December 02, 2013
Mel says that despite the absolutely natural urge to mock and scorn and roll one’s eyes at all this nonsense, our language is finally struggling to keep up with reality rather than what appears to be the case, which is that a tiny nest of chirping misfit parakeets is trying to force the language”and all the guys and gals who speak it”to conform to their fantasy role-playing:
This is not about young people in the US over the last 20 years kind of coming out of the woodwork and making up labels that aren’t real. This is a real variation among humans, period.
Whenever anyone ends a sentence with “case closed,” “end of discussion,” “period,” or any of their equivalents, it always signals to me a fundamental close-mindedness, a deep insecurity in their position’s infallibility. But maybe Mel was on his period when he said this.
Let’s at least pretend this is a free country, and therefore I see nothing wrong with a bunch of confused Daughters of the Moon demanding you refer to them with all manner of wacky and laughable nonexistent personal pronouns. They should be absolutely free to do that, just as I should be free to call these guys what it appears to me that they are: women trapped in women’s bodies who wish they were men and hate being women because they would suddenly be required to show some basic concern for their physical appearance.
Until I am convinced otherwise, I will counter their infantile and entitled demands with every bronoun in the book. You have your preferences, and I have mine. You prefer to be taken seriously, and I prefer not to oblige. Tell me what you want me to call you, and I”ll call you what I want to call you. Since I”ll be the one referring to you in the third person, I”ll be the one who chooses the personal pronouns. And if you don”t like it, well, then, we don”t have to hang out”not that such a thing was ever likely in the first place. What could be fairer than that? Man up and stop acting like such pussies!
As the culture devolves, the language curiously keeps “evolving.” But this truth I hold to be self-evident: When we wind up killing one another for food, no one’s going to care about gender-nonspecific personal pronouns. Case closed. End of discussion. Period.
