Bye Stack Exchange, I'm done. Coerced speech is incompatible with freedom

Question

From your official FAQ (now deleted and replaced, see update below) about the Code of Conduct revisions (I've bolded the parts that I find objectionable):

Q9: Do I have to use pronouns I’m unfamiliar or uncomfortable with (e.g., neopronouns like xe, zir, ne... )?

Yes, if those are stated by the individual.

It has long been a principle of American jurisprudence that the government cannot compel people to say anything that goes against their conscience. In the famous 1943 case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, involving parents who, for religious reasons, did not want their children forced to recite a pledge of allegiance to the United States, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote:

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Now, Stack Exchange is a private company, not a part of the U.S. government, and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not binding on you. You have a legal right to create a Code of Conduct that compels people to use speech they find uncomfortable. This would be a violation of the First Amendment if a government entity did it, but you have the legal right to do it.

However, the fact that you are willing to compel speech that people find uncomfortable has persuaded me that you do not believe in freedom of expression. At least, not in this particular area of speech. And if you're willing to sacrifice that freedom in one area, you're going to be willing to sacrifice it in more areas soon, because you hold other things higher than freedom of expression.

I cannot in good conscience sign any Code of Conduct that compels people to speak in ways that would offend their conscience, or even that make them uncomfortable. My conscience is not offended by using the pronouns that people have requested, but I know that some people do find that their conscience would not allow them to use neopronouns. (I have talked to some such people). And since I cannot in good conscience sign your revised Code of Conduct, which you require all contributors to sign, the only principled thing to do is to stop contributing to your site other than this farewell message.

My only major contribution to your site has been in the f# tag, where I have a gold badge. As of yesterday, there were 12 gold badge holders in the f# tag, 4 of which have not contributed anything (questions or answers) for at least a year, leaving 8 active holders of a gold badge in the f# tag. Now that number has gone from 8 to 7.

P.S. It's one thing to say "Certain kinds of speech are not allowed on our site and will be removed if found". Everyone has to do that, since sadly, there are many people on the Internet who think nothing of trying to spam their advertising messages in places where such messages are completely inappropriate. The principle of free speech means that you must not compel me to be silent, but it in no way requires you to give me a platform if you find my message objectionable. But there's a big, bright line between "you do not have to give me a platform" and "you can compel me to speak in ways that make me uncomfortable or offend my conscience". You have blithely stepped over that line with no consideration of the principles of free expression that you are violating, and I refuse to continue to participate in a site that does not understand the fundamentals of freedom.

Edit: I do want to start a discussion about the principles of free expression, and the only place I've seen such a thing happen so far is in answers to other questions (such as this one or this one), where a discussion is harder because the only way to answer an answer is with a comment — and comments cannot be downvoted so it's hard to gauge how many people disagree with a comment, and more importantly it's hard to express a full idea in 600 characters when you're discussing fundamental philosophical/political principles such as free expression and what its limits, if any, should be. That is part of why I put "Coerced speech is incompatible with freedom" in my title: it's my reason for leaving SE, but it's also the subject around which I hope to spark a discussion. If this is a duplicate of other questions, I'd be perfectly happy to have this closed as a dupe, and have that discussion in the answers to those other, pre-existing question(s). But if this is not a duplicate of other questions, only of answers where a discussion is harder to have, I would respectfully ask that the question be reopened so that a discussion can be had in the answers here.

Edit 2: Thank you to those who voted to close this as a duplicate of a previous question, as I asked. But Aza's "An update on my resignation notice" post, while an excellent summary of many of the issues involved in this debate, does not touch on the issue that is at the core of this post of mine: the principles of free expression and how coerced speech is incompatible with freedom. I would therefore, again, ask for this question to be either reopened, or closed with a duplicate that actually discusses the main issue I'm trying to address. I misunderstood the "This may be a duplicate" box that appeared at the top of my post to mean that the question had been closed. It has not; it's still open for answers if anyone wants to discuss the principles of coerced speech. Sorry about the mistake in my previous edit.

