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The Absolute Right to Choose Your Own Pronouns
I believe both in the right of individuals to express their personal pronoun preferences and in the right of other individuals to ignore them. It’s the same right in each case: the right of freedom of expression and it’s a right I hold dear.
I understand that some folks in the trans movement would like to tell other people which words they can and can’t use. I don’t approve of that, because I really do believe in freedom of expression: the same freedom that lets a guy put on a dress and say “I’m a woman” lets me chuckle and say, “yeah, no. But let’s agree to disagree.”
Live and let live. I know there are some men who like to dress up like women; there always have been. And I know there are people who are deeply confused about who and what they are. That’s too bad, but hardly new: troubled people have always been with us.
What is new, and what I can’t abide, is this insistence that I go along with their fantasy. Everywhere else we disagree in this wonderful country, we stop short of telling other people to use our words, to profess our beliefs. We let people think differently, and we tolerate their expression of their ideas, of their differences, even if we find them odd, off-putting, or offensive.
I believe that people are born either male or female and stay that way their whole lives, regardless of what they wear or what treatments they get. I think the trans movement is a silly often destructive fad and a way for people to avoid the stress of living up to their sex in a confused and sometimes challenging cultural climate.
But, as I said, I respect the right, if not necessarily the choices, of people to express themselves as they wish, while retaining my own right to choose the pronouns I’ll use when referring to them.
We don’t have to agree. We can just tolerate each other. I’m okay with that.
Published in Culture
You’re right. Nothing matters. Let’s just all keep our heads down.
Free speech matters. A lot. Bottom line.
One of our friends has a “daughter” whom they adopted as a boy. From an early age, he exhibited all the behaviors of a girl – toys, clothes, mannerisms.
She is an adult now, and quite attractive. Note I said “she”, and I don’t even know if she has had the final operation yet. I suspect so.
We ran into a transsexual at my wife’s high school reunion last year. Although the person was large in stature, her face and mannerisms were feminine enough where biological women wouldn’t run screaming from the ladies room if she entered. Heck, I’ve seen women in town who were very masculine looking.
The bottom line? LBGTs would get more support and acceptance if they weren’t beating people over the head with their endless quest to be called “normal”, and their desire to force feed LGBT education on our children, and re-education in the workplace.
Progressives are always selling the Emperor ‘s New Clothes, so they are constantly ready to attack and silence that proverbial little boy, the moment he opens his mouth to point out the Emperor is naked.
Unfortunately, if a conservative stands up to the progressives, the progs can always find a Never-Trumpy, Rob-Longy type of “conservative” to take their side “in this particular case”.
We should all wear socks with sandals in solidarity with freakish movements of the day. It doesn’t harm anybody. Don’t judge me!
I hear the next Super Bowl will include bunny slippers and Hello Kitty backpacks.
That’s a fait accompli.
I once wore socks with sandals. Our Genetics professor asked me to teach the lab one day when he had to be gone, so on campus that day I wore a jacket and tie with socks and sandals. There are people who won’t let me forget. I still don’t see what was wrong with it. I think that was my senior year; because Mrs R is one of those who remembers.
Names are arbitrary in the sense that, unlike sex, a person’s name really can be anything he or she wants it to be. It’s just a legal thing. I don’t consider it a confession of belief to use someone’s legal name, even if I think it is a silly legal name. But using the wrong pronoun would be, at least for me, a kind of confession of belief, and I won’t have such a confession forced from me.
I know some disagree, but I think this is a big deal. As I mentioned in the original post, it’s exceptional to insist that people use particular words to acknowledge things they believe to be untrue. Aside from all the social damage done by something as foolish as the trans movement, and I do think it is substantial, this forced confession aspect is unusual and disturbing, and I do think we should fight it. This is not a civil rights movement. This is compelled speech.
Henry, with respect, I find myself in disagreement with you about this. People are deliberately choosing bizarre names, and I do not have to go along with it. If I told you that I legally changed my name to “Your Holiness,” I hope you would say the same thing that Sarge said to “Psycho” in Stripes — “lighten up, Francis.”
(Coincidentally, my middle name actually is Francis.)
Henry, I don’t think that this is a small point. We have a malicious opposition that uses a claim to politeness as the mechanism for enforcing Newspeak. I respectfully dissent.
Except that we’ve trained our young people that being intolerant is wrong and must not be tolerated.
Oh, I get what you’re saying. And yes, it’s a problem. But the only response, I think, is to defy their demands and point out that tolerance goes both ways — and that it is not the same as approval.
Fair enough. We may draw lines in different places. I will use people’s legal names unless they’re offensive to me or ridiculously contrived. I draw my line at pronouns and other overt claims of sexual identity. If anyone feels less “woke” than me, I applaud them, and encourage them.
( I thought I’d already posted this here, but can’t find it. If I’m repeating myself, I apologize.)
Whether it’s the name given by one’s parents or the sex given by God, either way the person is grasping at a fantasy of self-creation; a disordered desire for total autonomy.
There are several respectable reasons people legally change their names. But if the reason is to pretend a sex change, the name is part of the lie. If I knew the person’s original name, that’s the one I would use.