I am glad someone is calling the Florida school system on their bullshit. Being non-binary hard and being treated like the coping mechanisms you use for avoiding hating the experience of dealing with people and existing in your body are somehow a delusion, some sort of sexual kink or deliberately confusing is like trying to go about your day with weights strapped to you. It makes dealing with every social interaction so tiring. It really feels like everybody else in the room is obsessed with your sex organs and characteristics like complete perverts that they don’t see the question is about how happy you are and how you feel about all the people in your life and whether you feel anxious and isolated being around them or just comfortable and able to express your full range of personhood.
This teacher is standing up because they know there’s others much worse off who aren’t secure enough to do it. Pretty admirable I think.
Thank you for sharing how thus affects you. It’s important for people to see that this is affecting actual people and not some strawman concept they don’t understand.
It’s something even a lot of my friends don’t even really get. I ended up going to a Birthday party where across the street from the restaurant there was a 250 plus rally of anti-trans protesters with zero counter protesters. We didn’t realize the thing would be there. I ended up not being able to eat because the stress from proximity made me throw up everything.
I know we get called sensitive snowflakes but having that level of outright hate shoved in your face can easily make anyone feel very small and very vulnerable and at some level it’s visceral.
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It’s harder to feel like a capable badass when you’ve borrowed a friend’s hat to cover your rainbow colored hair and are ralphing korean food into a strip mall garbage can.
At some level we as a demographic are sensitive, I can’t really control the way I feel about my body and my place in society. Being out does mean exposing that vulnerability where other people can see. Sensitivity isn’t cowardice but it does mean having to realize where your limits are and how you work. A lot of us learn to put on a tough as nails affect over time so we can get through a regular ass day. Realistically I know I am not a coward any more than I am Superman. I am just doing my best
Not only that, but then have the hate be called “reasonable debate”
As if we aren’t actual real people that just want to exist in the world. It’s like you have to fight against the fucking river in making anyone even believe you that what they are seeing is hate, transphobia.
We’re simply not treated like real people in these debates, and it’s frustrating and exhausting. If they faced the same treatment you would bet they would protest severely.
But I guess that is also the case for cis women in the abortion debate. I guess the debate being about half of the population still isn’t enough for empathy.
Pretty real stuff. A feels like lot of people just want to punch through us to hit somebody on the other side. I can’t say I like the way they frame things about parents rights either. It’s like they want to own their children like property not just be a major influence in their lives. The lack of empathy doesn’t even really extend to their own flesh and blood much less us.
My hometown’s council is like a microcosm of the whole thing. A vocal group storms the trustee meetings to rail on and on about how we need to Protect children from gender ideology, they run over their alloted time so nobody can get any regular business done and the board turns their mic off so they can just function as a government. The “spurned Conservatives” then go to the local paper and tell everyone that their freedom of speech was unjustly curtailed because a hypocritical progressive turned their mic off. The paper prints the story uncritically and all of a sudden we’re a threat to freedom of speech and democracy… They then turn around and say “I’m not transphobic” as though they didn’t just paint us as bogeyman who are dangerous to be around women, kids, polling stations, government, pens and paper etc. etc. etc.
Some days it’s just a lot.
Yeah…
However, regular guys from Florida succeeded in being waaaay worse than the memed Florida Man, good job guys
Florida Mx if you want to lose your job.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.We call people what they want to be called. (Credit for this to Charlie Worroll from Crimelines and other podcasts)
I agree.
That being said, how do you pronounce this? Is it Mix? Mixter? Mizz(that sounds too close to ms)
Just like “mix”
Mix of what?
Do you think it’s possible for two words to sound alike but have different meanings?
Repression has historically always won… right? !
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Online Public School, what’s that?
My brother did Florida Virtual School and graduated in 2011 or so. It was actually pretty great, and what they should have switched all the students to during COVID. It’s exactly what it sounds like, online coursework, just like if you’ve ever taken a college class online, but its a public high school option meaning its free. Some stuff doesn’t work quite as well, the lab kit they sent my brother to use wasn’t quite as good as my in person lab classes. Florida actually invested the time and money to make it good because a lot of child actors and some of the kids training at sports schools use it.
Edit: to clarify, “public” in the US means state government funded, I’m aware that some places mean the opposite when they talk about public/private schools.
It’s a public school that’s attended primarily online.
When I was enrolled in one, they had us do 99% of our work at home, and we could do the work at our own pace, but we had to come in to the building to take the more important tests to move to the next semester-equivalent. That was to make sure that we weren’t cheating like we were fully able to do for the regular tests, because this was before spyware was the norm.