Update: The FAQ that I originally linked to has been closed and deleted, and replaced by a new official FAQ, which does not contain the specific language I objected to. I have not yet read it carefully enough to decide whether it allows the free expression I value, or whether it still restricts people from following their conscience. Until I have time to give it that careful reading, I will continue to stay off the site. (I did feel the need to edit this post to keep it up-to-date, which will unfortunately have the effect of bumping it back to the top of Meta.SE. So if any new comments or questions show up here, I will try to engage with them, but I will continue to refrain from commenting or answering elsewhere until/unless I make the decision to return. If there was a way to avoid bumping this up to the top of the active list, I would do so.)

Also, even if I decide that the updated FAQ sufficiently addresses my concern for free expression, I do not plan to return until Monica's concerns are fully addressed. The way Stack Exchange treated Monica was shameful, and nothing less than a full and complete apology and retraction (including unconditional reinstatement) is sufficient to fix the harm caused to her. (Requiring her to reapply for mod status is not sufficient, for the reasons Monica explained: when you fire someone without cause, it is a further violation to require them to come to you hat in hand begging for readmission. The only honorable thing to do is to unconditionally offer them their job back. Anything short of that would fail to acknowledge that you did wrong. Since Monica did nothing wrong, Stack Exchange must treat her as if she did nothing wrong, by restoring the privileges that were unjustly taken away from her.)

Final update: After Monica settled her lawsuit against Stack Exchange, I decided I wouldn't be returning to Stack Overflow, because SE did not do the right thing. The right thing, as I said, would have been to unconditionally offer her her moderator status back. Instead, they asked her to go through the reinstatement process (controlled by some of the very people who fired her for no good reason in the first place) with no actual guarantee of getting her status back at the end of it. But that wasn't enough to make me update this question, thereby bumping it to the front page.

But the news that Shog9 has been fired (archive link in case that question gets deleted as so many other relevant questions have) is something I want to respond to. I did think that there were some people employed by Stack Exchange that needed to be fired for their abject mishandling of the situation, but Shog9 was NOT one of them. (I won't say whom I thought should have been fired; that would be pointless). Had Stack Exchange fired the right people, I might have come back. Since they've chosen to fire exactly the wrong people, it's clear to me that they have no clue about the actual cause of their problems, and therefore they're never going to solve them. Which means I won't be back, and this will be my final update. I'll spend my time working on Codidact instead, in the hope that when Stack Exchange inevitably goes under, there will be a place for the community to move to.

Answer 1

Instead of leaving, what you should — IMHO — do is:

1. Declare you reject the (new) CoC as coercive and inappropriate.
2. Ignore it in your SE activity

Don't leave — stay and fight!

And, let's be honest: By your rep, you seem to be a Stack Overflow user mostly. It's likely this whole "pronoun kerfuffle" won't actually come up anytime soon, if at all, in any of the questions you're involved in.

P.S. — Just to clarify — I'm not against personal pronoun choices (though not thrilled about the headache these might get me into), and I don't even know if you are; that's not really the point.

Answer 2

I can only wonder how many heads exploded on the english.stackexchange.com side...

In some cases, these "neo-pronouns" are just bad grammar. That is my position on this whole topic.

I am not by any means a linguistic expert. I have never posted attempted to answer anything on english.stackexchange.com. That said, I have traveled and had my share of high school English and Spanish. I was in Colombia last year, and tried explaining to some co-workers how this kind of was happening on campuses in the US. They thought I was making it up and that it was hysterical. You know, us crazy Americans and our first world problems.

And why wouldn't they? Spanish, like many European languages, is a Romance language. All the words have genders. How is this kind of thing supposed to work then? Does a non-binary person still drive un coche (a car)? Or should it be una coche? Do they eat in una cocina (a kitchen)? Or un cocino? Do you use los baños or las bañas? I wouldn't suggest trying to find out...

You may not know, but some people take their language seriously (grammar geeks). And they should. Language is an agreed upon system of communication used to convey thought. It has rules. It's how we first started passing on knowledge. Yes, it has and does change over time, but that is usually organic and not by political fiat.

