Yes. Your feelings and beliefs are not only “less important” but they are entirely irrelevant when it comes to someone else’s personal pronouns. However, your opinion is of the utmost importance when it comes to your own personal pronouns. I think @lothlin said it well in this post.
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@headsoup and @swampster you are both forgetting to consider the other. sometimes there is no win-win position. IF both parties would be caused pain – actual pain, not “ew Jesus said no” – then you must find a compromise.
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also… there is a difference between feelings and saying?
you can think that “it” is an acceptable pronoun, but choose not to use it / find a workaround for personal reasons. this is totally different than arguing that “it” is not an acceptable pronoun at all.
and nobody is forcing anyone to use a pronoun… technically, you can use no pronouns: eg
“Astra made a good point in Astra’s post”. it sounds silly but is grammatically correct.
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i wonder if “I’m not going to do it” could have been contextualized by stating what the alternative action would have been? from the perspective of someone who uses the pronoun it, is it any less disrespectful to say “I can’t use this pronoun because it conflicts with my own core beliefs, and if i refer to you in the third person, i will use your name instead of any pronoun”?
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it’s all in the context. and online, you can never be sure.
I came out to my mom about four months ago and she’s just starting to try to use my pronouns. I grew up fundamentalist-religious, and she still is…
in my experience, someone who has true compassion will either come around over time in baby steps, or will reach a point at which they stop and declare their boundaries are in conflict with yours. in that case, either compromise, or disengage.
someone who is coming from a point of bad faith or ill intent will usually let their disrespect show in other ways. but even then… it’s hard to tell. in that case, defend yourself and be fierce about it.
but when you don’t know? etiquette asks we assume best intentions. so… I try to do that.
as for “core beliefs”, well. this isn’t the place for debating what constitutes a legitimate core belief.
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What is the compromise?
If we go to just using actual names when addressing in the third person (which makes sense to me), the whole discussion around pronouns becomes irrelevant does it not?
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I recommend asking the person with whom you have the conflict, either one-on-one or with a mutally agreed arbiter present. I do not want to propose a compromise on someone else’s behalf, only for myself.
and the discussion is never “irrelevant”, I suggested a way to disengage with the discussion should you choose. the socially-constructed idea of “the economy” doesn’t stop being relevant because you choose to live off the grid.
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I have no conflict with an individual, I am just discussing the topic.
This was the opening statement of this thread, the OP proposed no compromise, but instead an expectation of corrective action. I think instead of reminding us halfway through the thread to consider the other, this response could have been provided to the OP and saved some effort all round.
I agree, more discussion and understanding is much better than stubborn bickering back and forth and I apologise if I come across antagonistic, though I am a little frustrated.
Well said, I think the point of the boundaries arising is where it gets difficult.
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How can this list of options include us, if we are the ones that hate speech is directed at? There is still a comment against our pronouns on another thread from a few months ago. If we flag it, we want to be consulted about actions you might take because punishment (suspension, threats of suspension) does not fit our values. We PM’d the author of the comment when it happened but never received a reply. If we flag, how can we be included in the process? Thank you.
This isn’t a thread started by whom you deem OP: it is a split-off from another topic and so was created by staff. That might have skewed context somewhat. Does that clear up some potential confusion?
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ya, bug parts of this happened when I was asleep or preoccupied. and sometimes I’m too tired to reply immediately… and there’s two threads to try to follow as well. it’s gotten pretty messy, but people are messy sometimes. it’s easy to meander. just look at me! rambling all over the place. I tend to talk for too long. take up more space in a conversation than I really need to. I also know that it’s tempting to pile on but I felt that previous comments had mostly covered what I’d intended to say. hmm. did I mention I tend to go on?
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Sorry about that. As @wildwestnature said, I split this from another topic. Maybe that was a bad decision, but Discourse advises to split off discussions about moderation into their own topics so as to not distract from the original topic’s focus. In this case I tried to only include posts that were about moderation, which were intermingled with posts about cargo pants. :-)
The original topic automatically makes a note that there was a split and links to this one, but this one doesn’t automatically point back to its parent topic. What I need to do is add a staff notice at the top of this to link to the original topic. I’ll do that after I post this.
You can message forum_moderators (I didn’t include the @ symbol here so as not to notify all of them) with your thoughts if you want, and include a link to the post in question.
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So, will the original inciting posts be removed, where someone came into the LGBTQIA+ Thread, and butted in on a discussion of pronouns to announce they weren’t going to use Nonbinary-Naturalists pronouns? Even though this person could have simply scrolled on without going out of their way to be hostile in what was supposed to be a positive and inclusive space for queer users?
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Removing Sedgequeen’s response from the original thread, apologizing, and promising to do better in the future is all that would have been needed at the original point but now it just seems like everyone is doubling down on the transphobia and refusing to actually listen to the trans and queer users in the original thread who all pointed out: refusing to use someone’s pronouns, weather now or saying you will not use them in the future is indeed misgendering and active transphobia. Allllll you have to do is remove Sedgequeen’s post in the original thread and apologize for not listening to the multiple queer users telling you what the problem is, all i’ve seen in this thread is people acting like irrational demands were made and it was just people asking for a transphobic post to be removed? And staff are defending the post and letting it remain up in the original thread with no visible reponse on that thread to show that post is in the wrong??
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Sedgequeen’s response is still there with what looks like zero interactions other than people liking the post to show that they, too, will refuse to use someone’s pronouns if they ““don’t agree with them”” for any reason, which is literally misgendering because it’s pretty much a promise to mi
sgender you in the future.
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wrong button but oh well. Hiding this in another thread is just part of the problem.
iNat Staff: it’s ok to state you will do something, because you didn’t actually do it
Who knew stating specific intent to do something harmful against a specific person can easily be ignored as harmless? That totally always works out well :D
/sarcasm
edit; oh i meant this for the moderate thread too, oh well. they can move it if they want.
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Sarcasm: I know, right? Telling someone, “I’m going to punch you” is totally not a threat at all and isn’t harmfull in any way! :) /Sarcasm
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Anyways I love how in my response after the thread was reopened I specificaly said “do not sweep this under the rug” and then that post and the others were immediately swept under the rug by being split off into another thread that no one’s going to look at or have the full context for. Which is literally already causing problems of people coming into that thread without seeing the full discussion here first.
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this, this, this
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So if all of OUR posts can be moved to this thread is there a particular reason Sedgequeen’s original post isn’t here? Considering, you know, it’s literally the reason this thread exists? And people who go into the LGBTQIA thread don’t need to see someone being transphobic??
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