You Shouldn't Have To Call Someone By Their Preferred Gender Pronoun

To my eyes, my opponent seems to be making a lot of assertions but not really any arguments. In the absence of any central thesis I can only go through each assertion and make a counter-argument. But firstly I would like to note that my opponent has completely sidestepped my original argument, saying that: "The fact that you can't see the difference between names and gender pronouns is sad." - they have not provided any counter-arguments, instead just declared the premise to be sad. I will be waiting in the response response to see if my opponent actually attempts to challenge my opening thesis. assertion 1: "If you have a penis you're a man, and if you have a vagina you're a woman" My opponent treats this statement as though it is a scientifically verifiable and self-evident "fact", but this is not the case. (side note) It always amuses me when people make this kind of argument in the context of a debate, it's like: "i think dogs are better than cats, debate me!" "ok sure" "argument 1: dogs are better than cats... this is not up for debate!" The only "facts" that we can actually be assured of is that: human beings are born, some have penises, testes, etc. some have vaginas, ovaries, etc. and a small population have something indeterminate or harder to classify. These are the facts, but to understand them, we need a theory. We could categorise these traits into two typological categories: male and female and ignore any outliers. This would be one theory for understanding gender, but is it the best or most accurate one? Well no, because it does not account for large portions of the population who do not fit this model. When presented with conflicting information that contradicts your theory, your theory needs to change. My opponent says they care about facts over feels, but dismisses the existence of trans and non-binary people in order to protect their gut feelings about the gender binary. assertion 2: using preferred gender pronouns is a political statement and therefore bad Are we talking about having a preferred gender pronoun or using someone else's preferred gender pronoun? Because, EVERYONE has a preferred gender pronoun it is just that for most people that pronoun aligns with the one they were given at birth. If we are talking about USING preferred pronouns, then - yes, using someone's preferred gender pronouns is a political act - but so is NOT using them. By misgendering someone you are also clearly making a political statement that you don't recognise and don't respect that persons gender identity. In fact every utterance and every interaction between people is on some level political because it always involves some interplay of power - even if it is very minor. What we should be asking is: are the politics good? not, is it political at all? assertion 3: "If you don't use their pronoun it really doesn't matter as they won't know about it since your talking to another person." is this really the argument your going with? ok... this really only requires about a nanosecond of thought - What about sir and ma'am? what about 'hey man?' or 'hey girl?' What about if you are in a conversation with more than 1 person? What if you are talking about someone to a huge room of people? What if you are writing about that person in a newspaper article? what if you thought the person wasn't in the room but they actually were? you haven't really thought this one through have you? assertion 4: "Making someone call someone else by their pronoun is also a violation of that person's free speech." Yes, you are correct. No one is making you call people by their preferred gender pronouns, in a free society, you are free to behave like an assh*le if you want. You are free to go up to someone on the street and start calling them racial slurs if you want. But if you do that, the other people are also free to take you to court if they want - and then it is up to the legal system to decide if you are guilty of a hate crime. It's a great system really. To close I would like to ask you why, on a personal level, do you NOT want to use certain peoples prefrred pronouns? Rather than a negative reason why we SHOULDN'T use preferred pronouns, I'm interested to hear if you have a positive reason for why we SHOULD use non-preferred pronouns.