It was great for anyone who could stay motivated to do school work and would go out of their way to interact with other students, and it was the worst possible method of schooling for my lazy, unsociable ass. I’d likely not have graduated if my high school hadn’t started giving what basically amounted to a GED test for seniors who couldn’t pass their classes in time. I knew the stuff, I just refused to actually do the stuff. Highly recommend for extraverts. Cannot recommend for introverts.
How about we come up with a better term rather than use a stupid one that someone has to tell you how to pronounce.
To be fair Mrs. (And to a lesser extent Mr.) Don’t have an obvious pronunciation from the spelling either. You’ve just been hearing them said out loud for most of your life.
Fair, but they are also shorthand for words: Mister, Miss, Missus. All of which are pronounced as you’d expect.
Is Mx short for something? I’ve not heard so but that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
It takes 10 seconds to learn its pronounced mix. Its not difficult in the slightest
Anyone with an S lettered last name is gunna sound like Mc S
I just tried it with my last name lol.
Mc Steele, makes me feel like a McDonald’s meal item.
I’m not saying it’s difficult to teach or learn, but if you first encounter it in a book are you going to know it’s pronounced “mix?” And if you hear is are you going to know it’s spelled “Mx?” You can argue difficulty all you want but if you have something that is spelled how it sounds and pronounced how it looks it’s still easier and there will be less confusion.
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I mean if you see “Mx” and you don’t assume it’s pronounced “mix”, you might have some elementary language difficulties. I understand not being sure, but it is pronounced how it’s spelled.
I don’t see anything stupid about this, but if you have better ideas, let’s hear them.
fake school upset by fake honorific
All words are “fake”
What makes a word a fake word?
How do you even say that? “Mexico Smith, can I get a hall pass?”
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Spanish is my first language. Spanish defaults to masculine of words, but so do all Latin based languages. Here in the states we see Latinx. In Mexico and South America, “latine” is becoming prevalent.
Linguistically speaking, it’s absurd. Polls in the USA, where Latinx was invented by uncomfortable, uninformed white people to try and be inclusive, show that 93% of the latino / hispanic population either disapprove of or don’t care about it.
Edit: putting this up higher for visibility.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx-survey-says
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html
As someone with no skin in the game, I don’t understand why people don’t just say “Latin” when they’re speaking English. We already don’t use genders, and routinely ignore plenty of other foreign language rules like plurals (“a cannoli”, for example). I don’t think anyone is going to be confused and think you’re talking about the Italic people annexed by Rome in 338 BC.
Because we’re not Latin - that’s just the language spoken by the Roman empire. In fact, latino is a bit wrong. Something my mom rankled at when I was growing up. Oddly enough, my grandma who got her PhD in Spanish from the University of Habana, didn’t give two shits.
Hispanic refers to “Hispaniola,” the kingdom primarily situated on the Iberian peninsula which had Portugal, Spain, and parts of France in it (to simplify the explanation).
Latino is accepted and fine. Hispanic seems to be fine as well. Latin works, but again, it’s sort of wrongish.
Edit: putting this up higher for visibility.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx-survey-says
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html
My perspective has always been “if it’s good enough for John Leguizamo to use on HBO, it’s good enough for me.” And he very frequently referred to his ethnicity as Latin in his comedy.
And then a few weeks ago he was on CNN saying Latinx.
Point being, the thing that matters is that the intent is to be respectful. Using the wrong word to offend makes you an asshole, and it doesn’t matter if you’re misgendering someone or denigrating an entire ethnicity. Using the wrong word because it’s ambiguous, or it’s traditional, or you’re not sure is a different matter. Most words were wrong at some point, because language changes. The point is that you treat other humans as people, and not as political targets.
Sure. 93+% of the others who have weighed in against it don’t matter. Only Leguizamo.
Let me state it clearly: most of us do not like it.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx-survey-says
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/05/us/latinx-gallup-poll-preference-trnd/index.html
Way to miss the point. None of this is news to me, and prescriptivism is a losing argument. I personally despise the term Latinx–just like I despiss Mx. I wouldn’t default to either. But I’ll call anyone whatever they prefer. If you want to doggedly refuse to accommodate someone just because their preference puts them in a minority, who are you actually helping?
Use latine, it already exists in the language
I will refrain. Thanks.
Latine is so obviously the better choice, but no, 'Muricans have to anglicize it to make it theirs. 🙄
Use latine instead
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Hot take: gendered language doesn’t serve any meaningful purpose and we should just get rid of it. There is no need for inanimate non-gendered objects to have a linguistic gender.
