To shriek from the rooftops that there is No Such Thing as “preferred pronouns”?

[Ddakji]

That’s it.

They don’t exist - any more than preferred adjectives, adverbs or nouns exist.

Even people who don’t like them still seem to think they exist.

Language is a shared, collective endeavour that belongs to all. It’s not a pick’n’mix for individuals to choose and change at will. For words not to be garbage they have clear definitions - in this case she for females, he for males, they (singular) for sex unknown.

Saying my preferred pronouns are she/her, even if that doesn’t fly in the face of reality, is no different to saying my preferred species is human, my preferred adjectives are sporty and lush.

It’s nonsense. Nothing to do with being kind or they don’t affect me, or I don’t mind if others do but I won’t. It’s nonsense.

Let’s make 2025 the year we kick this nonsense into touch.

I don't understand why people insist on conflating totally different situations

Gay rights was about acknowledging people's sexual orientation.

The trans debate is about compelling others to affirm falsehoods.

Plus gay rights didn't require others to compromise their rights to accommodate them.

I have ajways used pronouns to refer to people's sex and I see huge issues with people trying to prioritise gender over sex in these situations. There has been no argument made beyond 'trans people (mostly biological men to be fair) want me too'.

If you have a female body, you have absolutely no idea what it is to 'feel like a man'. Based on what?

I broadly sympathise with the sentiment expressed in the OP, but "Let’s make 2025 the year we kick this nonsense into touch" is not how any normal person speaks, nor does it really mean anything.

It’s not different. You want it to be because you don’t want to be seen as a bigot. But it isn’t any different. Someone else’s identity is not yours to decide. Someone else’s gender isn’t yours to decide. And it’s fine if you don’t believe it can be true, that’s your opinion, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to insist on misgendering people. It’s a nasty behaviour and that’s uncomfortable for you.

It's totally different. It's been explained why.

Personally I don't really care about people's gender identities, their sex is what's important

Trans women have zero 'right' to force others to blatantly lie.

Feelings about their body.
Your feelings are not truth. Your opinion and feelings are just that, opinions and feelings.
Nobody has a “truth” that differs from material reality, however strong their feelings are.

Aside from the fact that it’s impossible to know how it feels to be the opposite sex, feeling is one thing. Invading and colonising our spaces, and taking our words away from us, demanding that others go along with these reality-denying feelings, is something else.

No such thing as misgendering - because the words in question - man, woman, he, she - don’t refer to gender. Or feelings. Just sex. And sex can’t be changed.

So when I refer to someone male as a man or as he, I’m not “mis” anything. I’m using the correct words.

Feelings. Do. Not = Truth.

Some posters have been quite confusing on here.
How can saying the truth be judged automatically as horrible or judged as making a mistake?
The truth is simply that the truth
Saying a lie on repeat, loudly, with additional pressure etc. doesn't make it become the truth.

Because at one point in our history, the “truth” was that being gay was absolutely wrong.
Queen Victoria didn’t have a law against lesbians because her “truth” was that they didn’t exist.
It was illegal to be a male homosexual because the “truth” was that it was depravity.

“Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” was a slogan of people who believed homosexuality is a disorder, a mental illnesss, not real.

Gay conversion therapy existed (and is only recently being outlawed) because the “truth” was that being gay isn’t natural and normal.

In more modern times, there was opposition to gay marriage because of the fear that it would invalidate straight marriage, thereby depleting its rights and opening the door to all sorts of wrongness. (“Why can’t they be happy with civil partnership? Why do they want marriage? Marriage is sacred!!”)

Section 28 was all about the suppression and denial of homosexuality in the hope that it would just go away. But it didn’t, despite all the efforts to deny it.

Because homosexuality is true. And so is being transgender.

Goodness, I'm married and I prefer to be called Ms, but is the "truth" that I am Mrs because you say so?

Shall we start referring to people as fat Sue or obese Jenny if their BMI means it is factually true?

I think this world has room for us all to coexist and be kind to each other. I'm sorry you feel so afraid of a tiny percentage of the population.

Because homosexuality is true. And so is being transgender.

True in what sense?

Can humans change sex? Obviously not. So not true in that sense and lends the lie to transgender people having any rights to single sex spaces that don't belong to them.

True in the sense that your 'gender identity' can be different to your sex? Again, not true in a physical sense, as there is no way of verifying anyone's 'gender identity'.

Some believe that's true in a metaphysical sense, but that's an item of faith, like religion. There is no proof for it.

And it has no bearing on single sex spaces either as, once again, humans can't change sex.

So you are offended if people called Charlie, Alex, Bobby or Kim clarify in their email signature what sex they are? Seems an odd hill to die on but you do you.

