Wasting time
Well I’ll just have to give you the whole sequence. It’s too maddening and too illustrative to condense.
The woman at the end on the right gets up and talks to The Misgendering Criminal to explain where he went so very wrong. Many silent seconds elapse while she informs him of this utter bullshit. He then says he’s been informed, but in doing so he commits the crime again, and then again. Why does he do this? Is he a wicked brute who enjoys making non-binary colleagues storm out of the room?
We can hear why he does it – it’s because it’s natural. It’s ingrained. It’s ordinary language. We’ve all been steeped in it from infancy. It takes a massive mental effort to remember to do something different for this one boring self-obsessed time-wasting fool. That’s the point of the Specialty Pronouns: to force everyone to lavish extra attention and effort on gender narcissists. It worked beautifully here – all those minutes squandered on this one guy who, I think we can safely assume, otherwise has nothing that would hold the attention of a deeply bored person waiting for a bus that’s an hour late.
He shouldn’t be deeply sorry, or shallowly sorry either. He shouldn’t waste half a second on the factitious emotions of this goon.
Although I would prefer not to indulge these narcissists at any time, in the spirit of fairness I have decided that they can have several days a year when it is absolutely mandatory for other people to use their preferred pronouns, to keep them happy. Since they can accuse people of misgendering them on these dates, and throw as big a tantrum as they wish, they agree that at no other time can they insist on custom pronoun use by other people.
These Mandatory Custom Pronoun Use Days are:
February: 30th and 31st
April: 31st
June: 31st
September: 31st
November: 31st
Indeed. As I’ve said before, the whole point of pronouns, and in fact grammar in general, is to lessen the mental effort of both speaker and listener by providing packages of predictable or easily recoverable information, so that they can focus on important and/or new information. It keeps us from having to say something like “Person-who-is-speaking in-the-past go direction-of generic-store additional-information in-the-past buy bread-referred-to-by-pointing-gesture” instead of “I went to the store and bought this bread.”
This focus on pronouns defeats the purpose of pronouns.
It has occurred to me that presenting as ‘non-binary’ offers a splendid mechanism for reliably stimulating anger rushes. As I understand it there is not necessarily anything in a ‘non-binary’ person’s self-presentation to warn or remind an interlocutor to ‘affirm’ their special ‘identity’.
Innnnteresting.
Anger rushes are also somewhat aversive though, no?
[Interjection – spellcheck doesn’t recognize “aversive.” Come ON.]
Especially if they’re constant? Anger is quite tiring and jittery-making. Maybe we can hope that eventually it will all just become too exhausting.
“When someone asks you
(1) to respect them as a human being
(2) and as an individual
(3) and to not misgender them…”.
One of those things is not like the others….
[…] a comment by Night Crow on Wasting […]
It’s (normally) a response to an aversive stimulus… but in itself? Not necessarily…I mean, it’s like any other emotional response. To over-simplify the issue: some people enjoy adrenaline rushes and actively seek out “thrills” to induce such rushes; other people find that feeling aversive and actively try to avoid any risky situations (with plenty of room in between the extremes, too).
I too find extended anger exhausting, not to mention unproductive. But it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that some people actually find it rewarding… and I’m definitely convinced that some people would find it “better than feeling how I feel when I’m not angry”.
Ya that makes sense. And I suppose I spend too much time being remotely angry (as opposed to shouting in someone’s face) to think I find anger of all kinds aversive.
tigger, I presented your proposal to my husband. He is definitely in. Just tell us where we can sign the petition. ;-)
At the risk of crossing meme streams, it’s like SIWOTI in real life, with everyone knowing full well whether or not you are a dog.
Well, if we can assign Mandatory Custom Pronoun days to dates that don’t exist, I propose the following ammendments.
As genderists are quite happy to trans people from history, I suggest that a large proportion of MCP days by assigned to dates that have already passed. Like October 18, 1387. If you missed it, too bad. You had your chance. Another block could be assigned to dates in the far future that have yet to happen. so mark April 10, 6432 on your calendars! Save the date!
Extra bonus points for using complex, obscure, or defunct calendar systems to calculate these “special” days. Say the Mayan calendar, with its Long Count, Tzolkin, and Haab cycles, which operate simultaneously; by the time everyone else has figured out what date it is in our currency, it’ll have passed. Or perhaps they can be determined using the annual and daily cycles of other planets or moons of our solar system, with the additional stipulation that the MCPs are to be celebrated solely on the planet or moon in question.