Every once in a while I forget that this lunacy is going on amid all the hum drum banality of every day modern life. Then I remember, just riding the bus or something and it's like, "wow all bets really are off for liberal society". Why is everyone acting so normal? I guess it's a tiny-enough segment affected that we can just pretend the water's not boiling. It's like we're just waiting for things to reach some logical conclusion, or an absurd one as the case may be.
Wesley's patented, tortuous parentheticals outlining the absurd claims made in the name of social justice are true works of art. (It's not the same on your twitter, man!) When you systematically unpack the contents of a statement like "JK rowling is denying my right to exist" it's uncanny to see the byzantine mental leaps actually required for someone to get there!
...Another reason most normies will just live and let live til it's almost too late.
"If the courts finds that my feeling that I am something I believe myself to be because I have redefined what it means to be that thing as “having a feeling that I am that thing” imposes a duty of obligation onto others to affirm that I am the thing that I feel that I am, it will have expanded the meaning of what it means to have a right onto a whole frontier — an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
"— an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
Gramsci's "Repressive Tolerance" - which is the definition of tolerance that is used in "our" "Discourse." The word "tolerance" is thereby redefined - that is, falsified. It is via such means that reality itself becomes comprehensively falsified. Citizens use the word innocently - and many other words - and are manipulated by activists and intellectuals, and their accomplices (media, etc.). The citizens are uneasy, but can't "put their finger on" the lie. Their good will is exploited.
I was myself an ideologue for about 9 months - literally in my Sophomore year at university (!). I recall the sense of inner compulsion - the absurd, two-headed messianism (one head in reality, and the other outside of it). It was like a fever or perhaps like a mouse infected with toxoplasma gondii who does looking for a cat to eat it. - and dreams of watching itself get eaten. It is a weird mania which must be classified as a form of immaturity. Mine broke upon reality and the world's indifference - thank God nobody paid me any mind (I had no "activist" inclinations) or encouraged me. My family occasionally addressed my excesses (occasional commentary) with ironic indulgence. This is proper - the place of the immature is the private world of the family, and not the public world of the citizen.
I have experienced nothing remotely like it, since. It astonishes me that adults can entertain such enthusiasms. Social media plainly acts as a bearer of cultic indoctrination and false-affirmation, where reality can be suspended and the fantastic indulged.
I'm sure this isn't cutting edge thinking but I almost never see my observation about pronouns discussed anywhere. I don't understand why trans etc people make such a big deal about it, and all progressive folks introduce themselves with their pronouns. They're the wrong pronouns! Why are you introducing yourself with third person pronouns instead of second? After you introduce yourself as a they/them for example, the listener is never going to say "nice to meet them". We have the ability in English to ignore the whole thing, since the whole "issue" is about third person pronouns and we only use first and second in front of one another. This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
This drives me absolutely bonkers, and was a point I made in a (supposedly confidential, though we'll see) DEI survey my workplace sent out recently: people putting pronouns in an email signature aren't listing "their" pronouns, they're listing the pronouns they want me (and others) to use *about* them, generally when they aren't around. The only pronouns an individual could lay claim to in an email signature are I/me/mine; everything else is a request that I abrogate my own personal judgement, disguised as innocuous personal preference.
This is why it reminds be of wrongspeak and thought crime: it’s not even mostly relevant to how you address a person. It’s insisting that you perform a validation of their declared “identity” at all times and in all places.
I literally had someone scold me for dead-naming Ellen Page, who was not in the room nor known to either of us. So who is this deference FOR???
There's a level of deference demanded on the name change thing that we don't even demand of other name or identity changes – people (and paperwork) still sometimes call my wife by her maiden name, and of course they would. It was her name for decades longer than she's even known me! We don't care either; both names are a part of her history and identity.
Though I do think the name thing is the stupidest hill to die on re trans issues, for both sides. Out of all of this shit, names (and clothing,) are the only part that actually is 100% socially constructed – there really is no reason a female can't be named "Elliot," or a male be named "Amy." I don't use "preferred" pronouns, but I have no problems using new names because they're in some sense arbitrary.
It's not about "them" being accepted. It's about "them" making you say obviously false things to demonstrate "their" power over you. Solzhenitsyn has a lot to say about this wrt communism; he's a great resource for how to fight it.
I agree completely. The pronoun ritual has become part of their religion. Someone told me a story about a DEI meeting her employer forced her to attend. The DEI "officer" who led the meeting started by demanding in an aggressive manner that everyone in the room state their name, "race," and pronouns. The demand forced the employees to disclose information rather than allowing them choices, while at the same time implying that a person's sex and skin color are not obvious to anyone who can see and hear. So, the DEI officer was able to simultaneously violate the employees' boundaries, compel their speech, and manipulate them into implicitly endorsing the belief that gender and race are invisible thought constructs. If this is the case, I will say I am a black male. Maybe they will leave me alone after that.
