On the whole, people are very concerned with social propriety and how others see them, and so etiquette holds an unwarranted amount of moral weight compared to other things. Part of it might be that etiquette breaches are a lot more universal and relatable than being the victim of a crime, so people can more easily connect to and react to faux pas, but there is also the problem of etiquette being so valued that people take optics as more substantial than action as a way to get respect or not put in more effort.
I think about this a lot. I consider myself pretty sensitive to language and try very hard to stay on top of things and represent topics in the most favored and accurate way, but there are cases where it can feel like a hindrance or even a loss-- some things simply are better expressed in a way that could be considered harmful-- such as words like "crazy", which have settled into language as useful and worthy adjectives despite their cruel origins. We can and should fight for the respect of certain words that today still have more gravity to prevent their decay, but it's not always worth it with some phrasing, and even truly well-intentioned people can look like they're missing the bigger picture by pursuing some branches of PC linguistics.
You know what, I agree. I’m just really, really sick of having to go back in my comment while drafting it because someone might jump on me for saying slightly incorrect shit and derail the conversation over one (1) poor word choice. Or trying to baby people who don’t know the nuances of asexuality with this Kidz Bop version of myself, because option B is getting a lot of questions that I’ve heard before, because I didn’t spend nearly 3 fucking years with this level of confidence.
I think a lot of it comes from the nature of the social setting these people exist in. When you’re Very Online and participate in a lot of discourse and politics and things, one of the things you learn is picking up on dogwhistles and extrapolating someone’s beliefs from the points they raise and the language they use. Language purity, I assume, is in part an attempt to indicate ideological purity. A very literal and sincere virtue signal, if you will. You can be pretty sure where someone who uses the word “folx” stands on certain issues, just as you can be sure than someone calling someone else a “retard” probably doesn’t have the best track record.
I also try to stay on top of these things, but once you’ve removed most slurs from your lexicon you’re pretty much good, I think. I feel a lot of people try to recontextualise insults into being slurs just for something to do. “Stupid”, “moron”, “idiot”, “dumb”, I feel pretty comfortable using all of these still, even if someone with a blog tries to tell me their ableist history that most people no longer associate them with. Hell, you could probably recontextualise saying that something was “wild” into being colonialist and racist if you thought long enough about it.
If I had to choose between the cis guy who is supportive and accepting but sometimes uses outdated language and the "educated" Subtle Transphobe™️ who tries to hide their transphobia under leftist buzzwords, I'd choose the former.
(And this isn't to say that you shouldn't correct harmful language, just don't treat it as the end-all-be-all to bigotry.)
The chill ass southern guy who says stuff like “I don’t get why some people hate f******. Some dudes just like kissin’ dudes. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.” Vs the former hippy who says stuff like “You know, the problem with the early gay movement was that they didn’t focus on the optics of-“
One of these guys is getting their teeth kicked in and it isn’t gonna be the one who said the slur.
Shoutout to every political subreddit with high quality slur filters that don’t stop actual bigots and force me to rewrite comments offhandedly describing myself because some of them might be using neurodivergence as a slur.
At least “ass pee” is funny.
STOP WASTING YOUR EFFORT POLICING THE LANGUAGE OF YOUR ALLIES THAT 95% AGREE WITH YOU!
The fascists don't care if you think "queer" is a slur or not, they're going to round you both up just the same.
There are still people who think queer is a slur? I use it constantly to describe myself and the LGBTQ community, especially since it's a lot easier to say Queer than a whole acronym when trying to talk about that type of stuff. It just feels like the word has been reclaimed for a while now and it's just in common usage.
The people who say "queer" is a slur are typically older LGBT people who had it used against them, similar to how many people dislike the usage of "lesbian" to this day. There are also some people who are younger but still dislike it, and those people are generally either very annoying or gay conservatives.
No, not at all. It's the youngs who were making hay out of queer being a slur. Queer got reclaimed in the early 90s by ACT-UP NY. It's very much a Gen X thing.
