Earning that pronoun
Laurie Penny. Good grief.
The stupidity takes my breath away. Not LP’s personal stupidity, necessarily, but the stupidity of this whole new Pronoun Doctrine, and weird baroque rationalizations of it like this.
No, she/they is not comparable to tu/vous. Referring to women as “she/her” is not formal or stiff – and it’s not familiar or forward, either. It’s just humdrum ordinary usage in languages that do that.
How did she get there? I suppose by thinking that the closer friends are to her, the more familiar they are with the fact that she has Special Bespoke ideas about her exciting fluid indeterminate interesting GenDer, and so they know they’re expected to create opportunities to refer to her (them) in the third person a lot so that she can be called Them a lot. Not the same as the tu/vous distinction at all.
But this idea that being referred to as she/her is something women have to earn with a lot of hard work…while at the same time thinking it’s something women are forbidden to think of as naming female people only…yep it takes my breath away.
In a few years she’ll be repudiating being a woman at all. She used to discuss interesting feminist issues. Then she started navel- gazing and now here we are. I don’t bother reading her articles anymore, because they’re not about women anymore.
I wonder if they think they can really make people not on Twitter believe that sex isn’t real.
I also want to know if the sexism Penny faces is magically going to disappear now she’s non-binary. Because it makes one wonder why women didn’t just make gender disappear, rather than bothering with gaining voting and civil rights.
Since they’ve only really gotten a minority of people who are on Twitter to believe that, I doubt they could possibly believe that unless they are more delusional even than I think they are. Shouting the loudest and patrolling Twitter for wrong-think to dogpile does not equate with truth or right ideas. No matter what, you still have to defend your position logically. Oh, and it would also help if they could come up with a coherent, consistent, non-circular definition of women that can include men and doesn’t violate biological reality.
I wish we could have Granfer Tom explain this to them.
Whathebloodyhellyeronaboutmate? Demsbeheifers.
Nobody “earns” the pronoun “she,” hard work or no. You get the pronoun “she” by being born female.
In some subcultures, the pronoun “she” is used otherwise, but they don’t get to make the rules for the rest of us.
Or by being a boat.
I do like the idea that some people earn the she pronoun with a lot of hard work. I must have been brilliantly precocious, a total prodigy – I’m sure my parents were calling me “she” on the day of my birth – “she’s such a lovely baby girl” and other such cooing statements referring to me as “she”.
“I want to keep using ‘she’ when it’s convenient, but drop it when it’s not.”
Reminds me of the TIMs who revert to their “male persona” when they’re job hunting or trying to get a leg up on something, but then put on lipstick and call themselves Roberta when it’s time to play. Penny must have noticed that women are unfairly privileged in feminism, so decided to keep the my-womanhood-as-oppressed-by-the-patriarchy aspect of her reputation for business, but throw it off when her reputation increases without it.
I wonder if she is not joking. It sounds like what might be a rather funny retort to something if we knew what that something was. It surely doesn’t come out of nowhere. What is the context? She ‘earned’ the pronoun ‘she’ by being born, and by being recognised as being of the sex she is (so she is surely not being serious about all that ‘hard work’); and then people who know her personally or are speaking to her in a non-professional setting may use ‘they’, but while she’s being a ‘Feminist in public’, the correct pronoun is ‘she’ – so turning the usual pattern that distinguishes between polite (plural) and intimate (singular) forms (‘thou’ – ‘you’; ‘tu’-‘vous’) on its head.
Tim,
She’s shown very little evidence of having a sense of humour lately.
Come to think of it, that’s supposed to be one of the first signs that someone has joined a cult, isn’t it? Sudden lack of a sense of humour, sudden skew in perspective on what’s important…
Well, I knew nothing about her, or them, before. If she, or they, is (are?) being serious, then she/ they’s certainly being remarkably silly. And, yes, I warmly agree, joining a cult does seem to involve the repudiation of any sense of humour. Should one use the singular form of the verb with ‘they’ in such a case, or the plural? It all becomes very complicated and unnatural, although of course nature seems to get lost in this sort of case. I am reminded of Gulliver at a loss in Laputa.