Sounds like they could push that as being a HIPPA violation. Your race (actually ethnicity) is your genetic make up which is medical knowledge you choose to share.
I wasn't reprimanded, but I was corrected in a meeting where we were discussing the employment status of a non-binary identifying female; the HR lady (because it was a lady, of course) twice "misgendered" the employee by referring to her as "he." I saw an opportunity to test the boundaries and referred to her as "her." I was then corrected by the same HR lady that the employee uses "they/them."
I really do wish I was making that up.
On the other hand, it's experimental verification of a hypothesis I've had for a while: that "non-binary" girls (at least) aren't interested in being sexless, they just don't want to be female. To that end, I've suspected that "misgendering" them by calling them male would be less of a crime than a misgendering that accurately describes them as female.
It's only one data point, but so far it's looking good for my theory.
"you/me" and "I/me" doesn't have anything to do with gender though. You'd be surprised at how often progressives can squeeze them/they into shit that would get you medicated 5 years ago
It's funny, there used to be formal and informal "you" in English. Imagine if we still had that, and people listed their personal second-person pronouns, because some identified as informal in all situations.
I guess that's what I was getting at. In the normal course of events, you never use third person pronouns with the person you're speaking to. So call yourself whatever you want, but you don't need to tell anybody else your preferred pronouns because our language structure just doesn't give rise to the opportunity (for those few who want to)
Don't say this too loudly, other languages do have gendered first and second person pronouns, I could see the trans movement making up special gendered first and second person pronouns just so that they could then make us use them!
I know Thai does. I always thought it was funny you use gendered pronouns to describe yourself and then everyone else is just one sexless pronoun. I guess they were just ahead of these strange times!
Oh, it's coming... if some random "academic" can make up 67 new pronouns and be taken seriously, we'll see 67 new 2nd person pronouns before 2023 is up. I'll get it started... youhe, youshe.
Someone made a comment about Solzhenitsyn above... spot on. Compelled speech/pronouns are the crazy train to communism.
This is only partially true. In lots of social situations people refer to each other in the third person. I am a teacher myself and in class discussions I and other students sometimes speak of what one student said when speaking to the group. So it’s in group dynamics that the issue arises. This imperative is imposed much more on the collective, and as you say, is not even really relevant in one to one private communications.
I'm sure it occurs, but it still seems like it would be very rare. Like in your example, how often do you say something like "what she said" and point at her, rather than just say "what Jane said"? it's much ruder to do the pronoun and point rather than use a person's name. For the same reason, at a large random meeting where names are impractical, a speaker will still avoid using the pronoun and point method to refer to someone else. The person at the podium would almost certainly refer back to a prior speaker as "the woman who just spoke", or "the man in the back there" rather than just point into the crowd and say "her".
The only regular reason I can see to use it is in a negative situation, like when two people were fighting and the teacher comes to break it up. There one of the participants would likely say "well he started it" rather than "John started it", presumably because it's ruder as per above. And if that's the main use, the angry participant is unlikely to care about the pronouns of the person he's fighting with.
Sure, I would normally use the the student’s name first, but if I had more to say, would start using pronouns. It’s not that common true, but I wouldn’t say it’s very rare. Your negative example adds to the potential situations, which puts me in mind of courtroom trials and people on the stand using third person pronouns all over the place. The there’s news reporting, broadcast or in print. All of these are very public scenarios, which may well be the point. The ideologues who came up with this ridiculous pronoun scheme may be concerned most with controlling public discourse as a means of social change. It would make sense. It’s a classic radical left tactic to attempt to manipulate language to control public perception of reality.
Thank you for this. Something a great pro-reality advocate brought up lately regarding teen culture is that, unfortunately, trans is the only counterculture left. No more punks/goths/etc. is that something that rings true to you and your research? More here:
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, this last counterculture is almost entirely astroturfed by all the teachers, nurses, and librarians working tirelessly to feed these ideas to the kids.
It feels correct to me. Almost everything else has been absorbed into the mainstream and sold back to the public. Even being a comic nerd won't get you outsider points any more; all our huge movies are superhero BS.
I've spent a decent number of years on the periphery of the furry fandom, which might have the claim of being the last outsider fandom, and I've seen it basically merge with Pride over the past decade or so. Nowadays if you go to a convention it's as much LGBT paraphernalia and trans people everywhere as it is its ostensible purpose of funny sexy animal people. I don't know if that supports or refutes the point, but it came to mind.
