It’s not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.
It’s not fun interacting with them when they often want to engage in ad hominems. This is why I have no interest in the tankie triad.
Exist in what sense? Again, is it rooted in something like biology or social assignment in your view, or is it based on the existence of people self-identifying as such? If the former, why do you not take issue with singular they? If the latter, what’s the difference between that and “dragon”? Would you argue there are no people who genuinely use “dragon” as their pronoun? There are certainly quite a few who use “fae/faer”, so it wouldn’t be a significant leap.
In the sense of existing in the real world.
Why on earth would I take issue with a grammatical usage case that predates Shakespeare?
Why would calling themselves something and asking others to call them something inherently make them something a human being literally cannot be on account of it being a fantasy creature?
Words are defined and redefined based on their real world usage, so if there were enough people describing themselves as dragons, the definition could be updated to account for that. Denying or ridiculing novelty or unorthodoxy would hamper progress in any movement, be it for religious freedoms or trans rights.
At the same time that doesn’t give carte blanche for any word to mean anything. I could start using the word ‘conservative’ to mean ‘socialist’, but it would be ridiculous for me to attempt to force others to maintain that same usage, or even force them to acknowledge the usage’s validity. The fluidity of language is not an argument for absolutist individualist interpretations of language, which is nothing less than an argument for the ultimate incoherence of language. Language changes with mass usage, not automatically with individual usage.
Language is a form of communication first, and ornamentation second, not vice-versa.