In themselves, of course, pronouns are inoffensive little things. No doubt they can become tiresome if overused, as ‘I’ and ‘me’ too often are, but otherwise, like good employees, they are willing to do their work with the minimum of fuss and without crying out for attention.
Yet here am I talking about them once more (see Hobperson’s Choice) or, to be correct, about how some people want to tell us how to use them.
The pronoun police say they are promoting inclusivity but, as I suggested last time, they are doing exactly the opposite. They are forcing us to talk to one another in the way they prescribe and, in the process, compelling us to participate in the world of illusion, fantasy and outright fabrication they have created for themselves.
They are rigorous in their demands. These martinets spare no one – neither friend nor foe, neither kith nor Potemkin. They brook no opposition. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor, fought back against them with courage and determination.
His concern was that lawmakers were forcing people to use the pronouns chosen by their interlocutors and he claimed that the coercion was a breach of the constitutional right of free speech.
He was right in law, as he was right in morals and ethics, but this did not stop his students from abusing him, the regulatory authorities from harassing him, and the courts from traducing him. The toll on his health, always fragile, was debilitating but, bloodied though he may have been, he remained unbowed.
His courage made him a hero and, by writing books and talking plenty, he earned pots of money: fortune, here at least, favoured the brave.
Less bellicose
How willing are we, so much less courageous and less bellicose, to fight back? Scarcely at all, I suspect. We must shift as we can.
When we submit ourselves by contract to the dictates of others, we seldom have any choice but to comply. If we are told by the bosses whom we have agreed to serve, that we must call men women because they dress up as such, we better obey or face the prospect of dismissal for breach of contract.
Suggesting in the CCMA that the dismissal is unfair will cut little mustard. Fighting back when we have abased ourselves by contract is a luxury we can afford only if very wealthy or very proud.
What if our options are open? What if we are unbounded by law and can choose to respond to the pronoun police as we wish? Then, I suspect, we are best served by being kind, courteous and considerate. In the old days, people did not abuse the village idiot, seemingly ubiquitous souls in rural parts. They did not curse or malign them, pelt them with rotten tomatoes, or ‘throw them with brickbats’ (whatever they are). They embraced them.
Similarly troubled
People who trans, though by no means idiotic, are similarly troubled. Born as the one sex, they want people to treat them as the other. In pursuit of this goal, they dress up and parade themselves in the clothes customarily used by the opposite sex; use the toilet facilities and participate in the sporting events that, for very good reason, are reserved for that sex; and, most dismal of all, they permit themselves to be genitally mutilated in ways too ghastly to contemplate.
The derangement can go so far as to encourage those who trans from male to female to believe they can become pregnant.
When they discover that nature cannot nurture them thus, they fall into much the same slough of despond as Queen Mary, who erroneously believed that she was with child by her wayward husband, Philip II of Spain, only to discover that her tumescent belly was a ‘phantom pregnancy’, a fancy name for hot air.
Happily, burning outspoken Protestants at the stake improved her spirits a trifle, but this is not a consolation vouchsafed to her comparably deluded modern counterparts. Not yet, anyway.
But this is to digress. The point I am trying to make is that people who want you to use the pronouns pertinent to the opposite sex are not horrid and should be humoured in just the way their predecessors were.
If someone christened ‘Samantha’ wants to be referred to as ‘Sam’, we would, decent people that we are, be good enough to indulge her. In the same way, referring to a him as a ‘her’ or vice versa can do little harm and, by improving the spirits of the ‘him/her’ person, actually do quite a lot of good. When all is said and done, we are not prevented from doing what is customary in polite society – that is, scandalising them behind their backs.
Affected cant
Of course, there are cases when these troubled people can be dangerous. The adoptive penis can be mightier with a sword and affected cant is not to be discounted.
Such cases are made no better or worse by pursuing the course of kindness I commend – that is, that we should be gentle about gender.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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