Cheap Seats 2024 By Rich Trzupek

Pro None - 03/13

By Rich Trzupek
  I’ve been trying hard to digest the progressive obsession with personal pronouns, but I’ve made no discernable progress. Every e-mail that floats in where the signatory stakes out their place among the he/she/it world leaves me scratching my head. Just another symptom of boomeritis I suppose.
  But I can’t help but come back to this: do I – personally – care about how any other human being on planet earth refers to me in the gendered third person? The frankly honest answer is that I give less than a rat’s ass about this non-issue and it baffles me that anyone should.
  We are talking about third person usage. Nobody refers to you in the third person when having a personal conversation. That’s kinda what second person is for. Yeah, in some languages there’s a difference between the second person familiar and the second person formal, but we don’t make that particular distinction in English. Moreover, who cares if we did?
  The only time third person pronouns come into play is when you overhear someone talking about you, or happen to read something that another person wrote about you. Is that worth worrying about, much less getting angry about? I don’t see that it should.
  Consider how angry correspondents describe me when they complain about something I wrote. The pronouns they choose are never complimentary. I’m routinely referred to as “a**hole”, “jerk”, “bloviator”, “nut job”, etc., just to name a few. I don’t have a problem with that. But, I do think that people who hurl obnoxious insults at fellow human beings shouldn’t get all butt-hurt when they claim they have been “misgendered”.
  Why is it an insult for someone who “identifies” with one gender to find that they are referred to as another? If somebody wants to refer to me as “she” or “it” or “they” or as “Lord Protector of the Xion Alliance”, I’m totally cool with that, in each case.
  We are who we are. Spending time and energy worrying about how others perceive us is a gigantic waste of both. So called “mis-gendering”, like pretend “micro aggressions”, are fanciful concepts dreamed up by career academics who spend endless hours searching for new ways to be offended.
  I guess what I’m saying is that I reject the whole concept that people need to be affirmed and accepted by other people. We don’t all need to get along. When we make tolerance a necessity, rather than a reasonable priority, we surrender to the lowest common denominator. I fail to see – no, I refuse to try to see – how me refusing to refer to a dude in a dress as “her” diminishes the dude or reflects poorly on me.
  If a dude in a dress can do a job that needs doing well, I’ll hire him. If a dude in a dress is good company, I’ll have a beer with him. If a dude in a dress needs help, I’ll provide what aid and comfort that I can. But I’m not going to pretend that he is a she, no matter how desperately he wants to believe it.
  Kind of amazing that we’ve gotten here when you stop and think about it. Growing up in the seventies and eighties, standing up for equality meant rationally considering actual differences like race, creed and color. We have somehow morphed into a philosophy that insists that self-perception trumps objective reality. Refusing to accept that precept now makes one intolerant, at least among the left.
  It’s an odd twist on the old fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.  Now, we are not only expected not to notice that the Emperor is naked, we’re supposed to pretend that his dangly bits aren’t actually there.
  E-mail: richtrzupek@gmail.com