Do pronouns feel alien to anyone else?

[janeseymour78]

By this, I mean I have friends who are 100% pro pronouns as a show of support and we've had our debates, and then there are others who say it is unhealthy to reinforce stereotypes, eg. By using them on work signatures

For me though, adding she/her pronouns to everything and even having being asked what they are verbally, she/her feels alien to me in a visceral way. I'm curious about this because I have several friends who don't share that feeling at all.

Im GC and I don't believe people are binary. I have elements of feminity and masculinity that whatever else that form who I am. I know I'm a woman, I have endometriosis so I'm painfully aware, as well as all the other reasons women are made aware of their sex.

It comes down to adding 'she/her' to everything would not feel right to me, as though it didn't reflect me. It would like I was falsely reinforcing my womanhood when I don't live my life that way or feel that way. Am I making sense? Do others feel this way?

"Why, exactly, do you need to separate trans women from women for women to have rights?"

Firstly, women are an oppressed group of people. And they are oppressed by men. Women's lack of rights is caused by male oppression. Recognising these hierarchical structures and working to combat them is important for any civil rights movement (see black liberation, gay liberation, etc.)

There has never been a rights movement, however, where the oppressing class has declared itself to BE the class it is oppressing, and to even say that it is more oppressed. Except for now, with women's rights. Despite being oppressed by men for millennia (and often on the basis of our biology), women are now being told by males that they are women, because woman now has nothing to do with bodies or being female but is now entirely a mental construct which can instantiate inside a male's brain. Woman is a thought. And men can be women by thinking. By virtue of a mental state, men can jump from the oppressor class to the oppressed class.

If the distinction between men and women is broken down, if the oppressor can become the oppressed just by thinking it and declaring it to be so, then it is hard to see how there can even be 'women's rights' because there simply isn't such a thing as 'woman' that is a meaningful category other than "a person who is apt to declare themselves as such."

Secondly, women have special rights and needs by virtue of our female body. Only females can give birth, can get abortions, have periods, have female reproductive cancers, etc. Our female bodies are not catered to by science or medicine or technology (see the book 'invisible women'. ) Our bodies are highly sexualised and objectified by male society. The female sex has the right to gather away from males, in sports, domestic abuse shelters, hospitals, prisons, etc.

Transwomen, however, insist that they are female too and that they get access to these spaces as well. If transwomen gain access to these spaces, then women lose the right to female only spaces because by definition they are not female-only any more. So, in order for women to have certain rights it is essential that transwomen are kept separate in certain domains. This is exactly what the Equality Act recognises.

Re the original question, I can only think she/her might "feel alien" if you ascribe a value or meaning to the words beyond simply being a way to refer to a female person (or animal).

But that is all the words she and her do: they tell us the person being talked about is female. They don't tell us anything else about her. The words she and her don't tell us how clever she is, how witty, or kind or funny. They don't tell us how successful she is in her career, or if she has one at all. They don't tell us whether she is well read, has a deep knowledge of 19th C philosophy or gardening or particle physics, or if she knows all the lyrics to the entite Beatles back catalogue.

These words don't tell us much about her at all, except that she is female.* So no, they don't feel alien to me, but I can see how they might to you, if you believe that they are loaded with additional meaning.

*Notwithstanding the people who also use the words to refer to men and boys, aka male humans.

Yes, they do feel alien, because I don't buy into this gender ideology, and I don't see the need to announce my sex all the time. If you know me as a woman, then you'll use the relevant pronouns anyway.

But the only reason people state them is because they are being used to refer to people who are not female? i.e. transwomen?

If any TW uses she then clearly they do mean much more than you are allowing here.

@Whatiswrongwithmyknee I should have included the bit I was referencing (below) but maybe I misunderstood the op. To me it's not about pronouns "reflecting me" because all pronouns do (well, should do, at any rate) is tell give the sex of the person being referred to. I concede that there are people who think the words she and her relate to femininity, or gender identity or whatever, I just think they are wrong.

