Simple and crucial
Excuse me?
The two halves of the tweet disagree with each other. The first two curt bossy sentences just issue an order, without of course any authority to do so. The rest of the tweet pretends to give reasons for the curt order.
First of all, it’s just gibberish. Bits of vocabulary aren’t “required.” What are they gonna do, arrest us? Give us an F? Sue us? Carve us up? They’re not in a position to tell us what words to use or else.
Second, pronouns, like verbs and nouns and prepositions and the like, are neither preferred nor required, they’re just part of language. Use them correctly if you want to be understood, use them creatively if you don’t care about being understood. Next question?
But the intent behind the absurd claim is less trivial. The intent is to bully us into submitting to a new and stupid ideology that says men can become women by saying they are women.
No.
Another org started specifcally to serve lesbian rights captured by the genderborg. I am also quite certain they will either follow with a tweet about the transphobe pile-pn, or complerely ignore the ratio.
When I first saw the large graphic in my Twitter feed, my first reaction was, “Ah, here’s someone pointing out the problem with preferred pronouns”. Then I read the tweet text and realised that this person actually seems to think that telling someone else what to do or how to think is a good thing.
Gast well and truly flabbered.
“Simple acts of kindness” aren’t required, and if your sense of self rests precariously on how others refer to you, you might have a psychological problem.
As I keep pointing out, there’s no serious ethical system that makes kindness an obligation or duty. I have to put the qualifier in there, because there are things like Care Ethics, which we’re supposed to pretend are serious, lest we reveal ourselves to be -ists & -phobes.
Do you keep pointing that out? I don’t seem to have picked up on it. (There’s a lot I don’t pick up on.)
It seems like double over-reach. One, you don’t want make too many things an obligation or duty because we’ll just say no, and two, “kindness” goes past justice or fairness and zooms right into personal territory. We don’t have to let strange men get naked in our living rooms and we don’t have to be “kind” to everyone.
I don’t remember whether I’ve explicitly and plainly stated so here. But I’ve said so many things and don’t want to be like my mother, who often tells me the same thing multiple times, that I effectively try to apologize for repeating myself. Even if I’m not sure I am.
And you’re right. It’s at least a double overreach. If kindness be sufficient to demand action, then our set of obligations grows without bound, as what is kind is partly subjective preference. And that’s granting that a particular thing is, in fact, kind and not merely asserted to be so.