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Feminist OrganizationLet's Organize as a Bi-partisan Mass Movement
I just saw a presentation by a scholar of effective mass movements and gained clarity about the 4 vital aspects of an effective mass movement. Though the presentation and interview were decisively skewed left wing, anyone could use these ideas productively. I would be interested in organizing with others to do precisely that. Here are the 4 points of what effective mass movements do. They:
1 - Assemble large, diverse bases of mass popular participation
2 - Channel that participation into meaningful political pressure, persuasion, and disruption that begins to erode the loyalty of their opponents' pillars of support (pillars like media, businesses, governmental bodies, school boards, etc.)
3 - Don't rely solely on street protest, incorporating tactics like strikes, boycotts, and economic leverage and not cooperating or acting like things are normal/acceptable.
4 - Develop organizational resilience and discipline as opposition against them escalates. Then use any incidents of brutality against them to make the case of their moral superiority before undecided onlookers.
I would add a 5th element, which is to have clear, simple asks that are consistently repeated by all members, with an action path those in power can clearly be confirmed to have taken.
So for example, we might have an ask like: "Make a clear distinction between sex and gender identity, and have all laws use only sex, and never gender identity."
"Make the age of consent for gender identity changes, whether social or medical, the same as the age of consent for drinking alcohol."
Anyone interested?
I work somewhere that has a hard time hiring. I’ve been there for 10 years
In honor of those of you who can’t, I can
When asked what my pronouns are I say ‘my sex is female’ and smile expectantly in case they have any further questions
At the Red Cross, when they ask my gender, this is what I say:
“A set of stereotyped expectations placed on me at birth without my consent based on my medically relevant sex, which is FEMALE.”
Good thing they’re too thirsty for that sweet sweet O+ to argue lol.
Love that!!!
I identify as Rh neg
Work on overcoming your proteins preference, bigot!
Exactly. Here , A- person. Take my A+ Think of it as my NegDique
Same. My response is, "I used sex based pronouns"
I know not everyone can do this, but important for those of is who can to do so
How about
After conversing with members of the trans gender comminty I realise that stating pronouns can frequently force individuals into the situation where they are forced to come out of the closet before they are ready or stay in the closet and use pronouns that don't match their gender identity which can cause dysphoria.
Sticking to certain pronouns can also be restrictive to gender fluid individals and can alienate people who don't see their neopronons included.
Giving trans players the ability to easily change their avitars without pronouns makes them feel more affirmed and better supports their experience of the game.
This is amazing!! Pitch perfect cryptotervery.
It's easy to copy the word salad once you have read enough of this kind of thing. Throw around some buzzwords and empty claims. It doesn't really mean anything.
This is fabulous!
Ashamed to say there was a time when I would have nodded along with all this and taken it seriosuy.
Hey, you're not alone! The important thing is that we peaked somewhere along the way and are here now.
It's already an area that is rife with sexism and misogyny. It doesn't really benefit the makers of the game to lose out on the audience that they are trying to grow -- the growth area will come from women, Forcing them to lose their anonymity is halfway to doxxing. That's the issue that I would present.
This. I am a gamer and I will not play a game that forces me to either allow every dudebro asshole to know I'm female so they can treat me like shit or lie about my sex and perpetuate the myth those same dudebros believe that women don't game.
Fuck. That.
This is me rn, I’m friends with a girl who says she’s a they/them. She’s a really cool and kind person but I wanna say “Girl, you’re not a they/them, sit tf down!”😭😭😭
I think my sister is becoming a they/them. I love my sister, but I have always been butch and she's femme but somehow she was the one showing me a Non-Binary bracelet at New Years.
I love my sister, we are very close, but we have never talked about feminism. I have no idea how to discuss this with her.
Here's what i'd say: Unnecessary work that won't increase the experience. Having it can cause unnecessary backlash and cause the game to have less wide audience, but adding them will not significantly widen the possible player base or earn any positive attention. Time should be spent in actually making a game that everyone will enjoy, trans identified people are super rare and it doesn't serve the average player.
Good luck
Ask the team member what problem it solves to include the pronoun field. If it doesn't solve an actual problem or add actual value (such as being a known selling point to a target demographic), why spend the time doing it?
Would players refer to each other with pronouns throughout the game? Or is a pronoun field simply virtue signaling for the game developer? If pronouns serve a functional use within the game, it will be difficult to argue against. If it's simply a way to virtue signal, I would say that most people you know are "over pronouns" and that it actually dates the game and makes it seem less cool.
I'd just argue the trend is on its way out and using the pronoun field will date the game and make i less attractive to consumers.
Invoke the Yogyakarta Principles, which state that pronoun rituals are harmful.
I agree with the others here advising you to leave your GC views at the door when it comes to work; your income and security comes before everything else. Even if you don't lose your job, you don't want any issues with colleagues who could make your professional life difficult.
If you feel like you simply have to speak up and say something, try and frame it in a way that's pro-trans so that way, they can't hold anything against you e.g. "pronouns might be harmful to people still questioning their gender or reinforcing a chosen binary/whatever word salad fits".
I know nothing about game development, but if there's a way to suggest that adding this field will add unnecessary complications in the code I'd go with that strategy. SubTERFuge...
