If you are someone who believes you have pronouns or would like to supply them, by all means, that is your prerogative. Whenever anyone asks me to use their preferred pronouns, and I can do so without confusing my audience or muddying an argument, I do so and I think this is an important courtesy. But—when asked, I will not state my pronouns and if you don’t believe in Gender Ideology, you shouldn’t either. When you state your pronouns, you participate in the catechism of Gender Ideology—the belief that there are ineffable genders, unknowable to all but the subject. That no one can possibly know I am a woman unless I’ve supplied these. I do not believe this. I regard this as nonsense. When asked for my pronouns, I say: “I am a woman.” Take back your freedom. Reclaim it now.
—Abigail Shrier, What I told the students of Princeton (bolding mine)
I have a remote job. I’ve met a few of my colleagues in person, but most of them I’ve only seen on a screen. As in many tech offices, Slack is the main communication vector.
Slack has a profile field where you can indicate your pronouns, such that anyone could look at your profile to retrieve this information. There seems to be a convention, however, that this information is so important that it needs to appear wherever one’s name is present. In Slack (or Zoom), this means adding your pronouns to the field where your name is displayed. In many cases, where people have chosen to go with their first name plus pronouns, the impression is one of the pronoun dyad becoming part of their name, e.g., Karen (she/her) and Stephen (he/him).
Why is this happening?
In two words: gender identity, a vague and vacuous concept suddenly deemed the new frontier of civil rights. Whence this gender obsession? Most directly, it emerges from a small but vocal strain of Trans Right Activism, whose thesis is that transition isn’t something one does (say, a man deciding/desiring to present himself to society as if he were a woman) but a simple (and unfalsifiable) claim that one identifies with the other sex. It is on the basis of this inner feeling that a man can be a woman. As in:
This is, of course, bullshit—and the vast majority of trans people are not only not confused about their biological sex, but also have no desire to base their legitimate claim to civil rights on the illegitimate overthrow of biological reality. The now infamous Kathleen Stock appropriately labels the insistence to the contrary of TRAs like Emily an immersive fiction; and it is this fiction, rather than the civil rights of trans people, that is the source of our current gender troubles:
We can see, then, that though there can be genuine personal benefits to immersion, there can also be costs. Many of the most pressing dangers around immersion are wider ranging than this, however. Individual histories remain just that—individual. Large-scale problems also emerge when institutions coercively make it a social norm that everyone immerses themselves in the fiction that certain people have changed sex, or are non-binary, on pain of social sanction if not.
—Kathleen Stock, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism
It is by the logic of immersion that terms that have genuine validity (like women and men) are suddenly considered “exclusionary” and therefore “hurtful”. For the OG like myself, this confusion of terminology with treatment makes no sense: a man is free to alter his body and to live as a woman, but that transsexual’s civil rights neither require nor justify every institution simply pretending that that person is biologically female for all intents and purposes, consequences be damned—from rape and pregnancy in female prison to males “breaking records” in women’s collegiate swimming.
But on Twitter and in too many workplaces (wokeplaces?), resistance is futile. Many women and men insert their pronouns in unavoidable places, and it is of course unknowable whether they actually understand or give a shit about gender ideology. It’s worse than (Bill) Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”—it’s just, “don’t ask.” For the men, it’s most likely a gesture of self-preservation; feverishly checking their privilege since 2016, they figure a (he/him) is a truly small price to pay if it keeps the hounds of DEIBJ at bay (just added: J for Justice! B for Belonging!)
For the women, I don’t know. Certainly feminism (except the radical kind) is all about gender identity and the freedom and inclusiveness it supposedly represents. It’s possible many women really believe in gender identity—including what I consider the nonsense notion of “non-binary”—both as a form of personal expression and as a form of activism. And maybe some women are just going with the flow, just like the men are.
In any case, I loathe the unavoidable presence of pronouns at work. At best, gender ideology is a fad, at worst, a religion: in both cases, why is it at work at all? Can you imagine putting (emo) or (goth) in your display name? Or (Jew) or (atheist)? Or (white) or (BIPOC)? Of course you can’t. So why are pronouns different?
