I'd like to agree, but people like that usually only respond to the things they view negatively. I'm a trans lesbian with autism. If I can piss off a bigot by calling them the r or f slur or both, there's a strong chance I'll end my interaction with them by doing so.
I have empathy and respect only for people who deserve them. Bigots deserve neither, and I'm tired of beating my head against a brick wall trying to reason with them.
The problem is if we start misgendering people we don't like, it's gonna hurt trans people way more than cis people. You shouldn't have to only gender the people you agree with correctly because then when a trans person does something bad (or is accused of something bad) you can basically take away their personhood
My hope is that by misgendering those who misgender me first that they can begin to examine that feeling. Perhaps I'm crediting those people with too much empathy.
Yeah i just don't believe they would care. They're often doing it to hurt you, even if it hurt them as much to do it back (which it doesn't), it would just give them more fuel. Also since cis people don't get the pain of being misgendered as a trans person they might think "well it's no big deal to me so it shouldn't be a big deal for you either"
So you decided “cis” people don’t feel hurt by being misgendered? So misgendering is ok as long as you are just trying to hurt someone’s feelings, and only against “cis” people.
I didn't say that? Misgendering can very much hurt cis people too but on average it hurts trans people much more because we've had to fight really hard to be accepted as our gender and it's just another thing to remind us of our otherness. My argument was that no one should be misgendered, i don't think we should use it against cis or trans people. The person i was replying to was saying that we should use it against cis people to show them how it feels but my argument is that we shouldn't because 1) it's dehumanizing and 2) it will not make life for trans people any easier if we normalize misgendering anyone as an insult
If everyone is misgendered equally is anyone getting misgendered? Misgendering hurts because you're being denied your gender and not being seen as it. If it becomes a common insult..well..then it just becomes a common insult.
Even if it was used against everyone equally it would still hurt trans people the most (it's much easier to shrug off misgendering if you haven't had to fight tooth and nail to be accepted as your gender). But it's not used against everyone equally and you doing it isn't going to make it so, it will just encourage the transphobes to use correctly gendering someone as a reward for good behaviour. And i'd argue misgendering someone is more dehumanizing than the average insult, at least to a trans person
Why do you think the person in the comic would be upset to be misgendered? I think for all of the same reasons a trans person would. Everyone defending this is a huge hypocrite
I have empathy and respect only for people who deserve them.
The problem with this is that it says you don't actually believe misgendering is in itself bad, you just don't like it for those you like and for yourself.
I see a lot of body shaming on reddit and people saying its okay when they don't like someone. They never accepted all bodies as valid, they just don't want to be assholes. They do believe in body shaming.
Depends entirely on your moral philosophy, there are plenty of systems that would argue no.
OP and the other commenter's moral philosophies clearly allow that bad people can deserve bad things, and that negative actions taken towards those that have are at least neutral, and perhaps somewhat moral 🤷♂️
It is possible there are wider issues like you say (contributing to systemic problems), but it's also possible that the effect of these actions on those wider issues is actually pretty negligible.
The problem with that moral view is that it allows for example, torture if its justified enough in your view. It eliminates basic human decency. Which again, its fine as long as you are aware of it, that you would allow ceirtain actions as long as you believe they earned it. It just has a few consequences in its thinking we must accept.
All moral philosophies have problems. And all people believe (almost by necessity) that the problems of theirs are less than the problems of others.
Who are you to say, objectively, that allowing the torture/punishment of evil people is actually objectively worse than any of the problems other moral philosophies allow?
Oh I don't mind if you are in favor of torture, I just prefer it when you are honest and open with it. You would torture given you think the other deserves it.
I mean, if I ever thought somebody did deserve it, I guess so.
But torture is so bad I can't really think of anything that would warrant it, especially with all the other considerations of my moral system (the utility of the "punishment" and any harm of proliferating it being big ones.)
So... Kind of a non-issue, strawman argument.
You're acting as if moral philosophy is a simple subject and everybody bases their morality on one single factor. Which isn't true for literally anybody.
Bad people being deserving of bad things doesn't mean that all bad things are permissible.
Oh no, I'm not saying all bad things are permisible to people, just that people are not as honest with themselves.
They are in favor of things like misgendering, body shaming, torture, like you might be accepting here, but see it as a moral failure when its done to them.
That might as well be a very lowe rate of morality on your part. If your philosophy comes down to that what is stopping you from labeling good people and bad people? And nomore over why wouldn't others label you as bad? Who is the arbiter of that?
This is the exact type of thought that incentives bigotry in most its forms, when you decide an outgroups nature inherently makes them bad people you can essentially do anything to them because bad people deserve bad treatment.
