OLD CONTENT
blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/why-we-should-all-use-they-them-pronouns/
Across college campuses and in a growing number of professional workplaces, it is now common to begin meetings by having people introduce themselves and state their pronouns. Pronoun preferences are showing up on e-mail signatures too.
The above is False Left.
These new practices challenge assumptions that gender identity is always self-evident and that everyone identifies as either man or woman. But they leave intact the presumption that gender identity is relevant in all social interactions. Indeed, having to constantly announce one’s pronouns or choose an honorific may make gender seem even more important than it already is.
True Left consciousness finally appears! Yay!
it is not surprising that many seek gender-anonymity in online chat rooms and in other virtual spaces. Not only do these spaces allow us to escape judgments based on gender, but they free us from the obligation to be gendered in the first place. Sometimes a person just wants to be a doctor or a firefighter, not a woman doctor or a female firefighter.
What if there were a way to promote gender inclusion—as announcing pronouns and adding Mx. as an option to airline reservations seek to do—without running the risk of worsening gender inequality? We think there is: using they/them for everyone, regardless of gender identity. We could similarly make Mx. the salutation for everyone or simply do away with salutations altogether.
The universal singular they is inclusive of people who identify as male, female or nonbinary (e.g., “Drew is in my class; they are a great student”). It avoids the problem of misgendering by not using pronouns to gender people in the first place.
All of which is not only what I have been saying for years, but indeed how pronouns used to work for millenia in other parts of the world prior to the colonial era (during which they shamefully altered their own previously non-gender-specific pronouns to gender-specific versions for the sake of Westernization):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun
In 1917, the Old Chinese graph tā (她, from nǚ 女, "woman") was borrowed into the written language to specifically represent "she" by Liu Bannong. As a result, the old character tā (他), which previously also meant "she" in written texts, is sometimes restricted to meaning "he" only. ... The creation of gendered pronouns in Chinese was part of the May Fourth Movement to modernize Chinese culture, and specifically an attempt to assert sameness between Chinese and the European languages, which generally have gendered pronouns.[80]
...
In the modern Japanese, kare (彼) is the male and kanojo (彼女) the female third-person pronouns. Historically, kare was a word in the demonstrative paradigm (i.e., a system involving demonstrative prefixes, ko-, so-, a-, and do-), used to point to an object that is physically far but psychologically near. The feminine counterpart kanojo, on the other hand, is a combination of kano (adjective version of ka-) and jo ("woman"), coined for the translation of its Western equivalents. It was not until the Meiji period that kare and kanojo were commonly used as the masculine and feminine pronoun in the same way as their Western equivalents.
WESTERN CIVILIZATION MUST DIE.
Back to the main article:
To be sure, for people who have experienced the pain of being denied gender recognition in the past, announcing pronouns can lead to meaningful moments of affirmation. But this may come at a hidden cost to others. Some people feel that announcing gender, writes historian Jen Manion, of Amherst College, “requires them to make a declaration, whether they are ready, or want to.”
And, we argue, announcing pronouns may enable gender bias and discrimination. Likewise, while the use of honorifics is commonly viewed as a sign of respect, as long as the two most used options are gender-specific, use of honorifics emphasizes gender and potentially perpetuates bias and discrimination—problems we cannot afford to disregard.
I would put it more strongly: being denied gender recognition hurts the inferior, whereas being forced to announce gender hurts the superior.
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"As a trans girl is it bad if I want to be called she?"
If you live in a society where cis girls are called "she", then it is understandable that you would want to be called the same thing as cis girls, as otherwise would imply being discriminated against compared to cis girls.
But would you rather live in a society where even cis girls are not called "she" either, but instead everyone is called "they" or some other ungendered pronoun? That is the important question.
(In places which speak languages with no gendered pronouns, someone can talk about a person for ages without anyone knowing the talked-about person's gender until someone else specifically asks, no different than how we don't know the talked-about person's height (for example) without asking. Imagine how weird it would be if we had to use different pronouns for tall people and short people (heighted pronouns?)! That's how weird gendered pronouns actually are.)
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Another journalist makes the jump to True Left:
www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/opinion/pronoun-they-gender.htmlmost people guess that I go by “he” and “him.” And that’s fine; I will not be offended if you refer to me by those traditional, uselessly gendered pronouns.
But “he” is not what you should call me. If we lived in a just, rational, inclusive universe — one in which we were not all so irredeemably obsessed by the particulars of the parts dangling between our fellow humans’ legs, nor the ridiculous expectations signified by those parts about how we should act and speak and dress and feel — there would be no requirement for you to have to assume my gender just to refer to me in the common tongue.
There are, after all, few obvious linguistic advantages to the requirement. When I refer to myself, I don’t have to announce my gender and all the baggage it carries. Instead I use the gender-nonspecific “I.” Nor do I have to bother with gender when I’m speaking directly to someone or when I’m talking about a group of people. I just say “you” or “they.”
...
