Xref: utzoo news.admin:3030 misc.legal:5271 soc.women:11980
Path: utzoo!utgpu!utfyzx!oscvax!lsuc!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!bbn!rochester!ur-tut!giaccone
From: giaccone@ur-tut (Tony Giaccone)
Newsgroups: news.admin,misc.legal,soc.women
Subject: Re: Proposed lawsuit
Message-ID: <2306@ur-tut.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 18-Jul-88 10:56:03 EDT
References: <12165@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <6278@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <12180@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: giaccone@tut.cc.rochester.edu.UUCP (Tony Giaccone)
Organization: Univ. of Rochester Computing Center
Lines: 35
Summary: Be Carful!

In article <12180@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> era1987@violet.berkeley.edu writes:
>In article <6278@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> peter@athena.mit.edu (Peter J Desnoyers) writes:
>>Who is this MES person? Why does (sexual term) get so ****ed off when people
>>refer to (sexual term) by feminine pronouns?
>
>Pretending you know my sex but don't know my name is an
>interesting ploy to violate my rights yet again.  I am a person,
>a human being, a citizen, and my name is Mark.  Do you call everyone
>named Mark by diminutive pronouns, or are you doing it only to
>treat me differently from other people similarly situated, on the
>basis of my sex?  If you're not an attorney, or law student, have
>somebody explain that last statement to you, while I add you to the
>list of named defendants.
>

Now maybe I've seen too much television law, and maybe I just have a screwed
up notion of how things work in our legal system, but shouldn't we be
treating this proposed lawsuit a little more seriously?  Maybe all you folks 
out there, who are more familiar with the law, or more familiar with Mark's 
postings, have a better idea what's going on here.  However, I'd feel a lot 
better about this whole thing if someone with some real legal expertise gave 
us his/her opinion on the status of such a suit.

After all it seems likley that even if this suit has no justification* at all,
that just filing it could cause us all some trouble.  After all legal
harassment seems to be all the rage these days. What about it folks, anyone
out there care to render an informed opinion.


					Tony

*It hardley seems that Peter is being overtly sexist in refering to Mark as
her, when it's obvious that Mark's sex is female, and given common usage the
word "her" seems appropriate.  I hardley think that this instance is grounds 
to include Peter in the suit, then again what do I know.