Earning that pronoun

Laurie Penny. Good grief.

The stupidity takes my breath away. Not LP’s personal stupidity, necessarily, but the stupidity of this whole new Pronoun Doctrine, and weird baroque rationalizations of it like this.

No, she/they is not comparable to tu/vous. Referring to women as “she/her” is not formal or stiff – and it’s not familiar or forward, either. It’s just humdrum ordinary usage in languages that do that.

How did she get there? I suppose by thinking that the closer friends are to her, the more familiar they are with the fact that she has Special Bespoke ideas about her exciting fluid indeterminate interesting GenDer, and so they know they’re expected to create opportunities to refer to her (them) in the third person a lot so that she can be called Them a lot. Not the same as the tu/vous distinction at all.

But this idea that being referred to as she/her is something women have to earn with a lot of hard work…while at the same time thinking it’s something women are forbidden to think of as naming female people only…yep it takes my breath away.

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