To pronoun or not to pronoun
The making of a non-binary person:
There’s a meme that pops up every now and then about a bird that is called a penguin its whole life. One day the bird meets a doctor who says, “You are not a penguin, you are what is called a swan.” The swan is filled with relief. Suddenly, its whole life makes sense.
I had my swan moment in 2011 when I was in my mid-20s.
…I fell into an online rabbit hole and stumbled to the Wikipedia page for gender identities. It was here that I first read the definition of “non-binary”. In those paragraphs, I learned about people who do not follow binary gender norms, people who feel they exist in an intermediate space outside the definitions of male and female.
Which is most people. Few women refuse to pick up a screwdriver, simpering that that’s a man’s item. More men refuse to pick up a bottle of dish soap, to be sure, because for men it’s a step down, into the weak inferior stupid sex, but even so few men are 100 on the Stallone scale.
“This is me,” I thought. “I am non-binary. This has been me my whole life. And I’ve just never had the words to describe it.”
She did have the words. If she’d asked a feminist or two she could have learned that. The words are about ignoring or breaking the stupid rules about what Women Do and what Men Do. It’s not such a weird spooky subject that it needs a new vocabulary.
I was like [my mother] in my embrace of non-traditional gender roles. But unlike her I existed somewhere else. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel “girly”, or was taller, and larger and less feminine. It was more than that: the label “woman” just didn’t fit me.
In other words she had the subjective belief that she had stronger more intense feelings about not feeling “girly” than her mother did, disregarding the fact that she had no way of knowing that. It’s not as if there’s a measuring device we can use to discover whose gender feels are more intense than Mommy’s.
She’s decided she doesn’t like customized pronouns though.
For a while I was in favour of singular “they/them” pronouns. But as I saw their use blossom and take off, I began to dislike them, and now I can’t stand them. As a writer I take language seriously, and I’ve read several texts where people use the “they/them” pronouns which have left me genuinely confused as to whether they were speaking about an individual or group. Some writers argue that Shakespeare regularly used “they/them”, to which I reply, “Very few people write as well as Shakespeare.”
Plus he didn’t use them instead of the usual ones. Viola and Cordelia and Rosalind are hers, Lear and Hamlet and Orlando are hims. He wasn’t that kind of trendy.
H/t Sackbut
Shakespeare may have used they, and may have used them, but I have never seen a single instance of they/them in his collected works. What a load of crap.
It’s just a run-of-the-mill how-I-joined-a-cult narrative, isn’t it.
Just this afternoon I walked past the big downtown Hare Krishna temple and I saw a young guy dressed in the orange ersatz-Hindu robe the Krishnas wear, walking with a guy dressed vaguely like an ’80s punk. It reminded me of my own punkish teens in the ’90s, when my friend and I would sometimes visit the temple for the free and delicious vegetarian meals they offered to anyone who showed up. I still have no idea what Hare Krishnas actually believe, and I remember in my chats with the people at the temple all those years ago they couldn’t really explain it to me either. They just offered up nebulous suggestions to do with feeling this or that, stuff that anyone would feel, like, say, “Do you believe there isn’t enough love and togetherness in the world, and you want to do something to fix it? Well, that’s what we’re about: spreading that feeling. Oh — are you looking for a sense of belonging, too? Well, you’re just like us! You’re welcome in our community.”
Do you believe there’s just too much sex stereotypes in the world, and you want to do something to fix it? Well that’s what we’re about: spreading that feeling. Oh — are you looking for a way to stay connected to the gay community, too, now that you’ve entered into a heterosexual partnership? Well, you’re nonbinary; you’re just like us! You’re welcome in our queer community.
Bonus points to her for deciding neopronouns have become just too mainstream so she had to abandon them. I was into zie/zir before it was cool. Oooh, how punk!
A bird thinks it’s a penguin until a doctor tells it that it’s actually a swan? I don’t like this new updated version of The Ugly Duckling. To be fair though, it’s consistent in that someone with no relevant qualifications offers an answer to a question that hadn’t even been asked.
I don’t know how the author of the article could write that analogy without seeing how obviously shallow the ‘identifying as’ lark is. How can she not see it when she laid it out so clearly? With this passage right at the top of the article, I was at first under the impression it was written by someone sceptical of the whole idea of identity. I find it amazing that this could be written by a believer without them feeling silly.
