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Late last month, the Globe and Mail ran a column titled, “Still struggling with pronouns? Some of it is grammar. The rest is you.”
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The thrust of author Leah Eichler’s argument is that when people mistakenly use the “wrong” pronouns for transgender identifying persons, it is rarely an issue of “grammatical habit,” and more likely reflects an inner, discriminatory bias. For others, she argues, “misgendering” is a way to deliberately express one’s “internal biases.”
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Eichler wrote that “creating or changing words has always been political and this unwavering belief that a vocabulary is a solid thing usually masks a conservative agenda,” and that “grammar is still brandished as a respectable way to endorse people’s discriminatory beliefs.” The U.S. Constitution, she points out, refers to the president as “he.” Eichler asserts that, during Hillary Clinton’s 2015 presidential run, this led to the resurrection of an op/ed debate “about whether a woman could not become an American president.”
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What she fails to disclose, or cite, is that most of these articles did not conclude that a woman shouldn’t be president. One was written by a troll of the political left, goading “Hillary haters” to invoke the very discriminatory argument Eichler rails against. “Why don’t Hillary haters argue that a woman president would be unconstitutional?” reads the headline. Other articles merely reassure readers that legal scholars all agree that the American constitution, as written, does not bar a female president from taking office. All told, Eichler’s Hilary Clinton example is a straw man (straw woman?). She’s inventing discrimination where it doesn’t exist — and she does the same regarding the preferred pronoun issue.
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Most of us do not dedicate our mental bandwidth to guesswork about other people’s internal sense of gender. We are, however, a species adept at clocking the biological sex of strangers: several scientific studies have shown that humans can determine if someone is male or female with 96 to 98 per cent accuracy, even when “hairstyle, facial hair, clothing … accessories, (and) makeup” are removed from the equation — just by looking at faces. This is the result of human craniofacial dimorphism, not bigotry.
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That said, gender critical persons (those of us who take issue with the impact of gender ideology on women’s rights and children’s well-being) have varying arguments on using preferred or bespoke “neo” pronouns for transgender-identifying persons. Some do it as a social courtesy, sometimes only for certain people or in certain circumstances. Others refuse to do it at all — and instead insist on always using sex-based pronouns.
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Women have a legitimate argument against being forced — whether via social convention, public policy, or human rights legislation — to refer to biological males as “she” or “her.” How can we maintain that we are a distinct or disadvantaged sex class if we must, under threat of punishment or ostracization, use language that adds non-members to our class? “Misgendering,” in this case, is not about dislike of others; rather, it is about protecting ourselves.