Big if
Yes! Agreed! It’s a religion! And you can’t force us to join or endorse your religion! Those days are over! At least outside the Ummah they are. I don’t believe in your religion, I think it’s harmful and bad and stupid, now go away.
Also, of course, it’s an idiotic analogy. Mr Pope is one guy, the monarch of one religion. We’re free to ignore him and his religion. Even his neighbors in Rome are free to ignore him. That hasn’t always been true but it sure as hell is now. The Catholic church is a horrific institution and it still has its claws in way too many things, like hospitals and schools and universities, but at least it no longer inquisitions us for refusing to grovel to the pope.
Trans people however keep sending us new bills for ever-expanding attention. I’m not going to call Dave “Sally” no matter how loudly he announces he’s a woman now. Go say a rosary.
It’s also an easily missed distortion of the issue at hand.
The question isn’t whether I can or cannot call someone by a chosen name. The question is whether I must and whether I will. The question is whether I can without being dishonest to myself or others. The question is whether I am to make myself a means to another’s pleasure. The question is whether I am to be complicit in the reprogramming of my own mind to conform to another’s beliefs.
Can I call Oliver “Abigail”? Sure, my vocal apparatus is physically capable of pronouncing the shibboleth.
I simply choose not to.
My husband refuses to call him…or anyone…pope. So I guess he gets to call trans people as he chooses, too. And I don’t call him anything, except maybe that fucker in the Vatican. So I get to call trans people as I choose.
So the analogy can fall apart easily by people simply saying, nope, he’s not my pope, you’re not a woman.
Another point is that names are very much different from bespoke pronouns and related nonsense. People do change names under normal circumstances, and, for the most part, it isn’t a bother to use the new name. But many more things are being demanded: refer to him as “she” and “her”; call him a “daughter” or a “mother; say that he is a “woman”. Names are a wedge (“You can call her Daisy instead of Tom, so why can’t you refer to her as ‘she’?”), so there is reason not to agree to any of these demands, but names are much easier to defend. Nobody is being asked to pretend the pope is something other than a man.
Sackbut:
Regarding names: nobody would find it objectionable if somebody said “Pope Leo XIV, formerly Robert Francis Prevost.” Or, indeed, “VIn Diesel, formerly Mark Sinclair”, or “Lily James, formerly Lily Chloe Ninette Thomson.”
But say “Elliot Page, formerly Ellen Page”, or “Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner”, and there will be howls of outrage.
https://x.com/TransJA/status/1333836666822397952
Mostly Cloudy: That’s because names are not informationally empty. Gendered names actually have propositional content in addition to functioning as arbitrary identifiers. “Elliot Page” constitutes a false statement, a lie, and implicit deference to the ideology. Any attempt to argue from its being “just a name” is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Leo XVI isn’t his name, it’s his title, or job description, or rank.
I notice that the Wikipedia article refers to him as “Robert Francis Prevost”. I wonder if he is annoyed at the dead-naming.
For quite a while I’ve thought this the perfect analogy for not being coerced to use personal pronouns. The pope identifies as God’s representative on earth. He leads an organization that promotes the idea that one cannot achieve salvation without absolution dispensed by priests (all of whom are men of course). I heartily endorse his billions of followers’ rights to believe and promote all the tenets of Catholicism, no matter how absurd and misguided I think them. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to call him “his holiness ” or King Charles HRH. Somehow Leo and Chuck no longer have the power of coercion but God help us if we call Rachel Levine, father of two, a “he”?
I do have one burning interest in Charles III though: I wonder what size he is and what becomes of his old suits? I’ve always thought I’d rock that Saville Row look.