The problem is that the system is being imbued with this madness: teachers and educators are now they/them, so why shouldn't children be? It's so easy, it's trendy, it makes an insider out of an outsider (being trans or non-binary gives you instant points on the popularity/special scale), it gives a pseudo-explanation for all the body issues teens naturally go through in puberty. I'm terrified of how many children will be sacrificed to this ideology (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/why-are-so-many-children-declaring) before we can finally turn this around.
At its core, this legal fight around self-ID issues (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/i-identify-therefore-i-am-the-illusion) is in fact a fight for reality: If we base laws on how people FEEL and we cannot agree on factual reality anymore, then every single right is basically nullified.
Very interesting read, looking forward to part II!
Great post. The practical problem with each person creating their own reality, and then society making acknowledgement of that inner reality legally enforceable, is obvious. There are several billion people on the planet, each with their own conflicting realities. How can I, a single individual with my own perception of reality, possibly be expected to validate them all? What it really comes down to is whose internal realities are sacred and whose are collateral. And women's realities seem very much to be collateral.
Great summary. This is only tangentially about "man" and "woman" at all. It's about whether reality exists. This is postmodernism's final assault on objective truth. If we lose, we lose everything.
Yes, it's not the core issue, there are many factors at play here all creating a perfect storm; but a large part of this movement is sexually motivated. The original postmodernists themselves were driven by their "ideal" of complete sexual libertarianism, which is why they advocated for abolishing the age of consent and why they are so obsessed with obliterating boundaries. Boundaries protect the vulnerable from sexual predation, and they are being destroyed in the euphemistic name of "inclusivity". People forget that radical inclusivity requires that all boundaries cease to exist.
I totally agree. Well meaning liberals tend to be very naive about this. They believe in ‘tolerance’ but have no philosophical defence against incursions by bad actors that are manifestly evil. So they deny it is happening at all and call people who point it out bigots or at best suffering from a ‘moral panic’.
The core issue, I believe, is the foundational question of truth, whether it’s purely subjective and relative or independently discernible and potentially shared. We are being bombarded and overlaid culturally and politically with the former conception, which is very dangerous. The reason it’s so dangerous is because it reduces all relationships to unfalsifiable assertions of dominance over others. ‘My truth’ ‘lived experience’, gender ‘affirmation’. Mutual agreement is impossible except through total submission. This is what the culture wars generally and trans ideology specifically boils down to. In the private realm it’s bad enough, in the public sphere it’s a recipe for totalitarianism.
Do you have any thoughts as to why people surrender so easily to the "purely subjective and relative" theory? It seems so obvious to me that we all live in relationship with objective realities. It is easy to see why people with certain kinds of mental disorders would be less inclined to chose reality over fantasy, but what about all the normal, ordinary people who in past time were so sensible? I favor Mr. Musk's characterization of the woke cult as a "mind virus," because of its incredibly rapid spread.
Thanks! I hope Elon is right. Others have called it a mind parasite or compared it to the hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials. These notions imply that it’s something that will pass in time. This is actually an optimistic view. A more pessimistic view that I think sometimes is that the only reason normal people seemed to be grounded in reality before is that our culture generally, all our institutions, was much more grounded in reality, and normal people simply followed that. In other words most people just take as a matter of course whatever they are being fed. If they are fed sanity they are sane, if not, not. I’ve heard perfectly intelligent people say things like ‘We’re not supposed to say such and such or do X anymore.’ As if there’s some grand committee of wizards or poobahs in the sky regularly issuing right think memos to the populace. In this view, we are living under a seriously revolutionary force that is not going away anytime soon and could get much worse. I do see signs of hope though. We’re not Russia or China yet, so there’s plenty of discourse around resistance and action happening. Good publications, Substacks, even books that are pushing back. We just need to do our best to keep up in our own way a counter narrative that values objective truth, like you say.
I have been influenced by a comment made by British author Zadie Smith when she was interviewed by Radio New Zealand a few years ago.
Towards the end of a longish interview about her fiction Smith said “Identity is always a negotiation. I know am a black woman. I cannot control what every stranger in the street sees when they look at me. That is not something I can control. It's between who you know yourself to be true and what the other sees and it can't be other than a negotiation. It can be ridiculous, tragic, etc” https://t.co/Uqv5ymwCzU?amp=1 She says this at about 34.00 minutes and her comments followed on from a discussion of how she was perceived when she was on a visit to West Africa.
