation is good or bad, whether free trade is good or bad, increasingly on whether vaccines are good or bad), etc.
the solution is to not attend a left wing university. sure all the "elite" universities are left wing but we need to support non woke universities and slowly create a counter elite.
I was not in an uni where everybody wore MAGA hats, but in one where people would casually make jokes about throwing commies off the helicopter, describe their dad humiliating and outing a gay employee as a fun family anecdote, and used slurs for effect. The professors were obviously more composed, but barely disguised sneer at leftists or rw populists was palpable. At a certain point, one explicitely make a joke to the tune of "don't miss the job fair, so many welfare queens count on you".
And you know what? It. Was. Fine. Sometimes I felt a bit uncomfortable, more often enraged, but it was mostly interesting and challenging. I learnt to debate with people not sharing my assumptions and to banter. I learnt to respect people without necessarily respecting their views, and that sometimes it was better to just change subject rather than being mired in the n-th debate on minimum wage. I learnt how to joke about others' positions and conceit gracefully, without sounding (or being) bitter and ruining the mood.
So yeah, I can totally relate to rw students on American campuses. I understand their discomfort and disorientation. But I cannot share the feeling it is a problem to be solved, or that they are subject to some inconceivable psychological torture. At the cost of sounding cheeky, what do they use to say about safe spaces?
Can it be true? Those who study law in the USA and those who teach law are against prison? Such a radical notion? Have not hard any Swedes (I am Swedish) teach such a thing in Sweden.
What's your take on the origins of the 10:1 L:C ratios in the Ivies? This ratio vastly outstrips the baseline ratios in the younger demographics. I'm aware that college entrance criteria have pivoted away from scores and grades and towards extracurriculars in the last decade, but are left-coded extracurriculars (social justice) given more entrance weight than right-coded extracurriculars (church, eagle scout, shooting sports, etc)?
What do you think are the causes of it being so disproportionate?
My interest is this. If there's some level of bias that changes admissions some amount, and we know that more elite schools produce higher salaries, we should be able to back-calculate exactly how much literal wealth transfer between the red tribe to the blue tribe is transpiring based on an assumed amount of admissions bias.
There's more than just the social aspect. There's also simply that left-wing ideas aren't as interesting to conservatives. And it's deeply annoying spending your time reading great literature or studying different thinkers, and then having to write essays to prompts that by their framing disallow conservative ideas. I had to write an essay whose prompt was essentially, "is Julius literally like a Nazi, or not quite that bad?". That type of question doesn't lend itself to deep analysis from a conservative worldview.
For me to do the type of research I found interesting, I had to craft my own syllabus for an "honors writing seminar". That was the only way for me to read the type of authors I found compelling, AND not be constrained to left-wing framing.
Part of the anti-intellectilual bias of the right is due to this reason, and the intellectually inclined-types of the right tend to go into things like seminary so they can actually read Aquinas or Kant, and thus silo themselves off from regular academics.
I appreciate your observations and thoughts, especially because you are a student right there where things are happening.
The nature of the conformity that you report is indeed frightening. My undergraduate years were fifty years ago, and back then, I could see instances of the conformity to which you allude. However, there still seemed to be some room for open disagreement. What you are seeing today reminds me of the Catholic Church. The dogma was taken for granted, and while people may skirt the edges, nobody directly challenged the stuff. Those with doubts would, to echo what I recall you mentioning, played little verbal games with what they say in order to not upset the perceived Thought Police.
I also found the conservatives of those times to likewise be anti-intellecual. It was the people on the left who were the thinkers. Being an engineer, I need to know the principles upon which something is based in order to create a proper design. The conservatives didn't seem to care about principles, only what works in the short term, and only if whatever it is agrees with Christianity. Such evasion in engineering is likely to lead to disaster.
Little has changed since, IMHO. Yesterday, I heard a conservative saying that America needs to bring back mandatory military service in order to alleviate some "shortage". Evidently, the lesson with the draft in Vietnam has not been learned. As Ayn Rand once observed, they will say that you have a right to your bank account, but not to your life.
