Is National Public Radio supposed to be an advocacy reporting organization? Is NPR supposed to push a particular political point of view?
NPR’s Laurel Wamsley, who purports to be a journalist, wrote an article entitled A Guide To Gender Identity Terms, in which she presented the “proper use of gender identity terms.”
Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people — along with challenges to their rights — have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some.
That’s why we’ve put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another.
Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance. Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD, compares using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – “a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.”
This guide was created with help from GLAAD. We also referenced resources from the National Center for Transgender Equality, the Trans Journalists Association, NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists, Human Rights Campaign, InterAct and the American Psychological Association. This guide is not exhaustive, and is Western and U.S.-centric. Other cultures may use different labels and have other conceptions of gender.
Yeah, that’s an unbiased group!
But, Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.
The unasked question is — and the author never added anything in to her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?
It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.
When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow.
Everyone has pronouns that are used when referring to them – and getting those pronouns right is not exclusively a transgender issue.
“Pronouns are basically how we identify ourselves apart from our name. It’s how someone refers to you in conversation,” says Mary Emily O’Hara, a communications officer at GLAAD. “And when you’re speaking to people, it’s a really simple way to affirm their identity.”
“So, for example, using the correct pronouns for trans and nonbinary youth is a way to let them know that you see them, you affirm them, you accept them and to let them know that they’re loved during a time when they’re really being targeted by so many discriminatory anti-trans state laws and policies,” O’Hara says.
“It’s really just about letting someone know that you accept their identity. And it’s as simple as that.”
Well, yes it is . . . and I don’t. When Bruce Jenner tells me that he is now a woman, I do not believe him and I do not accept his claims. To refer to him as “Caitlyn,” to use the feminine pronouns in reference to him, is to concede something I do not and will not concede; it would be both lying to him, leading him to believe that I went along with his claims, and it would be lying to myself.
But, at least Miss Wamsley was sort of asking us to use the terms the transgender would like. It was November 29, 2018, that The New York Times granted OpEd space to Chad Malloy
Messrs Marantz and Malloy obviously believe that what hey can do about it is simply to ban any publication of speech with which they disagree. If I say that no, Mr Malloy is not a woman, I have not harmed him, at least not beyond hurting his precious little feelings, nor have I prevented anyone else from going along with his claims of being a woman; all that I would be doing is being truthful to myself.
It does not matter how well or how poorly this article is written; neither The New York Times nor any other outlet of the credentialed media would ever publish it, because they have established transgenderism as part of their core beliefs. In publishing Miss Wamsley’s article in its present form, it becomes clear that NPR has done so as well.
To control language is to control the terms of the debate, and the credentialed media clearly believe that if they can just get people to refer to Bradley Manning as ‘Chelsea,’ to get people to use the preferred gender identity pronouns and terms in reference to the ‘transgendered,’ such concessions will go a long way to validating their argument.
But I will not, and I urge others to look at what they are saying, and how they are saying it, and not to go along with the left’s attempts at controlling speech.
______________________________________
Cross posted on American Free News Network.