Or, you know, you could just get over it and realize that gender in language is not the same thing as gender in people. There’s one African language, for example, that has 16 different genders.
Also, you are mistaken that linguistic gender doesn’t serve a purpose. It does and there’s a pretty extensive body of linguistic literature on the subject.
Fun fact; as with most of the other Germanic languages, English originally had three genders; masculine, feminine and neuter. They got stripped out of the language for reasons having to do with English history that are too technical to go into right now.
And German still has those genders, and as you rightly said, they have nothing to do with gender identity.
The only issue here is gendered pronouns and other forms of address that rely on the gender of the person being discussed. Nobody cares whether a table is masculine or feminine, but they do care whether your parent’s sibling is a male or female because in many languages, there’s no word to eliminate that information. That’s the issue here, and the solution isn’t to rewrite the entire concept of gender in languages, but instead to introduce and popularize genderless pronouns and titles. I know I hate saying “how many uncles and aunts do you have,” especially since I know that doesn’t necessarily cover all of the person’s parents’ siblings. Give me words like “cousin” so I don’t need to separate people by gender in casual conversation unless it’s actually relevant.
Can you link a layman’s explanation of the value of grammatical gender regarding inanimate objects? After years of learning and being frustrated by French, I had come to the conclusion that grammatical gender was stupid and served no purpose, but I’d love to have a better understanding of its value.
Again, this isn’t coming from a position of “prove me wrong, buttfart”. This is coming from “I’d like to learn more and have a better understanding of something I’m probably just not getting.”
Like “mix”. It’s fairly simple to most people who have common sense and aren’t actively trying to be offended over nothing.
Dr. = Doctor. Mr. = Mister. Mrs. = Misses. There is also “Miss”, which has no period because it isn’t an abbreviation.
Mx. = ?.
Is “Mx.” an abbreviation? No? Why does it have a period? You pronounce it phonectically, though we do not do that with Dr. or Mr. or Mrs.?
I don’t oppose the use of gender neutral language, but I don’t think the pronunciation of “Mx.” or the fact that it isn’t an abbreviation is obvious. It conforms to conventions in one way and departs from conventions in another.
I pronounce it phonetically precisely because this is not an abbreviation of any word. But honestly I have no idea, this asking.
”Good morning, I am Mx. Vary, your science teacher." That’s it, that’s all you need for the entire year.
Do your classes take place entirely over text? They’re asking how you pronounce that in speech.
Mr. Is short for “Mister” Mrs is short for mistress, but is usually pronounced “Misses”
So how does one pronounce Mx.? Mix or Mixter? Mixes? And sometimes Xs are pronounced like Z, so is it just Mmmz?
Asking how to pronounce someone’s preferred pronouns is entirely reasonable when their preferred pronoun is not a regular part of the English language. I’d rather know how to say something and not offend someone than say it wrong for who knows how long and definitely offend them.
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If they’re saying it, they just told you how to pronounce it. That’s my point.
Yeah, but I’m trying to learn for myself, and have never had anyone say it to me.
So you’re not really helping by assuming I should know how to pronounce a new word
I’m not assuming you would know. Nobody is. If they’re introducing themselves, that’s how you would know. If you are a third party and want to learn for yourself, there is a very easy way to do that.
Okay, but like, if you were in their class you would hear them say it to you and then you’d know.
If you actually cared you’d just look it up tbh.
maybe the x is silent? is it pronounced mi, like in the solfege song?
Sure, but Mx. Vary wasn’t fired for using the honorific one time.
And I thought it is m-ex, like reading the letter “x”.
It’s pronounced emacs
I thought that they were declaring themselves as a mail exchange
I’m more of a ‘vi’ guy.
:q
It’s not immediately intuitive in my opinion, but it does make sense once you remember that other M- honorifics start “Mi”. Mister, missus, miss. Then it makes sense to follow, mix.
I think some people use it one way and others the other. I don’t think there’s one universal correct way.
I’ve heard it both ways. I’m sure no one would be offended either way you say it.
You’re the divisive one here, suggesting people are hateful for having legitimate questions.
It’s so simple, just like Mr. Is pronounced merr.
You’re very much part of the problem.
I don’t remember writing that anyone was hateful. Actively trying to be offended, yes. Legitimate questions ask questions like this “So how is Mx pronounced?”. The comment was I replied to intended to mock it, not ask in good faith. But see, you’d have to come to that conclusion by using common sense, so here we are again.