It made me realise what a huge and unusual expectation there is in respect of endorsing the gender identities of people who feel they have them. To say nothing of the fact that the demands often seem to stem from a need to be believed. Is there any other group that seeks to demand such endorsement? Generally we are allowed to be sceptical especially of far fetched claims or to seek explanation. Not 'believe me when I tell you who I am"
People who need constant "affirmation" of their identities by everyone around them don't know who they are, or even if they are, without all that "mirroring." They are in fact the only ones capable of sorting out who they are, but they prefer to hand that responsibility to others. All of this looks like narcissism, and little more than that.
Imposing speech and thought restrictions while threatening non-compliance with potential suspension, job loss and career destruction is violence. It is accuse the victim, gaslighting, passive-aggressive infliction of emotional and psychic violence. (Toxic feminism developed the technique while installing the D.E.I. commissariat.) The DNC/Biden conflation of criminal violence and citizen assault with revolution during the riot's and the administration's open declaration of war on half the American population is violence. It is long game avarice and tyranny masked as social concern. International criminal finance views the empowered educated American citizen and our Constitutional Republic as a threat. Their control of the EU flooded Europe with massive illegal immigration and displacement. Mass arrest's, prosecution's and re-education classes for bogus thought and speech crime's are underway now. Canada euthanized over 10,000 of its citizen's last year. You're next. When the Constitution goes down (and that's the goal) so are you.
The DNC/ surveillance state serves criminal finance. It represents an avaricious LIE of immense proportion. Like the '08 market crash, the Ukraine is yet another looting and "upward" transference, without consequence, of American treasure. American industry is gutted, DNC cities are war zone's, fentanyl flow's like water, the border is wide open, there's sh't in the streets and America's park's and underpasses are filled with the homeless. Do you actually think the DNC gives a damn about "trans"?
It is simply another instance of manufactured and weaponized chaos being used to bludgeon the Republic and American's into unconscious submission. The butchery of children is just "blowback"(and another chance for "big pharma" to stuff its pocket's).
Hopium: Without subscription journalism the "Twitter" revelation's would not have happened. We are slowly recapturing the American national dialogue but the DNC surveillance state psyop remains alive and dangerous. Criminal finance has totally compromised elected American political leadership. There is (at least at present) a malleable aspect to the Republican Party that might allow a way forward.
I am very curious what will come of all this when it hits the courts.
I just took a new job and I read through the employee handbook. They are trading sex for gender identity in nearly every instance. I am curious if I was to be outed as the TERF that I am if I could be legally fired because of breaking the handbook rules or if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook.
..."if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook."
This is important to know. I am an independent contractor, not an employee, and I have learned that I am mostly not covered by civil rights laws, federal or state. If you have rights to disagree with your employer's official gender ideology it could help you to feel more confident no matter what the employer or your coworkers say to you. I have been surprised to learn how limited the protection is that we get from the First Amendment, and state law doesn't necessarily add to our rights. I am for this reason emphatically in favor of Governor DeSantis's efforts to expand employees' rights to sue employers over DEI abuses.
Traditionally, struggling for civil rights was to prevent discrimination against people for their ascriptive identities--that is, what can't be changed, such as who your parents are, your sex, your phenotype, unlike what you can change, such as your political or religious affiliation.
But trans is an identity--the very name means "change"--that is not ascriptive, it is something one can declare. Fighting for civil rights for an identity that anyone can move in (or out of) undermines the entire purpose of traditional civil rights--it's being dismantled in front of us.
beautifully constructed argument. it seems to me that most people are actually NOT transphobic or anti-Trans or any of the other linguistic games or mechanisms used to gaslight, manipulate and control people and assert power. they are simply protecting, as is their MF right, what THEY believe: that, for example, nature and biology are objective realities, whether or not we choose to accept them; and that free speech and expression is as sacrosanct as compelled speech is unethical if not malevolent.
Great reporting, Wesley. Although I confess whenever I read the insanity I still find myself wondering how people can believe this stuff, despite having a front-row seat.
I feel therefore I am and you must agree with me is, as you point out, an extremely dangerous philosophy
I genuinely wouldn’t give a damn about any of the woke or gender ideology stuff if it wasn’t compelling speech and punishing wrongthink.
Every once in a while I forget that this lunacy is going on amid all the hum drum banality of every day modern life. Then I remember, just riding the bus or something and it's like, "wow all bets really are off for liberal society". Why is everyone acting so normal? I guess it's a tiny-enough segment affected that we can just pretend the water's not boiling. It's like we're just waiting for things to reach some logical conclusion, or an absurd one as the case may be.
