Reversed and Remanded

[dachte]

One of the ways you can tell you're arguing poorly about an issue is when people who have little opinion on the issue read your argument and hope things go against you just for spite. I confess to the latter with a recent post on Google+ by "Siderea B", a post which has been floating through my social circles. There are quite a lot of these posts

Comments

[bubblingbeebles]

i'm entertained to imagine "Siderea B" as the name of a star or planet.

what do you think about the current gender option (male/female/other)?

[dachte]

I don't really have an opinion on the gender option. I know that there are many different ways to think about sex and gender, I have my own framework of terms, and I will mainly argue to protect the acceptability of diversity of frameworks than to argue for my particular one. As such, I don't really care a lot when it comes to how third parties (like Google) expose their frameworks (even if vaguely) in the sites they lay out.

That said, I do reject-as-bullshit the concern that some have expressed that the broad use of "other" co-opts a term belonging to people who are "legitimately other" for people who just don't want to disclose. I reject it on the basis that "other" is not an actual identity and has little substantive content.

[bubblingbeebles]

so if somebody said they were "other" you would not infer that it meant explicitly "neither male nor female"?

if i chose "other" to indicate "unspecified", should i trust everybody who sees my profile to refrain from inferring the same?

[dachte]

Why is it any of your business what others decide to infer from it? You don't even know that "other" makes sense in everyone's framework, or if it does, that you'd fit into their notion of "other".

[_tove]

I read such statements as less like whining and more like "here is a way in which your service could be better (potentially making yours a more viable service than Facebook)."

I think the particular wording of Siderea B's post is unfortunate (especially the flounce), because there's some things at the foundation of her argument that I agree with. One of them is that being able to unthinkingly use one's legal name on the internet is a privileged position. I don't even mean that in the technical sense of "privilege," more just that, well, you've got a good thing going in life if you're in a position to use your legal name on the internet. There are a lot of reasons that various people might not want to do so, and some of them in particular (such as a history of stalkers) are certainly not situations I'd want to be in.

And while I certainly don't think a legal-name policy would ever be formed with the intent to diminish women, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the reasons why one might not want to use one's legal name online are

[dachte]

If she would've phrased it that way, I would not have objected. The way she said it made her plea worse than had she said nothing at all. I wouldn't classify it as whining so much as batshit-crazy-flaming

[_tove]

In your frame, you refer to "people who are paranoid about personal information [and] people who want the world to recognise their gender identity that involves learning new pronouns and/or grammar," and your phrasing sounds to me like you think these are irrational stances. So would you really have not objected? (This does count as a sidetrack, though, since your original post is about poor argumentation and spite, so I understand if it's too far off topic.)

I somewhat object (though I'm hardly challenging you to a duel or anything) to your use of "actual" and "true" in the second paragraph. I'm not sure I consider my legal name my "true" name anymore, at least to the extent that I often don't even remember to respond to it. Calpurnia Addams covers this with a bit more sarcasm in her most famous video.

...
As to the aside, I think I thought there were more people (or at least more upper-class people) using more names, but it's also not clear to me what the distinction between names and titles is in some cases. This has

[dachte]

I think sufficient paranoia is kind of kooky, yeah. I refuse to use non he/she pronouns to refer to people; people can choose which of the two they like and if I'm aware of their preferences I'll go with that. I'll get *very* grumbly if they insist I use other pronouns (I don't mind hearing these pronouns, but people don't get to insist they can write on my definitional framework

on gender

[pingback_bot]

User bubblingbeebles referenced to your post from on gender saying: [...] over here [...]

[gwillen]

As a somewhat-multiculturalist liberal, I want to state for the record how firmly I disagree with you here. We can discuss further, or not, at your preference. I do not expect either opinion to change; if you think Sidera's points are rubbish, you will likely think the same of mine, even if I state them less inflammatorily, and I have already seen your points and they do not sway me.

[gwillen]

(Mostly, I think I had the urge to reply just because I kept reading the word 'we' in your post, and as a liberal who has agreed with you many times before, I wanted to make it clear that I am not part of your 'we' here.)

[dachte]

That's fair. In my use of "we", I was intending to speak from the perspective of my notion of enlightenment liberalism, not necessarily to speak for all liberals.

I really don't have a very hard stance on the policy at hand, and I would be happy to hear arguments that amount to something more interesting than tossing forth labels like "culturally imperialist".

You're probably right that we won't come to agreement on this though.

[hvincent]

"She claims that the idea of having an actual real name is a "parochial white, middle-class, American assumption.". Well no, it's a fairly common assumption..."

i would like to point out that because you more or less fall under the white, middle-class, American demographic, it is easier for you to say 'it's a fairly common assumption' that people have an 'actual real name'. sure, in a typical white, middle-class, American society, people don't use tend to use mutable, fluctuating, or separated names for themselves. however, that just alienates certain groups of people and makes it undesirable for them to join a space in which they are obligated to choose one, 'real' name for themselves. at the risk of sounding like i'm trying to pull the 'underprivileged minority group' card, i am calling attention to this line because it seems to be a point you are somewhat missing. sure, i am choosing to attend the party, thus i am coping, and the vast majority of the time, i am coping with no complaint or discomfort because it actually isn't an

[dachte]

I mark paranoia as one possible reason for not disclosing that, not the only one.

Also, I mark Siderea as being "good riddance" because of the way she formed her criticism, not for her position on the matter at hand. I don't have much of an opinion on how google should handle names, I just find their current handling to be one acceptable way.