My far too expensive Philadelphia Inquirer subscription. I could use a senior citizen’s discount right about now.
Were it not for my website, I would not be wasting spending so much on newspaper subscriptions, to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lexington Herald-Leader, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Wall Street Journal. One thing on which I can always count is something silly from the Inquirer to give me inspiration!
Using a person’s preferred pronoun isn’t about being woke. It’s a sign of respect.
Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be.
by Jenice Armstrong | Monday, September 16, 2024 | 9:01 AM EDT
Applicants vying for a job in Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign have the option of selecting from nine different combinations of preferred pronouns.
There’s the usual he/him, she/her, and even they/them/theirs. But some options are much more obscure — most I’ve never even heard of, such as fae/faer and hu/hu (which is derived from the word human). I was this week years old when I learned about some of these neopronouns, as they’re called.
I continued with Miss Armstrong’s column, and you know what I didn’t find? I didn’t find any mention of whether those people who chose not to use the “preferred pronouns” an applicant might select — unless the “preferred pronouns” selected were the normal ones — would be disciplined or fired under a Kamala Harris Emhoff administration.
The Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office of the National Institutes of Health stated:
Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns — by which them mean their preferred pronouns — DRP — is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights.
The Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 expressly prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Title VII’s prohibition against sex discrimination includes discrimination based on an employee’s gender identity or sexual orientation. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s technical assistance publication Protections Against Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity considers the use of pronouns or names that are inconsistent with an individual’s gender identity as unlawful harassment. The EEOC guidance states, “intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment” and is a violation of Title VII.
Translation: use the “preferred pronouns,” or you’re history!
Back to Miss Armstrong’s column:
Before you groan and complain about how pronouns are an example of woke run amok, stop for a moment and think about how self-affirming it can be for people for whom the usual he/him, she/her, or even they/them don’t cut it.
I personally don’t mind referring to an individual by “they” if that’s what’s preferred. You shouldn’t, either. It doesn’t cost anything to show each other the kind of respect we all deserve.
Actually, it does. By using the non-standard “preferred pronouns,” or the newly assumed names, of the ‘transgendered’ or ‘non-binary’, one is, in effect, conceding their position that they are something other than their actual sex! Miss Armstrong is asking us to, in effect, lie to both others and ourselves, to keep from hurting their precious little feelings.
There’s more to it than that. The left in general, and Miss Armstrong specifically, wish to control language, in an attempt to control the argument. If someone concedes that Bruce Jenner is actually ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner, then one is concomitantly conceding that a person can actually change his sex. Mr Jenner has had his “gender confirmation surgery”, but he is still biologically male. He has the standard XY chromosomes which determine sex, and has to “dilate” his faux “vagina” frequently, because, being biologically male, his body sees that “vagina” as an open wound, and tries to close it up to heal it. That, in itself, tells you that while Mr Jenner has had extensive plastic and urologic surgery to attempt to appear female, he’s still male.
UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.
That, of course, leads to all kinds of stupidity, such as Will Thomas claiming that he is a female called “Lia,” and other males pushing themselves into women’s sports, in which they have dominated. As we have previously reported, Miss Armstrong’s newspaper has gone all-in on referring to Mr Thomas as a woman, even though, at the time of his competition on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, he was a fully intact male.
We have already seen some of the results of placing “transgender women” who are convicted felons in women’s prisons, and girls’ teams choosing to forfeit a game rather than play against biological males, because bigger males were injuring the girls.
If the ‘transgendered’ were content to just try to live their lives quietly, this wouldn’t be an issue. But no, at least some of them seem determined to use the force of law to compel you to confirm their delusions, and that constitutes a danger to individuals, to girls and women — there doesn’t seem to be a similar danger from females claiming that they are male, though Audrey Hale is an obvious exception — and to society in general. Miss Armstrong’s subtitle said that we shouldn’t think of it as being #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading run amok, but it clearly is an assault on science and common sense, on things human beings have known ever since human beings became self-aware.
References
| ↑1 | As specified in The First Street Journal‘s Stylebook, “In English, properly understood, the masculine subsumes the feminine. This means that, in cases in which the sex of the person to whom a pronoun refers is unknown, the masculine is properly used, and does not indicate that that person is male, nor is it biased in favor of such an assumption. The feminine pronouns, on the other hand, do specify that the person to whom they refer is female, and not male.” We do not use the silly and ungrammatical formulation “he or she.” We do not, however, change the direct quotes of others. |
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| ↑2 | From Wikipedia:
I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid. |
As the campaign’s communications director, one would assume that Mr Tyler understands the importance of words and choosing his words carefully, so when he tells everybody that Mrs Emhoff “shares the goals” of the pro-Hamas demonstrators, I believe him.
