Preferred Pronouns and Brain Rot

"Her is"? Did you just seriously write that?

If you do not select a gender identity, one will be selected for you

All I wanted to do was teach a fun little course on lucid dreaming. I had no idea of the fiasco in store for me courtesy of the gender stereotypes religion which, Borg-like, had gutted and repurposed yet another once-admirable organisation.

The first red flag was the new organiser’s email signature. Her self-selected moniker was written in searing pink lowercase letters next to “she/her” in brackets. This was a few years before every second corporate drone was adding pronouns to their email signature, so it stood out like the warts on a toad.

I’ll refer to the organiser as “popsi” to protect her anonymity and reflect the ridiculousness of her “business nickname”. (Mine is “Mother Shabubu”, for that extra professional touch.) Her legal name is a bog-standard English name, if you were wondering, along the lines of “Amelia”.

Popsi—I hope she doesn’t mind her codename being capitalised at the start of a sentence—brings to mind author and social critic Bell Hooks whose byline was “bell hooks”. Ostensibly, this was to keep the focus on her message, which is a bit like attending a wedding in the nude to ensure you won’t outshine the bride. However, I very much doubt Hooks demanded lowercase letters on her bankcheques or birthday cards. I digress.

After my application was approved, I had a Zoom meeting with popsi (italicised for your reading ease). She emphasised their’s was an “inclusive organisation” and therefore gendered language was verboten. Which I could have guessed from the bull ring—I mean, gender-neutral bovine ring—in her nose.

I limply agreed. I, too, was once a coward walking on eggshells; huzzah, it can be cured! I hadn’t mentioned either “men” or “women” in my slide deck, anyhow. When it comes to lucid dreaming, the more useful groupings are “meditator” and “videogame player”.

In this way, my acquiescence was reminiscent of a producer on The Godfather vowing to remove non-existent instances of the word “mafia” from the script in deference to the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Or was it in deference to the mafia? (I guess it’s true what they say, every good cause eventually becomes a racket.)

I agreed, yet my mind whirred away with possibilities. For instance, what if an attendee asked me which sex was most likely to blur the lines between wakefulness and unconsciousness? What was I meant to do, spontaneously combust? Spin my head 360 degrees while casting off sparks?

Do that ChatGPT thing where instead of answering your question, it chastises you for generalising and tells you a Labrador is just as likely to bite you as a Pitbull? (Yeah, maybe if there are 10,000 more Labradors in the room.) Pull a Gemini, formerly Bard, and say “As a language program, I can’t help you with that”? (Will they rename Bard every time it does something publicly embarrassing?) I digress yet again.

As for the matter of bathrooms, popsi’s instructions were more explicit. I was meant to call it “the all-genders bathroom”. Knowing the layout of the (historical garments district) building, I couldn’t help but imagine telling a man “The all-genders bathroom for men is upstairs and the all-genders bathroom for women is downstairs”. In my little daydream, he looked at me as though I’d grown three heads.

Later, I Googled this grifter, this popsi. Predictably, I found a photo of her receiving an award for the equivalent of championing the equal representation of people with magenta auras. (Magenta is a real colour, bigot.) She was surrounded by the sort of fine folk who have a “wolf-sona”, a sacred animal identity best expressed with a mouldering mascot costume. At this point, a different sort of fantastical scenario drifted across my mind’s eye.

This vision was of popsi and pals peeling the rainbow stickers off their smug little faces and using them to cover the bathroom door’s “Ladies” signage with poster paper. The new sign reads “All genders” in crayon and backward letters. They beam at it with the sort of beatific expression only otherwise found in paintings of martyred saints—a horrid daydream, to be sure.

Whether you’re a bepenised woman or a transmasc demigirl boyflux you, too, can sit on the can, turgid with “gender euphoria” while brushing elbows with the menstruation products bin. Ah, progress. Also, if you’re a man who doesn’t “look sufficiently female” (perhaps because you are male?) you’re allowed to sue when excluded from a female-only app. More progress. Is progress short for “horseshit”?

I digress. I digress. I digress. Back to the story.

I thought I could ignore popsi’s tedious little religion—accommodate it, even, by temporarily expunging the words “male” and “female” from my vocabulary. Not so—complicit silence is never enough for these soul-sucking ghouls; active participation is required.

Bunch of authoritarian ratbags, aren’t they? It’s not enough that you reflect their ever-shifting idiosyncratic and erroneous self-perceptions back at them, as though an inert mirror, no, no you must recast yourself in their image of you.

