Call me them
What happened to the whole idea that it’s a mistake to spend too much time thinking about yourself instead of everything else there is to think about? That idea does exist, doesn’t it? I didn’t imagine it?
Normally we think people who go on and on and on about themselves are boring, yes, but worse than that, they’re…well, the obvious: they’re self-obsessed. It’s bad to be self-obsessed. We used to know that, didn’t we? What happened to that?
Behold: from Science Mag: Why I came out as nonbinary to my Ph.D. lab
Who cares?
The illustration nails it:
Yes, every bit as smug as that.
But maybe the content is better than the title would lead you to expect?
No.
My hands shook as I sat down to write the email. “I wanted to let y’all know that I use they/them/theirs pronouns,” I typed. “I know that gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns are not a common staple in our language, but I ask that you please do your best to respect them.” Proclaiming my identity—one I had still not quite figured out yet—to a group of co-workers made me feel incredibly vulnerable. But I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my labmates, no matter how scared I was. After a few anxious moments, I clicked “send.”
“Their” hands shook as “they” sat down to tell “their” colleagues to go to the trouble of remembering that “they” must be spoken of in a tiresomely non-intuitive way that will take extra effort and attention to remember to use.
“They” should have just cut to the chase and said “Dear co-workers I ask that you please pay much more attention to me than you do to everyone else, because I alone am Special.”
And what does telling co-workers to waste their attention on remembering to refer to Someone Special by Special Pronouns have to do with surviving graduate school?
Never mind all that, the point is paying extra attention to Them.
During the months leading up to graduate school, I had been exploring the idea of using gender-neutral pronouns. I didn’t know whether they’d suit me; I just knew the words “she” and “woman” didn’t feel quite right when they were used to describe me.
Pronouns aren’t supposed to “suit” people, they’re not shoes or a haircut, they’re just a shortcut in talking about other people without saying their names every time, that’s all.
There’s a lot more fragile self-absorbed drivel after that; I can’t face reading all of it. What will these people be like in 20 years?
I hear you, Ophelia. There is a stunning amount of narcissism and self-involvement in thinking you deserve to control what pronouns people use to talk about you amongst themselves when you’re not even there.
Even the kids in Gen X who grew up being told they were special and getting trophies whenever they even swung a bat aren’t that lost in themselves.
How have we gotten so far away from reason? From perspective? Why does everybody need to feel so special?
The article continues:
“…the 6 [shouldn’t that be spelled, since it is under 10?. anyway] months that have passed since [I sent the email] haven’t always been easy. The word ‘she’ has slipped out in conversations more times than I can count, and every time, it feels like a knife is being stabbed into my stomach. Whether malicious or accidental, the impact is always the same: I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become. After one particularly tough week, I cried in the bathroom and left early.”
Oh my barfing tripe. Me. Me. ME. ME. MMMEEEEEEEEE.
I remember years ago having an appointment with a friend to paint an apartment. On the day of the appointment, this friend came out to my eventual spouse as a lesbian. Me future-betrothed called me to break the news, and I responded, “Good for her. Can she still paint?”
How long before this fragile flower starts policing the speech of others, compelling compliance from them on pain of being disciplined, removed from the lab, or expelled altogether?
There are a few people in my social circle who are self-centered and self-obsessed. I’m not close to these people, so I mostly don’t care. But there have been some occasions in recent years where, for various reasons, I have had to engage directly with them. It gave me a new and more literal understanding of the phrase “self-conscious”.
These people are constantly, intensely aware–conscious–of themselves. It’s all they think about. I find them tiresome and annoying, but I at least have the option of leaving the room. They can’t. They’re stuck with themselves. I have to say that I have some empathy for them. It must be miserable to live that way.
I’m sure most people who have actually been stabbed with a knife in the stomach would gladly trade that experience for having someone use a different pronoun to refer to them.
And it isn’t even about mocking or ridiculing, just talking normally and using a grammatically correct pronoun. How dare these people just speak English.
If your sense of identity is so fragile that even an accidental slip of the tongue can shatter it….
How does one tell that a random person is nonbinary? Because of the lack of markers of nonbinariness, there’s basically no way for a random person to know you’re a “they”, so this “misgendering” will necessarily happen ALL THE TIME if third person pronouns are being used.
And if this “misgendering” really does feel to you like a stab in the stomach … well, you’re going to have a really hard time living your best life due to all of these imaginary slights against your identity. And they are imaginary – they’re 100% in your head and not anything a typical speaker of English is trying to do to you.
Funny thing is … I’ve been “misgendered” before. I found it amusing. But this was back in the 1990s before everyone had lost their damned minds about this gender stuff.
So at the beginning she I’M SO SORRY they wasn’t weren’t sure “they” would suit them (her, not those other them), and a few paragraphs later she I’M SO SORRY they is are feeling stabbed in the stomach when the “they” is not vouchsafed.
I tell you what, I’m glad I don’t have to work with this narcissistic pill.
Oh, dear.
As originally conceived, the way I understand it, the purpose of a “trigger warning” was a courtesy to others who have suffered serious trauma, “Be prepared: difficult material ahead.” A victim could have a moment to steel themselves to handle the difficult or disturbing material, not to avoid it altogether. It was not intended to prevent anyone from being exposed to anything disagreeable. Similarly, a “safe space” was intended to be one small space where a traumatized person could go to recover, until they feel ready to go out into the world again. It was never intended to make the world a “safe space,” where nothing traumatizing is ever allowed to happen or even be talked about.
