Asking deeper questions
On pronouns:
If it’s all well-intentioned then why should we not adopt the pronoun game as a universal custom? There are several reasons why I believe we should not: because it undermines self-confidence and resilience by asserting that one’s self-concept is rightly dependent upon external-validation, it endorses and encourages narcissistic behavior, and it creates a world of bizarre and unnecessary confusion for children around the topics of sex and gender. Put simply: it does more harm than good both to those it seeks to aid and everyone else.
Especially everyone else, and there are a lot more of us, and we’re not the ones making bizarre demands to change the language in order to “center” us.
Why are we not asking deeper questions about what is happening here? If some individuals are unhappy enough with their secondary sexual characteristics that they engage in a radical form of self-rejection through a spectrum of cosmetic and medical interventions, and require consistent affirmation from others in order to complete the illusion that their mental health will suffer… is pretending to see what they want us to see really helping them to become healthier and happier or is it merely an act of codependency which enables dysfunction and fosters fragility?
Good question. I suppose that’s why the issue has been (forcibly) made so political as opposed to psychological. If it’s political it’s about what everyone else does, and it can be enforced via bullying and expelling and firing. If it’s psychological it’s about what the “trans” person does, and there’s nothing to enforce on everyone else. Telling everyone else what to do is fun.
By teaching people to dictate how others speak about them in the third person, we are also coaching them to adopt narcissistic traits such as interpersonally exploitative behavior (I am using you as a mirror to reflect the image of myself I wish to see), entitlement (you owe it to me to affirm what I say), lack of empathy (I don’t care what you really think/feel), and arrogance (I demand that you bend to my will or I will say you are harming me).
Truth. I wish more people would point that out. This is where much of the confusion about “transphobia” comes in, I think. It’s not phobia of the trans part, it’s phobia of the narcissism and entitlement and arrogance.
This is good stuff! But you neglected to link to the source — I want to read it all!
Oops!
Added.
(For when I forget, or others do, you can usually find the source by typing a distinctive few words from a quoted passage into Google between ” “.)
“Why are we not asking deeper questions about what is happening here?”
Because the human species is in deep overshoot, and the implications of it are too terrible to contemplate, so we have all lost our minds:
“The election was stolen!”
“Lesbians have penises!”
“Net zero by 2050!”
“Don’t say gay!”
“Transwomen are women!”
“Global warming is a scam!”
“Ivermectin works!”
“This is their new hoax!”
Better that than 9 billion people cannot possibly live on renewables, 2 degrees C global temperature rise is baked in, and world oil production peaked in November 2018.
Better contemplate goddamned pronouns.
There’s also the question of people’s motives. Your sex, like your age or your height, are just material facts about who you are, and there’s nothing you can do to change them. You have to accept them as givens. I can understand a man dressing and acting as if he were younger, or a woman wearing platform shoes and vertical stripes to make herself look taller, but everybody knows they aren’t truly changing their age or their height. And I can see people wishing they truly were younger or taller, or for that matter, older or shorter. But to insist that you really are a different age or height and demand that everyone else agree with you, is to insist that no one ask any questions about why you might be doing this.
If a teenager produced a fake ID and insisted she was really 21 years old, the first thing we’d do is speculate as to why she’s insisting she’s older than she is. We wouldn’t stop and ponder the complexities of quantum physics and how Einstein proved that time is relative and therefore everybody’s age is in some way subjective and self-determined so who are we to say she isn’t really 21 after all. No! We’d say, obviously this girl wants to buy alcohol or to get into bars and clubs that she’s too young to attend.
If a middle-aged man suddenly declared that he’s really 13 years old and tried to join the Boy Scouts, you’re damn right we’d be speculating about his motives, and rightly so.
The rigid enforcement of pronouns isn’t just about being kind to people; it’s also about insisting that we all collectively never ask any questions about why anyone might insist they’re not the sex that they are. That can be a cover for internalized homophobia or other mental health problems, and surely it’s not kind to turn a blind eye to such things. But when men insist that they’re literally women, and especially when they demand that no one ask any questions about why they’re saying they’re women, that in itself presents plenty of very good and very obvious reasons for women to want to know what those men’s motives are.
Thank you for bringing attention to that post! It articulates very clearly my feelings about TRA arguments. Saved in case I need to quote it to my employer or, more likely, my union… we’re not quite there yet, and I hope it won’t come to that here, but we’re getting dangerously close, and I don’t seem to have the right vocabulary to deal with some of my coworkers in other fields :-/
It puts people in a quandary, especially for those who have been asking the deeper questions and getting the response of “Because, that’s why!”
I am getting involved in politics again and last night the central committee met for the firt time with new officers. And of course, the introduction round included a request for pronouns. I knew the pronouns for each attending person and I and two other people did not provide pronouns in our intro.
So, the question on my mind was whether or not I start with a treatise on pronouns, or do I establish myself in the group first and then start revealing my GC stance. Someone on the party needs to start the pushback, I know, but if I’m marked as a hater the second I join will I have any influence? People will know when we talk one on one, or if they google my name.
I’ve got a mission and that is to get back to a position of influence (minor as it was,) because there are many issues that I feel need to be discussed. If I get marked now, then I get nowhere. But is that cowardly?
I’m still trying to figure that out.
There was one “They/them.” Had a green streak dyed in thems hair.
“Had a green streak dyed in thems hair” would make a nice line in a song.
I’ve seen more and more people adding pronouns to sigs and profiles. So far none have surprised me.
On the other hand, a Facebook friend recently copypasted a rant about “transphobia”, and announced that it’s not ok to be “transmisogynistic”. I had no desire to get into an argument with her, so I just had that particular post hidden. A couple of days later she put up a post about her teenage daughter, referring to her in the third person plural. I don’t recall my friend ever doing that before, so I took the one-two post as something of a coming out.
My husband has started searching playbills for “they/them”s in the cast and crew. We find at least one in every play we attend, if it is a theatre that includes bios. Some don’t. So far the only theatre we’ve been to that hasn’t had a they/them in the cast is in Grand Island, NE. I expect that won’t be long.
Theatre is at least as far gone as Hollywood; probably further. They have been on board before there was a bandwagon.
Why doesn’t that surprise me?
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that I never give a single thought about how people might speak about me when I’m not there. In my experience, either it’s really futile and I should not care the least, or it is wrong or insulting and in this case I should not care neither. Seriously, why on earth should I care?
I do not care in general because, as sad as it is, I’m not that important. I know I used to regard importance as a major component of one’s success in life, of course when I was a teen and a young adult –naive days, but now I’m really happy at middle age to be anonymous and thinking that I should be important was the actual mistake of young age, not the fact that I failed becoming ‘Someone’.
So here we are. I wrote three paragraphs only about me me me. This is a bit shameful, but at least I see that one can be egocentric/narcissistic enough without any need to poison the well for others.
You’re forgiven, Laurent.
It seems like you’ve figured out adulthood.
It’s only two paragraphs though! You can’t count the third one where you’re talking about the others, that’s cheating.
He’s French. We have to give him allowances.
The others are my pronouns… :-)