Why I will never declare my pronouns
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
Pronoun proclamations are a new form of religious hysteria.
[…] The pressure to conform, to advertise your fealty to wokeness with a pronoun statement, can be seen in the business world, too. Corporations love pronouns. ‘Big business is increasingly embracing the practice of sharing individual pronouns’, reports the Wall St Journal. Microsoft’s hyper-woke staff go the whole hog, pronouncing their race as well as their pronouns. ‘I’m Natalia. I’m a Caucasian woman with long blonde hair and I go by she / her’, said one employee in a Microsoft video. Goldman Sachs, Virgin Management and Lloyds have all made moves to encourage pronoun declaration among their workforces. It’s not always voluntary. As the WSJ says, some employees do the pronoun dance ‘at their company’s urging’. And when workers see their colleagues sticking their pronouns in everything from their email signatures to their LinkedIn profiles, ‘they feel social pressure to do the same’.
This pressure must be resisted. Last week a Twitter user ignited a furious debate when he said his wife’s employer has given her until the end of April to add her pronouns to her email signature. Doubtless there are many companies leaning on their workers to get down with the ‘diversity’ agenda. But compelled pronoun declaration is a very bad thing indeed. It’s as bad as your boss forcing you to say Christ is the true Messiah or ‘Allahu Akbar!’ or L Ron Hubbard was a stand-up guy. Indeed, there is a semi-religiosity to the pronoun phenomenon. Declaring one’s pronouns is really a declaration of one’s inner gender identity. It’s a way of saying ‘Outwardly I look like a man, but my internal gender orientation, my gendered soul, is [whatever]’. So pronoun-use is a public acceptance of the idea that there are two you’s – there’s your ‘deeply held inner [gender] feelings’, which are not ‘seen by others’, and then there’s your outward appearance, which might or might not match up with your mysterious, soul-like gender identity. Hence the need for the pronoun performance.
But what about those of us who think the idea of innate gender identity is nonsense? Who think it’s an unreasoned, unscientific claim? Who think it exists in the realm of religious fantasy, not rational observation? Who think you are born male or female (and very occasionally intersex) and that’s it? To pressure us to declare our pronouns – that is, to perform a belief in the fiction of an inner gender – is as obnoxious and outrageous as it would be to force a non-Christian to say ‘Christ is my saviour’. Compelled speech runs counter to the entire idea of liberty, and to the Enlightenment itself. No one should be ‘compelled by fire and sword to profess certain doctrines… to profess things that they do not believe’, said John Locke in his Letter Concerning Toleration. Nor should they be compelled by threats of the sack or the wailing of Twittermobs. Today’s tsunami of pronouns in work, politics and online is not evidence of widening ‘inclusivity’ but rather of the conformism and compulsion that lie at the root of the woke ideology. Heretics, step up – dare never to declare your pronouns.
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