Wesley's patented, tortuous parentheticals outlining the absurd claims made in the name of social justice are true works of art. (It's not the same on your twitter, man!) When you systematically unpack the contents of a statement like "JK rowling is denying my right to exist" it's uncanny to see the byzantine mental leaps actually required for someone to get there!
...Another reason most normies will just live and let live til it's almost too late.
"If the courts finds that my feeling that I am something I believe myself to be because I have redefined what it means to be that thing as “having a feeling that I am that thing” imposes a duty of obligation onto others to affirm that I am the thing that I feel that I am, it will have expanded the meaning of what it means to have a right onto a whole frontier — an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
"— an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights."
Gramsci's "Repressive Tolerance" - which is the definition of tolerance that is used in "our" "Discourse." The word "tolerance" is thereby redefined - that is, falsified. It is via such means that reality itself becomes comprehensively falsified. Citizens use the word innocently - and many other words - and are manipulated by activists and intellectuals, and their accomplices (media, etc.). The citizens are uneasy, but can't "put their finger on" the lie. Their good will is exploited.
I was myself an ideologue for about 9 months - literally in my Sophomore year at university (!). I recall the sense of inner compulsion - the absurd, two-headed messianism (one head in reality, and the other outside of it). It was like a fever or perhaps like a mouse infected with toxoplasma gondii who does looking for a cat to eat it. - and dreams of watching itself get eaten. It is a weird mania which must be classified as a form of immaturity. Mine broke upon reality and the world's indifference - thank God nobody paid me any mind (I had no "activist" inclinations) or encouraged me. My family occasionally addressed my excesses (occasional commentary) with ironic indulgence. This is proper - the place of the immature is the private world of the family, and not the public world of the citizen.
I have experienced nothing remotely like it, since. It astonishes me that adults can entertain such enthusiasms. Social media plainly acts as a bearer of cultic indoctrination and false-affirmation, where reality can be suspended and the fantastic indulged.
I'm sure this isn't cutting edge thinking but I almost never see my observation about pronouns discussed anywhere. I don't understand why trans etc people make such a big deal about it, and all progressive folks introduce themselves with their pronouns. They're the wrong pronouns! Why are you introducing yourself with third person pronouns instead of second? After you introduce yourself as a they/them for example, the listener is never going to say "nice to meet them". We have the ability in English to ignore the whole thing, since the whole "issue" is about third person pronouns and we only use first and second in front of one another. This seems very much like a solution in search of a problem to solve.
This drives me absolutely bonkers, and was a point I made in a (supposedly confidential, though we'll see) DEI survey my workplace sent out recently: people putting pronouns in an email signature aren't listing "their" pronouns, they're listing the pronouns they want me (and others) to use *about* them, generally when they aren't around. The only pronouns an individual could lay claim to in an email signature are I/me/mine; everything else is a request that I abrogate my own personal judgement, disguised as innocuous personal preference.
This is why it reminds be of wrongspeak and thought crime: it’s not even mostly relevant to how you address a person. It’s insisting that you perform a validation of their declared “identity” at all times and in all places.
I literally had someone scold me for dead-naming Ellen Page, who was not in the room nor known to either of us. So who is this deference FOR???
There's a level of deference demanded on the name change thing that we don't even demand of other name or identity changes – people (and paperwork) still sometimes call my wife by her maiden name, and of course they would. It was her name for decades longer than she's even known me! We don't care either; both names are a part of her history and identity.
Though I do think the name thing is the stupidest hill to die on re trans issues, for both sides. Out of all of this shit, names (and clothing,) are the only part that actually is 100% socially constructed – there really is no reason a female can't be named "Elliot," or a male be named "Amy." I don't use "preferred" pronouns, but I have no problems using new names because they're in some sense arbitrary.
That's exactly right, not that it matters much in the workplace.
It's not about "them" being accepted. It's about "them" making you say obviously false things to demonstrate "their" power over you. Solzhenitsyn has a lot to say about this wrt communism; he's a great resource for how to fight it.
I agree completely. The pronoun ritual has become part of their religion. Someone told me a story about a DEI meeting her employer forced her to attend. The DEI "officer" who led the meeting started by demanding in an aggressive manner that everyone in the room state their name, "race," and pronouns. The demand forced the employees to disclose information rather than allowing them choices, while at the same time implying that a person's sex and skin color are not obvious to anyone who can see and hear. So, the DEI officer was able to simultaneously violate the employees' boundaries, compel their speech, and manipulate them into implicitly endorsing the belief that gender and race are invisible thought constructs. If this is the case, I will say I am a black male. Maybe they will leave me alone after that.
