Off-topic for aiqbench
This story was gathered from a source we follow but falls outside AI and quantum coverage, so there is no aiqbench take for it.
A Very Simple Game Theory of Pronoun Degendering
I often vocally argue for the degendering of English Pronouns, that is to say, the replacement of the pronouns he/she with ungendered singular equivilents (depending on how knowledgable about the subject the person I'm talking to is, I'll usually either pitch singular they/them, or my prefered option of a dedicated singular gender-neutral pronoun set like ey/em or xi/xir). On account of having had far too many of these conversations, I've noticed a trend. The vast majority of people who I've had empathetically object to this are specifically trans women (as opposed to trans men, or nonbinary people). While it's easy to see why a smaller proportion of non-binary people might object to this (notably, many already consider some set of generic gender-neutral pronouns to be their personal ideal), this doesn't explain the gap between trans women and men. I think there's a simple game theory lurking behind this difference. Key to this game-theoretical model is an idea called "degendering". The concept of degendering is that in addition to active "misgendering" of a trans person; which is a hard rejection of a persons gender identity characterized by applying gender markets congruent to a persons sex to them; the act of not applying gendered markers to them in the same context where you'd apply said markers to a cis person of the same gender is in effect a soft signal of rejecting their gender identity. While trying to understand the viewpoint of trans-women who reject pronoun degendering, I stumbled into the following study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19419899.2021.1978529 Of particular interest is that clarifying a trans-womans pronouns decreased their rates of "degendering", while the same intervention had no effect for trans-men and nonbinary people. I suspect that the higher levels of pronoun-degendering opposition in trans women basically comes from the following mechanism: 1) Current gendered interventions have some non-negliable effect for trans women. 2) Attempts to degender pronoun usage will (presumebly) decrease the rate of current interventions. 3) Even if an individual trans woman might prefer the end-state of degendering* the intermediary state is likely to be on the order of decades and come with a non-negligable cost. Meanwhile, trans men and non-binary people don't experience the benefit of existing interventions, and therefore don't percieve a cost, only a potential long term benefit. Cis people (at least, gender conforming ones), on the other hand, probably percieve neither. * (I'm not really sure how to do footnotes in this editor). In conversations I've had, I've also found that a larger number of trans women will express discontent at the desired end-state of pronoun degendering. But I'm unsure whether this represents a real preference difference, or if it's instead a side effect of that being the belief that would most strengthen current policy preference. Discuss
I often vocally argue for the degendering of English Pronouns, that is to say, the replacement of the pronouns he/she with ungendered singular equivilents (depending on how knowledgable about the subject the person I'm talking to is, I'll usually either pitch singular they/them, or my prefered option of a dedicated singular gender-neutral pronoun set like ey/em or xi/xir).On account of having had far too many of these conversations, I've noticed a trend. The vast majority of people who I've had empathetically object to this are specifically trans women (as opposed to trans men, or nonbinary people).While it's easy to see why a smaller proportion of non-binary people might object to this (notably, many already consider some set of generic gender-neutral pronouns to be their personal ideal), this doesn't explain the gap between trans women and men.I think there's a simple game theory lurking behind this difference.Key to this game-theoretical model is an idea called "degendering". The concept of degendering is that in addition to active "misgendering" of a trans person; which is a hard rejection of a persons gender identity characterized by applying gender markets congruent to a persons sex to them; the act of not applying gendered markers to them in the same context where you'd apply said markers to a cis person of the same gender is in effect a soft signal of rejecting their gender identity.While trying to understand the viewpoint of trans-women who reject pronoun degendering, I stumbled into the following study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19419899.2021.1978529
Of particular interest is that clarifying a trans-womans pronouns decreased their rates of "degendering", while the same intervention had no effect for trans-men and nonbinary people.I suspect that the higher levels of pronoun-degendering opposition in trans women basically comes from the following mechanism:
1) Current gendered interventions have some non-negliable effect for trans women.2) Attempts to degender pronoun usage will (presumebly) decrease the rate of current interventions.3) Even if an individual trans woman might prefer the end-state of degendering* the intermediary state is likely to be on the order of decades and come with a non-negligable cost.Meanwhile, trans men and non-binary people don't experience the benefit of existing interventions, and therefore don't percieve a cost, only a potential long term benefit. Cis people (at least, gender conforming ones), on the other hand, probably percieve neither.
* (I'm not really sure how to do footnotes in this editor). In conversations I've had, I've also found that a larger number of trans women will express discontent at the desired end-state of pronoun degendering. But I'm unsure whether this represents a real preference difference, or if it's instead a side effect of that being the belief that would most strengthen current policy preference.
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