Is it any wonder that they are so unpopular, especially among young people?
It’s weird how much has changed in the last decade. When I went to law school, the Federalist Society was a huge and powerful group on campus. Sure there were a dozen leftist ones at similar size, but nothing really bigger. Part of this was how persuasive originalism is as a legal philosophy, but a large part was that there was a natural leveling effect that if you wanted a federal clerkship, the Federalist Society had a lot of pull with originalist judges and could help you get one.
I even had quite a few Originalist professors, including one that was a Bush appointee. I do admit I did self-censor slightly, but that was mainly in my civil rights class the day after Trump one the election. My normally even tempered professor was devastated and threw out the lesson plan to discuss how Trump one the election. That seemed to be a poorly timed moment to gloat, though I did highlight how my Hispanic mother voted for Trump, so I wasn’t surprised he won. It’s a shame that things seem to have gotten worse.
What you describe is business as usual in non STEM degrees in Europe, while in Law and economics there are pockets of resistance. Now, what about STEM? Is the environment so politically unanimous?
did you guys know substack doens't let you post 2000 word comments? found that out the hard way. the comment i would have left is here. https://ellenmeredith.substack.com/p/i-have-no-sufficiently-permissive
The reason liberal kids give their name and pronouns is to give cover for kids whose genders aren’t immediately obvious.
If you’re a tomboy, a butch woman, a man with long hair, or someone with a first name that doesn’t typically match your gender, you might appreciate being addressed correctly.
It also helps everyone with social or neurological issues who find it hard to determine someone’s gender on first glance.
>give cover for kids whose genders aren’t immediately obvious.
...By explicitly invoking gender in the conversation? How do closeted trans people feel about their nontrans peers establishing social norms where you have to explicitly out your own gender? If they want to remain closeted, should they lie? Should they uncloset themselves for the sake of social conformity?
Hardly anybody who adopts pronoun introductions does so because they have reliable empirical evidence of pronoun introductions working towards their intended purpose. They're just happy to fit in with their ingroup.
> How do closeted trans people feel about their nontrans peers establishing social norms where you have to explicitly out your own gender?
They don't like it, for sure. That's why a good introduction atmosphere is one where pronouns are optional. But if 14 of 15 people in a room are cis or comfortably out trans people giving their pronouns, and the last one doesn't give their pronouns, they stick out. Are they anti-trans? A cis person who just doesn't like giving out pronouns? A closeted trans person? Who knows. It's very hard to get that balance right. There are uncomfortable situations for all sorts of social norms.
> Hardly anybody who adopts pronoun introductions does so because they have reliable empirical evidence of pronoun introductions working towards their intended purpose.
Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work. I know that the community dropped the triple pronoun format as the practice went mainstream. The original version was e.g. "he/him/his" instead of "he/him".
As for "hardly anybody," why not find out? You could ask trans people how they feel about the practice nowadays and report back.
Non-closeted trans people don't like it that much either. It's often a marker.
obv folks disagree, i can't speak for all trans people, but Contrapoints was right
> Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work.
This is not credible, but maybe it's your first day on the Internet. BB alluded to an obvious reason people would do this apart from comforting /covering for any trans people in the room: to demonstrate that they are on board with the progressive program, or at least too cowed to publicly dissent. It's the progressive version of "it's ok to be white", an irresistible provocation designed to engage and expose anyone who might disagree with community norms.
>That's why a good introduction atmosphere is one where pronouns are optional. But if 14 of 15 people in a room are cis or comfortably out trans people giving their pronouns, and the last one doesn't give their pronouns, they stick out. Are they anti-trans? A cis person who just doesn't like giving out pronouns? A closeted trans person? Who knows. It's very hard to get that balance right. There are uncomfortable situations for all sorts of social norms.
