Now ad-hominem is a term that quite clearly does not mean what you think it means. Your position here is not wrong because of any property of you as a person, and none have implied such.
Nobody's claiming you're wrong because of privilege, merely that it takes a lot of privilege for one to put correcting the marginalization transpeople get below the marginalization of hypercorrect chemists.
(a) I certainly think he is claiming just that and (b) I never said anything about the relative rankings. I think you know perfectly well that I am capable of being annoyed about more than one thing at once, and I hope you know perfectly well that I'm opposed to the marginalization of transpeople and recognize that it's more substantial than my issues with language. But that doesn't make the latter cease to be.
Yeah, I understand where you're coming from, but your phrasing is often such that it sounds like you've lost all perspective. I'm sure you haven't, but you don't equivocate very readily.
I wasn't really referring to linguistics complaints, though I do think those are silly. Because, again, expecting absolute logic and consistency out of natural language is ridiculous. Even artificial languages like Esperanto which set out to do that fail. Even math can't manage it, thanks to Gödel.
Somewhere elsethread you reference "microscope" as being self-evident. I don't think it is. It could mean a device for viewing small things, sure. It could also mean a viewing device which is itself very small. Or a brief, superficial examination. Do you reject "microscopic" to mean minuscule? It certainly doesn't make any sense, if you insist only on using suffix roots. "Macroscopic" is even worse, since there isn't even anything called a macroscope. Unless you think that should be the term we use instead of telescope, I guess.
I think the reason hostility keeps creeping into this discussion is... why would anyone so energetically argue against the linguistic merits of a word like this? It's not an obviously flawed multi-language hybrid like "polyamory" or a crude Frankenstein1 like "staycation". It's a response to an existing word, using a valid (if obscure) prefix, indicating the appropriate oppositeness. You aren't even arguing that the term will be confusing to people because they're unfamiliar with cis-, which I could understand even though it doesn't worry me much. You seem to imagine that everyone will rush to the OED and dissect the word piece by piece, instead of just googling the damn thing like any sane person would. If nothing else, why not use all this energy to come up with an alternative, if it's that important to you? So, yeah, eventually people are going to wonder why you would choose to defend the imagined purity of the English language over attempts to oh so very slightly even the playing field when it comes to the terminology used to discuss trans issues.
1: Another term that makes no sense if you try to apply blind logic to the etymology, but "Frankensteinian creation" is pretty awkward to use.
It all comes down to one word, I guess: "valid". I maintain, strenuously, that this usage is simply not valid. You, of course, feel that it is, and the rest naturally follows.
If you are inferring Peggy McIntosh's essay, the point of that exercise is that everyone has one. So not an insult (though persistent failure/refusal to examine might be worthy of insult.)
I'm not referring to anything but gfish's snide remark. As I implied, I haven't read the essay in quesion (partially because I haven't seen a citation / URL for it, partially for other reasons). So if a misunderstanding has arisen from that fact, mea culpa.
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Somewhere elsethread you reference "microscope" as being self-evident. I don't think it is. It could mean a device for viewing small things, sure. It could also mean a viewing device which is itself very small. Or a brief, superficial examination. Do you reject "microscopic" to mean minuscule? It certainly doesn't make any sense, if you insist only on using suffix roots. "Macroscopic" is even worse, since there isn't even anything called a macroscope. Unless you think that should be the term we use instead of telescope, I guess.
I think the reason hostility keeps creeping into this discussion is... why would anyone so energetically argue against the linguistic merits of a word like this? It's not an obviously flawed multi-language hybrid like "polyamory" or a crude Frankenstein1 like "staycation". It's a response to an existing word, using a valid (if obscure) prefix, indicating the appropriate oppositeness. You aren't even arguing that the term will be confusing to people because they're unfamiliar with cis-, which I could understand even though it doesn't worry me much. You seem to imagine that everyone will rush to the OED and dissect the word piece by piece, instead of just googling the damn thing like any sane person would. If nothing else, why not use all this energy to come up with an alternative, if it's that important to you? So, yeah, eventually people are going to wonder why you would choose to defend the imagined purity of the English language over attempts to oh so very slightly even the playing field when it comes to the terminology used to discuss trans issues.
1: Another term that makes no sense if you try to apply blind logic to the etymology, but "Frankensteinian creation" is pretty awkward to use.
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