"Point Man": ax 600-word nuanced pronoun discussion

Cutting words always hurts. But you have to do it.

diff --git a/content/drafts/point-man.md b/content/drafts/point-man.md
index 1f887dd..6e542d6 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/point-man.md
+++ b/content/drafts/point-man.md
@@ -20,19 +20,7 @@ What was it like to be the _deer_? To be _used_ like that, as a prop in someone
 
 ----
 
-[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
-
-I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
-
-[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
-
-If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
-
-(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
-
-Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
-
-During a recent discussion of all this, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
+During a recent discussion of pronoun conventions, I received a _fascinating_ reply that I thought was very telling about an aspect of the _Zeitgeist_ that usually remains covert. My interlocutor said (edited and paraphrased):
 
 > I can imagine a sane society using _he_ and _she_ to refer to this-person-looks-male and this-person-looks-female. But in the society that exists today, "what pronouns does this person use for trans person" on-average **conveys very relevant information about the speaker and their attitudes to trans people.** (I mean this in a this-is-just-how-the-statistics-work rather than an accusatory way; I think in your particular case we have lots of other data.)
 

diff --git a/notes/notes.txt b/notes/notes.txt
index 6f3f7ce..aa5a9bc 100644 (file)
--- a/notes/notes.txt
+++ b/notes/notes.txt
@@ -2425,3 +2425,19 @@ https://unspeakablelgbtq.weebly.com/the-stories
 
 "Varied Reports of Adult Transgender Suicidality: Synthesizing and Describing the Peer-Reviewed and Gray Literature"
 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5436370/
+
+------
+
+[It's been occasionally argued that](https://archive.is/ChqYX) there aren't legitimate grounds to object to using trans people's preferred pronouns, because pronouns aren't facts and don't have truth conditions. Note, this is substantially _stronger_ that the mere claim that you _should_ use preferred pronouns; the claim is that no linguistic expressive power is being sacrificed by doing so. (Whereas in contrast, one might accede to the requested usage out of some combination of politeness, social coercion, and apprehension of [the Schelling point of standard usage](/2019/Oct/self-identity-is-a-schelling-point/), while privately lamenting that it feels analogous to lying.)
+
+I think the claim that pronouns don't have truth conditions is _false as a matter of cognitive science_. Humans are _pretty good_ at visually identifying the sex of other humans by integrating cues from various secondary sex characteristics—it's the kind of computer-vision capability that would have been useful in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. If it _didn't_ work so reliably, we wouldn't have ended up with languages like English where identifying a person's sex is baked into the grammar. And _because_ we ended up with (many) languages that have it baked into the grammar, _departing_ from that conventional usage has cognitive consequences: if someone told you, "Come meet my friend at the mall; she's really cool and you'll like her" and then the friend turned out to be obviously male, you would be _surprised_. The fact that the "she ... her" language [constrained your anticipations](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7n8GdKiAZRX86T5A/making-beliefs-pay-rent-in-anticipated-experiences) so much would seem to immediately falsify the "no truth conditions" claim.
+
+[From a certain first-principles perspective](https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10159421750419228), this is _terrible language design_. The grammatical function of pronouns is to have a brief way to refer back to entities already mentioned: it's more user-friendly to be able to say "Katherine put her book on its shelf" rather than "Katherine put Katherine's book on the book's shelf". But then why couple that grammatical function to sex-category membership? You shouldn't _need_ to take a stance on someone's reproductive capabilities to talk about them putting a book on the shelf.
+
+If you wanted more pronoun-classes to reduce the probability of collisions (where universal [Spivak _ey_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun) or singular _they_ would result in more frequent need to repeat names where a pronoun would be ambiguous), you could devise some other system that doesn't bake sex into the language, like using initials to form pronouns (<em>K</em>atherine put <em>k</em>er book on its shelf?), or an oral or written analogue of [spatial referencing in American Sign Language](https://www.handspeak.com/learn/index.php?id=27) (where a signer associates a name or description with a direction in space, and points in that direction for subsequent references).
+
+(One might speculate that "more classes to reduce collisions" _is_ part of the historical explanation for grammatical gender, in conjunction with the fact that sex is binary and easy to observe. No other salient objective feature quite does the same job: age is continuous rather than categorical; race is also largely continuous [(clinal)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cline_(biology)) and historically didn't typically vary within a tribal/community context.)
+
+Taking it as a given that English speakers are stuck with gendered third-person singular pronouns, there's still room to debate exactly what _she_ and _he_ map to in cases where a person's "gender" is ambiguous or disputed. (Which comes up more often these days than in the environment where the language evolved.)
+
+-----