Re: Some thoughts about Diversity and the CoC
Sorry, I just realized I sent this to the wrong list. It was for
-vote actually.
Gerardo
Il giorno gio 12 dic 2019 alle ore 11:22 Gerardo Ballabio
<gerardo.ballabio@gmail.com> ha scritto:
>
> Sam, thank you very much for raising this issue and for recognizing
> that there's more than one angle to it.
>
> I tend to agree with Scott. It is well known, at least since George
> Orwell wrote his books, that controlling how people speak means
> controlling how they think. So I believe that this issue is very
> important.
>
> And indeed, in the last decades, redefining language has been a major
> part of the political debate at large, with every group trying to
> "hijack words for their own ends". For example, the pro- and
> contra-abortion parties label themselves as "pro-choice" and
> "pro-life" respectively, that is, they both try to frame the debate by
> presenting themselves as "pushing for a good thing" while the other
> party is pushing against. When you choose which language you use, you
> effectively already take a side. And when you agree to use the other
> party's language, you've already nearly lost the fight.
>
> So this is also inevitably a political issue. It's not just about
> "being polite" (or "welcoming" or "excellent" or whatever). I believe
> that I absolutely have the right to "being impolite" if "being polite"
> means that I must use a language that conveys a political position
> that I oppose.
>
> For example (forgive me if this might seem off-topic, but I think that
> working out the details of an actual example is necessary to make my
> point clear), I do not feel that I should acknowledge people's
> requests to refer to them by their "preferred pronouns". That is
> because I believe that people's sexual identities are determined by
> objective facts, such as which chromosomes are there in their DNA, and
> not by how they subjectively "perceive themselves". So when I refuse
> to refer to a person with XY chromosomes as "she", or to abuse the
> English language by calling an individual "they", in fact I am
> defending my world view, and you must not deprive me of that right.
> (May I remember that the incident that led to Norbert Preining's
> temporary suspension from Debian started with him using "the wrong
> pronoun" in a blog post!)
>
> And while Debian isn't a government, neither it is an island somewhere
> out of the "real world". So we can't pretend that we can leave that
> out.
>
> Gerardo
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