In Spanish (as well as I understood it in high school, and recall some 20+ years later) if the gender of an object/word wasn't known, the rule was that you defaulted to the masculine. That wasn't to "mis-gender" or because the masculine was "better", or the feminine was "bad". It is because you need A default. As far as I ever knew, English had always been the same way. The bible doesn't refer to God with he/him/his because God was a man - God was supposed to be beyond that kind of concept. Those masculine pronouns were just the default.

Non-specific spouse #1 :

I talked to someone at the cable company about our lowering bill...

Non-specific spouse #2 :

What did he say?

There is nothing malicious there. Could they be used instead of he? Yes. Is it acceptable to use he when the gender of the person being referenced is not known? Yes.

Should this kind of thing get someone kicked off a platform? Should they be fined? Thrown in jail? Executed?

I guess for some people it's all of the above. For me it's none of the above.

As for spouse #1, I guess it depends on how much love there is for spouse #2.

Answer 3

Why leave? Some SE employees stated they'd be pleased with exactly that.

Sara Ownbey Chipps has retweeted

Reading comments on a blog post about a CoC:

If you’re against CoCs and to protest you’re leaving the community because the CoC has become more inclusive...

1. You identified yourself as part of the problem
2. You removed your problematic self from the community

... thank you?

Instead:

• stop contributing completely (including flags, reviews, etc)
• encourage other dissidents not to leave and to instead oppose unethical behavior with constructive criticism.

Answer 4

Respect goes both ways.

1. Anyone has the right to choose whichever gender they want and the right to ask people to address them with whichever pronoun they prefer.

2. Anyone has the right to not believe in the existence of certain genders and the right to refuse to address a person with the pronoun that person prefers.

This is what we do in all other situations. I work with people who believe in God while I don't and we get along fine. We are even friends. I play volleyball in a team with people who vote for political parties that I believe aim for the wrong goals. I'm vegan and yet I take care of my old parents who eat meat.

You are free and welcome to say what you like, and I am free to either comply with your wishes or not.

Answer 5

We coerce speech all the time and almost no one objects.

Stack Exchange, and indeed any polite community, compels many kinds of speech. This is good.

Simple example

A user who refuses to say "please" and "thank you" when appropriate (e.g. who insists on "Edit this to add an example!" instead of "Could you please edit this to add an example?") would probably have their posts edited against their will, may get banned, and certainly wouldn't be trusted to be a moderator.

Extreme example

Suppose a user refuses to believe women can program. If they believe a question was asked by a woman, they don't say "you can use jQuery" but "tell the man who wrote this code that he can use jQuery".

Faced with moderator warnings, they offer the following compromise: "the programmer who wrote this code can use jQuery", which does not explicitly claim that the programmer in question is a man; but they refuse to use any language that suggests they believe in female programmers.

It's clear that we would and should reject the compromise. The most sympathetic reaction such a user would get is "If you can't be polite to female users, please don't use the site"; the most common would be "What's wrong with you? Just say 'your code', she clearly wrote it!".

This example is intended to show the clearest-cut possible example of acceptable compelled speech, and is not intended to be realistic. Though I have in fact met people like this.

Historical example

In the early history of the US, many people supported race-based chattel slavery and considered doing so a deep and important part of their values. They claimed this was a religious duty imposed by their conscience. They thought of abolitionists as unreasonable fanatics.

I've been asked in several places to endorse a value statement containing platitudes like "We are all equal, regardless of race". If a time-travelling Alexander Stephens objected to such a demand on grounds of opposition to compelled speech/religious conscience/personal values, he would get no sympathy whatsoever.

Conclusions

There are a few grounds on which one can object to compelling this particular speech:

• Bite the bullet and oppose compelled speech in all cases, including for the anti-polite, sexist strawmen, and racists with TARDISes. This can be done, but must be defended: it's certainly not a widely accepted principle.
• Defend this particular objection on its own merits. It seems hard to do so without overt transphobia, but perhaps there is such an argument.
• Appeal to some norm that defines when it is and isn't okay to compel speech.
• Question Stack Exchange's authority to compel this particular speech: muddling between enforcing rules that society already agrees on vs picking a side in a current hot-button issue, or introducing division when they should maintain peace. This sounds like a fruitful line of argument.

But "It's compelled speech, therefore everyone reasonable can see it's bad" does not hold water.