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Pearl Red Moon's avatar

Its not "norm change" thats the problem. I experience the expectation to accede to pronouns as something far more significant. The crux of my resistance is not accepting that "transsexual" is real objective phenomenon because I don't believe Homo sapiens can change sex. Humans who claim they are neither male or female are even more ridiculous. I do not believe in gender identity claims. It is my view that people who claim they have changed sex are either pretending, deluded, narcissistic or mentally ill. Therefore refusing to use pronouns is a deeply felt and profound act of principle on my part to refuse to participate in a performance I find completely offensive to my values and world view.

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Shawnelle Martineaux's avatar

Footnote 4 is my absolute favourite thing on this article. It's always lovely to be reminded that science is debate and its nature is often uncertainty at the margins. Bravo!

For me, it is moral, but in a more systemic way. For example, with the trans issues, I've had no issues using people's preferred pronouns over the years, even though I think that gender that is divorced from sex is fiction, and so on. Conversely, I have a very strong negative reaction when people try to elevate these courtesies to the status of law. A government should not be compelling me to say anything, nor should it be able to punish me for saying or not saying it. That kind of thing remains the domain of regimes like the CCP and Saudis. When I add the layer of history, where women have had to fight for equality on the basis of sex and categorically NOT gender, mandates of this kind become anti-reality, anti-woman, and anti-liberal democracy for me. So, that's wholly moral. For other terms, like illegal alien vs undocumented migrants, woke, progressive, the list goes on... I use them all. Perhaps this is because I'm a libertarian, and so have much in common with both the conservatives and the progressives (and because we are more morally ambivalent, except for systemically), but it's also because these words don't attempt to change laws, and affect society in particularly deep ways. My suspicion is that the strength of the reaction depends on how the new trends are affecting society's identity, and not just individuals' personal ideologies.

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