harrisonreed wrote: ↑Sat Jun 05, 2021 6:03 am
[
Well we can add those real issues to the pot! None of what you posted in your excellent post that I'm quoting was even remotely similar to the issue brought up in this thread, which is a forum member attacking robcat for not using a gender neutral example in his story, but imagining a male trombonist getting his hair caught in the rotorless valve.
How can you compare the two, is right! Real issues, and non-issues. People getting treated as subhuman and discarded by society and potentially dying early because of it is a real issue. Let's solve that as humanity.
I feel, unequivocally, that it is extremely hostile to take your own ego issues (how dare someone assign a gender to a person in their own made up story when I'm not that gender) and project them on completely harmless statements. It's terrifying if that is acceptable to go unchecked. Imagine if the reverse happened.
Taking offense to something that is truly not offensive is a personal, ego-based, problem. I would never take the same stance on someone else's words or writing, where they choose some other gender in a hypothetical story to express their own thoughts about a subject. That is their voice. If someone took offense to a female writer choosing to use the pronoun "she" in their textbook, that would be sexist. The same must be true for offense taken against a male choosing so to the same. It's how we view our world, and it's interesting, not offensive.
I think you're kinda of missing small but kind of important part of this though. It's not about that initial post (tbh I didn't read the original thread and don't care about it cause it's not about that thread), it's not about one single use of he vs she or they. It's about the constant, presumptive assumption of a default to he vs the anything else and the way those issues exist on a spectrum. What I mean by that is that that always assumption of he, let's take with trombone for example, does two things. For everyone just subtly reinforces that men play trombone and non men don't, it's really really really far on one end of the spectrum and does, for all intense and purposes, seem harmless. However that small subtle thing exists on the same spectrum as some much much bigger issues with sexism in the brass community. A spectrum that eventually leads to people using their gendered power in a situation like Massimo La Rosa did. I know that that sounds insane and I'm not saying that just using he makes you a racist or anything like that, but when the predominant cultural assumption is that the gender of what you do is different that your own, the constant drip of it overtime becomes two things. 1. it's just exhausting to hear an assumption that this isn't for you in a way that's so small that a thread this big will go just because someone pointed out that is doesn't ALWAYS have to be he, with the only people not being the point being "he's" who have no reason to notice it or ever feel unwelcome. 2. Small things like that and the reactions to them being brought up, overtime, become a tell as to who is safe in the community and who is not inways that white men, who are basically always safe in the community don't notice.
I know it seems like this subtle and nitpicky thing, but that's because it's a subtle and nitpicking thing that doesn't effect you so you have no reason to ever notice or be bothered by it. BUT making that small, yet supportive shift in language when you don't have to makes a huge difference when it comes to, you've deemed it "real" issues. "Real" issues don't exist in a vacuum. They grow ever so slowly out of small issues. Tiny small issues of making people feel unnoticeably unwelcome, overtime, really affect big issues and when big issues happen you start to notice the little ones afterwards cause they tell you who pays attention and who gives a shit. Cause of course you view this as "taking offense to something that is truly not offensive" because if you're a cis male you've literally never been truly unwelcome in a trombone related space and most likely in any other, so you're not in a position to deem something like this offensive. Not cause you don't have the right, but because you have no experience in the matter. It's like telling a Black person what's racist as a white person. I have zero experience being Black, whereas the the Black person. has experienced that racism their entire life, so when they say something it's time to listen, not gatekeep what is or isn't offensive.
If you take the time to make subtle changes when there's no reason for you to, that has a huge effect on how welcome people feel in spaces, but it also says to the people that this effects that you're an engaged human and, if the chips are ever down, you're a safe person to turn to. I've learned from personal issues that I'm not going to get into related to sexual harassment, that you start to notice after.
In a lot of ways the pronoun thing is like the trope of misgendering someone and they "yell" at you for it. It's not cause of the once, it's because of the constant drip of it happening everyday and then getting misgendered by another person who just isn't paying attention because none of it effects them. I know this thread seems out of proportion, but just sit with how it would feel if you weren't a man and literally everything in your job/community is male and just trying to draw attention to it brings up this thread (and the one from the other day) where people are coming out of the woodwork to bring associate you with it's and geldings and sexual predators. It reinforces that subtle message very very clearly because the debate seems comically academic to men because it's like trying to explain water to fish, whereas it's not academic to the people who is very subtly erodes their feeling of being a part of the community (if they were lucky enough to ever feel that way given how much they were told it's a boy instrument when they go started). These things genuinely aren't academic and exist on the same spectrum of a serious forms of discrimination and violence, or "real issues."
If you want a specific, first hand example, I teach a lot of younger kids. Im a privy who keeps their gender to themselves. When parents find out I'm non binary either they're cool about it or the lessons suddenly stop for some "reason". I regularly lose students not cause of behavior but because of words in my email signature/zoom profile. Not defaulting to he all the time normalizing having different pronouns, it makes them less unfamiliar, and it makes that kind of backdoor firing over "words" happen at a lot less.
re the sexism of taking issue with someone using "she" instead of he and all that, that's the same basic category as reverse racism, like he and she and they aren't on equal footing so, while saying it would be sexist would be true in an ideal world, it's not in ours. Only using he in a writing is a presumptive norm of a patriarchal system and so using it reinforces that. Frustratingly, using she or they instead is a radical departure that is taken as a statement rather than just a use of language. They aren't equivalent because there's different weights behind them- language isn't a vacuum. Also, once again, it's not academic. When I wrote my book I just freely switched between he and she and they. No big deal, just a small preference that I was considerate about how I used it to make sure it always read smoothly and didn't effect the readability. I've had dudes write me and be super fucking angry that I brought that "snowflake shit" into a technical book. I know other people who've had that same issue. none of the complaints have come from anyone other than white cis men. it's all an academic language debate until you depart from it and people take e a big issue with you doing you, cause you doing you applies to men and their comfort and stops when it runs into that.
Speaking of existing in a world that jsut assumed you're comfortable and you being welcome at all
[email protected]? REALLY? after everything in this thread you bust in with that? Lemme guess....you didn't read the thread, you saw someone was "offended", and decided you to bust right in with a term that's very regularly used as a precursor to dehumanizing violence. Way to go.
you sound like the student I had this semester who never once brought his book or did the assignment but felt the need to dominate every disçussion. Like maybe read the thread before just busting in with a term that not only people take offense to, but is intentionally used as a dehumanizing term towards a group that suffers a ton of violence. Way to go.
you sound like the student I had this semester who never once brought his book or did the assignment but felt the need to dominate every disçussion. Like maybe read the thread before just busting in with a term that not only people take offense to, but is intentionally used as a dehumanizing term towards a group that suffers a ton of violence. Way to go.
)
