Right and respectful
But how do you know which side that is?
The issue of course isn’t the Fauci part, it’s the pronouns part. (Tiresome of Musk to jam them together.) How does he know it’s right and respectful to pretend that people can and should decide what pronouns other people use to refer to them? How does he know it’s not, on the contrary, rude and narcissistic to make that demand? He doesn’t, because he can’t, because it is rude and narcissistic. It’s an attempt to force people to think about you and remember Special Instructions about you, and to feel anxious about forgetting the Special Instructions about you. It’s an imposition of extra work and pointless anxiety all for you wonderful you extra-special you.
It isn’t right factually, and it isn’t right morally.
It isn’t even genuinely respectful. It involves treating people as extra-fragile and perhaps delusional or otherwise mentally dilapidated in some way. That’s not particularly respectful.
As a very broad piece of advice it’s ok – it means don’t go around shouting misogynist or racist abuse at people, don’t mock people, don’t pick fights, don’t bully – you know, just basically don’t be an asshole. He’s right that that’s better for all parties; he’s not right about the specifics in this case.
It’s such a broad imperative as to be useless.
Breaking it down, it amounts to a conjunction of two imperatives. We ought (i) be on the right side of things AND (ii) be on the respectful side of things. To be on the X “side of things” in this usage is semantically equivalent to being X. Thus we ought (i`) be right AND (ii`) be respectful. Now, as we’re dealing with a conjunction, each can be examined separately.
i` states that we ought be right; that is, correct. Of course, we want to be correct. Truth is a root value, perhaps the root value. Even when we determine in some situation that it is morally correct to lie, that determination supervenes on the existence of moral truth: it is true that it is correct to lie in that situation. But that’s the thing: what is right is not always self-evidently so. Determining what’s right requires more than the choice to be right. The alternative is that any moral (or whatever) failing is the result of a conscious choice to not be right. (This is analogous to the idea that economic status maps 1:1 to the will. The rich are rich because they choose to be; i.e., they are ambitious and diligent, etc. The poor are poor because they choose to be; i.e., they are directionless and lazy, etc.) Humanity’s curse is that we can and do believe ourselves to be in the right while doing wrong. American citizens of Japanese descent who found themselves in internment camps during WWII, for example, would certainly understand this fact and not adopt such a simplistic, childish mindse—Oh. Right.
ii` states that we ought be respectful, which is, at least, more interesting in that respect is valued instrumentally rather than intrinsically. Unfortunately, what is respectful is also not written in our minds by the hand of God. We can’t actually be respectful merely by choosing to be, in the same way that we can’t be right merely by choosing to be.
The compound imperative takes as an implicit premise that Genderism is both right and respectful, but such claims aren’t known to be true simply because someone has made them. Neither are they generally considered constructivist; i.e., the truth of the claim consists in making the claim. Claims of rightness and respectfulness actually have to be argued and demonstrated, and every such attempt by Genderists has met with pathetic failure.
With “friends*” like that, who needs enemies…
*The same way being against Hitler makes you a “friend” of Stalin and vice versa.
If the T and Q soup were not clinging to the LGB, people would examine the issue in finer detail to see the misogyny and homophobia, but when the letters were all put together people accepted that it was all part of the same cause. I think this explains, at least in part, the accusations of “hate” against any LGB Alliance group and especially the English one started by early Stonewall founders. They expose the forced teaming that Uncle George has yet to see. Being gay, he still sees the struggle as RW v a broad class of GNC. And since to him being gay is as much of a ascribed class as being of Japanese descent, he does not look too closely at what the transgender activists are doing.
It’s very hard to peak when you don’t see the reason to peek into the issue. It’s common cause, and he knows that he’s on the right side; just like I did when I excused an all-male panel I had created for a radio show on atheist podcasters by pointing out that one of the guests was trans. I didn’t look too closely at all this back then, and just assumed at face value that it was all for the good of GNC people. And I think that’s where Takei is. He has a perceptual blindness that causes him to miss all of the responsorial tweets that tell him he’s wrong. He just lumps them in with anti-GNC hate.