And and and

Comments

2 responses to “And and and”

1. 

   Peter N

   Oct 15, 2026 4:09 PM

   The Stoics would say that how we act is up to us; how others see us and act toward us is not up to us, and is really none of our concern. We should of course strive to be deserving of some of the things on that list, but we have no right to expect others to see us in any particular way.
2. 

   Artymorty

   Oct 15, 2026 5:08 PM

   Most of [the list of trans demands] depend on other people being massively generous with our time and attention and emotional labor, and it’s just not at all clear why we all owe that to trans people in particular.

   Plus all this demanding and babytalk is harmful to the very category of people it’s supposed to help: trans-identifying people themselves.

   It’s a way for people with mental illnesses to build a protective barrier around their mental selves, usually to avoid dealing with their mental problems and to prevent anyone from even attempting to confront them or to help them address their problems.

   It’s a demand to be coddled from the very people who often badly need limit-setting, corrective pushback, structure, and discipline.

   It recently struck me how many young rapid-onset gender-dysphoria types I know of who are now dead. It struck me while I was having dinner with someone recently who was telling me an anecdote involving a they/them. I had to interrupt my dinner companion for clarity: was this story about a singular “they” or a group of people? A singular person — a woman with special pronoun demands — it turns out. The specifics of the story don’t matter, but it became clear that the person was clearly narcissistic and severely mentally ill. She was dead by the end of it, and I wasn’t remotely surprised.

   What bothered me was that this dead nonbinary person, like so many enbies, clearly needed real help, but she surrounded herself with people who only offered “gender affirmation” and then patted themselves on the back as though they’d done their part as good little allies. Even after this enby’s death, my companion continued to refer to her as “they” with a tinge of pride. But all I saw was a dereliction of duty to help a troubled young woman who needed some firm pushback on her troubled and troubling behaviour, for her own good.

   Pronoun demands aren’t just a way for troubled people to shirk responsibility, they serve that purpose for the people around them, too. It’s a get-out-of-having-to-address-the-issues free pass. Validating a friend’s pronouns is a lot easier than confronting a friend about their spiralling mental health problems. It gets you off the hook. I saw the same thing with my AGP friend who killed himself a few years ago: everybody saw him fall apart; everybody patted themself on the back for playing along with his pronoun demands; nobody really intervened to try and help him. Even at his wake, no one took any responsibility, as if his mental health collapse was a natural thing that just happens to poor trans people, rather than a consequence of his identifying as a trans person in the first place.