Funny kind of “health education”
First it’s the pretend-police, now it’s the NHS.
Why not try fucking right off.
To elaborate a little, because there is no such thing as “cisgender people” and because all this noise about “misgendering” and “your pronouns” is just a way to force us to pay more and more and more attention to a tiny set of people who want all the attention in the universe and beyond. That’s why not.
Why do I get the feeling that whoever at the NHS posted this might be more inclined to seek the advice of a functional based medicine practitioner about their intuitive fasting healing regime than the guy who responded to Gwyneth Paltrow?
I’ll bet “them” $5 that misgendering is not, in fact, “one of the most common unintentional blunders made by cisgender people”. My money’s on accidentally hitting “reply to all”. [I’m “cisgender” and I’ve certainly done that way more than misgendering anyone except, possibly, cats.]
Someone misgendered my cat today!
Definite proof that misgendering is the most common Literal Violence(TM)* and happens way more than replying to all.
* Actually, vets misgender her all the time. She is quite fierce. Does that make her gender non-conforming or is she a tomcat inside?
Latsot — she wouldn’t be a calico by any chance? Around here we have a saying, “calico attitude”.
No, she has no fancy breed or lineage.
But this is the sort of thing the vet has to contend with: https://t.co/puwMbS6vSV
Isn’t “misgendering” calling a man a woman?
Holy shit! That’s one ray of fucking sunshine, latsot. If I hear that Satan’s short of a demon I’ll know where to send him.
People often mis-gender my dog. Apparently it’s because he looks too pretty to be male, so despite the fact that he is uniquely blessed in a highly visible way (seriously, more than 4 inches of snow and there’s a set of pawprints with a ploughed line running between them) I always being asked ‘her’ name, breed (Border collie/Welsh corgi mix, full-blooded terriorist) and so-on.
Fumny, but he really doesn’t seem to give a toss. Not at all woke, my mutt.
Calico isn’t a fancy breed – it’s what we in the British Isles call tortoiseshell-and-white.
Diawl! (Welsh for ‘the devil!’) This mealy-mouthed talking down that is so constantly used nowadays not only sets my teeth on edge but makes me feel nauseous, just as Hershey’s chocolate does. Hershey-speak. It is very much haut en bas, letting you know that you are thoroughly inferior and thick as a brick whereas the calm, enlightened speaker knows it all and wants to let you know they know it all while you bloody well don’t. I came across this attitude when I was, I think, five years old, and it infuriated me so much I have never forgotten it. I was sent to Sunday School to improve my morals and get me, along with my sisters, out of the house. We were divided into groups according to sex (I shan’t say gender), and on one occasion when we little boys were seated on the floor in a circle round a particularly unctuous teacher, for whom I had held a particular dislike from our first encounter, she told us the story of the young Jesus saying to his mother, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ at the party at Cana, after the wine ran out. I found this a pleasantly shocking and salutary tale and resolved to keep it in mind (I had a difficult character from even before birth, but I shan’t get into that). But then the teacher, employing her most Hershey-esque tones, went on to tell us, ‘Now, it was all right for Jesus to say that to his mummy, but you little boys must never say that to your mummies.’ I at once thought, ‘Why can’t I say that sort of thing to Mummy? They say Jesus is the best man in the world. Why can’t I do what he did?’ That was the beginning of the disenchantment of my mind from the entanglements of religion, and with those of the Christian religion in particular.
…Speaking of misgendered cats, one of my wife’s two [fixed] boy-cats was a black siamese-mix named Sheba. Flo wasn’t quite clear on cat anatomy at the time of adoption and pet names tend to stick.
Sheba continued to confuse folks — through his long and tough life, he would cycle between a very svelte, er starvling, 10 pounds and a very porky 15. Each time his girth became obvious, neighbors would ask us if we knew our cat was pregnant…
AoS: I have the matched pair for your dog then… she’s a dark pug cross and thus too ugly to be female XD
As to the pronoun lists… I can’t but help see it as super obnoxious from most people: it amounts to either empty virtue signalling or “My pronouns are exactly what you’d expect, you weirdo, neener neener neener”. If it ever comes to being required at work, I fully intend to list mine as “you/we”, as those are the only pronouns anyone should be using to refer to me when I’m within earshot… and everyone may of course use “Dr. MyName” if they’re in desperate need of using the third person.
AoS@7:
You have no idea! I’ve been following latsot on twitter for some years, and I have watched him go from a vibrant, engaged, active chatter to a downtrodden shell of a man under the iron boot-paw of Fortran. It’s a sight to behold. Fortunately, he tweets the latest adventures fairly regularly, and they are highly amusing. I recommend a follow. Two thumbs up, ten stars out of ten, would follow again.
ibbica, if they make me state my pronouns at work, I have decided on quark/charmed quark. Confuse ’em. Keep ’em guessing. What sort of gender does quark and charmed quark depict?
I figure if enbies can have the singular they, I can use nouns (and an adjective) for my pronouns. After all, I get to determine my own gender, right? And if they make a mistake and call me up quark or down quark instead of charmed quark, well, that’s literal violence, and I shan’t hesitate to say so.
You strike me as more of a strange quark kind of person.
Wel, if they were matter and antimatter, they’d get more literal violence than they’d know what to do with.
‘Don’t panic’??? Um yeah OK I won’t.
Two otherwise normal guys in my office have put pronouns in their email signatures, presumably because they’re well-intentioned sheep. I’m not going to remark on it, but it’s annoying.
If I were ever to work somewhere that required pronouns in my profile, preferred adjectives would definitely be in there too.
Now you know why I’m self employed.
On misgendering cats: we adopted a stray many years ago. It was long-haired, mostly white, and it somehow seemed right to refer to it as “she” during the 6 months where it just hung around our garden. My mum kept calling her Fluffy, which I changed to “the fluffy one” because I didn’t want it to stick, and she became Fluffy Wan Kenobi. When we moved house, the cat – by now identified (by us, not herself) as a neutered male, came with us. We left our contact details with the vets in case it turned out that we had stolen someone’s cat, but never heard anything. We continued to refer to Kenny as “she” because it seemed to change her character to call her “he”. Every time we took her to the vet’s, we had to explain that yes, we know she’s a boy but we didn’t find out until the pronoun had been well established. They must have thought we were nuts.
Quark Lives Matter. Or Quark Lives Antimatter.
I’m tempted to list my pronouns as “sheerbuckaneenerfloobitaus”, “algortinshiberlithogas”, and “George”.
George is getting upset!
So you do know what you’re doing. Well, then I’m not letting you in the door.
Especially not if you think Orwell wrote god damned instruction manuals. I see you and what you’re doing, and you can just eff right off.