Funny kind of “teaching.”
And do we in fact know “how important it is to listen, and be respectful, when somebody tells you who they are and how they feel”? I don’t know that. Suppose it’s a stranger sitting next to you on the bus, for instance? Or someone you work with but don’t know well? Or a neighbor you don’t like? I don’t think I have any duty to fall silent and listen when random people talk to me about themselves.
This may seem peripheral but I don’t think it is. I think gender-woo and self-obsession and self-importance are inextricably linked. The belief that people can swap genders goes with the belief that people should think about themselves most of the time and that they should also talk about themselves all the time regardless of whether anyone wants to hear them or not.
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7 responses to “We all say”
He reaches down and gives Wafer a friendly pat.
Wafer is non-species – not a cat and not a dog.
So when we’re talking about Wafer, we don’t use “puppy” or “kitty” or “woozle” or “floof,” we use “thing,” because we use nouns to talk about people, places, and things, and Wafer is neither a person nor a place. He tells us (in sounds that are neither barking nor meowing) that the words cat and dog just feel wrong and uncomfortable. We know how important it is to listen, and be respectful, when somebody tells you who they are and how they feel. Unless they’re your parents, of course.
It’s straight out of the religious playbook; present the belief as fact while they’re too young to give it serious thought and by the time they reach adulthood it’ll be firmly entrenched.
The degree to which the cultists have succeeded in rolling out this balderdash and making it uniform and obligatory is remarkable. If only they’d been so determined to normalize something that actually helps people. Anybody with children today knows at least one kid who is going to reach thirty missing some body parts and deeply regretting it.
I think so too, there’s plenty of evidence for it.
Because it’s so virtuous to be happy and proud. You too can achieve utter self absorption kids.
What if non-binary people didn’t tell anyone they were non-binary? Kept it to themselves, dressed comfortably, and accepted whatever pronouns people used for them (because there are no correct ones anyway, right?).
But no, it requires pronouncement, declaration, publicity. You have to put in the work to be “happy and proud.” I’m sure gendered situations arise all the time during the course of each day. It’s such a struggle. I wonder all the time whether what I’m wearing is male enough, or what I’m doing is masculine enough (virtually never). I suppose everyone needs a hobby, but making sure everyone gives a rat surely takes all the fun out of it, doesn’t it? Or maybe annoying other people is the part of being non-binary that gives them happiness and pride.
What’s sadly amusing is that we know perfectly well that this non-binary person called Ash is a girl, because she has short hair and dungarees. If the non-binary person called Ash were a boy, he would be sporting long hair and nail polish and probably a sexual assault accusation.
It’s creepy, that’s what it is.
And that illustration could be of any child in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, when kids actually were ‘non-binary’ in the best and most appropriate sense. They simply wore comfortable clothes and nobody tried to sexualise them.