'Multiple sets of pronouns' article - she/they etc. in their own words

[NoWireHangersEver]

www.them.us/story/multiple-sets-of-pronouns

It's not often that you get people of this background providing detailed explanations of what gender means to them or what pronouns actually do (beyond TWAW, the usual threats etc)

This article is really useful for that reason, but the consistent attitude to women makes me so depressed - the insinuation that someone cannot be female and be referred to as female while still 'containing multitudes'. eg:

"Using multiple sets of pronouns interchangeably is how I affirm and honor the multitudes that my spirit and personality contain."

"Using she/they pronouns is a way for me to affirm that my womanhood is not binary and cannot be understood within cisheteronormative understandings of what it means to be a woman; I am a woman, sure, but I am also so much more." (from a transwoman)

"I love hearing myself referred to as both she and he because they convey the divine femininity and masculinity that I feel every day."

"For me, they embodies my wholeness, which is a mix of masc and femme energy that resides outside of the binary."

Honestly revealing and disturbing - makes me wonder how, eg, my bio female nonbinary supervisor perceives me and other women I work with. In these people's minds, are 'cis' women thought of as lacking in wholeness? We're being talked about as if we are dysfunctional beings...

Too much naval gazing imo

Way too much. They should be glad they have such charmed lives that this is all they have to agonise over.

It’s cos we haven’t been on the sacred journey to being whole obviously. We are just poor unenlightened beings doing all the bloody work. Seriously who has time to think about this drivel, never mind articulate it? Do they not hear themselves in their heads and think ‘that sounds a bit wanky, I won’t say that out loud’?

Drugs. It’s fine, but drugs.

I haven’t got enough energy to channel both the masculine and feminine bits of it!!

As pp says. A load of bloody naval gazing.

Problem with this shit is that there are no barriers to entry. Literally anyone can start bigging up their own pronouns, energy and general specialness.

Up they own arses.

Self absorbed, boring, nonsensical

I assume the article is supposed to be at least a little tongue in cheek.

I suppose I'm halfway sympathetic towards someone who wants to go by both he & she (e.g . 'yes I have a man's skeleton & so on but I'm pumped full of female hormones & 'live as a woman' so I'm in a sense a bit of both really...'). I much prefer that to some hulking 6'3" oaf with fully intact cock and balls swinging between 'her' legs insisting that she's a woman, a woman, and nothing but a woman, and that 'man' is the most offensive word you could possibly use about her

My pronoun today is Bitch.

Had shit day.

It seems a bit self indulgent to me, there’s so much going on in the wider world that needs our attention - wars, famine and poverty under our noses.

BorisBooster 🤣🤣
That I can get !

'I respond to folks who ask me which pronouns to use by not really giving them what they really want, an out'

I can't describe how stony my face is reading that. As if any attempt to interact as a human being using language is a competitive game that they have to win.

Christ, I can barely summon up the energy to clean the sink, let alone muse about my complex inner multitudes and how best to express them to the totally uninterested world.

I am really very tired of people who are so desperate to be special they elbow their way into as many oppressed groups as they can - & then tell us all about it. Because how could we be anything other than fascinated by their textbook cluster B behaviours wonderful insights?

Disability “activism” is bloody riddled with similar nonsense, too - & indeed crossover nonsense.

You’d think it had been made an actual crime to be white, middle-class & abled from the way this lot carry on. Trying to pretend your privilege doesn’t exist is vastly more offensive than acknowledging it, showing gratitude for it, & making use of it. There is always space for talking about the problems you actually experience[d] but some thought about which spaces you use matters, the same way it does for everyone. This particular group, though, have lots of the privileged people who absolutely reject the notion of their privilege.

I don’t really want anyone to have real problems, because it would be wicked to ill-wish people so - but I would like it if people could somehow… get the perspective + knowledge without the trauma/pain/damage? Then maybe we’d be spared all the explanations from people about how they are the most special people to have ever specialed.