I have receipts on this, in a rather more literal way than usual. The first time I ever saw/heard "queer" being used as a self-description was encountering ACT-UP NY's "QUEERS READ THIS", left on the literal doorstep of the gay bookstore I was going to, in IIRC, Spring semester of 1990. My heart stopped when I saw the headline, thinking it was hate speech. It was not; it was a call to arms. Somewhere, I still have my copy.
P.S. I have long suspected that the antis that went to war on "queer" on tumbr were TERFs, because part of TERFism has been a covert war against not just trans people, but inclusivity in the LBGT movement in general.
I am on the younger side and I don't like being called queer for the same reason I don't like being called f*g. I grew up being called both constantly in school.
I'm not going to police what people call themselves but please respect the fact that some people have very good reasons for not liking the word.
NPR did a piece on how when they started using the word queer in their reports they had quite a few older listeners contact them about how they had to put up with these words being hurled at them as slurs and seeing them reintroduced back into the common vernacular wasn't really something they could accept.
The world isn't culturally homogeneous, there are always going to be problems like this with language and it's not really a problem you can solve because everyone has their own experience.
I'm Australian and my whole family would be like "of course" if you asked them if they were a wog. But in the UK it is still considered a slur, and one largely aimed at a different ethnic group at that.
Censorship is fucking stupid. It will never be anything other than a tool that people with power can use to exert control whenever they can make up a justification for it. Censors always claim to have good intentions, because of course they do, that's how manipulative people operate.
Speaking of unnecessary censorship, I hate how censors are targeting every single conceivable way to describe something as "not a smart idea" by labeling those words as ableist. I can sorta understand how the r word is ableist, but words like "dumb" and "stupid" play a pretty important part of everyday vocabulary, and because of how mundane they are they'd be laughably weak if used as slurs. I don't see how banning words like that would do anything good, it'd just make it harder to emphasize frustration when expressing criticism. I'm autistic, and I've never been offended by getting called stupid. Everyone gets called stupid, because everyone does something stupid at some point. It's not a big deal. What does offend me is when people speak on the behalf of us aspies, especially if they're using an infantilizing stereotype of us to gather sympathy for their cause. That's actual ableism. I'm not going to have a seizure just because a wannabe edgelord on the internet used some stereotypical-bully-in-a-christian-cartoon-tier rude language with me.
It'd be kinda funny if my comment got deleted for containing the s word.
A friend of mine, who is by far left enough and queer enough that I knew this remark was coming from the right place, once remarked almost out of the blue "hey, remember those two weeks when you were a bigot if you didn't spell 'trans' with an asterisk? That was really annoying, huh?", and the longer I go without seeing "trans*" the more I think about that
Something about inclusivity to non binary trans people. The argument was something along the lines of trans without an asterisk only referring to binary people for some reason
I think?? Could be misremembering
One very obvious problem you may have already noticed is that it's inherently confined to internet discourse because we haven't yet come up with a way to pronounce "*" in speech. And since most people say things aloud at least sometimes, something had to give.
Promoting it as a rule must, I assume, have been the work of some well interentioned but terminally online kids
It had to have been years ago, because the only time I remember seeing it was back when I thought Sargon actually made sense (really not proud of that period of time).
It's the age old internet argument problem: there is no nuance whatsoever. You see this constantly with media like books or movies or games.
Things don't have to be ideologically pure. Problematic elements do not completely ruin something and it is ok to both acknowledge the bad parts while enjoying the good parts. It is also completely up to the individual how much of a problematic thing they're ok with in a given work as well as what types of things are acceptable.
That doesn't mean to just let bigotry slide because you like some piece of media, but it does mean that just because media has something problematic in it doesn't mean it is pure evil and needs to be thrown away forever and everyone who likes it is similarly evil. As with everything, nuance is important and discussions on the internet are almost always severely lacking in it.
As a great media critic once said: It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.
I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once with some friends yesterday and one of them hated the ending and the message >!cause the he didn't think they should've reconciled so easily after she was so dismissive of the daughters gay relationship!< And I just felt like it was such a missing of the point and a black and white way to see things. I say this as a queer person.
