I’m amazed that I need to write that there are only two sexes and see here. That said, many people have a felt need to announce personal pronouns that go light years beyond identifying one’s sex. At New Discourses, in an article titled “Land Acknowledgment Statements: The Cultural Violence of the Academic Elite,” Adam Ellwanger took a stab and trying to understand what is really going on with this fast-spreading custom:
While the stated purpose of explicitly naming one’s pronouns is to foster inclusion and tolerance, the practice actually performs two unstated functions. The first is to compel compliance from those who might not be willing to cooperate with the increasingly complicated lexicon that grows out of the pronoun wars. The paper trail generated through daily institutional interaction (which frequently indicates preferred pronouns) is used to force dissidents to comply. If you “misgendered” someone and that person wishes to file a formal complaint with the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, it is a great boon for their case if they can prove you were aware of their preferred pronouns by showing email communications where they made their preferences clear to you.
The second unstated purpose of listing one’s pronouns is to signify one’s membership in the priestly castes of university life: those intellectuals who, by mastering a complex vocabulary that eludes the grasp of regular people, demonstrate their superior respect for human dignity and their deeper concern for the many marginalized communities in the racist, fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynous hellscape some people still insist on calling “America.” The ways that this group indicates their status among the clerics of social justice often parallels the performative aspects of religious sacraments. Naming pronouns when introducing oneself takes on a formalized, ritualistic character that is akin to making the sign of the cross at the end of a prayer. It serves to signal one’s profound devotion to a particular way of understanding the world.
This particular article uses personal pronouns as an introduction to a recent fad, “Land Acknowledgment Statements.” According to Ellwanger, these statements “represent a kind of virtue-signaling that marks one’s belonging to the intellectual elite, there are a number of problems with this trend.” And there are many problems . . .
Most of us are pretty agreeable. If you want me to call you Erich, or E, or Attorney, or Musician or any of the other “yous” I will try to comply. If I fail occasionally, and you throw a tantrum, the intolerance is yours, not mine. Some of us prefer to use language to communicate meaning, not to signal our virtue, not to have another arrow in our quiver, nor to have a means with which to browbeat anyone.
Effective communication needs common definition of terms. For that we have language, which develops over thousands of years something called grammar, an agreed method of assigning meaning. U.S. English is a syntactic language, which uses not merely agreed forms of words but agreed sequence to impart meaning. One of history’s great prophets, Lewis Carroll, foretold the pronoun oppression in “Through the Looking Glass:”
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”
“Pronoun oppression” is a power play, pure and simple.
Bill, I command you to bow to the Personal Pronoun God. You shall refer to me as “hiMmmmmm,” because I identify as a piece of banana bread tonight. If you fail to do so, I will call you a bigot and never forgive you, because Wokeness cannot comprehend that some humans are imperfect.