Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
Language evolves because people force it to. It’s not a natural organism independent from our choices. We choose taboos, we choose meaning, we choose pronunciation, we choose loanwords. It’s all evolution. The idea that it’s “forced” is ludicrous because no one can take words from you nor force you to use them. Your words are your own and no one is capable of stopping you from speaking them. But, if you choose not to respect the wishes of others, you will suffer consequences.
The reason some languages have a gender binary is often because that society forced a gender binary on people to control them. There are plenty of non-Euro languages that have no gender binary built in. Language is an active participant in social oppression and changing language is an active countermeasure to that oppression and indeed a tool in shaping future society.
Inventing entirely new pronouns is no more ridiculous than inventing yet another television show character or yet another tiktok dance craze or yet another romance novel or yet another $15/month subscription service that does the same things other service do or writing yet another magazine column.
We put effort where we care. That’s how we work. Where you put your effort shows you what you care about.
Sometimes, yes, often, no. New slang is naturally picked up and often makes it into the common vernacular, not because people are forcing other people to use it, but because people voluntarily start using. The same goes for loan words. The enter the language, and sometimes get mutated over time in that particular language. When “tablet” became popular someone tried to pick a Danish word for it, but it didn’t stick. Same goes for many other computer-related words, which ended up just being the English word.
This is the aggressive attitude that immediately makes me reluctant to adhere to any special pronouns people may choose. I don’t know if you meant this as a lightly veiled threat, but people can become very aggressive if you “misgender” people.
I haven’t heard this before, do you have some reading material I can explore?
I would tentatively agree, if not for the fact that “the consequences” you mentioned above for ignoring any of these things are that I don’t have to suffer them. The consequences for misgendering Elliot Page is ostracization, even if he isn’t in the conversation or likely to ever hear about any conversation I will ever have about him.
That is true. And I really don’t care that much about trans people. I want them to live a life without oppression with the same freedoms I have, but aside from that I care as much about them as do about the guy who lives in the apartment down the street, whom I’ve never met. And to that end, I think there are things that are reasonable to request from others in society, and I think there are things that are not. And changing the language for them I don’t find reasonable, just like I would ask anyone to change the language for me, and shame them if they didn’t. In the same vein, if people are so horrified about trans people using the wrong bathroom, just stop gendering them. To me, the only reason why we gender them anyway is because men take their bits out in front of everyone, so if we remove that part, they are virtually identical.
Based