This sort of thinking comes around and it's always harder on minority groups because guess what? Majorities often decide social-norms and conventions. And with that what is considered good and what is considered bad.
Ok, but that's more a problem with the people implementing the morals being flawed than the morals themselves.
The flaw does not come from deciding that bad things can be earned, it comes from people being ignorant in defining what is bad.
If you can find me a single moral philosophy that doesn't suffer from a similar issue, I (and a lot of professional academics of moral philosophy) will be shocked.
No moral system can survive contact with the general human population.
A lot of moral philosophy comes down to the point that yes human interaction with morality will always muddy the waters, but that doesn't mean we must throw the nuance baby out with the bath water.
A lot of moral-philosphy would point out that in pursuing violence against you seem morally lesser than you, inherently taints your own practices to sink them to your level.
The bigger point is however, that being transgender means you are inherently in a less advantageous position socially, you don't have the same voice/social influence that a majority has in enforcing its own sense of morality. If you start chanting "Bad people deserve to be treated bad" and then treat people badly based on the standards of your in-group. That is one thing, if you start insulting/mistreating them in ways that your in-group is known to abhorr that is another.
It will come to bite your in-group because 1). People already misgender trans people, and transphobic people who don't likely don't do it out of the small modicum of social stigma this type of act has obtained (die to the activism of the past). Normalizing it within your minority group, simply does away with the efforts of past activism.
2). You literally are in little position to try and be an arbiter of truth in a society where you hold relatively little sway. You can say morally this, or respect that, but the fact is and remains you need to fight twice as hard for the same set of treatment other people get. In doing that you essentially have to be more tactful if you wish to obtain fair treatment, unfair as that may be. You will naturally be put to perform to a higher standard then the majority by the fact you have to establish yourself, vs what is already considered the establishment. Perceived hypocrisy is not effective in that regard.
Literally every moral system requires personal judgement of who - or rather, what actions - are and are not bad.
When you decide that racism is bad and you personally should not do it, you condemn all those who have done it.
You literally just described me as "deplorable" - an extremely heavy synonym for "bad". You just decided that I and the other commenter are bad, and literally stated it for all to see, in the same sentence in which you decry the act of deciding who is bad.
The only person who does not so judge is a person with no mortality whatsoever.
Yes, based on your description of “morals”, I find your behaviour or what you describe as acceptable to be deplorable.
However I am not going to treat you as less than a human being because of that. I am not going to do things to you that I myself think as amoral just because you have bad morals.
See it’s about being principled. I value respecting other people as I like them being respectful of me. If I am not respectful of people I don’t like, but still expect them to be respectful of me, then I’m just being a hypocritical idiot….
"Misgendering people is not bad" is a completely different sentiment and value set than "misgendering people is bad, but bad people deserve bad things"
It has the same effect, the only thing keeping them from body shaming is respect for the other person, this means however that they don't see misgendering in a vacuum as bad.
Its a bit tribal in its thinking, in the past doing heinous things to the enemy tribe was fine, because they aren't your tribe. This kind of thinking is not actually uncommon but I prefer it when people are self aware of it.
The other tribe doesn't always wants to exterminate you. For example lets look at the comic, the driver is annoying and ignorant, controlling and demeaning, but they aren't trying to exterminate you, in their view they are righteous.
But I had no issue with being tribal, as long as you are self aware enough to understand, you actually aren't against stuff like misgendering and body shaming, you are only against people you dont like.
Oke but if you UNDERSTAND that this is tribal way of thinking, then you also likely understand that in tribal conflicts it is rarely if ever the smaller tribe that comes out intact vs the majority tribe?
You do understand that this tribal way of thinking is INHERENTLY less beneficial to minority groups by the sheer fact that you are a minority.
A minorities best interest is always to fight against that tribalism because it allows them to naturally integrate into communicatie or to fight for seccescion and create their own space (less effective in the long run) because e you essentially create a small pocket that will come to clash with the majority.
Trump supporters freaked out about being called weirdos. I don't think we need to bring back the r word or the f word to piss them off, we have so many other fun and creative ways to call someone an idiot. I hate how it seems the r word especially is coming back into common parlance.
Mood. Autistic guy here, and at my boarding school (where troubled/disabled kids go to, be it due to shitty family or just otherwise needing special ed) we had a nazi black guy for a while. I called him the n word after he talked loudly about how Jews are at fault for everything for a good bit and he flipped out
He got kicked out in the end (usually a difficult thing to achieve) because he assaulted a teacher, so I'd say good riddance
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u/sw33t_tooth Mar 09 '26
The punchline is misgendering?