Quote:
Originally posted by ThurgreedMarshall
I look at what other people think of as useless PCisms as a positive trend. I believe that people should be called what they want to be called. Whether, like in my conversation awhile back with leagl, a transvestite wants to be referred to as a woman or an asian man wants to be referred to as such instead of an "oriental," I think it's a good thing. It makes people think before they speak. And most often, the people who have trouble with that are lazy and overly set in their ways -- can't let go of the labels they've used for so long.
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You know I agree with you on this - people should absolutely be addressed as they wish, be that with respect to race, sex, names and titles or whatever. However, "people" is individuals, and there still needs to be a clearly and universally understood default fallback for when individual preferences aren't known. And it can't change often - even once a generation is a lot, because even then you have at least 3 generations at any given time, each having been taught - forcefully - a different term of respect and every other generation taking and giving dire insult. And people who have spent their lives using a term, title or description that was
legitimately respectful really have to be grandfathered in for a significant amount of time (w/r/t the default use of the term only, of course - knowledge of an individual preference overrides anything else). Society-wide usage can't change in 10 or 15 years just because a younger generation has a new political point of view.
We agree wholeheartedly that people should always be aware of and thinking about how to address others with respect - but the purpose of having society wide standards of manners (i.e.: society wide standards of how not to insult people unintentionally) is so that people who wish to be respectful have a reasonable chance of getting it right and not having to worry that the correct form of address has changed this year (or this decade, for that matter). No one is well served if everyone is walking about on eggshells afraid to address each other.
The transvestite issue is actually a pretty interesting one, because it is rare enough (or unacknowledged enough) that there isn't a specific, generally known default for the situation, so you have to default to the default-default: you address someone as they present themselves (which means someone presenting as a female is addressed as a female, and if a transvestite objects that dressing like a woman does not lessen their inherent masculinity, which has happened to me, you just apologize and say you weren't aware of their preference and get it right the next time).
BR(and its "DebtSlave" professionally, for your information, and "Mrs. Mister Slave" socially, because I know you were all dying to know)C
