For anyone who thought the Guardian had seen the light...

Oooo they've published a gc letter alongside the gender wang ones

www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/30/a-full-exploration-of-the-rise-in-gender-questioning-girls-is-much-needed

I used to work with a person whose first language was Spanish. In a Facebook post, they asked their English speaking friends to respect their non-binary identity and pronouns, yet also said that their Spanish/Catalan friends could continue to use she/her as they understood that it wasn't possible to use their chosen pronouns in Spanish or Catalan.

It really was TL:DR but as I skimmed it, this bullshit plopped out "Because personal pronouns not only give people a sense of their place in the world but also, in the English language at least, have for centuries been used to keep them in their place, socially and politically. "

The only people who have been kept in their place by pronouns are BIOLOGICAL WOMEN. More appropriation of women's history and experiences.

And it's so fucking anglocentric. It's no different to watching an episode of Friends in a foreign language and sharing the in jokes.

Yes, but the TRA movement relies on 3rd parties policing your language and castigating you for misgendering the holy bepronouned one. Flying monkeys make this world go round.

Actually I'd find a genuine conversation about gender identity, where we can explore questions like "why do you feel your gender does/doesn't match mine? What do you feel like? What do you believe I feel like? This is how it feels to be me, growing up in the body I have...do those experiences fit what you expected? How did you experience those things?" incredibly interesting.

But that is not what's on offer, is it? The trans-identified and their TRA "allies" have no interest in hearing how the people they are shoving into gender boxes really feel and think, or the effect that their redefining the world into mental gender boxes has on us, in case it doesn't fit the beliefs they have build their own identities on.

swive me, what a load of miserable nonsense.

surely this is only any kind of issue in the really heavily gendered languages, eg a German writing an email can barely get out of the choice between addressing a recipient as 'lieber' or 'lieber'? pronouns are just so easy to swerve altogether.

miserable virtue signalling/appropriation of other cultures' issues, far worse than before the England-USA match last night when the (fairly black) American team stood on in puzzlement as the (less black) England team 'took the knee' with ham-fistedly exaggerated solemness

Ha, well, that'll learn me. 😄

Did a bloke write it?

I've not read the article or the thread here, I want to put a bet on with myself that it's a bloke first.

Hadley leaving. We know why. Suzanne left. We know why. If John and Marina leave, that’ll be it for me. God knows that this country needs a corrective to the right’s capture of MSM in this country. But The Guardian is failing on so many fronts, not just this one. Viner is such a disappointment after years of brilliant guardian editors. What’s worse is teaching my DC and DN to read it too.

To be honest, I find all this navel gazing and reflection about the “self” really tiresome. i think that some people are incredibly fascinated by their sense of self and enjoy preening it, cultivating their personal identity like a hobby (see the person in the article who finally decides they are a “boy”.) it’s a little bit like people who find religion and suddenly it’s the most all consuming, interesting thing in their lives. But I find it quite narcissistic and consumerist , and I resent the pronoun shit because it means that I’m dragged in as a participant in their self-building.

This^^ Teens do navel gaze in trying to work out who they are, but pronouns and gender politics is making that so much harder for them. No big surprise that it’s all young girls IME who opt for ’they’ or ‘him’ in this hypersexualised extremely misogynistic world. And I can’t blame my DC for the confusion when putative feminist colleagues have also swallowed pronouns hook, line and sinker including name badges and email signatures.

But almost it’s the narcissistic turn to the self and subsequent entitlement that is the most troubling. That way brings only unhappiness.

Yes , exactly. This writer falls at the first fence. It’s also not a quiet revolution but a bellowing abusive one.

Yeah I noticed the "boy" bit. Very Eddie Izzard 😐

Person in their 30's says they identify like a boy rather than a man and no-one seems to pick up on how disgusting and creepy that is. Right then.

DontAsk it makes me think that it can’t just be us. I bet you the vast majority of people feel exactly the same.

Funnily enough I got a few lines in and decided that if I am asked to out pronouns in my email I might go with OD/FOD.

I dragged my eyes across the rest of the article. It’s amazing how many people are having a revelation that gender stereotypes don’t fit them.

I’d be infinitely more interested in what they had for breakfast. Pronoun bores can just bore off.

I stopped reading at 'a quiet revolution'. Nothing quiet about it. It's being rammed down our throats by our banks, energy suppliers and supermarkets.