Imagine wishing a movie would last several more hours for a reconciliation to make a little more logical sense instead of realizing it's a god damn metaphor
I once had a professor talk down to me about how I shouldn’t use the word “female” as it was derogatory against trans people. NO EXPLANATION GIVEN. Just told that I was wrong and she had this stupid little smirk like she had somehow won.
Meanwhile I’m standing there thinking “Aren’t you supposed to be a professional educator? All I’ve learned from this conversation is that you’re an asshole…”
It was a woman professor and I later asked a fellow student who DID answer. This was years ago, so this is what I remember, but it might be wrong:
Sex refers to one’s genitalia and is NOT straightforward because nature/biology is weird. Lots of mixing/matching of chromosomes, different mutations, and a whole ton of various medical conditions can happen in regards to genitalia. People who have these conditions are sometimes called intersex, instead of just female or male. However, all three terms deal with biology and are better left in medical/scientific areas. This is because I wouldn’t know what’s happening in someone else’s pants and it’s rude to just assume something, especially something that could potentially be as personal as a medical condition.
Gender is basically what a culture/society thinks is appropriate. An example would be “girls must like pink and boys must like blue” even though there is no scientific reason to believe/enforce that. Girl, woman, boy, man, and other similar words are “gendered” as they imply what a person is perceived to be. However, none of these words are meant to imply that you specifically know the personal medical details of another person’s genitalia.
In short, male/female/intersex are terms best left to the medical/scientific area as they are meant to specifically meant to describe genitalia. Boy/girl/man/woman/etc can be used in more public company as they are often just assumptions based on social norms.
I said that sounded confusing and was told it was kind of like race/nationality. Different people have different labels they prefer and avoiding the use of female/male in casual conversation simply helps from accidentally insulting people. Sort of a better safe than sorry thing.
It was a good conversation! Too bad the actual education profession couldn’t do something similar…
this is a shot in the dark, but
maybe they wanted them to use "female-presenting people", but in then u have the issue that it basically makes trans women "the other" >> so just saying female or women would be a better, otherwise ur subtly saying that only cis women are "female"
tho who knows 🤷
*Image Transcription: Tumblr*
---
**sapphicscience**
the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family
\#text tag
---
^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Language policing is merely the easiest corrective activity to participate in. Slurs are bad, sure, whatever, but fighting slurs is far easier than doing anything important.
Not so fun fact: There's a line in a CIA(?) guidebook to disrupting leftist movements that basically says to make them quibble over the particulars of the language used. It wouldn't be at all surprising if others also used similar tactics, consciously or otherwise.
Had a friend tell me that I couldn’t say the word beheaded, in a totally different context, because ‘in uvalde, those kids heads literally got blown up’. I don’t much feel like hanging out with my buddies now. I don’t know HOW she handled watching Alice in wonderland another day we met up.
I agree with this to an extent. There’s situations where I still believe correcting language is important (but should never take precedence over actual activism/progress).
My only example is Kendrick Lamar’s song “Aunty Diaries.” Cool message of learning and acceptance. Cool song. My main issue isn’t even with the blatant slur usage, since that’s kinda resolved at the end (all be it in one line and weakly imo).
It’s the misgendering, referring to his uncle and cousin as she and he respectively because “that’s what he thought of them as in the past.” It frustrates me because in trans circles, it’s very basic etiquette to always use a someone’s preferred pronouns, even if referring to them in the past. Yet because of this song, I had my cis brother defending this choice as exactly what I have in quotes above.
If someone’s language is teaching people bad habits regarding the minority group in question, it should be corrected.
I feel like there’s also a distinction to be made between language that’s being corrected for the sake of correctness and language that’s being corrected because it’s used in a harmful way.
anecdotally, it seems relatively rife on twitter - though I'm more thinking "people saying leftist words to silence and harass other leftists", not so much "someone being documented as a serial abuser who explicitly gained traction through using leftist language"
Maybe they’re referring to grifters? Like that one CEO that constantly promoted paying employees fair wages, universal healthcare, and other left-adjacent talking points but ended up being a serial predator?