Partly, it’s about politics. College-educated women are overwhelming liberal, and so it was an easy shift among this cohort from the battle for gay marriage to the (supposedly similar) fight for trans rights. Partly, though, it’s about how a strain of academic theory around gender and sexuality essentially took over women’s studies departments, and from there made its way into the broader culture, especially online and especially among digital natives. Feminism for the gender-identity crowd is, like the word women itself, now understood as exclusionary.
At work, this meant that I was invited to a private channel that I assumed was for women at the same moment a proposal was floated to change the channel’s name (which included the word “ladies”) to make it “less binary/more inclusive”. After a tense but genuinely civil, well-meaning exchange (for which I will say, I am quite grateful, as these are co-workers I’ve since gotten to know better and indeed like), it turned out that my understanding of the purpose of the channel (women and their sometimes separate interests vis-à-vis men) was fundamentally different from those who had founded it, and that I had been invited not because I belonged to the sex-class of women, but rather because I am “not a cis-het male”.
In short, the distinction was one of power differentials, not sex-class membership. And while I still see women as a sex class, at least I could see some thread of logic by which someone who believed that power differentials were super significant would believe that (traditionally) women’s spaces should expand to include any and all other “oppressed” groups. Because it wasn’t about biology, goes this logic; it was about power. Don’t you see?
Trans women are [oppressed like] women
This is the most charitable way I can interpret women who are willing to go to the barricades for a movement that wants to allow biological, intact males to opt-in to any and all female-only spaces, be it locker rooms, women’s advocacy groups, sports teams, rape-crisis centers, or prisons.
While I absolutely believe that transsexuals exist and should be granted civil rights, I know that this is possible to do so without the destruction of women as a sex class. Civil rights aren’t based on feelings; rather, they are based on legal principles of equity. In the case of gay rights (to which “trans rights” are often compared, falsely), granting civil rights meant a) the removal of legal punishments for behaviors specific to homosexual sex and b) the prohibition of discrimination (in jobs and housing, etc.) on the basis of sexual orientation. In both cases, civil rights meant treating gays and lesbians for all intents and purposes like heterosexuals. It meant that, legally speaking, sexual orientation was no longer the basis for discrimination.
The same can and should apply to transexuals. But not legally discriminating against a male who wants to socially integrate as a woman does not include forcing everyone else to act as if this person is actually female under every circumstance. To the extent that people like Emily want that to be the case, there exists what Julia Bindel has called a “conflict of rights”.
As a culture, this is the conversation we need to be having: how do we navigate this conflict of rights, such that trans women can express themselves yet at the same time, not violate the rights of women? And yes, I believe it is a violation of women’s rights to put a male on a women’s sports team, or in a women’s prison. Why couldn’t we accept that some men want to socially integrate as women, but, given their biological development, include them on the men’s team for sports? Why would it be impossible to create separate, safe spaces for trans women in prison? Why aren’t we trying to find workable solutions that satisfy all parties? Why can you be banned on Twitter for saying “trans women are men” while TRAs can use all the foul language they want against women who disagree with them? Why are they heroes and we’re Nazis?
If you peruse the comments on this tweet, you’ll see that I’m not inferring the rationale behind this Nazi comparison. It’s more than a hyperbolic moral insult, à la “nothing worse than a Nazi!”, it’s based on the notion that their enemies (anyone who doesn’t agree with them and their demands) don’t want them to exist. This was precisely the attitude of the activists who created the furor over Dave Chappelle’s special; his jokes were the equivalent of murder.
While these accusations sound ridiculous, the Nazi comparison has important rhetorical implications: if the enemies of trans women are Nazis, then trans women themselves are Jews. This comparison has two useful components. The first is the more obvious: that trans women are a victim class that bad people (<cough> women <cough>) want to exterminate. In an American context, as a new book explores, there is no better group to analogize oneself to when the point of the analogy is the threat of annihilation, as most non-Jewish Americans only really learn about what it is to be Jewish through learning about Dead Jews.
