How to own an airline in 3 easy steps and grab the TSA nofly list along the way

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What? I agree that for my tastes a lot of people take gender very seriously. But it seems wild to me to think this is somehow a new phenomenon.

For millennia in many societies one's society-assigned gender determined a great deal about one's status, including what work you could do, what work you could do, and what sort of violence against you was acceptable. And in a lot of times and places, misgendering somebody was used as a deliberate insult and could even be seen as "fighting words", legitimate legal cause for violence.

The only thing that has changed lately is a bit of individual freedom in picking that role for one's self. For those people, many consider it rude to ignore their choices, partly because of the history of gender, but partly because those people are targets of bigotry and violence. There's a whole list! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_killed_for_bein...

All moral codes have a "coercive" element to them, just like all legal codes do. If you're going to be rude, people may, gasp, say something about it. You trying to establish a different coercive moral code against that isn't somehow better. And getting all het up about it in this specific case, instead of all the other codes of politeness, suggests it's not really "coercive" morality you care about.

Personally, it seems to me that trans folks have a pretty hard role in life. They always did, but now at least they're getting to be open about it. I'm glad to support them in that; calling them how they want to be called seems like literally the least I could do. Indeed, as a thoroughgoing nerd, I spent a lot of my childhood getting shit on for being different, so I'm happy to help make space for different kinds of difference.

The point of gendered pronouns is that sentences very often have two nouns: a subject and object. If you have only a single pronoun, then any sentence can only use a pronoun to unambiguously refer to one of those. If you have two pronouns and you randomly and evenly distribute them across various subjects, then it's fairly likely that the subject and object will get difference ones and you can now unambiguously use pronouns for both.

Since a very large fraction of human speech pertains to other humans and since human sex is a roughly 50/50 distribution, it makes some sense that we used gender as our mostly arbitrary thing to assign a pair of pronouns too. We could have used, say handedness instead, but with only ~10% of people being left-handed, the odds of a sentence being about a righty and a lefty is much smaller.

Pronouns are basically like special variables in a REPL that let you refer to the most recent expression. It's nice if you can refer back to a couple of them.