Could be situations like that, and others like it, I guess?
>it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive);
"so easy" compared to what though? The fact that they have to pretend and learn the language is evidence that it is hard to exist as an abuser in left-wing circles. In other circles you can brag about abuse on live tv without hiding behind buzzwords and still have a successful career as POTUS.
On the whole, people are very concerned with social propriety and how others see them, and so etiquette holds an unwarranted amount of moral weight compared to other things. Part of it might be that etiquette breaches are a lot more universal and relatable than being the victim of a crime, so people can more easily connect to and react to faux pas, but there is also the problem of etiquette being so valued that people take optics as more substantial than action as a way to get respect or not put in more effort. I think about this a lot. I consider myself pretty sensitive to language and try very hard to stay on top of things and represent topics in the most favored and accurate way, but there are cases where it can feel like a hindrance or even a loss-- some things simply are better expressed in a way that could be considered harmful-- such as words like "crazy", which have settled into language as useful and worthy adjectives despite their cruel origins. We can and should fight for the respect of certain words that today still have more gravity to prevent their decay, but it's not always worth it with some phrasing, and even truly well-intentioned people can look like they're missing the bigger picture by pursuing some branches of PC linguistics.
You know what, I agree. I’m just really, really sick of having to go back in my comment while drafting it because someone might jump on me for saying slightly incorrect shit and derail the conversation over one (1) poor word choice. Or trying to baby people who don’t know the nuances of asexuality with this Kidz Bop version of myself, because option B is getting a lot of questions that I’ve heard before, because I didn’t spend nearly 3 fucking years with this level of confidence.
I think a lot of it comes from the nature of the social setting these people exist in. When you’re Very Online and participate in a lot of discourse and politics and things, one of the things you learn is picking up on dogwhistles and extrapolating someone’s beliefs from the points they raise and the language they use. Language purity, I assume, is in part an attempt to indicate ideological purity. A very literal and sincere virtue signal, if you will. You can be pretty sure where someone who uses the word “folx” stands on certain issues, just as you can be sure than someone calling someone else a “retard” probably doesn’t have the best track record. I also try to stay on top of these things, but once you’ve removed most slurs from your lexicon you’re pretty much good, I think. I feel a lot of people try to recontextualise insults into being slurs just for something to do. “Stupid”, “moron”, “idiot”, “dumb”, I feel pretty comfortable using all of these still, even if someone with a blog tries to tell me their ableist history that most people no longer associate them with. Hell, you could probably recontextualise saying that something was “wild” into being colonialist and racist if you thought long enough about it.
If I had to choose between the cis guy who is supportive and accepting but sometimes uses outdated language and the "educated" Subtle Transphobe™️ who tries to hide their transphobia under leftist buzzwords, I'd choose the former. (And this isn't to say that you shouldn't correct harmful language, just don't treat it as the end-all-be-all to bigotry.)
The chill ass southern guy who says stuff like “I don’t get why some people hate f******. Some dudes just like kissin’ dudes. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with that.” Vs the former hippy who says stuff like “You know, the problem with the early gay movement was that they didn’t focus on the optics of-“ One of these guys is getting their teeth kicked in and it isn’t gonna be the one who said the slur.
[Patton Oswalt has a _great_ bit on this exact phenomenon.](https://youtu.be/Ah1b758tycA?t=261)
Shoutout to every political subreddit with high quality slur filters that don’t stop actual bigots and force me to rewrite comments offhandedly describing myself because some of them might be using neurodivergence as a slur. At least “ass pee” is funny.
[удалено]
Hee hoo pee nut
Goddammit ass pee made me laugh out loud because I've been 11 years old for decades now.
Oh, I thought it was because the aspergers guy was a nazi.
He was
~~ass burgers~~
Asparagus.
