Liberals’ astonishingly radical shift on gender
by Damon Linker, The Week:
Sometimes a piece of writing so perfectly distills a cultural moment and mood that it deserves to be given outsized attention. That’s very much the case with Farhad Manjoo’s op-ed column in Thursday’s New York Times, “The Perfect Pronoun: Singular ‘They’.”
Little in the column is original to Manjoo. In 2019, one encounters similar arguments, assertions, and assumptions every day in published essays, on social media, in lavish advertising campaigns, and increasingly in the literature produced and enforced by corporate HR departments. Yet Manjoo’s column is worth focusing on because it presents such a concise and cogent statement of the emerging elite-progressive consensus.
What is this consensus? That “if we lived in a just, rational, inclusive universe … there would be no requirement for you to have to guess my gender just to refer to me in the common tongue.” We would instead refer to Manjoo — along with everyone else in the world — by the gender-neutral pronoun “they.” Not only would this help to avoid “the risk of inadvertent misgendering.” It would also subvert the “very idea” of thinking about gender in binary terms.
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