In other words, this is a terrible social practice because it doesn't function as advertised. If there are antitrans members present in the social context looking to hatecrime or insult or stalk or make fun of trans people, pronoun introductions fully expose trans people's identities to them, whereas in social contexts in which pronoun introductions aren't practiced, anybody directing the group attention to gender would be seen as the odd one out. Not only that, but increasingly many social interactions today are recorded, broadcast online, present on social media, etc, which makes it even easier to harass trans people.
>Making non-gender-conforming people comfortable in mixed groups was the pitch for giving out pronouns with names in the first place. I can't imagine people would keep doing it if it didn't work.
People on the progressive left will typically take the viewpoint that our social norms and institutions are overflowing with racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, colonization, and so on. They've also supported social faux pas before like the "Ban Bossy" campaign or "Yes all men" hashtags, and in general they will shut down any criticism of their tactics by calling their criticizers racist, sexist, oppressors, etc. I have essentially 0 credence that social practices like pronoun introductions and the people who are happy to go along with them are capable of self-correction or self-policing. For example,
>I know that the community dropped the triple pronoun format as the practice went mainstream. The original version was e.g. "he/him/his" instead of "he/him".
Where do genderqueer people fit in this? Are xenopronouns allowed for people with xenogenders? What verification methods are there to rule out people making fun of the movement vs true believers who call themselves dogself? Are she/he pronouns valid?
Pretty much every single one of these questions is going to be answered arbitrarily because there's nothing like a systematic investigation into which social norms are good vs bad going on that informs pronoun-introduction-supporters' views. They just get painted a pretty picture in their minds - "Oh saying you 'have' pronouns helps transgender people, and you surely aren't an evil bigot right?" - and they uncritically reproduce the social practice without considering cases where e.g. the trans person gets forcibly outed by the social practice, the people involved don't know what it means for a person to 'have' pronouns (especially foreigners and older people), where they would be the minority political group and their opponents force them to recite the majority political group's platitudes, where more pronoun-opposers are made unhappy than transgender people are made happy (the situation is net-negative utility under a crude and simple utilitarian account where everybody's happiness and unhappiness is worth the same amount), where this causes other political groups to form their own shibboleths in opposition ("You will never be a real woman," "My pronouns are U/S/A"), etc.
>As for "hardly anybody," why not find out? You could ask trans people how they feel about the practice nowadays and report back.
For the record this would be a terrible way to measure the effect. "Do you agree with x social practice that y social group does purely to pander to you and gain your support?" Nearly everybody would say yes just due to tribal reasons; transgender people's personal experiences don't translate to a representative sample of what occurs in pronoun introductions; asking for people's approval of a topic is generally an unreliable indicator that it is in fact a good thing (see polls on whether inflation is good or bad, whether free trade is good or bad, increasingly on whether vaccines are good or bad), etc.
How kind of them.
the solution is to not attend a left wing university. sure all the "elite" universities are left wing but we need to support non woke universities and slowly create a counter elite.
I was not in an uni where everybody wore MAGA hats, but in one where people would casually make jokes about throwing commies off the helicopter, describe their dad humiliating and outing a gay employee as a fun family anecdote, and used slurs for effect. The professors were obviously more composed, but barely disguised sneer at leftists or rw populists was palpable. At a certain point, one explicitely make a joke to the tune of "don't miss the job fair, so many welfare queens count on you".
And you know what? It. Was. Fine. Sometimes I felt a bit uncomfortable, more often enraged, but it was mostly interesting and challenging. I learnt to debate with people not sharing my assumptions and to banter. I learnt to respect people without necessarily respecting their views, and that sometimes it was better to just change subject rather than being mired in the n-th debate on minimum wage. I learnt how to joke about others' positions and conceit gracefully, without sounding (or being) bitter and ruining the mood.
So yeah, I can totally relate to rw students on American campuses. I understand their discomfort and disorientation. But I cannot share the feeling it is a problem to be solved, or that they are subject to some inconceivable psychological torture. At the cost of sounding cheeky, what do they use to say about safe spaces?
