Pronoun Prodigies

he/she/they/them/it/zit/zee/zir/xe/xer/bish/bash/bosh

What is it with pronouns? Most people (when pressed) don’t like using them but feel they have to use them in order to BeKind. Or because they’ve been told to. Many people feel compelled, to do so in order not to offend or insult the individual demanding them. Using pronouns “validates” a trans person’s identity.

I’ll re-write that last bit again, using more honest language:

Using pronouns means that you ideologically comply with a trans person’s idea of themselves and the group to which they feel they belong.

To gender heretics, the use of pronouns is “compelled speech”.

It’s not too much to ask is it, Really? Such a small courtesy to help out a fellow human being, is it really too much to ask? What does it cost you?

I keep returning to the fact that I used that word (“cost”) so many times in my pinned story, but I find it a very powerful tool to use when trying to show others that using pronouns (as an example) really doesn’t cost you very much if you’re young and idealistic and gender-questioning, and all the rest of it AND you’ve only just met that nonbinary person for the first time today. It costs you absolutely nothing if you’re already in the gender club, it’s a simple act of kindness given to someone fighting hostility and prejudice and oppression.

Well, as one of several reality-denying steps taken by our trans-identified child, it cost me my truth, my reality, my understanding and awe at the natural world, of evolution, of humanity itself. It told me that her beautiful birth and her beautiful life prior to her “rebirthing” into a new identity, had no value, no significance, no truth. It pulled the rug of reality from right under us. As just one step in her transition, it ended up costing us our daughter. Obsessive adherence to pronouns signifies one thing and one thing only: Me/Myself/I.

Because these pronouns were effectively weaponised against us, in the erasure of her parents required to construct her new identity, I wrote about my early experience of trying to use pronouns in the “pinned tweet” of my substack; We Used To Have A Daughter.

I tried really hard to do it; I wanted to do it. I wanted to do it more than anything and make it work because I wanted to be a better father to her, show support for her in the confusing time she was having. But I just couldn’t get it to work properly. I couldn’t get my brain to shout at itself “Wait! Red Alert! Remember to use THE PRONOUN!” whenever I spoke about her with anyone else or was ready to transition a thought about her into a sentence, for someone else.

Whenever SHE walked into the room (like she had done for 20 years of her life previously) there she was, just as ever, our beautiful human female daughter. The moment she was born, we both knew we had a baby girl, and what a beautiful memory we have; forever etched in our memories. The following 20 years were beautiful too, until groomers started to exploit her vulnerabilities and exercise “undue influence”.

During my pronoun difficulties, I was bombarded with all the counter arguments of course, “You’re just not trying hard enough”, or “It’ll work, just give it time. If you make a mistake, just apologise and move on. I won’t make you feel bad about it”.

It never worked.  I always stumbled. Something was just not letting me see quite why this was. She and I held an awkward conversation once wherein I admitted my failings and tried to urge us to keep moving on, keep moving forward, keep talking. But weeks later she was gone, off to university with an affirming GP her no.1 priority once she was welcomed by her tribe. I felt pathetic and enfeebled, unable to find any kind of resolution or common ground – almost as if psychologically and physiologically, my own testosterone had been stolen from me (there’s one for the therapists!).

I realised that those parents who manage to hold on to their gender-questioning sons and daughters must have super-human powers, or maybe they have much more patient children, with maybe slightly less conviction? Perhaps a determination and drive that is still somehow fluid and just flexible enough, rather than steely-eyed, cemented and fixed forever. Or they may be younger than ours, less reluctant to cut ties, and so parents are still able to apply some influence while they remain at home, within sight.

Playing the long game means doing what’s necessary in order to keep them close. So I think this is what parents that are “reluctant” affirmers do. And I really admire that. We tried that too and I also wish we’d been given more of a chance. It might have given us a little more time. But she was off in an instant; while we were still unknowing of the transwomen and groomers that had already identified their mark and acted on her vulnerabilities behind our backs.

Trying to find help from friends and family meant declaring our situation, only to be told to get behind our trans child. They had no idea what it was like to deny your reality and attempt to appease your own child experiencing undeclared mental health difficulties and asking you to comply with their idea that they were suddenly and miraculously of the opposite sex. Or somehow between or outside of the sex binary. We’d spent 20 years living with our gender-conforming daughter until this miraculous metamorphosis happened almost overnight.

There was loads of chat online about it all, and I came across Barra Kerr’s superb Pronouns Are Rohypnol https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns/ and the thought experiments that show how dangerous it is for women to disregard their own instincts for danger and threat, and how pronouns numb and confuse our senses. I also found plenty of people who had intelligent responses and witty ripostes that were very clever, in theory, but I wondered how - when push comes to shove - they would really go down with the genderists and their authoritarian lack of self awareness and surplus religous self-righteousness. To any self-aggrandizing Inclusivity Officer or workplace HR Genderist, this level of cockiness would just piss them off forever, surely.

And over time, listening to both trans people, and parents (and many others besides) I wondered what I would do now; if I were forced to appear before some HR McCarthyism panel asking me to be compliant, like the good little worker drone, and kowtow to the authoritarian ideology. Luckily I haven’t had to – although I’m tempted to think I wouldn’t stand for any nonsense, I’d tell ‘em where to shove it.

