The misgendered councillor: a very modern farce
by Fraser Nelson, spiked:
A council meeting in Newham has laid bare the nonsense of nonbinary.
If you want to get a sense of the entitlement of the trans movement, then look no further than the farce that unfolded at a council meeting last night in Newham, east London.
Newham’s Green Party leader, Danny Keeling, stormed out of the meeting in a huff. He was supposed to be leading the opposition to the local Labour council’s budget, but his mind was apparently distracted by far more serious matters: two Labour councillors repeatedly referred to him using ‘he / him’ pronouns, and he identifies as a ‘they / them’.
According to the trans movement, there are few offences more vile than the failure to use a person’s preferred pronouns. This act of ‘misgendering’ is viewed as a direct assault on a trans or nonbinary person’s chosen identity and sense of themselves. And so it invariably invites a hostile response.
After he fled the meeting, Keeling tweeted to accuse the two councillors, council chairman Winston Vaughan and finance lead Zulfiqar Ali, of ‘discrimination’ and ‘bullying’. A fellow Green councillor also chastised the chair for failing to make the meeting ‘a safe space for trans and nonbinary members’.
No one can really fault the two councillors here. Footage of the meeting makes it clear that they actually tried their best to respect Keeling’s identity. But, even as the council leader apologised, he couldn’t help but ‘misgender’ Keeling all over again.
[…] I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you pick your own pronouns then you are going to be ‘misgendered’. Clearly, even people you might expect to be trans allies, including Labour Party politicians, are struggling with ‘they / them’ pronouns. To call a singular person ‘they’ simply does not compute with how most people use language and grammar, or how they see the world.
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