@ControversialOpening - this article about why pronouns lead to a slow creep of embedding gender ideology is brilliant if you've not read it before.

The author used to post here before she was banned

fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

I know Francesca. I am as interested in someone else’s self-perceived identity as I am interested in what they had for breakfast that day.

No one else needs to know fgs.

Can’t even be bothered to read this navel gazing bullshit.

For people who insist on pronouns: I will refer to you however I like in your absence. If you’re standing in front of me and I need to address you I will, of course, use “you”. This is how English works.

Half a paragraph in and I’m thinking ODFOD. I cannot be entertaining the self-absorbed bullshit of others. Everyone, put yourselves and your inner lives first. Anyone who wants you to prioritise their inner life over your own, needs to do one. Tiresome, tedious twats. FOTHFSOF.

The book’s assumption that children should be free to make up their own minds is supported by Claudia, a consultant clinical psychologist specialising in young people with gender dysphoria, who says: “Misgendering young people with an intense trans- or cross-gender identification can cause them pain and sometimes results in them not even recognising themselves. Language is a social construction which brings things into being, and pronouns are a part of that.” Sam has experience of this with Milly. “They find it physically painful when I get their pronoun wrong,” he says.

well quite if you insist on misgendering a young girl as a boy of course she won't recognise herself....but that's not what they're trying to say is it.

Completely agree. I can excuse narcissistic introspection in teenagers; anyone over the age of 25 who seriously contemplates this stuff (or worse, utters their inane musings out loud - e.g. recent guardian interview with Héloïse Letissier/Christine and the Queens) is someone who has failed to exit adolescence and is, ironically, insufficiently self-aware to realise they are mistaking arrested development for growth.

you know I don’t actually mind the pronouns thing too much. It seems daft to me, but it’s not a hill I’d die on. if that was all TRAs were after I’d shrug.

However, it now feels like accepting preferred pronouns is accepting the ideology - that TWAW, no single sex spaces, no same sex attraction, etc. This means that I’m not going to use anyone’s preferred pronouns or announce my own, and that ant website that asks for them is going to get a comment in the ‘anything else’ box.

Soon Rijneveld began to feel that this didn’t represent the true picture. “I’m being billed as non-binary everywhere, but actually it is becoming increasingly clear to me: I feel like a boy. Not a man or a woman or non-binary, but a boy.”

Is Rijneveld trans-age as well as transgender? This is very odd but is not expored further in the piece.

Heaven help these people if they ever encounter anyone who doesn’t have English as a first language.

Heaven help these people if they ever encounter anyone who isn’t an idiot.

As a linguist, I quibble with some bits of the article. It is not true to say that if Lewis Carroll had used "they" when referring to Alice, he would "merely have been following" Dickens and Austen. Dickens, Austen and other writers used singular "they" to refer to a person of unknown gender (an indeterminate individual, as in Austen's "“I would have everybody marry if they could do it properly"). Occasionally, "they" was used where the gender was known but considered irrelevant, as in Shakespeare's "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me as if I were their well-acquainted friend" (though this could also possibly be interpreted as the old use of "man" to refer to a non-gender-specific individual). But all these usages are a different kettle of fish from "Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by their sister", which would have seemed very odd to Carroll, Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare.

Secondly, we are told that "Old English used variations of the same word – “he” and “heo” for “he” and “she”, and “hi” for third-person plurals of all genders. But in day-to-day life these could be confusing." OK, if it was confusing to use a similar word for singular and plural 3rd-person pronouns back then - so confusing that "hi" was replaced with "they", even though the pronouns were only similar and not indentical - why then are we be encouraged to think that using "they" as a singular (to refer to a definite individual, not the traditional indefinite usages) won't be confusing and that anyone who says it is is some kind of bigot?

"In April this year, the US became the 17th country in the world to introduce gender-neutral passports, offering the option of “X” alongside “M” (male) and “F” (female). We live in a globalised world where many languages, such as Finnish, don’t have gendered personal pronouns; there’s no one size that fits all."

This is lumping different points together in the same paragraph. The fact that Finnish lacks gendered personal pronouns has never stopped them from distinguishing M and F. They don't all feel nonbinary. I don't think Finland allows X on passports yet. In fact a Finnish government website states that you must be entered on the national population register as M or F - you cannot be nonbinary: "The Finnish law only recognises two genders: man and woman. In Finland, a gender-neutral person is always entered as a woman in official documents and registers." ( dvv.fi/en/gender-recognised-abroad )