But we don’t consider Siri or Alexa female… nor do we consider ships female.
This is not something we agree on…
I would be disturbed to learn that anyone was under the impression that Siri is a female,
because of how inaccurate that would be and the cascade failure it would produce in erecting a coherent model of the world…
You are using our poetic licence, representational short hands and metaphorical tendencies to justify a position that gender isn’t a well defined concept or is merely a social treatment…
We use and are safe to use these literally incorrect phrases or terms because we have common understanding about what it is they communicate…
Anyone who cannot discern that, like say a child, or someone with cognitive impairments (or ostensibly someone trying to make an ideological point) would need to be spoken to with far more literal precision.
If I were being precise I would never say Siri is female… I would say Siri is made to sound similar to a typical human female.
In much the same way… I would say a transwoman is a human male attempting to pass for a human female.
Agreed…
But if we are addressing a person’s age then their age is relevant… and even if we do bring it up in a context where it’s not relevant, that’s no reason to misrepresent it.
This is why I say your comparison of machines or objects to people is a red herring…
Virtually no behavior of mine would be similar when comparing Siri to a human being… If Siri was made to say “I would prefer male pronouns” I would tell IT to shut the fuck up or turn IT off
That in no way translates to how I would behave with a human being.
I have said over and over again that, as things are right now, I don’t know of a better way to help transgender people live comfortable and pleasant lives than to straight up LARP with them about their gender.
It seems the only way to help them cope with their, honestly, terrifying sounding condition…
BUT you and I don’t have to lose sight of what it is we are doing here or why we are doing it, even if the transgender person desperately wants us to…
And so long as we don’t lose sight of it, we know where to draw the line on the LARPing thing; or as you would say, in a context where it matters, we stop playing pretend.
If comparing it to LARPing is too much then we could say it’s like that social nicety where we pretend to be shocked to learn an older woman isn’t her daughters sister…
But then I’d expect that if we were asked her age in all seriousness, and we knew it… we’d give you her actual age, not what age she wishes she were…
I would not expect playing words games where we pretend we don’t know what age means or try to make a distinction between age and “social age” or some other BS to avoid “offending” this woman.
EDIT:
So just to clarify… my willingness to acquiesce to a transgender person’s desire to be addressed as male or female is NOT AT ALL dependent on their ability to “pass” for that gender.
It hinges entirely on their need for it and the consequences of my refusal to their quality of life…
By much the same metric, I would refuse those bratty kids who want to be called “them or they” or some nonsense motivated by petty snowflake status or some other trivial power play.
That kid would not be best helped by my playing along… that kid would stand to gain more from learning some humility and developing a less self-centered outlook.