I'm in South Korea. We don't have many trans people here, the mainstream feminist movement is anti-trans, and most of the mainstream Christian movements are anti-LGBT. (My boss is Catholic.) Despite this, when we had a trans person visit my workplace ... absolutely nothing happened. They had lunch with us, nobody said anything about their gender, sexuality, or appearance, and they never mentioned it. Conversation was the same as for non-trans visitors.

Now, I don't know if this is because the people in my workplace are especially tolerant, if they were afraid of confrontation, or if they lacked a lens through which to interpret the visitor, but something sounds really weird to me about your workplace. Are the people in your region so vocally political as a matter of course? Are you in the bible belt? What does it mean to acknowledge the existence of a trans person?

From what I understand about SEA countries, they tend to not be rude upfront but will definitely discriminate later.

America is different. We do both.

I work for a company run by evangelical Christians, and this extends to probably 80% of the company. Certainly the only people taking about religion are the evangelicals. Management attends explicitly Christian "leadership retreats". Among other things, I would not be comfortable attending these events. Officially discussion of religion and and politics is discouraged. In practice that means the conservative culture warriors are vocal about whatever issue they're worked up about.

For the trans people I know, "acknowledge the existence of" them basically means to treat them according to their self-understanding as communicated to you. Usually that means using the name and pronouns that they identify with and not asking invasive questions. The idea is, roughly, that you are acknowledging that they - the person in front of you, a real physical body presented according to their self-understanding - exist. Dead naming or using a gender assigned at birth would imply that you are making their identity subject to your own model of the world, they're an abstract notion to you. Or, worse, that you are addressing a person that doesn't, in their conception, exist. It's imprecise language, perhaps, and not every person experiences it the same way.

Your second paragraph is a word salad and non-sequitur. Treating a human who claims they're a deer as a human isn't denying their existence.

No one in this thread is asking anybody to do that. I was responding to a question that was asked of me.

Treating a man who claims they're a woman as a man isn't denying their existence.

Frankly, none of what you said is relevant to my point. What I have a problem with is the immediate reversion to the most caustic framing possible of a person who disagrees with you.

> If a trans person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem

Maybe my problem with this is a semantic one, since I’m a student of language, but describing it in this way is legitimately insane to me. Insane in the sense that I don’t think the word “existence” is being used in a way that means what is meant by e.g. OP in this case.

"Insane" is a pretty charged word for a person deeply concerned about jumping to the most caustic framing possible.

I can't say that I know how every person means the things they say, but "my existence is political" is a relatively common statement, and I have never understood it to strictly mean that "I am alive subject to political whims." Every time I've encountered it the person saying it described how the mere act of being somewhere was enough to get people unhappy with them or to make someone else feel threatened. That regardless of what they did they were treated like a threat.

> I can't say that I know how every person means the things they say, but "my existence is political" is a relatively common statement…

This is in fact not a common statement, and is only found in select coastal cities with high populations of people who have elite educations. More than half of the country has no idea what you’re talking about.

So have you encountered this phrase before or not? If not, why are you so confident that the person you are talking to is the exemplar of some hyperbolic, overreactive activist and not, say, someone talking about an experience you are unfamiliar with? Why do you assume there is a fixed, single meaning to a word or phrase when, simultaneously, you understand that other people may have no idea what it means?

GP said it's not a common statement, not that they haven't encountered it before.

The issue is that it’s possible for that person to not “be political”, even typical in large parts of the world, so if the person thinks they always are, they’re not seeing correctly. Insane is way too strong a term but such a person does risk their misperception harming relationships and wasting good opportunities.

Sure. A person's existence may "be political" in certain spaces and not others, and it is helpful and necessary to be able to sort out where your existence challenges other people, whether it should, and whether you are projecting undue fears onto other people based on a biased history or an unexamined worldview. It is further useful to examine your worldview to understand what is fundamental to your self-understanding and to your beliefs. Sometimes you write a sign or a headline and it doesn't include the nuance that you exhibit in the world around you.

If you "are not political" in a space it is because you do not challenge it, either because you agree with the existing culture or norms or have decided that it is not worth the cost of doing anything about it. If someone else does challenge those norms or that culture, they become political, but if that comes from something that is fundamental to their identity their choices are to either suppress that part of themselves to fit in or to stick out, "be political", and experience whatever reactions to that challenge.

My claim, here, is that creating workplaces that "are not political" is a way of enforcing the authority of people who already have it, and encouraging people not to challenge what they may see as unethical or inequitable practices in a business or other organization. It is a form of authoritarianism, soft-sold under the guise of civility.

I understand. The trick is that a person can believe and practice all that and still not actually be any sort of meaningful political or ethical challenge to their coworkers, even though they imagine so. Leaving the only available challenge to be trying to work with someone who doesn’t understand themselves or their environment.

Companies are publicly committing to a priori support of one or the other of the conflicting views rather than do the more difficult work of helping someone get past this, in the US, but in other parts of the world it seems possible for culture to exert itself and heal the misperception over time.

If a conservative person walked into my office their existence would be a political problem, because none of my coworkers or company leadership accept the legitimacy of conservatism. It isn't that the person's physical safety is in danger (necessarily), but merely being present makes them the subject of politics. And those politics are generally hostile. I have a conservative friend who was qualified for an open position, and I asked her about it, but it was clear there was no way she would even be applying.

Now, I'm thousands of inches away from Silicon Valley, in a much larger town than most posters here. But I think this kind of thinking is toxic wherever you work. If you push out anyone who might challenge the structure (formal or informal) of your company without taking a good look at who that structure is serving, you're going to reject a lot of good people. And you're going to reinforce any existing biases already in the company.