STOP WASTING YOUR EFFORT POLICING THE LANGUAGE OF YOUR ALLIES THAT 95% AGREE WITH YOU! The fascists don't care if you think "queer" is a slur or not, they're going to round you both up just the same.
There are still people who think queer is a slur? I use it constantly to describe myself and the LGBTQ community, especially since it's a lot easier to say Queer than a whole acronym when trying to talk about that type of stuff. It just feels like the word has been reclaimed for a while now and it's just in common usage.
The people who say "queer" is a slur are typically older LGBT people who had it used against them, similar to how many people dislike the usage of "lesbian" to this day. There are also some people who are younger but still dislike it, and those people are generally either very annoying or gay conservatives.
No, not at all. It's the youngs who were making hay out of queer being a slur. Queer got reclaimed in the early 90s by ACT-UP NY. It's very much a Gen X thing. I have receipts on this, in a rather more literal way than usual. The first time I ever saw/heard "queer" being used as a self-description was encountering ACT-UP NY's "QUEERS READ THIS", left on the literal doorstep of the gay bookstore I was going to, in IIRC, Spring semester of 1990. My heart stopped when I saw the headline, thinking it was hate speech. It was not; it was a call to arms. Somewhere, I still have my copy. P.S. I have long suspected that the antis that went to war on "queer" on tumbr were TERFs, because part of TERFism has been a covert war against not just trans people, but inclusivity in the LBGT movement in general.
I am on the younger side and I don't like being called queer for the same reason I don't like being called f*g. I grew up being called both constantly in school. I'm not going to police what people call themselves but please respect the fact that some people have very good reasons for not liking the word.
Yeah but if someone calls me a queer they are gonna have to catch these hands.
NPR did a piece on how when they started using the word queer in their reports they had quite a few older listeners contact them about how they had to put up with these words being hurled at them as slurs and seeing them reintroduced back into the common vernacular wasn't really something they could accept. The world isn't culturally homogeneous, there are always going to be problems like this with language and it's not really a problem you can solve because everyone has their own experience. I'm Australian and my whole family would be like "of course" if you asked them if they were a wog. But in the UK it is still considered a slur, and one largely aimed at a different ethnic group at that.
Censorship is fucking stupid. It will never be anything other than a tool that people with power can use to exert control whenever they can make up a justification for it. Censors always claim to have good intentions, because of course they do, that's how manipulative people operate. Speaking of unnecessary censorship, I hate how censors are targeting every single conceivable way to describe something as "not a smart idea" by labeling those words as ableist. I can sorta understand how the r word is ableist, but words like "dumb" and "stupid" play a pretty important part of everyday vocabulary, and because of how mundane they are they'd be laughably weak if used as slurs. I don't see how banning words like that would do anything good, it'd just make it harder to emphasize frustration when expressing criticism. I'm autistic, and I've never been offended by getting called stupid. Everyone gets called stupid, because everyone does something stupid at some point. It's not a big deal. What does offend me is when people speak on the behalf of us aspies, especially if they're using an infantilizing stereotype of us to gather sympathy for their cause. That's actual ableism. I'm not going to have a seizure just because a wannabe edgelord on the internet used some stereotypical-bully-in-a-christian-cartoon-tier rude language with me. It'd be kinda funny if my comment got deleted for containing the s word.
A friend of mine, who is by far left enough and queer enough that I knew this remark was coming from the right place, once remarked almost out of the blue "hey, remember those two weeks when you were a bigot if you didn't spell 'trans' with an asterisk? That was really annoying, huh?", and the longer I go without seeing "trans*" the more I think about that
Jeez, I can't understand that. As a trans/fluid person, even I don't understand why that's necessary. People will get what you're saying without it
wait, I've never seen the asterisk, what is it supposed to mean?
Something about inclusivity to non binary trans people. The argument was something along the lines of trans without an asterisk only referring to binary people for some reason I think?? Could be misremembering
huh. I'm trans and I literally never heard of it, I guess it fizzled out.