I think gender identity and its associated ideology is bollocks. I haven't got pronouns in my email signature, I don't tell people which pronouns to use when talking about me, and I don't expect other people to tell me how to refer to them.

"It comes down to adding 'she/her' to everything would not feel right to me, as though it didn't reflect me. It would like I was falsely reinforcing my womanhood when I don't live my life that way or feel that way"

Sorry, tired, and this is actually a hard one to articulate in writing!

What I was trying to say was:

No, they don't feel alien to me because I use them the same way everyone always used them up until about 5 minutes ago.

What I mean is the reinforcement of them by use of adding to all social media platforms and being asked to say my name and then pronouns at most classes I go to now feels alien.

Someone referring to me as 'she' or 'her' on conversation does not.

I've moved on from pronouns to adjectives now - mine are "angry" and "dispirited".

You don’t get to choose your reality. A white man does not get to choose to be black. A rich person does not get to choose to identify as poor to get benefits, or an Englishman identify as French to get the right to work in Europe.

Asking people to play along with the conceit that you are the opposite sex, or that there exists an innate gender is no more reasonable than any of the above examples, and as we know, if anyone does play along then that will be used to invade women’s single-sex spaces and facilities.

And yet, according to normal people’s definitions, we know that your mother was a woman and your father was a man, and that your mother was the one who gave birth.

You are deliberately mixing the labels with the underlying reality.

Of course you are. What’s going on in the head of someone with psychological issues doesn’t force anyone else to change how they view reality.

A trans woman is no more a woman than a person claiming to be Napoleon III is really emperor of France.

No, sex refers to which type of gametes you developed towards support for in-utero.

You are pretending that secondary sexual characteristics define sex, and they don’t. This is exactly analogous to claiming that wearing a striped pullover and beret, giving an insouciant shrug and smoking Gauloises would make you French.

No-one passes. That they do is a lie told by trans people to each other, but in real life, no-one passes.

A trans woman’s skeleton is still male. The pelvis differs, So gait does too. Hands differ, facial shape, voice, shoulders, articulation.

This is why on Twitter there’s such a propensity to cartoon avatars or extremely heavy editing amd filters. Out in the real world, despite what they claim, trans women are far more like Eddie Izzard than like Kylie Minogue (ask your mother who that is.)

This

fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/

Fuck me. I really hope certain posters don’t ever attempt livestock farming.

It would be a short lived career.

I think they'd be too busy asking their animals for their preferred pronouns to do any farming.

If forced I'm going to insist that my pronouns are 'the cats mother'

I'm going to be kind because I am guessing you are very young but you don't seem to have grasped the basics. You can have empathy for a group without pretending to be them. I empathise with the struggles that black people face, for example. I don't go along to protests and pretend to be black! That would be crass and inappropriate, no? Feminism is for females. Stop expecting us to solve everyone else's problems. As I said before, I have nothing in common with tw that I don't have in common with other men. That doesn't mean I don't empathise with them. Trans activism would be so much more effective if it worked separately. Instead transactivists have either ignored or bullied women and we've had enough. No.

Please try to understand the difference between “feminine” and “female”. It’s crucial to the argument. You’re conflating the two.

I've read that ' celebrities ' are removing pronouns from their bios as a result of Bill Maher's episode on the subject .

“Hate-driven pathological delusion”?

It’s still a bit early for such hyperbole.

Nope, I can guarantee you that the vast, vast majority of children from aged 3/4 upwards can see who’s a man and who’s a woman. It’s hard-wired in us. That’s why small children stare so hard at adults in masks/dressing up clothes etc. They’re trying to work it out. It’s crucial for us as a species to tell the difference. I’m pleased that my teenage DDs can tell in a split-second that the person walking towards or behind them on the street, particularly if it’s dark, is a man or a woman. It has zilch to do with what the person is wearing or how, to borrow your phrase, “that person is presenting”.

Do you understand this?

And have you grasped the difference between feminine and female yet? Homework for today.

@FrancescaContini
If you're so confident, tell me, is any of these women trans?

Or here, can you tell the sex of everyone on this picture?