It’s not “fairly simple if you have common sense”. The known abbreviations have been in use for a hundred or more years and are widely known. Everyone knows how to pronounce them, the only curveball is Mrs being misses since it was originallymistress but that word later became associated with cheating and “ladies of the night”.
Mx was made up recently, it stands for nothing AFAIK. They just took the standard M beginning and slapped X on it because X tends to mean “unknown”.
It’s akin to asking you to address me as “Zf. Cat” because that’s what makes me feel comfortable.
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They weren’t introduced in anything like an analogous way. Mr and Mrs evolved slowly over decades and even centuries from older forms referring to master and mistress.
I don’t have a strong opinion about Mx either way, but as an amateur linguistics nerd I can assure you that the way it’s been introduced to our lexicon is very different from these much older terms.
Yep, language flows and changes over long periods of time, not through a court order or “marginalized” people screaming “we want our own pronoun that we just came up with to be culturally except! If you don’t comply, you are an insensitive asshole!”
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Most floppy disks aren’t floppy either, so maybe not the best example.
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Actually the floppy part of the disk is inside the plastic case. It’s a floppy piece of magnetic tape.
But that’s a great example of how language evolves - people don’t even know what the name means, and yet they know what it is.
Ok, Zf. Cat :) If that makes you feel comfortable it costs me nothing to be considerate of your preference. See?
Now you have to remember that for every interaction with me. If you happen to call me sometime else, I’ll grit my teeth and have to correct you or if I’m an asshole, I’ll berate you about it, constantly. You will also have to refer to me as Zf. Cat to everyone you know, regardless of whether or not they know me, or are in my presence.
You should be asking yourself why you assume the person would react angrily instead of just politely correcting the pronunciation. If someone accidentally mispronounces my name I gently correct them, while smiling, and I have never once been offended or take it personally. You also assume it is a heavy burden on others to simply call people what they’d like to be called. When it is not. Being angry over this is not a healthy attitude. It’s simple manners to be considerate of others and that is precisely what the person is asking for, nothing more.
If you have to correct someone about your name/title every single time it gets pretty damn annoying. I met a girl years ago whose name was spelled Remy but pronounced Ray-me she said “I hate my parents for it” (I doubt she actually hated her parents, but hated the fact that they gave her a “bad” name).
Except it’s not like that at all, because you just made that honorific up!
Mx. has an actual cultural context outside of their classroom. Sure, it’s new, but it’s not like this teacher just made it up themselves.
What is that context? You failed to include it.
The context is Mx. already being used and recognized around the country and around the world. It’s new, but it’s not just something the teacher made up.
So common sense is dictated now by a few members of niche social media circles?
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One, it’s virtue signaling at its best.
Secondly, randomly adding in the letter x to things is not ‘common sense’.
Common sense is the ability to make practical judgments and behave in a sensible way. It’s the knowledge and experience that most people have, or should have.
So my original point still stands. ‘Mx’ is not common sense. Knowing not to play a game of chicken with traffic, is common sense. Maybe this is why common sense isn’t so common anymore, people just appropriate words/phrases to mean whatever they want, instead of what they mean.
This is how we’ve ended up in a world where the word literally no longer means the word literally.
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Bitcoin and NFTs… That’s the counter argument you go with. Fucking Christ…
You’d think someone using the name CaptPretentious would be all in favor of things being made up by niche social circles.
Sorry was I supposed to put my first name, last name, social Security number, and mother’s maiden name as my username?
Well see, common sense would have me ask “hm, how do I say that?” then google it, then when I see that it’s simply pronounced “mix” I’d say “oh, okay”. And then go on about my day… instead of ranting about how hard it is to figure out and how angry it should make everyone. But that’s just me.
If it were me, I would probably figure out what the person I’m trying to argue arguing with was actually arguing about. Instead of getting up on a soapbox and pretending like I know what I’m arguing about. But that would take effort.
But you keep using those canned responses you got ready to go.
Wow, those two letters really shook you. Deep breaths.
My position has fuck all to do with the letters.
But you really need it to be don’t you. Because your canned responses only work if that’s what I’m arguing about.
You don’t need to have kids call you weird names, it’s really not necessary. Just be normal.
“Just be normal” is the first step toward “just be straight” then “just be white” then “just be Christian” then “just be our version of Christian”. Why can’t people just be who they are? Like, literally no one is hurting anyone in this scenario, yet your absolute paper thin fragile porcelain toilet of an ego is hurt because the teacher isn’t exactly how you picture the ideal person your children think the world is filled with.
What if who they are is a literal Nazi? Do the get to just be who they are too?
Read my comment again. No one is being hurt here. That’s the one part that matters.