The second component is a little more subtle: if trans women are like Jews, it means they absolutely, unequivocally exist as a group. The group has an identity and a history, specifically, a history of persecution. As I said before, civil rights struggles are about reversing legal discrimination, the highest forms of which do rise to persecution. Gay people in this country were persecuted under the law; their civil rights movement was based on (at least initially) removing those legal persecutions. Since there are no current American laws specifically against transsexuals (please correct me if I’m wrong), the “fight” for “trans rights” cannot follow the same trajectory of gay rights, but rather has to glom onto a vague notion of “violence” and “oppression” (much the way that anti-racism works today, I might add), such that the “fight” is not really about legal rights at all, but rather against those who (supposedly) “don’t want them to exist”.
This veneer of victimhood, through which trans women become Jews and anyone against them becomes a Nazi, hides (as it is meant to) a fundamental difference: Jews don’t need other people to call them Jews for their identity to be affirmed. Indeed, no other civil rights campaign has insisted that the rights of the minority depend on forcing the majority to believe something about the minority group, much less compelled to express it.1
Safetism, victim status, and the erasure of women
I have always had a problem with the expression “women and minorities”; when this phrase is used (and isn’t it always used to mean this?) to mean “those traditionally disadvantaged groups that we need to make sure to include”, it seems to elide the difference between excluding half of all adults and excluding members of actual (if we are talking statistics) minority groups. The origins of sex-based and race-based (or religious, or national origin) discrimination are different, and they have very different recent histories. Indeed, it is in the midst of the so-called “racial reckoning” that discussion of sex-based discrimination has disappeared; note that, in that sign pictured above, all but one of those characteristics (race, national origin, religion, and sexual orientation) are protected categories under anti-discrimination law.2 The other protected category (did you miss it?) is of course, sex, but these days, it’s been disappeared into gender identity (which itself would become protected at the federal level if the Equality Act of 2021 were to pass; it is currently under review by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was passed by the House this February).
And so the old phrase I have a problem with transforms into an even more egregious one: “[people] of Color and [people] who identify as female”. This transformation reflects the woke insistence that 1) systems of privilege precisely follow gradations of pigmentation and 2) that women and girls aren’t a sex class, but rather an identity category (therefore validating the cri de coeur “trans women are women”). Neither of these declarations are true, and the increasing gaslighting required to keep the immersions in these fictions functional are nearly unbelievable.3
In both the cases of race and sex, at the root of the issue is that identity—and only identity—is what creates the vulnerability. This is why the celebrity Jussie Smollett thought it would be taken seriously (he was right!) that he was attacked in subzero Chicago by properly-equipped (noose, bleach) MAGA meanies.4 This is also why trans rights activists talk incessantly about vulnerability and the need to be accepted in women’s spaces as a safety issue.5 The claim that women’s spaces can and should protect trans women from men—without any acknowledgement that introducing trans women to female space introduces men to women’s spaces—is a deft attempt to transform the fundamental nature of sex-based oppression into something it is not.
Sex-based oppression is based on facts about women’s bodies: the fact that women’s bodies are sexually attractive to (most) men, the fact that women are physically weaker than men, and the fact that women bear and nurse children. While an individual female’s mileage will vary in terms of how she is treated by the men her in family and society, it is certain that women as a sex class are not vulnerable because they “identify” as female. If only! Imagine if we could end the mistreatment of women, from casual sexism to degrading pornography to pervasive lesbophobia and epidemic femicide with a pronoun change.
At the root of hoaxes like Smollett’s and fictions like Emily’s is an attempt to make privilege and celebrity appear like oppression and persecution via declared membership in a group (black, gay man; trans woman) whose victim status cannot be questioned without your relinquishing of your bona fides as a good person. Into Clinton’s basket of deplorables you go.6 Good people, on the contrary, sympathize with the oppressed and the marginalized and try their utmost to create safe spaces for them to express themselves authentically. Good people use pronouns.
The Sound of Silence
The company I work for was recently acquired by another company based in San Francisco. It’s very woke. It’s so woke that pronouns are regularly solicited, both on Slack and orally in meetings; relative to the original company that hired me, many more people put their pronouns not just in the boxes provided but everywhere their name is. (The respectful discussion in the women*-only channel took place long prior to the acquisition, in my original company’s Slack.)
