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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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
Gendered names & gender pronouns encode a host of more-or-less associated priors, some more relevant than others. Many have only been predictable at birth through enforcement & socialization (like the constellation of behavior norms called 'gender performance').
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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
In other words, this is a situation where lowering the information load or changing the signifier became necessary because people felt safer deviating from expectations.
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Replying to @enkiv2 @generativist
Having these expectations is often pretty useful. Like, we have clusters of gendered behaviors (modulated by other attributes) so when they're predictive, it helps us know how to avoid conflict (or create it). The elements of that constellation aren't equally mobile, though.
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My dissertation structures beliefs in a way that’s decomposed indirectly through stereotyping. All else equal, lower discriminatory potential of sterotypes induces increased disorder over beliefs. But, all else equally denies the construction of new traits or belief contexts!
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Replying to @generativist
I like this take!
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Replying to @enkiv2
(Stay tuned for the git repo in a few months — i hope)
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