sassyonsunday

Stopping the words won't stop hate but it can deescalate things and help communication take place. When someone calls me a t-word they're signaling an aggressively negative stance toward me right out of the gate. It raises the tension too high to be able to have meaningful conversation. We all know intuitively that there are things that should be left unsaid in life so that we can get along with others.... Slurs belong to that class of things.

It's not theoretical for me. My FIL doesn't know I'm trans and he loves Fox News and called some person getting covered by Fox a t-word in a really hateful way about two years ago and it's made me feel less comfortable around him. He could have just said "I don't know about this trans stuff" which I get totally but by jumping to a slur he put a barrier up. I've begged my husband to "out" me to his family at some point ... imagine how that would go now. Even assuming he can overcome the fact that his DIL who he's known for the better part of a decade is actually some sort of demon creature from a Tucker Carlson segment, don't you think he's going to think back on all the nasty stuff he said and feel awkward as heck??? Even if he moved on from it, I could never forget or trust him like I would have if he'd only revealed a more measured mistrust of trans people instead of jumping straight to calling us the most hateful thing he could think of.

It would be the same with a stranger. If you call me a slur or use the slur around me without knowing that I AM ONE OF THOSE "SLUR WORDS" it would prevent me from being able to form a relationship with you on equal footing and would make me want to hide who I am from you which just amplifies the level of misunderstanding in the world.

When lots of people are throwing slurs and stuff around in general that feeling of alienation becomes a suffocating amorphous cloud that covers you up and makes you want to retreat from society. I guess that's a feature and not a bug for the people using the slurs. They want us to stay in the gay bars and away from them and their kind but.... that's not healthy. We should all be able to participate in public life on as near to equal footing as possible.

Some people might say it's my fault because I take slurs personally but... I'm just human here. I don't wanna spend my life placating people who use slurs to describe me. I'll bet it's the same for members of other groups who have slurs that people use against them. Once somebody uses those slurs against you it's hard to build a bridge with them which is sad.

I'm transgender. I transitioned 17 years ago. Sometimes I call myself a t-word or tranma (because I transitioned a long time ago I'm only in my early 30's so I guess I have a few years before I'm a literal granny :'[). Should I get canceled because I said the t-word in a gay bar with my besties or when I joke around with my husband and say things like "this is what you get for marrying a t-word"? No. But it's also used as a slur against people in real life by haters who have no business saying it and I don't want them pointing at me saying it and think that they have a right to because I did. So I don't use it outside of private company.

I have met trans women, especially those who came out of the gay community like me, who use the t-word with vicious intent because of hate they have for themselves and others. They're disgusted with being trans and they're disgusted by other trans people and they throw the slur the same way a non-trans person would and in doing so give moral cover to non-trans people who hate us. "See they even hate each other and they use that word the same as we do!" If you call these self-haters out they'll claim it's fine for them to behave the way they do because they're trans too, but, no.... The reason you shouldn't use slurs has nothing to do with the slur itself, it's about the impact of it and the impact doesn't change just because you're trans yourself.

So anyway, imo, normalizing the use of slurs by publicly broadcasting them is a bad idea in general outside of very specific contexts because slurs are not just words, they are symbols for an entire series of related negative stereotypes so when we normalize those words we also normalize the ideas associated with them. AI doesn't get an n-word pass. /rant

Sure. I was just sharing my POV as someone who never cared about unionization and works in the industry. I associated unions with manufacturing and filmmaking. It didn't occur to me that they would be a good thing for software engineers since we seemed to be treated extremely well already. I also never trusted people who spoke about unions because I figured they may have ulterior motives, like placing themselves in a position of power by acting as a middleman between myself and the companies that pay me so that they could take a cut.

I'm not saying what I felt was true. It was just my instinct and because I was already richer than my wildest dreams (I come from a lower middle class background) so I didn't care to overthink it. An "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thinks this way and since unions require popular support it's a data point toward understanding why software engineering unions aren't widespread.