Can it be true? Those who study law in the USA and those who teach law are against prison? Such a radical notion? Have not hard any Swedes (I am Swedish) teach such a thing in Sweden.
What's your take on the origins of the 10:1 L:C ratios in the Ivies? This ratio vastly outstrips the baseline ratios in the younger demographics. I'm aware that college entrance criteria have pivoted away from scores and grades and towards extracurriculars in the last decade, but are left-coded extracurriculars (social justice) given more entrance weight than right-coded extracurriculars (church, eagle scout, shooting sports, etc)?
I’d imagine so, but I doubt that’s the main cause of it.
What do you think are the causes of it being so disproportionate?
My interest is this. If there's some level of bias that changes admissions some amount, and we know that more elite schools produce higher salaries, we should be able to back-calculate exactly how much literal wealth transfer between the red tribe to the blue tribe is transpiring based on an assumed amount of admissions bias.
There's more than just the social aspect. There's also simply that left-wing ideas aren't as interesting to conservatives. And it's deeply annoying spending your time reading great literature or studying different thinkers, and then having to write essays to prompts that by their framing disallow conservative ideas. I had to write an essay whose prompt was essentially, "is Julius literally like a Nazi, or not quite that bad?". That type of question doesn't lend itself to deep analysis from a conservative worldview.
For me to do the type of research I found interesting, I had to craft my own syllabus for an "honors writing seminar". That was the only way for me to read the type of authors I found compelling, AND not be constrained to left-wing framing.
Part of the anti-intellectilual bias of the right is due to this reason, and the intellectually inclined-types of the right tend to go into things like seminary so they can actually read Aquinas or Kant, and thus silo themselves off from regular academics.
I appreciate your observations and thoughts, especially because you are a student right there where things are happening.
The nature of the conformity that you report is indeed frightening. My undergraduate years were fifty years ago, and back then, I could see instances of the conformity to which you allude. However, there still seemed to be some room for open disagreement. What you are seeing today reminds me of the Catholic Church. The dogma was taken for granted, and while people may skirt the edges, nobody directly challenged the stuff. Those with doubts would, to echo what I recall you mentioning, played little verbal games with what they say in order to not upset the perceived Thought Police.
I also found the conservatives of those times to likewise be anti-intellecual. It was the people on the left who were the thinkers. Being an engineer, I need to know the principles upon which something is based in order to create a proper design. The conservatives didn't seem to care about principles, only what works in the short term, and only if whatever it is agrees with Christianity. Such evasion in engineering is likely to lead to disaster.
Little has changed since, IMHO. Yesterday, I heard a conservative saying that America needs to bring back mandatory military service in order to alleviate some "shortage". Evidently, the lesson with the draft in Vietnam has not been learned. As Ayn Rand once observed, they will say that you have a right to your bank account, but not to your life.
Is it any wonder that they are so unpopular, especially among young people?
It’s weird how much has changed in the last decade. When I went to law school, the Federalist Society was a huge and powerful group on campus. Sure there were a dozen leftist ones at similar size, but nothing really bigger. Part of this was how persuasive originalism is as a legal philosophy, but a large part was that there was a natural leveling effect that if you wanted a federal clerkship, the Federalist Society had a lot of pull with originalist judges and could help you get one.
I even had quite a few Originalist professors, including one that was a Bush appointee. I do admit I did self-censor slightly, but that was mainly in my civil rights class the day after Trump one the election. My normally even tempered professor was devastated and threw out the lesson plan to discuss how Trump one the election. That seemed to be a poorly timed moment to gloat, though I did highlight how my Hispanic mother voted for Trump, so I wasn’t surprised he won. It’s a shame that things seem to have gotten worse.
What you describe is business as usual in non STEM degrees in Europe, while in Law and economics there are pockets of resistance. Now, what about STEM? Is the environment so politically unanimous?