Among the many issues of contention today, one that has taken up a lot of time and air, that shouldn’t even be an issue at all, is the gender terms people prefer for themselves.
Now, I’ll confess that I resisted use of ‘they’ and ‘their’ as singular pronoun substitutes, despite the fact that they’ve been used that way since the late 1300s. I didn’t like it because it just grated on my ears. It had nothing to do with any objection to it being used to refer to people who don’t identify with a binary gender.
I finally relented, though. If people wish to use it that way, so be it.
A lot of people, though, are unwilling to bend and this includes some senior politicians who should know better, but who are adamant that they and only they have the right to determine what words are appropriate descriptors for use by others to identify themselves.
We even have one politician here in the U.S. who is considering introducing legislation making it illegal for people to use gender neutral pronouns to identify themselves. They will be required to use the he/she pronouns associated with the gender assigned them at birth. This would be funny—well, it is a bit funny—considering it’s being introduced by a politician who refuses to use the name on his birth certificate to identify himself, and who comes from a political party and state that supposedly prizes individual freedom and resistance to government control of people’s personal lives.
The same politician, by the way, wants the government to have the final say on what a woman can do with her body, but that’s another issue.
Aside from the hypocrisy of someone who out of one side of his mouth screams for individual rights and liberty and out of the other wants a law that circumscribes individual liberty, this whole issue is just plan stupid. Just as he has the right—as he should—to forego the name his parents saddled him with at birth, so should anyone else have the right to decide how they want people to refer to them.
When I was a young man in the 60s and 70s, the nickname Chuck was popular for people named Charles, and while I find Charles, the name of most of the English butlers in the black and white movies I grew up watching, stuffy and somewhat pretentious, I also detest Chuck. Sounds to me like a cut of meat or a furry critter that digs up people’s backyards.
I could be quite obnoxious about it when I met people who insisted on calling me Chuck, to the point that some of them quit referring to me at all. Not, mind you, that I minded. They were usually the people who made me prefer a trip to the dentist over talking to them. The bottom line, though, is that I felt it was my right to decide what I wanted to be called, not someone else’s.
Things change, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s one thing that should never change.
I am who I say I am, not who you and your ideology wants me to be. | NWI
