I feel like this is an example of using weasle words.
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Original Question
I caught someone saying:
"From all the things they could choose to be interested about children and underage people in general, is very disturbing that they have chosen to be interested about what they do with their genitals."
This was in response to a story about gender affirming care being given to children, that other people have pointed out was a lie.
It's easy to assume that he is talking about the lgbtq community in his statement but now he claims:
First you say that I'm just meaning the whole trans community to then showing and remarking my comment where I say "they" and not "the whole trans community".
Is that the use of "they" as a weasle word?
Answers
1A writer could use the word "they" to be purposefully ambiguous about who they're referring to. But, they could also use it because they assume there's enough context that a reader would be able to discern who they're talking about. That is not always a correct assumption.
In this case, I don't think that they're using an ambiguous "they" as a weasel word to refer to the whole trans community, for two main reasons. First is that the initial comment was made in response to a story about gender affirming care for children. Maybe the story itself would give more context, but based on the summary, I think it would be reasonable to assume they were referring to people who promote or perform gender affirming care specifically. Second, after skimming this person's comments through the whole thread, they did seem pretty adamant that sweeping assumptions shouldn't be made about groups, and I didn't really see any indication that they were referring to trans people generally.
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