I'm trans FtM. My truth is MY truth. I don't get to force it on anybody else. I can't expect, let alone demand, that they see inside my head and agree with me on how I see myself inside. I certainly can't demand that they deny their OWN truth, what they see with their eyes: that I have a female body.

Do I hope and wish that they'll be nice to me and treat me as I would like to be treated? Yes, of course. But if they don't want to entertain any cognitive dissonance for my benefit, well, tough for me, but it's my problem, not theirs.

You can add an note at the end of your signature, Miss, Mrs, Ms, Mr with your full name. Plenty of us use a short version followed by the full version (&role etc.) underneath.
I have no need to tell people what pronoun to use in my absence.

A voice of sanity, and also probably the most sustainable mindset that you could have.

For a post so sold on 'truth', yours is full of distortion and anecdote.

The anecdote about Queen Victoria and lesbianism is precisely that. It's an urban myth. There was no such law proposed and even if there had been, she had no power of veto. The suppression of sapphism, as it was then called, relied on silence. The Lord Chamberlain had Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness censored precisely because it risked informing women that lesbianism existed, where they were previously assumed to have been ignorant of it and that the very knowledge would somehow 'corrupt' them into similar behaviour. This is why so many lesbian, gay and bisexual writers of that time wrote about it in coded terms. And the offence was 'sodomy'. There was no outwardly gay identity but a coded performance, begun by Oscar Wilde: which of course was what caused offence. Nobody truly cared about his sodomy - he was persecuted because of his public performance of it. Thus Wildean dandyism became camp, which then morphed to 'queer' - first used to describe homosexuality in a 1926 US government publication. 'Gay' wasn't an identity up until that point. Sodomy was viewed as a separate act.

Yes, British conservative politics have been responsible for a great many travesties, likely caused by far too close an entanglement between state and church. Your usual suspects of course claimed it was a mental illness - just as it claimed women were 'hysterics' who denied their 'natural' inclination as wives and mothers. Civil partnership was the Blair government's concession to these coy conservatives: but civil partnership was marriage. The rights and status conferred via such a partnership were exactly the same as those of marriage - it was simply called by another name to appease the conservative element.

Of course homosexuality is true. It's the Gender Ideologists who have been banging the contrary drum. Consider the revolting sentiments behind the phrase 'cotton ceiling', and 'get over your genital fetish'. It's a denial of female same-sex attraction. It's as homophobic as it gets.

Trans genderism is also true. Despite the baffling lie to the contrary, no one is claiming that trans people don't exist. But they are trans. Humans cannot change sex. This, also, is inescapably true.

I agree that no one has to agree with you or can/should be forced to agree with you, but equally no one can change my opinion that it makes them a dick to intentionally misgender you or people like you. The people who gleefully celebrate being cruel.
I can’t fathom why a person can be so cruel over something that truly makes no difference in their life. Maybe it’s the autistic in me, but I just don’t understand it.

No such thing as misgendering. The words man, woman, he, she all refer to someone’s sex. Which can’t be changed.

Autistic people are very vulnerable to gender identity ideology and are hugely overrepresented in those being referred to gender clinics. Maybe have a look into why that might be.

It's called backlash. When a group forces another group to deny reality, to deny what they see with their own eyes, what they know with their own brains, under threat of being called a bigot or worse, it's only natural that the group under pressure celebrates when finally relieved of that pressure.

And again; it does make a difference in their life. Trans people are asking other people to willingly engage in cognitive dissonance. That's neither fair nor right. That so many people accept to do it is a proof that they do have a lot of empathy for trans people at base. But that empathy should neither be taken for granted, nor abused like it was for a decade in the UK.

I don’t think that’s the reason at all. People have always been mean and cruel to trans people. People have always delighted in hurting people who are different to them, whether that’s race or social class or ethnicity or religion. It’s not a new thing that has started happening since transness has been more publicly talked about. They just happen to be the target group of the moment.
It doesn’t make ANY difference to anyone’s life to just not engage in discussion around transness. Most people who are so vehemently opposed don’t even know any trans people, so it really doesn’t affect them.

"People have always been mean and cruel to trans people. "

I completely disagree. I live in a more conservative country than the UK, and I have zero problem living as a trans person. Everyone is perfectly nice with me, whether they clock me or not.

"It doesn’t make ANY difference to anyone’s life to just not engage in discussion around transness."

Ah but they don't, do they? It's trans people who demand that people engage in cognitive dissonance by using pronouns that don't align with their sex. Or that everyone indicate their pronouns when said pronouns are perfectly obvious and don't need to be indicated at all. TRAs are the ones you need to blame here.