Helen Webberley orders us all to submit or else.
Funny that she dehumanizes us in the process of telling us we’re hate criminals. The wording should be “This is a message to all those people who think” – not “that” think. She must think we’re subhuman, and here she is saying so in public. To the dungeons with her.
But more seriously – this shit has got to stop. Men are men, and medical doctors have no business trying to bully us into saying men are women. Helen Webberley should rethink her life.
Comments
14 responses to “The word is “No””
So is deliberately “misgendering” the same as properly identifying someone’s biological sex?
Will this put an end to the horrible transgression of genders being ‘assigned at birth?’
TBF, the use of “that” instead of “who” is common these days.
Maybe so, but that doesn’t make it more precise or less sloppy.
If there actually is a section of our brain that aligns one’s self with the sex of one’s body (a “gender”) then there would be some validity to “TWAW.” (Even then, the proportion of transwomen incarcerated as convicted sex offenders would show that this “womanhood” clearly exists on a spectrum. Because women tend not to commit sex crimes to any great degree.)
However, if there IS NOT such a thing as “gender” then what we have are men who want to be women and women who want to be men. And that reality has to be front and center of any discussion of this issue.
“Deliberately misgendering someone undermines their gender identity…”
As they said once upon a time, don’t build on sand.
You could call me “she” all you want, it won’t undermine my sex.
Because my sex is a real thing, which doesn’t go away if I stop believing in it.
The “crime” here is apparently interfering with a person’s ability to continue believing in a thing that’s not real.
The use of the relativizer “that” for people has always been common in English. But if you want to accuse the likes of Twain, Austen, and Shakespeare of being imprecise, sloppy, or dehumanizing, who am I to complain?
https://medium.com/@mattbarros_42186/that-is-not-a-relative-pronoun-4dace169f67
Don’t be shy, get it off your chest.
Yeah, that came off more pissy than I intended, sorry. But you’re wrong about “that”.
No I’m not. It’s a matter of taste, aesthetics, style.
The switch doesn’t work both ways. You can’t talk about the apples who are on the table. That is, you can, but it would sound odd or like a joke. That means “that” is more thingy than “who.” It has thingy overtones. If I had been the editor for that piece I would have changed it. Judgement call, yes, but I’m very judgey.
Which should read:
This bullshit comes from a medico (GP? Gynaecologist ? Urologist. ?)
An excellent reason not to seek medical advice from her; as she appears not to know the anatomical differences between men and women. Could easily lead to complications; need for her to visit an optician, etc etc.
Category error. No one is referring to any women as men. So-called “misgendering” is simply referring to men as men. It’s recognizing an undeniable fact, that men are not women, no matter how much they wish or fantasize that they were women. It cannot be a crime to state a true fact.
I’ve been mistaken for a man multiple times throughout my life. Not once, at the time, did any of those occasions bother me in the slightest; rather, they were amusing (for a while, you may recall, I was persuaded by cult thinking that they were evidence of transness; how embarrassing).
One of the reasons why gender identity is so fragile is, I think, that there’s actually no such thing as having ‘an identity ‘, especially a personal one. We all have a personality; identities are how we relate to other people. Friend, lover, father, mother, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, employee, employer, etc.
To ‘identify as‘ someone is, therefore, necessarily a fiction; which isn’t the case for identities conferred upon us by our relationships with others. All fiction comes up short when faced with reality. It’s not possible to live in a fantasy game, even as a child, without others refusing to play; but this is not the first time in history that a bunch of people have decided to use force against non-compliance with a fiction. This is just the latest version of the inquisition, witch trials, McCarthyism, pogroms.
Which is to say, personal preference. Which is fine, but it doesn’t make the use of “that” wrong, or even inferior.
All that shows is that the use of “who” is more restrictive than “that”. But you could make a similar argument for “which”: you can’t say “the girl which is on the table”. Does that mean that you shouldn’t use “that” for things?
And if an editor made that change on something I wrote, I’d fight to change it back. Again, personal preference.
I don’t have usage stats, but it seems plausible that some of the “that”/”who” choice is influenced by the preceding word’s terminal sound. “The boy that” feels physically easier to say than “the boy who”, but that’s not true of “the girl that” relative to “the girl who”.