Sounds like they could push that as being a HIPPA violation. Your race (actually ethnicity) is your genetic make up which is medical knowledge you choose to share.
Excellent idea! I'll suggest it to people.
True. And yet I’ve been reported and reprimanded at my work for misgendering a person who wasn’t even in the room.
I wasn't reprimanded, but I was corrected in a meeting where we were discussing the employment status of a non-binary identifying female; the HR lady (because it was a lady, of course) twice "misgendered" the employee by referring to her as "he." I saw an opportunity to test the boundaries and referred to her as "her." I was then corrected by the same HR lady that the employee uses "they/them."
I really do wish I was making that up.
On the other hand, it's experimental verification of a hypothesis I've had for a while: that "non-binary" girls (at least) aren't interested in being sexless, they just don't want to be female. To that end, I've suspected that "misgendering" them by calling them male would be less of a crime than a misgendering that accurately describes them as female.
It's only one data point, but so far it's looking good for my theory.
"you/me" and "I/me" doesn't have anything to do with gender though. You'd be surprised at how often progressives can squeeze them/they into shit that would get you medicated 5 years ago
It's funny, there used to be formal and informal "you" in English. Imagine if we still had that, and people listed their personal second-person pronouns, because some identified as informal in all situations.
Don't give them any ideas!
I guess that's what I was getting at. In the normal course of events, you never use third person pronouns with the person you're speaking to. So call yourself whatever you want, but you don't need to tell anybody else your preferred pronouns because our language structure just doesn't give rise to the opportunity (for those few who want to)
Don't say this too loudly, other languages do have gendered first and second person pronouns, I could see the trans movement making up special gendered first and second person pronouns just so that they could then make us use them!
I know Thai does. I always thought it was funny you use gendered pronouns to describe yourself and then everyone else is just one sexless pronoun. I guess they were just ahead of these strange times!
Oh, it's coming... if some random "academic" can make up 67 new pronouns and be taken seriously, we'll see 67 new 2nd person pronouns before 2023 is up. I'll get it started... youhe, youshe.
Someone made a comment about Solzhenitsyn above... spot on. Compelled speech/pronouns are the crazy train to communism.
This is only partially true. In lots of social situations people refer to each other in the third person. I am a teacher myself and in class discussions I and other students sometimes speak of what one student said when speaking to the group. So it’s in group dynamics that the issue arises. This imperative is imposed much more on the collective, and as you say, is not even really relevant in one to one private communications.
I'm sure it occurs, but it still seems like it would be very rare. Like in your example, how often do you say something like "what she said" and point at her, rather than just say "what Jane said"? it's much ruder to do the pronoun and point rather than use a person's name. For the same reason, at a large random meeting where names are impractical, a speaker will still avoid using the pronoun and point method to refer to someone else. The person at the podium would almost certainly refer back to a prior speaker as "the woman who just spoke", or "the man in the back there" rather than just point into the crowd and say "her".
The only regular reason I can see to use it is in a negative situation, like when two people were fighting and the teacher comes to break it up. There one of the participants would likely say "well he started it" rather than "John started it", presumably because it's ruder as per above. And if that's the main use, the angry participant is unlikely to care about the pronouns of the person he's fighting with.
Sure, I would normally use the the student’s name first, but if I had more to say, would start using pronouns. It’s not that common true, but I wouldn’t say it’s very rare. Your negative example adds to the potential situations, which puts me in mind of courtroom trials and people on the stand using third person pronouns all over the place. The there’s news reporting, broadcast or in print. All of these are very public scenarios, which may well be the point. The ideologues who came up with this ridiculous pronoun scheme may be concerned most with controlling public discourse as a means of social change. It would make sense. It’s a classic radical left tactic to attempt to manipulate language to control public perception of reality.
Thank you for this. Something a great pro-reality advocate brought up lately regarding teen culture is that, unfortunately, trans is the only counterculture left. No more punks/goths/etc. is that something that rings true to you and your research? More here:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/would-you-rather-have-a-living-son
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, this last counterculture is almost entirely astroturfed by all the teachers, nurses, and librarians working tirelessly to feed these ideas to the kids.
It feels correct to me. Almost everything else has been absorbed into the mainstream and sold back to the public. Even being a comic nerd won't get you outsider points any more; all our huge movies are superhero BS.
I've spent a decent number of years on the periphery of the furry fandom, which might have the claim of being the last outsider fandom, and I've seen it basically merge with Pride over the past decade or so. Nowadays if you go to a convention it's as much LGBT paraphernalia and trans people everywhere as it is its ostensible purpose of funny sexy animal people. I don't know if that supports or refutes the point, but it came to mind.
