1/ You choose your online handle; it's an identifier that reflects who you are.
You don't choose your birth name; it's a name that reflects who your parents were.
(I'm channeling someone's earlier tweets but I can't find it -- maybe @Aelkus or @sonyaellenmann?)
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2/ The distance between my identity and the name my parent's chose for me is in the sweet spot of invisible (like water to a fish).
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3/ On my birth certificate, I'm John. But, my grandfather John -- who was a fantastic man -- dominates my perception of that name. I couldn't take it. It wasn't me. So I introduce myself as Johnny (which I chose because it matched more) or JB (which kinda just happened).
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4/ These alternatives are different but the distance is infinitesimal so it doesn't provoke a social sanction or any perception of deviation. Still, I prefer Johnny because I think it conveys more about me than John which is just an arbitrarily named pointer.
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5/ When people chose not to call someone by their preferred name or gender its usually because they find it uncanny -- they can't perceive the water. But, distilled, it's inherently antisocial -- rejecting proffered social information as socially irrelevant.
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6/ Personally, the time in my life when I ideologically identified as a rugged individualist and the time when I thought preferred pronouns were absolute bullshit were exactly the same period.
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7/ That's really weird and obviously inconsistent. But, I think it's part of a persistent illusion: individualists become blind to the existence of other individuals, especially when their individuality and the social default (to borrow from
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8/ I'm sure folks with a large distance between their endowed identity and the one they forged for themselves have clearer explanations. But, I'm just pawing at my own prior mistakes… …because it sure seems like the individualist-"fuck your pronouns" correlation remains high.
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Replying to @generativist
Related: it's generally considered good manners to choose 'normal' names -- i.e., names that have so little baggage that they can easily stretch to apply to all sorts of situations. (Ex., my name is also John & I'm sure we're very different!)
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Ah, good point. And one empirically verifiable with ml — “john” makes for a near useless feature in so many possible classifiers!
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