See also Grail, who insisted their pronouns must be capitalized.

Respecting people’s gender is not carte blanche to make up rules. Like, I can’t say my pronouns have italicized vowels during local business hours, and must use thee / thou / thine if you’re disagreeing with me. That’s simply not what pronouns are for. It’s not why they matter.

Taking a ‘shut up and do it anyway’ approach to moderation is simpler, and perhaps understandable. But you have to acknowledge that’s what you’re doing. When you genuinely believe there is no limit, that gender is both super fucking important and so meaningless that it can be anything, people are going to try politely talking you through some immediately obvious problems.

Is dubvee run by and for one guy? What little I’ve seen (and dealt with) feels like a level of pettiness antithetical to any level of organization. More than once, I’ve checked the site, and expected it to be like those self-hosted users… the vanity plate of the Fediverse.

The problem with this euphemism treadmill is that we do need to interact with people for whom this label is a useful warning. People tried pushing “wild” as if that’s not the same damn issue. In ten years it’d go ‘how dare you use dehumanizing animalistic terms, just because that person escalates every negative interaction into a vicious counter-attack.’ Even dry terms like “unreasonable” see performative scoffing in rebuke.

British journalists aren’t allowed to say “drunk,” but still need to describe when a politician stumbles out of a pub and picks a fight with a trashcan. On forums like this, identifying someone as a troll can be treated like a slur, even though trolling is against the same rules, using the same word. Sometimes the only problems solved by changing how we talk about stuff are the problems caused by how we talk about stuff. If we’re bluntly describing something that already exists - it doesn’t just go away.

Some people have brain problems. That’s real. Occasionally, we all have to deal with that. Shorthand for the typical behaviors associated with common forms will emerge no matter which words we taboo.

These labels aren’t even rooted in medical terminology - nobody’s ever been diagnosed with “nuts” or given a prescription for “crazed.” These started as analogy-based insults for the behavior of neurotypical assholes, and were later applied to people with brain problems. Crazy is already the polite alternative. Calling someone shitty for their shitty behavior might be essentialist, but it’s not ableist. It’s about their shitty behavior. Even when someone can’t help it, they’re still doing it. Managing the consequences is a lot easier if someone warns you it’s gonna happen.

What insisting there’s only one problem does to a motherfucker.