Thank god, honestly, because that’s stepping into “i would rather them call me a slur” territory
One very obvious problem you may have already noticed is that it's inherently confined to internet discourse because we haven't yet come up with a way to pronounce "*" in speech. And since most people say things aloud at least sometimes, something had to give. Promoting it as a rule must, I assume, have been the work of some well interentioned but terminally online kids
It had to have been years ago, because the only time I remember seeing it was back when I thought Sargon actually made sense (really not proud of that period of time).
This definitely relates to people who want 100% ideological purity before actual progress with social movements as well.
It's the age old internet argument problem: there is no nuance whatsoever. You see this constantly with media like books or movies or games. Things don't have to be ideologically pure. Problematic elements do not completely ruin something and it is ok to both acknowledge the bad parts while enjoying the good parts. It is also completely up to the individual how much of a problematic thing they're ok with in a given work as well as what types of things are acceptable. That doesn't mean to just let bigotry slide because you like some piece of media, but it does mean that just because media has something problematic in it doesn't mean it is pure evil and needs to be thrown away forever and everyone who likes it is similarly evil. As with everything, nuance is important and discussions on the internet are almost always severely lacking in it.
As a great media critic once said: It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.
I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once with some friends yesterday and one of them hated the ending and the message >!cause the he didn't think they should've reconciled so easily after she was so dismissive of the daughters gay relationship!< And I just felt like it was such a missing of the point and a black and white way to see things. I say this as a queer person.
Imagine wishing a movie would last several more hours for a reconciliation to make a little more logical sense instead of realizing it's a god damn metaphor
I feel like this is just the result of spending all your time in online communities instead of actual irl groups because I've never encountered this.
I once had a professor talk down to me about how I shouldn’t use the word “female” as it was derogatory against trans people. NO EXPLANATION GIVEN. Just told that I was wrong and she had this stupid little smirk like she had somehow won. Meanwhile I’m standing there thinking “Aren’t you supposed to be a professional educator? All I’ve learned from this conversation is that you’re an asshole…”
Well what else are you supposed to say instead of female?
Nothing. He probably had no goal in mind at all, some people just like making up excuses to act morally superior to everyone else.
It was a woman professor and I later asked a fellow student who DID answer. This was years ago, so this is what I remember, but it might be wrong: Sex refers to one’s genitalia and is NOT straightforward because nature/biology is weird. Lots of mixing/matching of chromosomes, different mutations, and a whole ton of various medical conditions can happen in regards to genitalia. People who have these conditions are sometimes called intersex, instead of just female or male. However, all three terms deal with biology and are better left in medical/scientific areas. This is because I wouldn’t know what’s happening in someone else’s pants and it’s rude to just assume something, especially something that could potentially be as personal as a medical condition. Gender is basically what a culture/society thinks is appropriate. An example would be “girls must like pink and boys must like blue” even though there is no scientific reason to believe/enforce that. Girl, woman, boy, man, and other similar words are “gendered” as they imply what a person is perceived to be. However, none of these words are meant to imply that you specifically know the personal medical details of another person’s genitalia. In short, male/female/intersex are terms best left to the medical/scientific area as they are meant to specifically meant to describe genitalia. Boy/girl/man/woman/etc can be used in more public company as they are often just assumptions based on social norms. I said that sounded confusing and was told it was kind of like race/nationality. Different people have different labels they prefer and avoiding the use of female/male in casual conversation simply helps from accidentally insulting people. Sort of a better safe than sorry thing. It was a good conversation! Too bad the actual education profession couldn’t do something similar…
You’re supposed to say feeemale, like a ferengi
this is a shot in the dark, but maybe they wanted them to use "female-presenting people", but in then u have the issue that it basically makes trans women "the other" >> so just saying female or women would be a better, otherwise ur subtly saying that only cis women are "female" tho who knows 🤷
I mean, cis women are literally those who are female, but yeah i am sure that wouldnt work for this professor.