Even though you know damn well that every person can tell whether you’re a man or a woman—yes, even if you’re wearing a pink boa, tux, or your birthday suit—you must declare what you are. I’m a woman because I declared it in my email signature and any man can too. I’m a woman because I feel the same feeling as a man who says he’s a woman—according to him. Honestly, could it be any more stupid?

If you’re sexually attracted exclusively to the opposite or same sex and your lover declares an opposite sex identity—bear with me—your sexual orientation has magically altered to align with their internal self-image. Whether you know it or not. You will be assigned a gender and a sexual orientation in this brave new world.

On the teaching application form, the preferred pronouns section was non-compulsory. Naturally, I left it blank. It was of course, a trap. I thought I’d been spared the mortifying ordeal of pretending to possess a gender identity, which I have no more than I do an infestation of 10,000-odd Thetans. Sorry, Scientologists, but the radiance of my magenta aura keeps them away

I suppose I could navel-gaze about my average level of adherence to the stereotypes and social expectations associated with my sex in the current milieu. The problem is, I’m too busy doing Buzzfeed quizzes to determine the type of bread I am. I’m rye. Ba dum tss. Plus, only a dyed-in-the-wool sexist would ever reduce an immutable physiological reality to a free-for-all fleeting fancy.

Furthermore, “he” and “she” are third-person pronouns—you refer to yourself in the first person. (Unless you’re Caesar.) You do not “use she/her pronouns”, other people do when referring to you. (Typically, while you aren’t even in the same room.) You bloody well don’t talk about yourself in the third person—unless it’s your author bio.

I wrote my author bio for my lucid dreaming class advertisement in the first person. I hate the fashion of third-person bios, they’re so artificial. For instance, I mentioned that “I studied psychology at university” for that gloss coat of credibility that the unfalsifiable claim of being an adept lucid dreamer notably lacks (outside of being monitored in a sleep lab). (I am reminded of the celebrities who claim to have had sex with a ghost—a brag available to all and sundry.)

Popsi, ever so kindly, rewrote my bio in the third person for me. She used “they”, a third-person pronoun reserved for people whose sex you don’t know, after interacting with me on a video call. Odd choice.

Singular “they” has been co-opted—like every single word referring to sex—by trans-privilege activists to refer to a gender soul. “They” is not gender identity neutral the way it is sex-neutral. Rather, it is the pronoun desired by the “non-binary”. (Who are, by the way, the demographic of schoolchildren most likely to bully, right after those with an opposite-sex identity. Shocked, I tell you, shocked.)

If you don’t think “they” is for non-binaries according to the gender religion, try referring to someone with an opposite sex fictional identity as “they” right after referring to an actual woman or man with “she” or “he”. They certainly won’t take it neutrally. (As for “cis” allies, well, they’ll take anything—while gripping their ankles.) Popsi had, in effect, assigned me a non-binary gender identity. (A female identity is only for entitled men and bowing and scraping women.)

To normal people—even counting those who support the ideology in principle, having never run into it in practice—the bio popsi rewrote must have sounded utterly deranged. It made me sound utterly deranged. You’d think I was experiencing a schism with reality only just rivaling my splintered psyche. I wouldn’t take a class from someone like that. I wouldn’t even buy turnips off them.

Well, you had better believe I had notes for popsi:

Hi [popsi],

Could you please change "they" to "she", and also in the bio it should say "hasn't stopped" instead of "has stopped".

Please find attached my presentation slides for printing (when student numbers are finalised). Great course title idea, by the way, but is there a chance it might be mistaken for dreams in the sense of goals?

Thanks,

Angela

Followed by:

Could you please take out "(she/her)", there's already a "she" in the next paragraph. I feel like a bio is very personal, and I'm not interested in being a mouthpiece for gender identity ideology.

Popsi-self’s response:

Hi Angela,

Including pronouns next to our teachers names is part of our ongoing work to create a kind and inclusive learning environment.

I've attached our inclusion policy which all Laneway Learning teachers follow.

So if you were to teach with us we would need you to be able to follow these guidelines.

[popsi] (she/her)… in searing pink

Can ya feel the kindness? The inclusivity oozing from every pore? My response, having read their policies, was:

Hi [popsi],

You are free to ask the participants whether they are transgender at the start of class. You can also tell them to call me "she/her" if you think they need this help. I'm just there to teach them about lucid dreaming, and not indoctrinate them. 