@twiliter,
Shakespeare used singular they*, but not in the trans/enby sense. Instead he used it much the same way modern English speakers do—when the sex of the referent is unknown or irrelevant, or there are actually multiple referents. So for example “Someone called but they didn’t leave a message,” or “Every student should have their shots before school starts.” You can argue the grammaticality or acceptability of those examples (spoiler: you’d be wrong), but they’re perfectly normal in most forms of English. The use of they to refer to specific people of known sex is new, and it’s dishonest to cite Shakespeare (or Austen or Twain or whoever) for that.
*Sorry for not giving examples, but they’re easily googled.
Penguin: “You mean this whole time I was dodging orcas and leopard seals I could have been eating stale bread in Central Park?”
I still can’t quite work out what people mean by “non-binary.” Yes, it claims to be counter to the gender role narrative of a dichotomy between boys and girls. But it seems to actually encompass so much more of the gender woo, and apparently gender-queer is nested within enby. It’s amorphous, and yet it denies sex as a personal trait. “Non-binary transmascs give birth, too!” And even that one identifies with a masculine binary,,,
So. What is it, really?
Nothing. Live your life. You’re a woman who does man-stuff, some of the time. No added pronoun rules necessary, shakespearean norms aside.
lol thanks for that first sentence Mike. I love a good laugh first thing in the morning!
I exist to serve.
WaM @5 I really do enjoy pedantry, and I’m not just saying that. :D With that said, someone left a short notation in a book I borrowed, and wrote it using the correct pronouns. I was pleased that THEY did that. It was like it came naturally to THEM. :P
“Non-binary”, was, in a lot of ways, the point where I started to break from my total adherence to TRA philosophy–it simply didn’t fit, but everyone was insisting it did. If “non-binary” has any meaning at all, that meaning should utterly undercut the current notion of “trans”, especially the focus on Self-Id and so on.
After thinking it through, I realized that “non-binary”, by any definition I was given, was either entirely internal and self-referential (“I don’t feel the way I think other people feel, even though I have no real means of comparison”), or pretty much universal–the latter applying to pretty much anyone who still has a pulse.
This has always been a marriage of convenience to bolster numbers. It’s like the genderist version of the German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact. The “trans umbrella” has so many identities that, if you look for very long at all, are completely contradictory. NB and gender fluid identities both go against the concept of gender as a fixed, internal sense of whatever it’s supposed to be a sense of, but in different ways. Nonbinary identities supposedly stand outside the male/female dichotomy. But how does that work with the trans/cis dichotomy? Meanwhile, gender fluidity involves moving back and forth between the male/female within the binary. How do you reconcile those with each other? How does that work? The same goes for agender or gender neutral. The whole “trans” and “cis” thing depends on everyone having a fixed gender identity which aligns, or doesn’t, with their “assigned” sex. To admit of a group of people who are outside, or beyond, or who slip back and forth kinda buggers up the whole idea. Getting clear definitions of these concepts is like nailing jello to the wall; that’s itentional. That nobody on the genderist side seems to care is interesting. As I noted elsewhere, if genderists were really interested in how this all works, they’d be conducting research on it before going all in on cutting kids up and pumping them full of drugs and hormones. But research and study might just end up showing there’s no there there, only wishful thinking and religious obscurantism.
Not that it’s ever likely to happen (as the unrelenting weight of Reality is likely to make the whole enterprise implode beforehand), but I could see further schisms, purity spirals, and purges if trans activists ever had enough power to be able to eject and discard those supposedly allied “identities” once they were no longer needed. We’ve seen this happen with the L,G, and B, who have been supplanted by the T in many groups and associations, their mission statements bent or rewritten in favour of the arrivistes. Given a chance, the rest of the alphabet soup would be dropped or dumped by the T too. The “validity” of NB “identities” is already a perfunctory, tail-end afterthought in the “TWAW, TMAM” mantra. Do so-called “intersex” or “two-spirit” people get anything at all in return for the instrumentalizing forced-teaming of trans activists? From the former, trans ideologues appropriate the “assigned at birth” terminology; from the latter, the ability to add “white, racist colonialism” to the arsenal of epithets available for use. How long would these other tag along “identities” be tolerated in the circles of trans power once they had outlasted their usefulness?
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