Nobody saw an end to the good times in sight. I've hopped jobs about 5 times in my career and saw a 20-30% pay raise each time. What incentive existed to unionize in that environment? Unionization only makes sense if you think the good times won't last.

I understand what you are implying. Elon Musk has aligned himself with what appears to be a power structure that aims to replace the current dominant social order. If a social revolution comes due to war, economic restructuring or some other black swan event and The Daily Wire becomes the new CNN and Saturday Night Live skits come straight from The Babylon Bee, yes, the crowd that sees Teslas as toxic will be marginalized.

We'll see if that comes to pass. I'm guessing it won't, but if it does I'll adjust accordingly to the new reality as will we all.

> Saying something like that in real life would get you laughed at.

All you've told me here is that the people you personally associate would laugh at the idea that Tesla is a toxic brand. The world is not made up of a single social group with a single set of norms. In the groups I associate with, and no we are not blue haired SJWs I am married with a family in the suburbs and work a boring corporate job, Tesla is toxic.

Some things I try to keep in mind as much as possible:

- We are all operating from different frames of reference.

- Social networks are fundamental to our survival: people will go to great lengths to stay in the good graces of their families, friends and associates.

- "Society" is a huge tapestry of interlocking social networks, each with its own internal logic and reward systems.

- The logic and reward systems of the most powerful networks tend to leak into all the others over time to some degree.

I said that if you don't associate with the crowds I'm talking about it doesn't matter.

Ironically pretending that we don't play social signaling games and critiquing others for playing them is itself a sort of social signaling game. These games can't be avoided because they are a fundamental part of human interaction, so much so that when we aren't good at playing those games for whatever reason we are unable to function properly in society and are pathologized as a result.

> If I made my purchasing decisions according to the personal failings of the corporate executive teams of all of consumer and durable goods, I might as well live in a tent in the woods.

Elon Musk's involvement with the companies he is associated with is not the usual involvement that an executive team would have. His personal brand is intermingled with the products he sells and cars are a way of signaling social status whether we like it or not. There are certainly people for whom buying a new Tesla would decrease their social capital which could have negative impacts in other areas of their life (relevant to HN, social capital converts to actual capital in many cases by opening up business opportunities).

We're in a grace period right now when it comes to driving a Tesla, where people who already owned one can't really be blamed for supporting Musk, but the day has already arrived when buying a new one will signal poor taste and lack of social acumen to much of the white collar class.

Vulgarity is relative so if your crowd isn't this crowd, fine. But you can't blame people for wanting to avoid putting stigma on themselves when there are other EVs on the market nearly as good as Teslas which don't have the same toxicity.

My existence hasn't been a burden on anyone. I worked hard to make sure that I put as little stress on my parents and grandparents that I could through everything and took out loans to pay for everything and paid the loans off. I've had surgeries but I'm not disabled. I work and pay taxes and have friends and a husband and participate in a large social circle. Forcing me to live as a gay man with gender dysphoria would have limited the possibilities in my life with no discernible benefit to society.

The only joy I found in life before I transitioned fully was in doing drugs and hooking up with guys. I could have maybe started a career and settled down with a man while living as a gay man but I doubt it. My misery was all consuming. My goodness, when I was 5 or 6 I remember bargaining with God to make me a girl and vowing to hold my breath until he would. I passed out many nights doing that in bed when I was alone with my thoughts and my sadness about not being a girl hit the hardest.

As a teenager I could barely function and nearly died from an eating disorder. I hated every masculine thing about my body and with testosterone pumping through me the only thing I could do to feel less masculine was starve myself, to try to be smaller.... In short I wasn't functional and I was physically withering away to the point where pneumonia nearly killed me because my body was so weak.

After I transitioned I stopped living in survival mode and started building an actual life.... I also gained a few pounds and got fit instead of being a shambling skeleton. I doubt my story is unique among gender dysphorics.

So whatever. You can debate the ethics of whether or not society was better off with me being a starving depressed twink versus a trans woman I guess but if you think it's bad for society that I was able to look how I want and start a family and feel happy I think you've got weird ideas about how the world works.

- whoops I replied to the wrong person -