Platinum badges
Pronoun badges have been introduced at the British Library on the advice of Stonewall, despite fears the move could appear “too woke”
Never mind “too woke”; that’s too sophisticated for this childish nonsense. Pronouns are how we refer to other people so as to avoid repeating their names every time we mention them. That’s it; end of story. They’re not little pills to boost people’s feelings of Validation or Chosenness. The whole idea of personalized pronouns is idiotic, and bragging about them is even more so. That the British Library has fallen for the idea is embarrassing.
Labels displaying “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them” have been rolled out for staff, with internal documents stating that making assumptions about gender can send a “harmful” message “even if correct”.
No it can’t. Recognizing who is female and who is male doesn’t send any message, any more than recognizing who is human and who is equine does. It’s not a message, it’s just knowing where we are in the world.
The assessment for the rollout of the voluntary badges stated that it could be perceived as “political” and that the £1,300 cost of the scheme could lead people to question “why is the BL (British Library) spending money on this in times of financial difficulties?”
More to the point, the BL might as well flush that £1,300 down the toilet. Why waste £1,300 on annoying bullshit? And for that matter, why does it cost £1,300? Isn’t all but about £20 of that just profit for Stonewall? They don’t make the badges out of gold leaf, I’m betting.
An internal email laying out the scheme states that the “aim of these badges is to encourage discussion and understanding of gender identity and the range of identities that people have”.
But that’s a bad, stupid, wrong discussion, so it’s bad to encourage it.
Oh here it is, the Telegraph does explain where all that money goes.
The library’s badges were introduced in September, with provisional budgets estimating a cost of £676 for the 400 badges themselves, £450 in “trans awareness training”, and £250 for the services of the same transgender awareness consultant who recommended the scheme. This may not have been the final budget.
“The services.” What services? It’s such a Ponzi scheme. Pay us to tell you what to pay us to tell you; profit!
An internal message titled “Introducing Pronoun Badges” outlined the purpose of the scheme last year, stating: “By wearing a pronoun badge, even if your pronouns are rarely if ever used incorrectly, you are sending a message to colleagues, visitors and readers that you recognise the validity of pronouns other than what is immediately obvious.”
But again, there is no such thing, so it’s bad to send a message that you “recognise” this stupid thing that doesn’t exist.
It added that part of the aim was to “continue to make a more inclusive environment for trans and non-binary collgeaues and visitors at the British Library”.
You’d think they were the only people on earth. No. This is as inclusive as we’re going to get, so take your expensive pronouns away and don’t come back.
Glory be to Ponzi; And to profits, and to the Holy Pronouns. As it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be, bullshit without end. Amen.
(Aside: I think I might have missed my vocation. I could have been High Priest of something or other.)
This is such ridiculous virtue signaling that these people are just flying their pronoun flags without even knowing what they mean. I used to see groups of three (he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs) to supposedly cover all the third-person pronouns (it doesn’t, but let’s ignore that), which I always thought was redundant as nobody really mixed them anyway, so you’d really only need one word. But then I did start seeing what I thought was mixing more frequently, in particular she/them. How odd, I thought, that these people want female pronouns when they’re the subject but neutral ones when they’re the object.
Except they don’t. This is apparently an attempt to indicate either female or neutral pronouns are acceptable, the latter apparently “out of solidarity”. Well, OK, but that’s confusing. Why not she/they? That could at least imply both types are OK since both words are subject pronouns. I do see that occasionally, but I see she/them more. So no real thought all all, just trying to use the right magic words to be an ally or whatever.
Obviously this is all just a roundabout way of people labeling themselves “female”, “male”, or “other”, but actually using those terms as labels would be considered offensive. But, for some reason, “pronouns” are OK, even fun! Yay!
It’s not a Ponzi scheme.
I’d say it’s more the emperor’s new clothes (And you can have a suit just like the emperor’s for the low, low price of just £1,300…)
I wholly agree with Skeletor’s remarks on the ridiculousness of this. What kind of person walks about with little badges on them saying not how they expect to be addressed, though that would be ridiculous enough (‘you/you’?), but how they expect others to talk about them when they are not present? And when you have a crowd of them doing this, how are you expected to keep up? Anyway, if people want to talk about me when I’m not there and make reference to, say, ‘that bastard, Tim Harris’, it really is none of my business.
@2 I am 100% convinced that no one in my office who put pronouns in their email signatures had any idea what they were for or what they signified. (And I’ve seen some pretty funny random ones; a very clearly male nonwoke late middle aged gentleman decided to ‘identify’ as a he/they.)
“Even if your pronouns are rarely if ever used incorrectly”? Hang on. I thought this was about using the wrong kind of pronoun for someone. Now it’s about using someone’s pronoun incorrectly. How does that happen? If I claim “she” as “my” pronoun, is nobody allowed to apply it to another person? Is this the reason people are making up new ones? Or has the email been written by someone who has no idea what they are talking about (but is giving it a go anyway)? You would have thought the British Library of all places knows how language works.
Tim,
Except that a startling amount of young people have taken it as one of the greatest causes of their lives to enforce other people’s pronoun usage upon their peers, retroactively and for all time, upon pain of social stigma and ostracism every bit as intense as an actual queer child could have expected to face from The Straights a scant decade or two ago (though largely minus the threat of physical violence, except for the self-inflicted variety that such mobs can engender).
It really is a neat trick, building a new religion with all of the horrible anti-social consequences of heresy hunts, public flogging, and witch-burning, without even the barest hint of a promise of any kind of redemption for anyone involved. The only benefit is the naked social advancement of the worst sorts of busybodies and thought-police and priest-aspirants, who all get to feel like they are channelling their inborn social instincts into a Good Cause, while the world burns and no real problems that exist outside the minds of the most privileged people on the planet get addressed.
I wish Jonathan Swift had been alive to write about the practice, particularly when the British Library rouses itself from its bookish slumbers to encourage it. I am supposing, though, it is not compulsory, at least not yet.
Since “gender” remains undefined (along with “sex”) none of this makes any sense.
This is fascinating. If “they” were in fact a third gender (rather than what it actually is, which is not a true singular but a placeholder for “he” or “she”, when we’re not sure of a person’s sex and therefore we imagine two possible people in our minds), then how would it be solidarity for a female to “use” it? At the very least, it would be silly, and at the most, horribly appropriative.
Outstanding; five stars.
Sorry, I’m only here to borrow a book.
It would seem even this has become “problematic.” Here’s a link to a twitter thread about someone picking up a copy of Helen Joyce’s Trans from the library:
https://mobile.twitter.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1488603083873660935
When she went to pick up Joyce’s book, she found that another book had been included for her beside it. This book was The Care We Dream of: Liberatory & Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health by Zena Sharman. How “helpful.” How “thoughtful.” No, how creepy, intrusive, and policing.