My way of including people is by treating them all as equals. Obviously, to you the concepts of "diversity" and "inclusion" are political and narrow in scope. I'm not sure what normalising pronouns means, pronouns to distinguish men from women have always existed in the English language. 

Thanks,

Angela

Popsi replied that my views and those of [organisation name] did not align and thus “we will not be able to host your class”. I secretly rejoice because I am lazy. Also, who knew that organisations were sentient beings, possessing not only “views” but views they must disseminate to their paying customers apropos of nothing?

How sad, an entire organisation in ruins because gender priests view everything as either a vehicle or an empty vessel for their religion. For Cripe’s sake, this is the place where I attended a lecture on “quantum mechanics made simple” and learnt how to dance to Thriller. It used to be fun, now it’s a mere husk eviscerated by a woke parasite. Just one zealot’s vanity project.

Do you think a man in high-heels, pantyhose, and scarlet lipstick would appreciate being asked his pronouns? Would a gender priest have the balls to ask? Somehow, I doubt good ol’ popsi would be brave enough to hesitate before calling a man “she”—a courtesy she doesn’t extend, ironically, to women.

The organisation’s guidelines stipulate a member of staff can “lead” the discussion—the kumbaya circle—of sharing one’s gender identities. However, it soon transpired, this was a service only extended to “uncomfortable” teachers. Uncomfortable, naturally, not referring to opposition, but to being bamboozled by the sheer brilliance and complexity of the “me girl if say so” ideology. (A lot of middle-aged men claiming to be “girls” nowadays, aren’t there? Perhaps they are trans-aged? Coming to a kindergarten near you!)

If you are a conscientious objector, or simply unwilling to get involved due to apathy, you aren’t allowed to stand back and simply watch the priest at the pulpit.

The email exchange did not end there; I informed popsi I had vetoed a recently suggested team building activity at her gender church. I suppose I got the last laugh.

Cultist nonsense

Dear Reader, I am about as devoted to the cause of “normalising the use of [gender identity] pronouns”—popsi’s calling in life—as I am to SparkleMotion. Alright, that’s not quite true: I oppose replacing sex with opt-in gender identity as it leads various atrocities. I just wanted to reference Donnie Darko.

I am sick to my gills of cultist nonsense; “Amen” in Catholic school; “Namaste” at yoga; and that creepy in unison clap at the end of a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu demonstration.

What else do I find wearying? Acknowledging that some sliver of the lands upon which you stand still belong to whatever indigenous tribe last held dominion—but, you’d like to keep “standing” there all the same.

The soporific cadence of “paying respects to elders past, present, future, and emerging” reminds me of ending prayers with “in the name of the Ghost, the Host, and the Holy Spirit”. The droning on and on of someone deeply enamoured with the sound of their own voice is all I hear. The ‘acknowledgement of country’ prayer grows ever more elaborate as the self-righteous need always distinguish themselves from the herd of the so-called enlightened.

To bring it back to the gender religion, have you noticed that bracketed pronouns have expanded from “she/her” to the capitalised and elongated form of “She/Her/Hers”? And is “He/Him”, likewise capitalised, not reminiscent of capitalising the word “He” to refer to a deity?

Nothing but a black hole of narcissism. People make fun of neopronouns—nouns selected seemingly at random e.g. jello-self—but none of it is more or less ridiculous than calling a man a woman.

Parting thoughts on preferred pronouns

Have you noticed that if you don’t have “(She/Her")” in your email signature you become a “they” but your male colleagues do not?

Have you noticed that if you don’t want “(He/Him)” next to your name—because you’d like gender identity ideology to remain 500 feet away from you at all times—you won’t get the “he” pronoun anywhere in your (employee) bio?

The woke-scolds will instead write “Bob likes skiing. Bob is formerly Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration” and so forth. Sometimes the Wokesters will throw you a bone with “they”—but only when being spiteful gets too mentally taxing. Using sex-based pronouns is acknowledging sex is real—and we can’t have that.

Lastly, yes, I have seen a bio where the second sentence began with “Her is”.

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Quote of the day

“Yes, it is possible for your mother, who gave birth to you, to be a transgender woman.”

—Gemini, trained on data I wouldn’t wipe my feet on

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Knowledge is Power, France is Bacon (She/They/Them/Theirs/He/Horseshoe crab-self) is a reader-supported publication. If you would like to support they is her, please consider a subscription or buying me, myself and I a coffee.