That’s an easy fantasy to buy into if, like me, you’re self –employed. I do my own thing, I’m my own boss. But even with this freedom, I still have to work with others who don’t have that luxury, who can’t be free of this reality-denying pronouns hokum.

I wondered in the end if there was an effective approach that allowed both parties; the Pronoun Enforcer (PE) and You/Me (YM) to retain some integrity and find some level of consensus.

Assuming that this might start out as a 1-1 convo, I’ve been thinking along the lines of challenging the terms of the original contract itself. So a private conversation might go something like:

• YM offers to change the “nature” of the contract offered (The contract originally offered being “You must comply or you are a transphobe!”)

PE: Why should I do that? You’re either with us or against us, It’s My Way or the Highway

• YM Offers instead a better alternative, even better than the contract PE is demanding YM accept

PE: Go on then, but make it quick, I’ve got a misgendering tribunal hearing at 3. (or if trans, Go on then, but you’ve already erased my existence)

• YM suggests using the trans persons TRANS NAME instead of pronouns. (I know, radical right?)

PE: confused, befuddled, but then wonders “Why would you want to give me an increased level of validation? Why can’t you just use my/their pronouns like everyone else?”

• YM “Well, I think pronouns are too impersonal, they’re generalised terms that could apply to anyone, whereas if I use your proper name then YOU, as a unique individual are easily identifiable, visible, specified, “seen” much more so than any casual he/she/they that doesn’t really recognise YOU. Don’t you see? Why enforce pronouns that link to the generality of people as a population, when you can elevate the identity of the individual? I feel it’s more respectful to use your/their name in your absence.”

PE: still confused, but getting there slowly - there’s an uncomfortable glimmer of recognition that a greater personal respect could arise from this. People would be using my TRANS NAME, so they could only be talking about ME. An Individual. Standing out from the crowd.

• YM “The number of times I’ve used pronouns to describe to others what they’ve done, or what you’ve done, and they ask me who on earth I’m talking about when I say he/she did this/that - WHO exactly (they ask) am I talking about?

• YM Well – using your name instead of an impersonal pronoun is far more personal and clear I think, at least it is to me”

PE: perhaps at this moment sees the Win-Win of it. It’s unorthodox, different, but I suppose it does clearly personalise the person in a way that pronouns actually don’t. Those pronouns demand constant clarifications and explainers whereas a name takes you straight to the individual and identifies them clearly and unambiguously.

A couple of caveats. Firstly, of course this idea can be blown out of the water completely by any trans person, or gender/trans D&I officer, at any time. They simply have to demand staying with the original contract terms. In many situations both private and (more likely) public, this could be doomed to fail. Similarly, different pressures and agendas would apply if done in public space with others in earshot. OK, I’m rowing back a little here….

BUT

YM is being urged to comply with the brain-interrupting rohypnol of reality denial, on pain of dismissal or disciplinary punishment, why not allow those brain stutters to use the named individual Sky or Jet or Dax or whatever single-syllable name is fashionable in the trans-identified alphabet soup of names. Better hope you don’t have to use more than 2 syllables! It wouldn’t work for example if your PE demanded you use the name Ignatious Humbleton-Greengrass or Constantina Opoudopouschenko.

ALSO

It would be clunky, and interrupted, and difficult BUT it would be no more so than using pronouns. This way you get to avoid the dreaded he/she/ze/zir machinations by substituting it for an alternative (hopefully) simple word – the name. You would be mirroring back to the PE the brain-scrambling effects and fluid speech interruption. LET IT BE SO. Let the PE see how clunky and difficult it is – he/she/they can’t criticize you for it - after all, you’re personalising, validating and humanising them to a level they’d never experience if they happened to overhear you talking about he/she/them/zir/zoo in boring old pronouns.

AND

In an ideal world, they’d have to acknowledge that this is the mess created by compelled speech. But if it works for both parties, why not give it a go? It’s not appeasement, or cow-towing, or even subversion. It’s about simply negotiating different terms and trying to find a workaround for both parties.

If I accept that, for however long I might need to buy some time, I’m going to have to find a way of referring to a trans person in the third person, out of their earshot, and that my brain will be scrambled by the experience of doing that, then I’d be happy to refer to any individual by their name. That’s a small price to pay. It costs me much less. Everybody has a name – but incredibly not everyone buys into the notion of gender identities.

Personally, I’d have been happier to use our daughter’s trans name instead of inserting reality-denying pronouns because a name is simply what you like to be called. Everybody has a right to a name. Your name personalises you, differentiates you from other human beings and I don’t have a problem with what anyone wants to call themselves. But many people DO have a problem with being asked to use language that conflicts with their primary senses response to other human beings.

Truth is, Pronouns lie.

And I refuse to use linguistic and coercive brain trickery that other people have demanded of me, that link to the denial of sex, or the assumed agreement that the person referred to is of a sex that they are not.

Just a hunch, let me know if you’ve tried this, or if you think this is completely insane. Thanks for reading