Some responses in this thread are incredibly tasteless and offensive, and as such I’d like to make a probably incoherent response addressing some of the major things I noticed reading through the thread.

In their responses, a number of people who disagree with the TC seem to like pulling the “A majority of players are male therefore I will refer to everyone as male” card. According to data from the the sixth volume of Nick Yee’s “Daedalus Project” report [1], 31.8% of MMO players are women (where n = 4429, a statistically massive sample). Some people responded to numbers like these by arguing that 30% if a minority and therefore irrelevant. One poster went so far as to argue that 55% of players being male would be enough to justify calling every player male.

Consider the following proposal. You’re given a choice, you can roll a 10 sided dice and if you roll between 1 and 7 (inclusive) you would be given $10,000. If however you roll between 8 and 10 (inclusive) you would lose that same amount of money (and go into debt if you didn’t have that much). Would you take the bet? If not, then why would you consider 30% of a population to be an insignificant minority.

The second major argument used is that her being transgender is a non-issue to other people and ignorable. The general public is blissfully unaware of how much discrimination transgender people face in everyday life (and can go as far to unintentionally support that discrimination). Transgender people are four times as likely as the general population to live in poverty (less than $10,000/year) and twenty-five times as likely to attempt suicide. More than half of the respondents were harassed in public accommodations (ex, hotels, restaurants, government buildings). [2]

When transgender people go online to find the same kind of archaic attitudes that are prevalent in real life it should hardly come as a surprise that they might speak up and ask to be treated more fairly, especially since speaking up for one’s self is significantly easier in an anonymous setting such as the internet. The fact that a simple request like “I want to be referred to by the same pronoun as my avatar’s gender.” is met with such vitriol is exactly the same problem that leads to the aforementioned discrimination. It can be a challenge for people, but once you learn how to be empathetic (which inherently requires making yourself emotionally vulnerable) you just might come to realize that your actions and the actions of some of your peers may have been hurting others around you.

And for the people who are intentionally misgendering the TC, your actions are absolutely disgusting and in the real world would get you in trouble, people have lost their jobs over much less horrid speech.

In regards to the prescriptivists in the thread who believe that the “singular they” is incorrect, it’s common usage among both academics and the general populace is enough to make it valid English. While historically “he” has been used to refer to unspecified genders (though not as far back as the singular they was used) it’s silly to try to argue that the word can be completely divorced from its gender implications.

I realize this has gotten rambly but as someone with transgender friends I have some strong feelings around the ignorance displayed in this thread that I felt needed addressing.

TL;DR: Show some empathy for your peers.


[1] http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/pdf/6-1.pdf
[2] http://www.thetaskforce.org/download.../ntds_full.pdf