Not to open a whole can of worms again, but a few points have been rattling around in my head since the big discussion I got into about gender identity and pronouns and so on last month (please find it in my archive if you're so inclined). These serve to refine my previous arguments, particularly about how one should characterize the debate over using trans people's pronouns, and somewhat to concede a little ground to the people I was arguing with (and mainly to Morlock Holmes I suppose).
First of all, I argued that, while my moral calculus about calling people by the pronouns they ask for clearly falls on the side of using their pronouns as the right thing to do, there is a fundamental difference between letting people identify however they choose even if from your own perspective it's a "religious" belief you really don't ascribe to, and being compelled to actively vocalize something (i.e. using pronouns) that reflects the "religious" belief you don't hold. I compared it to a non-Muslim being compelled to say "praise be to Allah" whenever in conversation with a Muslim. The response (coming from Morlock) was that for the transgender person who has to continue interacting in a normal manner with someone who won't use their pronouns, that is an equal form of being compelled to affirm a belief they don't hold to the non-gender-self-identity-believing person who is compelled to use pronouns they disagree with.
Reflecting a little later, I realized that I'm in pretty much the exact equivalent of Morlock's position whenever I argue about, say, the ethics of compelling people to get COVID vaccines, or more broadly about a lot of libertarian principles. Someone arguing against COVID vaccine "mandates" (to the extent that they ever existed) from a libertarian-ish standpoint will say that they hold a fundamental value that it's wrong to compel anyone to have to have anything done to their own body. For the past half-decade I've gotten very impatient with this way of thinking, on the grounds that if COVID is/was sufficiently dangerous (and I would say it did happen to be), then having to be around people who by not being vaccinated would increase your exposure to COVID was in its own way just as much an infringement on your bodily autonomy. In other words, each side can claim a violation of bodily autonomy for one of the choices of policy between "require people to get vaccinated" and "leave people completely free to choose whether they get vaccinated".
I guess the best way to reconcile this mentality with the way I talk about the issue of pronouns is to say that, however much my convictions are in favor of vaccinating against COVID for the common good, I do have to recognize that in some (to me naive) direct way, making someone get a vaccine is forcing something on their body in a way that bringing about a society where everyone has to be exposed to a lot of unvaccinated people is not. I may find this very clear-boundery-lined and literal interpretation of bodily autonomy to be pretty dumb, but on some level I have to empathize with it. Then again, one could argue it's pretty dumb to be so particular about what pronoun you have to utter when referring to someone else, so we're back at square one.
I think Morlock is probably on the same side about COVID vaccines that I'm on, so I'll give him credit here for having more consistent convictions than mine on the meta-level I suppose, even though I'm not sure whether my set of beliefs is quite inconsistent.
Things get even trickier when I think of my disdain for libertarian conceptions of "positive rights" versus "negative rights" and things like that (I had a libertarian colleague once who insisted that we all have "negative rights" but nobody has "positive rights" -- extreme examples to illustrate the point are that, according to him, we have a right not to be killed but we don't have a right to life, whatever that means). I've always held that the distinction between so-called "positive rights" and "negative rights" is poorly defined to the point that it doesn't really exist, so that type of libertarian framework is a bad one. This is going a step further from my attitude about compelled vaccination, where I do recognize it in some sense to be more directly and literally forcing something on someone's body in a way that the opposing policy does not. Probably many people view the pronoun culture war struggle in such a way (as in, there's no dividing line at all between the right to not be compelled to speak in a certain way and the right not to be spoken about in a certain way), although I'm not sure it can correctly be fit into this paradigm. It's worth mentioning that I've always been fairly dismissive of Jordan Peterson's argument that having to use someone's chosen pronouns is "compelled speech" in a way that refraining from using racial slurs isn't, on the basis that there's only a finite (and usually quite small) set of terms for each person/thing one is referring to at a given time, so this dividing line doesn't really exist.
Another thing that came up in last month's discussions, with both Morlock and some other people -- and I remember people making this point to me years ago as well -- is that my contention that there's no analog in the gay rights debate where one side can claim being compelled to verbally affirm things that don't reflect objective reality in their belief system is questionable, since (I am told) there have always been anti-gay-marriage people who claim that a same-sex marriage, however legal it may be, isn't true marriage, and that they're being forced to articulate something they don't believe in by referring to a man's/woman's partner with the word "husband"/"wife". I don't remember ever running across this conviction in all my (many) interactions with anti-gay-rights people back in the '00's, but I don't know, this was before gay marriage was legal anywhere near where I was, and I possibly didn't run into the "right" people here. Anyway, I think the analogy at least one other person made to me which didn't sink in properly at the time was to one's gender being printed on government-issued documents. That is, I think maybe the idea is that someone can have convictions about marriage that completely override a marriage certificate in the same way that someone (on either side of the trans debate!) can have convictions about gender that completely override the gender listed for someone on a government document (whether under a more Biden-ish policy of allowing people to change their gender listed on documents or under a more Trump-ish policy of disallowing this).
I didn't quite acknowledge the strength of this argument at the time. I think I would still respond with the following point: marriage has only sometimes, and to some people, not been ultimately defined in legal terms (e.g. someone might deride someone else's marriage as a total sham -- they kind of hate each other and haven't spoken or slept in the same bed in forever -- and still use words like "wife" or "husband" in referring to that person's partner). Whereas gender has never been defined in legal terms except when being evoked in a completely legal setting. That is, nobody ever -- either under the traditional default everyday-interactions concept of gender pre-2010's or under the more recent everyday-interactions concept of gender advocated by the trans movement -- defined anyone else's gender to be what was printed on their birth certificate (terminology like Assigned Male At Birth notwithstanding) even if traditionalists have held that someone's gender is identical to what's written on their birth certificate.
I had another point of afterthought from last month's discourse, but it's on a more personal and less argumentative note and isn't so much about pronoun usage, and I think it'll work better in its own separate post.
