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Gijinka stuff

the only catch is you have to read this with the Gilbert Gottfried voice

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1014 fluff week day 7 its been hectic so I'm glad im able to do this on time ^_^

Singular they was meant to be (and mostly still is) the way to refer to someone without gendering them! using singular they was the 'it's too hard to make a new gender neutral singular third person pronoun catch on, lets just use singular they, we already use it for unknown gender and have for ages, "they" is more palatable than "it" and the most feasible to popularize' compromise.

calling someone 'they' is not misgendering them, it's NOT gendering them at all. it's going 'i'm not telling you what gender this person i'm referring to is'.

maybe it's because i don't know their gender or it's a hypothetical person of any gender (classic use case), maybe it's because i don't want you to know (i've done this when i'm talking about cis friends to family who think men and women shouldn't be allowed to be friends), maybe i just don't think it's relevant to the conversation at hand, maybe it's because they're agender or nonbinary or their gender is complicated (the people who say 'my pronouns are they/them').

maybe it's a losing battle, and the use of singular they has shifted from all the people in the last category that we really do need to come up with a new word if we want to refer to people without bringing up people's gender in english.

But i think it's unreasonable to go 'i'm not someone in that last category, so you are never allowed to talk about me without explicitly mentioning my gender in any conversation you have with anyone ever'.

this is where the hostility to using singular they for trans ppl comes from, ultimately. some trans ppl get constantly degendered, which understandably leads to suspicion about anytime someone uses singular they, even if the person doing it would have done the same thing when talking abt anyone else in the same context (you can't prove if they would or wouldn't, of course, which, again, is why ppl doing it intentionally have plausible deniability). the supposed solution, then, becomes to never use singular they for a trans person who uses different pronouns

Laypeople (and also a concerning number of scientists) have often got the idea that unethical human experimentation is some sort of ultra-effective super science that would fix all the disease and discover all of the medicine and we only don't do it because it isn't nice (see: every science fiction show ever). No! Jumping straight from abstract theory to human trials is a terrible way to do science. It produces incoherent results and useless observations and nonsensical conclusions. We have pages and pages of historical precedent demonstrating this.

And lots of people have got the idea that totalitarianism is some sort of magic super-government that does all the government stuff really effectively abd efficiently and we only don't do it because it isn't nice. No!!!! "Let's put one idiot in charge and do whatever dumb shit they say" is the worst way to organize any project at all, let alone an economy and a political machine. Fascist regimes are models of corruption, waste, and inefficiency.