proper pronouning

them/they never fail to provide a perfect heuristic

it seriously never fails. never.

pronouns in name and bio remain undefeated as a predictor of of being a censorious, oppressive authoritarian.

i have never seen a community so thoroughly and gleefully badge themselves as irrational and toxic.

put pronouns in your self description and you pretty much suck.

i don’t think it’s a coincidence.

i think it’s the manifestation of a pathology.

foremost, it shows a need to performatively demonstrate allegiance to the victim cults of the woke and noisy. here is my identify! see it! praise it! accept my alliance and validate my otherwise bereft and hollow sense of self!

these are the sorts of semi-NPC automatons that have ceased to be “people with ideas” and chosen rather to “be their ideas” as a substitute for cultivating any sort of nuanced selfhood. agitariat. ideology as identity. it’s an attractive proposition for the otherwise empty.

what makes this particular manifestation so pernicious is the intersection of such identiology with just what ideas like “demanding proper pronouning” mean.

these pronouns are rarely issued as suggestions. they are demands.

i have decided this about me and i require you to comply.

implicit in this stipulation is an aggressive narcissistic assumption: that you must conform YOUR sense of my identity to MY sense of my identity.

deciding who you seek to be is all well and good, but when you step over the line into feeling entitled to dictate that others agree with your conception and join in the validation of it, what could be more inherently authoritarian?

i get to decide who you see me as.

those are some serious bossypants.

and, obviously, the power move there is to generate ever more outlandish demands.

you make up bespoke pronouns and rarify gender and sexual identity into a nomenclature so dizzyingly complex that no reasonable person has any idea what you are even talking about when you declare yourself a nonconforming poly-genderfluid cis-avoidant demi-queer androgyne.

my pronouns are unpronounceable by human tongues and are can only be truly manifest in the divergent neurostructure of the old gods of r’yleh.

it can get pretty baroque.

and exceedingly demanding

“list your affiliations!”

the performance of alliance is required.

(though arguably, this sign was probably not. like so many associative issues, most of this request seems likely to take care of itself. just a hunch…)

this is, of course, a bridge much further than many like doctor thomas are willing to traverse.

interestingly enough, it also sheds some light on why so many of those with simple, biological gender conforming pronouns are among the worst of the worst.

consider:

why would an an obviously identifiable male like dr tom seek to ensure being called “he/him”?

i suspect the reason is this:

they did not go into it for the identity.

they went into it for the bullying.

their alliance is tactical.

performative anti-racism and anti-genderism is a great way to parlay your own lack of intersectionally aggrieved status into getting to wield the whip hand. you ally yourself to a group so that you may anoint yourself a holy warrior in a cause not your own because jihadis get special privileges and they get to hit you and you are not allowed to hit them back.

i will speak. you must listen.

adopting pronouns in your bio that would have been the default used for you over 1000 years is not about carving out space for yourself, it’s about carving strips off other people.

it clarifies nothing. it simply serves to establish bona fides to be beastly to people and tell them to shut up and think what they’re told and, of course, reserves your right to decide to make people call you and see you as you demand to be called and seen.

it’s a brownshirt of convenience, all future tyrannizing® reserved.

folks like this do not become horrible authoritarian thugs because they want pronoun justice.

they wrapped themselves in the convenient flag of aggrievement alliance because they were horrible authoritarian thugs already and saw an opportunity act on it.

if i get to force you to accept anyone’s identity, no matter how hallucinatory or counter to your own ideas or senses, what could be more powerful?

this renders “how many fingers am i holding up, winston?” positively prosaic.

getting people to see an additional digit held aloft is small beer beside demanding that they see you as a pan-dimensional space pony whose pronouns include an interlude of interpretive dance.

what would be a better way to commence driving the wedge of “the world is what i say it is and consensus reality shall be adjudicated by me” to set up dominance in the endless cavalcade of causes and crises in which one must be obeyed?

using pronouns to reflect some complex assumptive identity might at least be construed as an earnest attempt at explication (though mostly not) but to trumpet one’s own obvious default choice pronouns is simply credentialism for bullies.

so of course it finds consonance with a desire to wage disinformation war and proclaim oneself the anointed “evidence arbiter.”

the sort of person who wants this is the sort of person with strongly held beliefs that they cannot defend in open debate but that they wish to be able to impose upon you anyway.

they seek to coerce, not convince.

and so the overlap is near total.

pronouns in bio are the stigmata of authoritarian impulse masquerading as martyrdom.

i am all for people identifying as whatever they like in pursuit of their own happiness and human agency.

have at it and good luck. i hope you find your happy place. sincerely, i do.

but when that pursuit spills over the banks into coercion and performative demands that the world must think as you do and conform to the conception of self and of reality that you would impose upon them, you have become the enemy of the agency of others and this is not something that can or should be countenanced.

convince, do not compel and there is room for all peaceful people.

but seek to control the thoughts and actions of others and bend them to your world view and you are no longer someone with whom a free society may be shared.

the truth does not require the censor’s shield. those who feel a need for such appurtenances are invariably “the other guys.”

loudly proclaiming yourself the champion of “evidence” serves only to identify you as its inimical foe.

it’s one of those phrases like “wicked classy” that self-abnegates.

the hilarity of those so professing having so little self awareness is as persistent as the pronoun heuristic is prescient.

it’s simply the performative pretextual pathology of a bankrupt ethos.