Everything is cyclical. This too shall pass, especially now that middle-aged folx are claiming to be non-binary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNdbJYX93mY
You couldn't make this craziness up.
The problem is that the system is being imbued with this madness: teachers and educators are now they/them, so why shouldn't children be? It's so easy, it's trendy, it makes an insider out of an outsider (being trans or non-binary gives you instant points on the popularity/special scale), it gives a pseudo-explanation for all the body issues teens naturally go through in puberty. I'm terrified of how many children will be sacrificed to this ideology (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/why-are-so-many-children-declaring) before we can finally turn this around.
At its core, this legal fight around self-ID issues (https://twoplustwo.substack.com/p/i-identify-therefore-i-am-the-illusion) is in fact a fight for reality: If we base laws on how people FEEL and we cannot agree on factual reality anymore, then every single right is basically nullified.
Very interesting read, looking forward to part II!
Great post. The practical problem with each person creating their own reality, and then society making acknowledgement of that inner reality legally enforceable, is obvious. There are several billion people on the planet, each with their own conflicting realities. How can I, a single individual with my own perception of reality, possibly be expected to validate them all? What it really comes down to is whose internal realities are sacred and whose are collateral. And women's realities seem very much to be collateral.
Great summary. This is only tangentially about "man" and "woman" at all. It's about whether reality exists. This is postmodernism's final assault on objective truth. If we lose, we lose everything.
That’s the feminist take, the ‘misogyny’ of the trans movement. But that’s just one element, not all of it, and not the core issue.
Yes, it's not the core issue, there are many factors at play here all creating a perfect storm; but a large part of this movement is sexually motivated. The original postmodernists themselves were driven by their "ideal" of complete sexual libertarianism, which is why they advocated for abolishing the age of consent and why they are so obsessed with obliterating boundaries. Boundaries protect the vulnerable from sexual predation, and they are being destroyed in the euphemistic name of "inclusivity". People forget that radical inclusivity requires that all boundaries cease to exist.
I totally agree. Well meaning liberals tend to be very naive about this. They believe in ‘tolerance’ but have no philosophical defence against incursions by bad actors that are manifestly evil. So they deny it is happening at all and call people who point it out bigots or at best suffering from a ‘moral panic’.
What do you think the core issue is?
The core issue, I believe, is the foundational question of truth, whether it’s purely subjective and relative or independently discernible and potentially shared. We are being bombarded and overlaid culturally and politically with the former conception, which is very dangerous. The reason it’s so dangerous is because it reduces all relationships to unfalsifiable assertions of dominance over others. ‘My truth’ ‘lived experience’, gender ‘affirmation’. Mutual agreement is impossible except through total submission. This is what the culture wars generally and trans ideology specifically boils down to. In the private realm it’s bad enough, in the public sphere it’s a recipe for totalitarianism.
This is a remarkable post!
Do you have any thoughts as to why people surrender so easily to the "purely subjective and relative" theory? It seems so obvious to me that we all live in relationship with objective realities. It is easy to see why people with certain kinds of mental disorders would be less inclined to chose reality over fantasy, but what about all the normal, ordinary people who in past time were so sensible? I favor Mr. Musk's characterization of the woke cult as a "mind virus," because of its incredibly rapid spread.
Thanks! I hope Elon is right. Others have called it a mind parasite or compared it to the hysteria that drove the Salem witch trials. These notions imply that it’s something that will pass in time. This is actually an optimistic view. A more pessimistic view that I think sometimes is that the only reason normal people seemed to be grounded in reality before is that our culture generally, all our institutions, was much more grounded in reality, and normal people simply followed that. In other words most people just take as a matter of course whatever they are being fed. If they are fed sanity they are sane, if not, not. I’ve heard perfectly intelligent people say things like ‘We’re not supposed to say such and such or do X anymore.’ As if there’s some grand committee of wizards or poobahs in the sky regularly issuing right think memos to the populace. In this view, we are living under a seriously revolutionary force that is not going away anytime soon and could get much worse. I do see signs of hope though. We’re not Russia or China yet, so there’s plenty of discourse around resistance and action happening. Good publications, Substacks, even books that are pushing back. We just need to do our best to keep up in our own way a counter narrative that values objective truth, like you say.
I used to laugh at historical events like the Salem Witch Trials -- not anymore!
I have been influenced by a comment made by British author Zadie Smith when she was interviewed by Radio New Zealand a few years ago.