The pseudo-inspirational postcard I had as decoration in my room as a teen (& then at uni) saying “remember you’re unique (just like everybody else)” is seemingly some form of heresy today - & certainly it seems said fact’s eluded a worrying number of people. It would make a nice strapline for use on billboards giving definitions of male/female/how “honest opinion” works in law…

Do you know what they never, ever do? They never describe any of it.

All their energies, their multitudes, the masc and the femme and divine womanhood, none of it is ever actually defined or described.

It's just labels.

”For me, they embodies my wholeness, which is a mix of masc and femme energy that resides outside of the binary."

The problem I have is that my masc energy seems to manifest itself as chin hair and then all my femme energy is taken up with removing it so they cancel each other out. So maybe I am non-binary too, after all?

Using multiple sets of pronouns interchangeably is how I affirm and honor the multitudes that my spirit and personality contain."

Is it "you" that is doing it? "Using" the pronouns? Or is it that you are trying to get other people to do that for you?

This divinity/sacred aspect seems to be being talked about more and more and it’s so weird. People literally making trans into being about being superhuman and special in a godly way, using terms that only apply to religious belief. You’re not just morally superior and more oppressed, you’re actually Jesus-like.

It’s fascinating and also frightening. Especially given anyone can identify into being trans and there’s no way of testing if they are substantively different from anyone else or not, so basically anyone can now become divine, via being self-absorbed. It’s all so bizarre and going down a very strange route. (the extreme ideology, not all trans people per se.)

But I no longer ascribe to the limitations and expectations of womanhood as the core of who I am.

Um - no me neither. You could just be… I dunno, a feminist?

Regarding the whole article, I’m going to sound old now but when did people stop being embarrassed about sounding totally up themselves? No one would have talked like this even 20 years ago because people would have laughed or told you to stop being a pretentious twat. How did that change happen?

@MoonOnASpoon

But I no longer ascribe to the limitations and expectations of womanhood as the core of who I am.

Um - no me neither. You could just be… I dunno, a feminist?

Regarding the whole article, I’m going to sound old now but when did people stop being embarrassed about sounding totally up themselves? No one would have talked like this even 20 years ago because people would have laughed or told you to stop being a pretentious twat. How did that change happen?

Yes, on that feminist label. But it doesn't provide instant victim-status in the Oppression Olympics.

We have gone backward when it is assumed that one has to identify out of being a woman OR ascribe to the limitations and expectations of womanhood. The whole point of feminism was to remove those limitations and expectations, but for EVERYONE, not just a handful of special pronoun people.

The worst aspect of this, of course, is that the small minority can only be special by forcing everyone else appear to uphold rigid sex roles and accept sexist stereotypes. Whenever someone declares that they are non-binary, people who don't so declare are pushed into retrogressive gender roles and assigned stupid sexist beliefs. I hate that so much.

What a load of old toot

Honestly, the examples in the OP just made me think of a bunch of hippies wittering on about their star signs and how they gained clarity from knowing which House their moon was in. Naval-gazing twaddle.

"I become a queer little problem for anyone — indeed any system — aiming to absorb the rupture wrought by non-binaryness by casting it as a third gender. This is all to say I locate my identity less within the pronouns she/they, and more through the conjunction that joins them: not or, but and. And affords an openness to multiplicity, to those changes upon changes that construct our ever-forming selves"

Did you now?
😂😂😂😂😂😂

Imagine having to spend time with someone who talks like this.

Does Private Eye still have Pseud’s Corner?

@LittleWhingingWoman

"I become a queer little problem for anyone — indeed any system — aiming to absorb the rupture wrought by non-binaryness by casting it as a third gender. This is all to say I locate my identity less within the pronouns she/they, and more through the conjunction that joins them: not or, but and. And affords an openness to multiplicity, to those changes upon changes that construct our ever-forming selves"

Did you now?
😂😂😂😂😂😂

Imagine having to spend time with someone who talks like this.

Maybe these people could be recruited as torture devices to break foreign terrorists. Forget physical torture, an hour with one of these wankers and they’d be spilling everything just to make it stop. .