As you probably know, you can't out yourself at work or you'll almost certainly lose your job. Unless you're well-positioned to battle on behalf of your beliefs a la Maya Forstater, it's best to zip it until the tide turns.
To that end, I actually learned about this method on Ovarit! Tell your colleagues with an extremely straight face that forcing players to choose a pronoun risks genociding alienating people who can't reasonably be expected to select a single static pronoun because they are in the process of exploring their extremely precious and important gender identities, to say nothing of the many people of gender who run pronoun checks/circles and demand new pronouns on a regular basis. Out-specialing the special is a good way to stay under the radar.
Can you afford to lose your job? Or get possibly blackballed in tech? If not, then I wouldn't say anything. Its not worth it. Don't trust anyone you work with, even if they say something and you think you are in agreement. Ever. Keep in mind men can get away with much more when pushing back against trans ideology than a woman can.
I wouldn’t. When I first started peaking last July, I felt this big egotistical urge to let everyone know Trans was not real and in fact very dangerous. Since I was a true believer and all. I think it was like some kind of defense mechanism, I couldn’t process how badly I had been lied to. Really freaked me out. I was not okay lol. But It’s honestly not worth it. I am keeping my views to myself from now on! Especially for your job, I wouldn’t bother. Protect your peace. Come on here to vent and know you haven’t lost your mind, it’s society that is very fucked up.
Like everyone here suggested, bring up that it might be too enforcing on the player and their gender identity and whatnot. You know, using their own arguments against the other.
But I would also try to suggest a "happy" medium. Instead of having a permanent dedicated field, have it hidden underneath advance settings or through a toggle. So players that would appreciate it can find it and add it and those that think its bs never have to touch it or see it.
That way, those that want that feature are able to say that its in and you don't have to out yourself, and its not in your face and seems more neutral. Fighting against adding it will only encourage them to try to add it in, and add it in more prominently.
"We should all be striving towards a post-gender world where people and players are no longer bounded by primitive conceptions of human expression." Just out gender nonsense him. Whatever his retorts are, counter that gender is a prison and he is merely rearranging its confines, but the true goal is to deconstruct and abolish gender altogether. That's why you can't ever add pronouns to the games.
What are you trying to get out of it? I would start with that question. When we refuse to play the pronoun game for ourselves its about integrity. I actually dont see any issue putting it in a game if thats what youre being paid to do.
I would go the other way in your position. Make sure you include aaaaall the neopronouns and combinations. You dont want to discriminate do you? Dont you think the gaming community will enjoy using the set of pronouns they like best?
Work is the one area where I say leave the GC views at the door. Nobody is helped if we lose our jobs because then we certainly won't have time for feminism.
However, if you want to bring up how harmful pronouns are without outing yourself there's an easy cop out: mandated pronouns are incredibly harmful and can be violence to trans people because if they're not out they have misgender themselves!! So at the very least there should be an easy option to completely refuse giving pronouns, it's for the TIPs protection and well being.
Another subTERFuge approach: argue that if you give gamers the option to put in pronouns, you give license to edgelords (who are rife in the community) to make disrespectful use of this function. Lots of “shit/shat” and other offensiveness that could normalize the view that pronoun disclosures are jokes and not meant to be taken seriously.
If the idea is that gamers will be limited to a drop down menu of pronouns, well then you could argue it’s impossible to include all neopronouns in usage and therefore someone is bound to feel excluded. Better then to exclude all pronouns that to presume some pronouns are superior to others, right?
I couldn't agree more. I'd also mention that it can be harmful to people who are questioning their identity, or anyone else who may have other reasons (coughGCcough) that would make them feel uncomfortable if it's mandatory to announce their pronouns.
OK, maybe it's better to leave off that "anyone else" part, you don't want to give them even a tiny reason to suspect you aren't a follower of trans ideology.
Play their game, use their language, position trans people as the victims (because they always must be), just as long as you get the result you want - no more mandatory pronouns.
It also depends on the kind of game it is. Pronoun labels for an interactive online game could make the people who use the labels targets of harrassment. For a single player game, you could argue that the player should only have to choose whether they want to play as a man or a woman - because TWAW after all, it's offensive to distinguish them as something separate.
subTERFuge
You can speak the language so well, lol
Aww thanks! I was actually thinking about how the evil TERFs can in general summarize the opinions of the TRAs party accurately. But the other way around not at all, they don't even try to understand what we think. Just call us Nazis and how we want to kill all trans people on sight.
I was thinking of making a thread where we all present TRA arguments as well as we can. And then refute them because hey, it's still ovarit and misogynistic arguments are not allowed. Sort of an "understanding the enemy". Do you think that would be interesting?
They discussed this on Mumsnet, called it “steel-manning” (as opposed to straw-manning), but it turns out TRAs have no arguments, gender ideology is just a pile of big hairy bollocks.
I do!
There's a great website that lists all their arguments and refutes them. I can't remember it, can someone link please?
Here you go!
I keep it open on a tab most of the time!
Thank you so much!-😚
I think WOLF has something like this on their website, but there may be another website that has this too
I love the women here so much. This is fucking PERFECT