It’s so inside out and upside down.
This is of a piece with the bastardization and hijacking of what was originally intended as a courtesy to people who had genuinely been hurt: e.g., combat veterans or rape victims. Now gender warriors want to claim victimhood and demand kid-glove treatment when their trauma is either self-inflicted or imaginary.
It’s so infuriating and so ho-hum at the same time.
One of the popular reasons given by those who support the right of the transgender to identify out of their biological sex is that doing this helps to lessen the tight grip conservatives and the religious have on policing gender. The belief that boys-should-be-masculine and girls-should-be-feminine can’t take hold if there’s no longer a clear-cut binary between who’s a boy and who’s a girl. Transgenderism liberates not just individuals but the entire culture from sexism. We are no longer bound by our sex!
But this is the result. It is so, so, so critically important that you’re a boy —or a girl — or neither — that even the most casual slip-up in how you’re recognized leaves you bleeding. “I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.” The person they worked “long and hard to become” is not a wiser person, or a kinder one, or one with talents and skills and character. It’s one that fits into whatever gender box they feel drawn to. And this gender- person doesn’t exist without other people acknowledging it. There’s no resilience.
I have trouble understanding how so many intelligent people think this sort of thing eliminates sex-based boundaries and liberates people to be ‘who they are.’ That would surely involve placing an emphasis on personality instead of gender by limiting sex to biology. It’s as if they just looked at what pisses off conservatives and the religious — gender nonconformity, same-sex attraction — and decided that transgenderism is equally progressive because that, too, pisses them off. Let’s do that and watch them squirm!
Another trait of the self-absorbed teenager.
You know, when I was growing up in the age of SexandDrugsandRocknRoll, to be gender fluid, or non binary, was to be bisexual. Men or women, didn’t matter, if Bi was your thing. But you still remained a man or a woman.
Here’s another snowflake, this time a woman pretending to be a man.
That’s right, its all about Dr Anne (Yves) Rees and all those other sad, tragic, suffering, trans.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/debate-on-transgender-issue-has-one-thing-missing-20201207-p56l9i.html
Free to read.
#12
*gasp*
People expressed opinions on current political matters! IN PUBLIC!
Of course, it is about us, at least if “us” includes women who are now playing sports against men, who are using the bathroom alongside men, who are sharing rooms with men in women’s shelters, who are expected to tell their trouble to male counselors. Just because this man says he is a woman, we have to accept his body shoved into our spaces.
So, yeah, it is about us. It’s about a creepy male showing young girls how to insert tampons (the ultimate mansplaining?). It’s about a dangerous male rapist housed with female prisoners. It’s about men taking jobs on a women’s short list, and awards for women’s literature and women’s art. It’s about being called uterus-havers and front-holes and not-men. It’s about men stealing the very words we use to describe ourselves, and not allowing us to use them anymore.
It sure the hell is about us…but entitled transgender identified males cannot see that, nor can their female (or male) allies who have drunk the KoolAid.
Oh, lort, my granny would have laughed herself silly at that. Her hands shook, did they? My grandmother’s hands probably shook a bit as she was fleeing from Soviet bombing in the dark of the fucking night, I imagine. I don’t imagine that she complained about it, though because “pronouns” don’t fucking matter. At all. Maybe my mother’s hands shook as she was separated from her family and they were trucked off to temporary housing while she was forced to stay in a hospital among people who did not speak her language, because she’d picked up measles somewhere on the trip and was forcibly quarantined away from everything and everyone that she knew. The sad snowflake-ism of people these days never fails to make me laugh.
Ahem. My apologies for the swearing on your wall, Ophelia. I guess that I have some strong opinions on this matter.
Roj Blake#12
Dr Yves Rees: ‘ We don’t need cis-splainers to speak on our behalf; we’re more than capable of doing that ourselves – if only we could be given the time of day. Buy our art, boost our voices, hire us. Sit back and listen. We have important things to say.’
Well, why not say something important instead of complaining about terfs & ‘cis-plainers’? I, for one, should really like to hear a trans-person speak seriously on the matter instead of merely reciting the usual litany of complaints and talking-points that seems to be de rigueur.
sub
How does this person have any mental energy left to do actual graduate research? We only have a finite amount of time in the day, and a finite amount of attention to pay; how can this person be competitive in a demanding field when using up so much of this finite attention on self-obsession?
They has pluralized so they is a group of narcissists now. I take it they is not an English major.
Repeating Sastra @ 10 with added emphasis:
The person they worked “long and hard to become” is not a wiser person, or a kinder one, or one with talents and skills and character. It’s one that fits into whatever gender box they feel drawn to. And this gender- person doesn’t exist without other people acknowledging it. There’s no resilience.
“I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.”
How can you ‘become’ in this way? I am a bit long in the tooth now, but even in my mis-spent youth I should not have been able even to begin to think in these terms. All human beings are astonishingly complex, nobody really knows who, intrinsically, they are because your self is not something that exists in some pristine and well-locked little box inside you, and that might be changed by some effort of the will (who changes who?), but is in a state of constant flux & creation through your relationships with others, with society, and with the wider world, with things that are beyond your control. I find in this sort of statement the long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity, with its insistence on willed belief, and the whole Western insistence on achieving things through force of ‘will’, a mostly meaningless concept whose existence and nature are assumed and never examined. What these people work ‘so hard and long to become’ is in fact a caricature, not a person.
Aw yes. Well spotted.
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