If you write about me, interview me, tweet about me, or if you are a Fox News producer working on a rant about my extreme politics, I would prefer if you left my gender out of it. ... because the world will be slightly better off if we abandoned unnecessary gender signifiers as a matter of routine communication.
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One truth I’ve come to understand too late in life is how thoroughly and insidiously our lives are shaped by gender norms. These expectations are felt most acutely and tragically by those who don’t conform to the standard gender binary — people who are transgender or nonbinary, most obviously.
But even for people who do mainly fit within the binary, the very idea that there is a binary is invisibly stifling. Every boy and girl feels this in small and large ways growing up; you unwittingly brush up against preferences that don’t fit within your gender expectations, and then you must learn to fight those expectations or strain to live within them.
But it was only when I had a son and a daughter of my own that I recognized how powerfully gendered constructs shape our development. From their very earliest days, my kids, fed by marketing and entertainment and (surely) their parents’ modeling, seemed to hem themselves into silly gender norms. They gravitated to boy toys and girl toys, boy colors and girl colors, boy TV shows and girl TV shows. This was all so sad to me: I see them limiting their thoughts and their ambitions, their preferences and their identity, their very liberty, only to satisfy some collective abstraction. And there’s little prospect for escape: Gender is a ubiquitous prison for the mind, reinforced everywhere, by everyone, and only rarely questioned.
We’re a long way from eradicating these expectations in society. But we don’t have to be wary about eradicating them in language.
“Part of introducing the concept of gender-neutral pronouns to people is to get them to ask, ‘Why does this part of society need to be gendered in the first place?’” said Jay Wu, director of communications at the National Center for Transgender Equality. They continued: “Part of how we fix that is more and more people noticing that things are so gendered and being like, why does it have to be that way? What benefit does it bring us?”
None, I say, other than confusion, anxiety and grief.
Right (and False Left):
"In His own image created He them; male and female created He them." - TanakhTrue Left:
"When you make the male and the female one, so that the male will not be male nor the female female ... then will you enter the Kingdom.” - Jesus---
Victory:
news.yahoo.com/berkeley-bans-gendered-words-manhole-195405363.html
The City Council in Berkeley, Calif., voted this week to ban gender-specific words in the liberal city’s municipal code, clearing the way for the changes to become official.
...
The new ordinance would eliminate the use of masculine and feminine pronouns in the municipal code. Instead of “he” and “she,” the city will use “they” and “them.”
Under the heading "Gender," the amended code will read as follows:
“Whenever a personal pronoun is used in the neutral gender, it shall be deemed to include the feminine and masculine also. ‘They/them’ shall indicate a singular individual, unless the context indicates the contrary.”
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Counterculture-influenced schools vs Western protestors:
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7434561/Angry-pupils-protest-outside-school-gates-against-new-pointless-gender-neutral-uniforms.htmlPolice and teachers have been criticised for locking school gates to schoolchildren who protested a new 'gender neutral' uniform policy this morning, leaving pupils to wander the streets of a Sussex town.
Angry pupils and parents protested outside the gates of Priory School in Lewes over the clothing policy for the new school year.
But teachers and Sussex Police officers locked the gates on pupils and refused admittance to girls in skirts
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The Priory School in Lewes, East Sussex, forced all pupils to wear trousers in 2017 after 'concerns' were raised over the length of skirts - and to cater for transgender pupils.
It has brought in a fully gender neutral uniform and yesterday the head teacher warned pupils would be sent home if they are not wearing it.
The uniform that is causing protests:
Despite
explicitly aiming at a gender-neutral uniform they still end up
even at the drawing board stage with significant sexual dimorphism (note the shoes, trousers, hairstyles and even the heights)! Of course they deserve some credit for starting the journey towards reducing sexual dimorphism, but this is how deeply-embedded sexual dimorphism is in Western civilization.
Meanwhile in China:
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I think it'd be better if mandatory school uniform is abolished. School teachers and staffs don't require wearing uniforms because they're "adults".
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Without mandatory uniforms you'll just get the traditional male/female divide in clothing that are already commonplace. Mandatory uniforms for both staff and students is the way to go.
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More victory:
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/opp-no-longer-releasing-gender-1.5293637Ontario's provincial police service will no longer release the gender of people who are charged with crimes and those who are victims of crimes.
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"It doesn't matter if it was a male or a female who was an impaired driver or speeding down the highway, what matters is that we pulled them over and laid a charge."
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"We will now say "the individual" or "the accused," and not use gender-specific pronouns," Dionne said. "In the case of a suspect where we need to be more specific, we will say "appears to be a female" or "appears to be a male."
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www.rt.com/news/470964-air-canada-ladies-gentlemen/Employees of the top Canadian airline were instructed to drop the long-time tradition of calling their passengers “ladies and gentlemen” (or “mesdames et messieurs” when speaking French). Instead, passengers will be addressed as “everybody” and “tout le monde,” local media reported.
Note that this merely puts English and French belatedly on par with languages of lower sexual dimorphism which have never used gender-based address in the first place.
Bonus clip: