I can’t help but think of the “reasonable person standard” under the law, which is an important underlying legal concept in the U.S. common law system. This idea is crucial to offenses base in negligence under tort law (torts are about civil legal violations where liability means the defendant pays money to the plaintiff if found liable as opposed to criminal legal violations subject to the criminal justice system).

The “reasonable person standard” is the idea that behavior that would not offend a reasonable person cannot be actionable. Not to be confused with the doctrine of the “eggshell plaintiff,” which is that the pre-existing frailty of a plaintiff is not a defense to liability and does not mitigate damages. The latter means that if you hit someone with brittle bone disease or hemophilia with your car because you were driving negligently, you’re liable for the damage that actually results from that even if it’s far beyond what the results would be for the average person (since the average doesn’t have those conditions). You injure the fingers of a professional concert pianist? You’re liable for the consequential damages that factor in the injury you caused to their ability to earn a living if they now can’t play in some major concert. You take your plaintiff as you find them, as they say.

But the difference here is that in order to be liable, you have to be violating some duty of care. The hypersensitivity around stupid stuff like pronouns is essentially imposing a duty of care on people that did not exist before under the law and in society and that doesn’t seem like a natural development but rather some externally forced system of control from the top down that is at odds with reality and is counter to human beings coexisting peacefully in society because it is imposing on human beings a legal and moral responsibility for every other human being’s feelings. It’s making us all have to be therapists and manage the trauma of others and prioritize everyone else’s feelings ahead of our own. And it is preventing ordinary interactions between people because no one wants to be canceled and everyone is on edge as to people being out to get them.

Or it is alternatively creating an intentional tort out of ordinary human communication and otherwise mundane momentary interactions like the hourly workers dealing with the MtF meltdowns. To commit a legal act of negligence, you must owe the victim some duty of care. To commit an intentional tort like intentional infliction of emotional distress you have to perform an intentional act that is considered outrageous conduct. “Outrageous conduct” has always been a very high standard that ordinary sexual harassment and nonconsensual sexual touching has famously failed to meet (e.g., Paula Jones v. Bill Clinton). But now using sex-based pronouns for everyone is being considered outrageous conduct. And using sex-based pronouns for everyone is apparently something that we are saying a reasonable person would get upset about.

Would an actual reasonable person get upset that you assumed their sex based pronouns based on their visible sex? No, but under the law, the standard is a “reasonable person in like circumstances” and so it becomes a question of what circumstances can you factor in. They’re making the standard “someone who claims to have some gender identity regardless of any changes they’ve made to their body or lives” and basically saying that it’s reasonable for someone like that or even a Yaniv type person to be offended by use of their sex-based pronouns.