Adults who work at a university?
Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.
There are no “neopronouns.” There is slang, argot, jargon, dialect, in-group code, and so on – but no neopronouns. Nobody needs lectures on how to make discourse more muddled and laborious and full of traps.
The University of Bristol has provided guidance for its staff on “using pronouns at work”, urging them to declare in verbal introductions and email signatures whether they use he/him, she/her or they/them, to support transgender students.
Even the Telegraph can’t get it right. We don’t “use” the pronouns other people refer to us – it’s the other people who use them, and it’s nonsense to talk about “using” the pronouns other people call us. Also, this nonsense does nothing to “support transgender students.”
But unlike myriad pronoun manuals on other campuses, Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns”, where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.
Naturally. Thin end of the wedge, innit – unless it’s mockery. How, by the way, does one use a colorful digital icon to represent gender in spoken conversation? Does one keep little digital icons in one’s pocket to whip out on these occasions?
Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”
Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.
This may all be very meaningful for small groups of intense post-adolescents who haven’t grown up enough yet, but for actual functioning adults working in universities it’s an insult.
The Telegraph understands that a University of Bristol staff member was invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager after objecting to being encouraged to add pronouns to emails, fearing that it undermined the concept of binary biological sex.
Ah a senior diversity manager was it. There’s your problem right there.
Comments
25 responses to “Including catgender”
Quite apart from the resultant erosion of the concept of material reality as it pertains to sex, IT’S FUCKING STUPID.
The emperor has no clothes because they’re a cat. Whatever.
It’s gotten so that anytime I see the word “western” appended to the front of anything, I tune out, because it’s at least a 50/50 chance it’s going to be nonsense. Guess it’s a good thing I don’t receive bills from Western Union; I couldn’t pay them.
I find myself checking the links thinking that surely the quoted text must be from an article in The Beaverton or The Onion…
Nyan cat is a fucking gender?!??!?
I don’t want to live on this planet anymore *eyeroll* *facepalm* *barf*
…Oh hey look I think I just found my emojigender /s
Maybe down Bristol University way, the have never heard of one Bill Shakespeare. But it brings to my mind the immortal lines he gave to MacBeth:
“I am in bullshit waded in so deep that to return were as tedious as go o’er.”
I’m pretty sure that’s the quote.
My pronouns are ‘nya’ and ‘nyan’, actually. Be a better ally.
https://imgbox.com/HVleMiFK
I think I’ve noticed a bit of a tendency in trans+ claims. First someone makes some utterly absurd claim, beyond the pale even of the movement, and the other TRAs mock her or him for making the movement look bad. For example: On Urban Dictionary, “bunself” is defined as: “A ‘pronoun’ seventh graders use to feel quirky and oppressed while there are actual trans and non-binary people dying because of who they are.”
Then, a year or so later, the new idea that the others in the movement used to decry as making the movement look bad is now the new dogma, and denial of it is heresy. Then someone makes up some even crazier shit, and the cycle repeats.
But I don’t have a large enough sample size to really say that this is a consistent tendency. Just something that I’ve seen.
There’s for sure a pattern of constantly ratcheting up the demands, so that what would have seemed absurd 5 years ago is now what all decent people must endorse and promote on Twitter.
I wonder how much that ‘senior diversity manager’ gets paid in comparison to a lecturer. I also wonder how many other senior & junior ‘diversity managers’ there are, and how much they get paid. I expect they all have ‘tenure’, unlike many lowly lecturers, and enjoy the feeling of power that goes with doing their footling job.
I am so shocked, horrified, and triggered. The quote implies that us other kin are deluded! If I feel like a blue furred Venusian Dragon, I am a BFVD!!! My pronouns are Char and Ash. Once I have my surgery of course!
If I call you a blue furred Cytherian Dragon, rather than Venusian Dragon, am I mis-speciesing you? Or is it OK, because those are synonymous?
CATGENDER! Now there’s an idea that I can get behind. I may not be a cat, or ever hope to become one, but by george I can sleep all day, and then some.
You would be mis-planeting me! I am of the sulfurous 600 degree sulfur cloud glories of the real Venus!
But not ottergender, how dare you mock us! That’s obviously just satire and therefore continues to be genocide-thought.
ibbica #4
My thoughts exactly.
@14: Exactly! Ottergender is some stupid thing that idiotic tucute cis-het “genderspecials” on the internet made up to feel special, while catgender people all around the world are dying because of who they are.
GW, now you have triggered me; I may have to do violence to myself! Real violence, like eating an entire can of tuna in one sitting!
Would it make heads explode if we demanded to be called by neopronouns based on the works of the dreaded witch, she-who-shall-not-be-named?
My pronouns are Hufflepuff/Hufflepuffself
As a parent who was in close proximity while my kids were playing Pokemon or watching on TV, I can see the relationship between the ever-expanding gender roster and the ever-growing list of Pokemon. Jey McCreight blogged about her Pokemon collection when she was still Jen, and now look at her. Writing about gender identities for 23andMe! Talk about seeing her opportunity and running with it.
Oh lord. I was thinking about that, or a close relative of that, just yesterday – about the Gen-whatever vibe of Skepchick and Rebecca personally and the people around them – where everything is some kind of smartass joke and the cool kids always know better. By “thinking about” it I don’t mean anything productive or useful, just noticing it and wondering how much of a connection there is, if any. Skepticism as smartassery versus skepticism as serious work.
I think that there has been an element of being smartassy as either a substitute for being skeptic, or using the skeptic work of others to move into the limelight, and it certainly manifest at that time. Getting hammered on Buzzed Aldrin’s at cons and then holdng a bleary-eyed hungover panel the next day certainly seemed to carry the day for many of them.
Are there different pronouns for male and female catgender? Just wondering because actual cats come in male and female, and as every compiler of “top 100 gender identities” lists knows, those are the number one and two genders (don’t ask them to name more!). So there must be, I don’t know, subgenders of catgender, or something. Cats of course have the option to identify as humangender. But then humans come in male, female, non-binary, agender, catgender – oh wait, I just noticed how silly this is.
Somebody should do some research on how many cats identify as not the sex they were assigned at birth.
I suppose that pointing out the blatant Orientalism in British University students apparently using “Nya/Nyan” for ‘catgender’ is simply too easy, here? Like a lot of Western Otakushit, it’s incredibly patronizing and more than a little bit racist. (And I say this as someone who enjoys manga and anime, but without feeling like it somehow makes me Japanese.)
My cat identifies as a queen and as owner of the house. Is that the same thing?
Sort of like their constant use of “two-spirit”.