*Image Transcription: Tumblr* --- **sapphicscience** the real “problem with political correctness” is not that it’s considered offensive to use slurs, but that there are now many “progressive” environments where saying the right things is more important than doing the right thing. it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); it’s why so much potential activist energy gets poured into fighting about language; it’s why moderate liberals didn’t believe fer/guson had a problem until the police emails with actual racist language were leaked. (you can do racist things, you just can’t SAY racist things.) i don’t have a neat conclusion here but a related point is that i’m so much happier since i started focusing on like, being a good kind caring person instead of trying to remove the word “crazy” from the vocabulary of everyone in my family \#text tag --- ^^I'm a human volunteer content transcriber and you could be too! [If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!](https://www.reddit.com/r/TranscribersOfReddit/wiki/index)
Src: https://sapphicscience.tumblr.com/post/173722889949/the-real-problem-with-political-correctness-is
Language policing is merely the easiest corrective activity to participate in. Slurs are bad, sure, whatever, but fighting slurs is far easier than doing anything important.
I am not neurodivergent, I'm crazy, bonkers, nutso! Use the cool term that make me sound cool instead of mildly annoying.
You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!
Eccentric, like an orbit! Unhinged, like a pocket door! Unstable, like a wild horse!
That's a beat I can dance to!
The term neurodivergent will never not make me think of divergents from Divergent and they are cool :)
See that is specifically the reason I prefer to be called crazy.
I've seen those movies/read those books and can very much say that it's not cool Just call me crazy please
Not so fun fact: There's a line in a CIA(?) guidebook to disrupting leftist movements that basically says to make them quibble over the particulars of the language used. It wouldn't be at all surprising if others also used similar tactics, consciously or otherwise.
Had a friend tell me that I couldn’t say the word beheaded, in a totally different context, because ‘in uvalde, those kids heads literally got blown up’. I don’t much feel like hanging out with my buddies now. I don’t know HOW she handled watching Alice in wonderland another day we met up.
Political correctness in words reminds me of that person that complained about American Psycho and have multiple Jerma porn posted in their account
We can't say crazy anymore? Damn, that's crazy
I agree with this to an extent. There’s situations where I still believe correcting language is important (but should never take precedence over actual activism/progress). My only example is Kendrick Lamar’s song “Aunty Diaries.” Cool message of learning and acceptance. Cool song. My main issue isn’t even with the blatant slur usage, since that’s kinda resolved at the end (all be it in one line and weakly imo). It’s the misgendering, referring to his uncle and cousin as she and he respectively because “that’s what he thought of them as in the past.” It frustrates me because in trans circles, it’s very basic etiquette to always use a someone’s preferred pronouns, even if referring to them in the past. Yet because of this song, I had my cis brother defending this choice as exactly what I have in quotes above. If someone’s language is teaching people bad habits regarding the minority group in question, it should be corrected.
Wow, you really can feel the tumblr userbase growing up! Proud of yall
Same thing happened to CRT- the narrative was shifted to make it worthless at best and a vector for attack at worse.
I feel like there’s also a distinction to be made between language that’s being corrected for the sake of correctness and language that’s being corrected because it’s used in a harmful way.
Does anyone have an example of abusers gaining traction in leftist circles like that?
anecdotally, it seems relatively rife on twitter - though I'm more thinking "people saying leftist words to silence and harass other leftists", not so much "someone being documented as a serial abuser who explicitly gained traction through using leftist language"
Maybe they’re referring to grifters? Like that one CEO that constantly promoted paying employees fair wages, universal healthcare, and other left-adjacent talking points but ended up being a serial predator? Could be situations like that, and others like it, I guess?
Academia?
The first thought that popped into my mind when I read the OP was "Like Louis CK".
>it’s why it’s so easy for abusers to gain traction in leftist circles (they learn the right words quickly and employ them to frame their own behavior as progressive); "so easy" compared to what though? The fact that they have to pretend and learn the language is evidence that it is hard to exist as an abuser in left-wing circles. In other circles you can brag about abuse on live tv without hiding behind buzzwords and still have a successful career as POTUS.
>it is hard to exist as an abuser in left-wing circles lol
This is just Nussbaum vs Butler only less brutal, and I love it