A Grumpy Computer Scientist
1 min readDec 4, 2021

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Exactly.

People can call me whatever they like: it's none of my business and it certainly does not affect how I feel. How silly that would be.

Who am I to tell other people how to refer to things? The brazen and absurd fascism of it. Fascists always want to police how you refer to things as one of their staple moves. Control YOUR words, so that they control the narrative.

Mussolini forced everyone who wanted to drink a cocktail in the 1930s' Italy to call it a "bevanda arlecchina".

By the same token, I refuse the imposition to have to remember the pronoun of thousands of acquaintances. People have no right to tell me how to allocate my cognitive resources, any more than I have a right to tell them how they prefer to refer to themselves. I have better things to do with my time and my memory than having to lookup each person in a registry before I can refer to them.

BTW, I steer clear of any narcissist poser event/group asking me to specify my pronouns, but I had to once.

I found myself in the situation that I could not register for something I really wanted to attend without doing so (which is an abusive and bullying practiceof course).

Fortunately, they had space for "other" so I could pay them back by forcing everyone at the event to refer to me by my preferred pronouns in that particular circumstance: gundrundorendihertamenderthim / gundrundorendihertamenderthis

You are welcome

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A Grumpy Computer Scientist

UK-based AI professor interested in AI, mind, science, rationality, digital culture and innovation. Hobbies: incessantly fighting nonsense.