Brendan O'Neill:
"You cannot compel me to say something I do not believe."
www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/03/why-i-will-never-use-female-pronouns-for-eddie-izzard/
"How long will it be before only men are allowed to call themselves women? That might sound preposterous but all the signs for such insanity are already here. Women are frequently referred to as ‘birthing bodies’ or even ‘bleeding bodies’, in the words of a notice at the University of Calgary that went viral last week. They’re ‘people who menstruate’, ‘people with cervixes’, anything but women. Female-identifying blokes, on the other hand, like Eddie Izzard, are definitely women, and woe betide the filthy transphobe who says they aren’t."
...
"In refusing to use female pronouns for Izzard, Duffield is striking a blow for freedom of thought. ‘Preferred pronouns’ are one of the most troublesome examples of compelled speech. Saying ‘she’ in reference to men is not about ‘politeness’, as some claim. Rather, the extreme pressure to use ‘preferred pronouns’ is about coercing people into a new belief system, one that says we all have an innate gendered soul which sometimes differs from our biological sex. But many of us don’t believe that. We think it’s baloney."
It's not new (others have been there) but still it's good pointing out the way 'politeness' is used as cover and that Rosie Duffield is fighting for freedom but alas, not everyone can exercise that freedom, for practical and livelihood reasons. The fact is that women are being compelled to say something they don't believe and whether individually free from those practical life constraints or not, are having it thrown in our faces by courts, workplaces, the NHS, politicians, the media, among many others.