There is word that the DEIJ (I guess they haven’t caught up with the B yet) committee will soon be getting back into gear; they are making a full-time hire in this space. And there is at least one trans woman at this company who is delighted, as she is tired of marginalized communities doing emotional labor for free. (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s truly the gist.) At least, that’s what she told the CTO on a Zoom call that I was also on.
At that point, I’d really had it. I wanted to know: could I express any opposition to this ideology at work and keep my job? So I wrote the CEO a flamer of a letter, in which I minced no words (although I kept it civil) in calling the company’s espousal of DEIJ hypocritical and purely political.
The good news: I still work there.
The bad news: I haven’t yet and never will get a reply. Unless you count the gushing statement of support issued by that same CEO to the entire company regarding the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which fell on a Saturday this year. Which he also mentioned in a Zoom meeting. Suffice it to say that the CEO and I both know who the men are in the room.
If people who disagree don’t speak out about this, it will just keep rolling ahead. It is costly to speak, for sure, but it is more costly to stay silent. Right now, we have one male shattering records while swimming for UPenn on the women’s team. By remaining silent—frankly by remaining in the building—women are, to quote Bridget Phetasy, “cosigning their own demise.” Indeed, I am willing to take a bet that, in leagues and competitions where post-puberty males competing as women isn’t banned, in five years, almost all women’s sports champions will be biologically male.
Only a majority willing to call the bluff of a vocal minority can stop this. It is only because the majority remains silent that we can have situations like the one Rosie Kay finds herself in: starting a dance company and being forced out of it by other, younger women just for saying that biological sex is real. It is easy to be cowed when the moral momentum appears to be on the other side of the argument, when one’s status as a “good person” appears to be on the line for speaking out.7
To which I counter: If you see a fraud, and don’t say a fraud, you are a fraud.8
Perhaps that is why the TRAs freaked out about Dave Chappelle’s “anti-trans” jokes while Jews let the ones about “Space Jews” fly right on by. Indeed, Jew-Hate has a kind of reality that exposes the merely aspirational status of so-called “transphobia”. To murder a Jew, you have to kill someone; to “murder” a trans woman, all you have to do is say he’s a man.
Although not all of these protections are federal—yet.
Two recent examples of the first point include the reassignment of Asian-Americans as white and BLM’s statement on Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.
One root of hate crime hoaxes, judging by what Wilfred Reilly tells Bari Weiss, seems to be a desire to make visible to the larger society what the perpetrator feels to be already real: namely, that racism is a serious, pervasive problem. For most people, this perception of threat doesn’t excuse the invention of a crime (and certainly shouldn’t prevent its prosecution); however, the harder the woke narrative pushes the notion that the essential experience of a “person of color” is the threat of, or experience of, being unsafe, the more Jussie Smolletts there will be—as there is less and less room to signal group solidarity without demonstrating that one is the persecuted minority that BLM claims people of color to be. Oh, and he’s gay, too. So he’s absolutely unsafe, and definitely oppressed—never mind that Smollett made per episode of Empire more than what 75% of Americans make in a year.
I’m not going to rehash the propaganda that TRAs create and disseminate regarding the murder and suicide rates of and hate crimes against trans people (although I recommend Stock’s discussion of the matter in Chapter 7 of Material Girls).
Which was the nadir of modern Democratic politics—until Kamala Harris, a whip-smart, all-American daughter of two striving immigrants tried to sink Biden by painting herself as a poor colored child on the forefront (or maybe forebus?) of desegregation. Truly, no party knows how to squander female excellence like the Dems. More on Kamala to come soon.
Despite the fact that many, many Democrats and liberals don’t buy this nonsense, the only large media outlets that provide any pushback on this issue are “conservative” media (Fox News, NY Post). Which serves the activists just fine, since they can then paint anyone who disagrees as always, already Untouchable. Judge for yourself, I guess—but kudos to Cynthia Millen, who resigned in protest.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.