Towards the end of a longish interview about her fiction Smith said “Identity is always a negotiation. I know am a black woman. I cannot control what every stranger in the street sees when they look at me. That is not something I can control. It's between who you know yourself to be true and what the other sees and it can't be other than a negotiation. It can be ridiculous, tragic, etc” https://t.co/Uqv5ymwCzU?amp=1 She says this at about 34.00 minutes and her comments followed on from a discussion of how she was perceived when she was on a visit to West Africa.
It made me realise what a huge and unusual expectation there is in respect of endorsing the gender identities of people who feel they have them. To say nothing of the fact that the demands often seem to stem from a need to be believed. Is there any other group that seeks to demand such endorsement? Generally we are allowed to be sceptical especially of far fetched claims or to seek explanation. Not 'believe me when I tell you who I am"
People who need constant "affirmation" of their identities by everyone around them don't know who they are, or even if they are, without all that "mirroring." They are in fact the only ones capable of sorting out who they are, but they prefer to hand that responsibility to others. All of this looks like narcissism, and little more than that.
I just want to say thank you to Molly Myers. We need more principled, courageous people to stand up for themselves and their kids.
Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Imposing speech and thought restrictions while threatening non-compliance with potential suspension, job loss and career destruction is violence. It is accuse the victim, gaslighting, passive-aggressive infliction of emotional and psychic violence. (Toxic feminism developed the technique while installing the D.E.I. commissariat.) The DNC/Biden conflation of criminal violence and citizen assault with revolution during the riot's and the administration's open declaration of war on half the American population is violence. It is long game avarice and tyranny masked as social concern. International criminal finance views the empowered educated American citizen and our Constitutional Republic as a threat. Their control of the EU flooded Europe with massive illegal immigration and displacement. Mass arrest's, prosecution's and re-education classes for bogus thought and speech crime's are underway now. Canada euthanized over 10,000 of its citizen's last year. You're next. When the Constitution goes down (and that's the goal) so are you.
The DNC/ surveillance state serves criminal finance. It represents an avaricious LIE of immense proportion. Like the '08 market crash, the Ukraine is yet another looting and "upward" transference, without consequence, of American treasure. American industry is gutted, DNC cities are war zone's, fentanyl flow's like water, the border is wide open, there's sh't in the streets and America's park's and underpasses are filled with the homeless. Do you actually think the DNC gives a damn about "trans"?
It is simply another instance of manufactured and weaponized chaos being used to bludgeon the Republic and American's into unconscious submission. The butchery of children is just "blowback"(and another chance for "big pharma" to stuff its pocket's).
Hopium: Without subscription journalism the "Twitter" revelation's would not have happened. We are slowly recapturing the American national dialogue but the DNC surveillance state psyop remains alive and dangerous. Criminal finance has totally compromised elected American political leadership. There is (at least at present) a malleable aspect to the Republican Party that might allow a way forward.
Stay strong. Stay clear.
I am very curious what will come of all this when it hits the courts.
I just took a new job and I read through the employee handbook. They are trading sex for gender identity in nearly every instance. I am curious if I was to be outed as the TERF that I am if I could be legally fired because of breaking the handbook rules or if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook.
..."if I still have rights that outweigh the handbook."
This is important to know. I am an independent contractor, not an employee, and I have learned that I am mostly not covered by civil rights laws, federal or state. If you have rights to disagree with your employer's official gender ideology it could help you to feel more confident no matter what the employer or your coworkers say to you. I have been surprised to learn how limited the protection is that we get from the First Amendment, and state law doesn't necessarily add to our rights. I am for this reason emphatically in favor of Governor DeSantis's efforts to expand employees' rights to sue employers over DEI abuses.
Traditionally, struggling for civil rights was to prevent discrimination against people for their ascriptive identities--that is, what can't be changed, such as who your parents are, your sex, your phenotype, unlike what you can change, such as your political or religious affiliation.
But trans is an identity--the very name means "change"--that is not ascriptive, it is something one can declare. Fighting for civil rights for an identity that anyone can move in (or out of) undermines the entire purpose of traditional civil rights--it's being dismantled in front of us.
beautifully constructed argument. it seems to me that most people are actually NOT transphobic or anti-Trans or any of the other linguistic games or mechanisms used to gaslight, manipulate and control people and assert power. they are simply protecting, as is their MF right, what THEY believe: that, for example, nature and biology are objective realities, whether or not we choose to accept them; and that free speech and expression is as sacrosanct as compelled speech is unethical if not malevolent.
Great reporting, Wesley. Although I confess whenever I read the insanity I still find myself wondering how people can believe this stuff, despite having a front-row seat.