October 17th was International Pronouns Day, in case you missed it. If zir are wondering if this includes a paid holiday, go back to work. If zir is wondering what a pronoun is, zir may be in trouble. If zir wants to know what this is all about:
According to the International Pronouns Day official website, referring to people by the pronouns they determine for themselves is basic to human dignity. Being referred to by the wrong pronouns particularly affects transgender and gender nonconforming people. Together, we can transform society to celebrate people’s multiple, intersecting identities.
Based on this explanation, we can be break it down into three premises to make it easier to understand. First, it’s basic to human dignity. Second, it’s about transforming society. Third, it celebrates multiple, intersecting identities.
Dignity
This word is defined as “The state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect, a sense of pride in oneself; self-respect.” Accordingly, dignity is something that is internal, and it is achieved by rationally pursuing one’s values. Conversely, for someone to determine for themselves how others are to refer to them is nothing but personal subjectivity. It is based on feelings. It is based on sacrificing other people to satisfy those feelings. It says that truth and morality are a matter of personal opinion. After all, who’s to say what’s right?
However, the exploitation of the dignity angle is even more insidious. According to the definition, dignity entails self-respect. How does one earn their self-respect? It starts with the most basic of human capacities, reason. To think is to process information and form abstract ideas. The second step in the process is purpose, using our concept forming capacity to support life-supporting goals. Self-esteem comes from our confidence in our ability to be productive and achieve happiness.
For someone to think their dignity comes from the personal pronoun usage imposed on others will actually deny them their self-respect. It is not internal, it is not earned, it is not rational. But it does enter the realm of social subjectivity. This is the idea that truth and morality are the creation of social convention. This is the premise of the second component.
Transforming Society
The intellectual foundation for social subjectivism is rooted in the 18th century philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which claims, among other things, that it’s your good intentions that matter. In this case, the feelings of the collective group overrule reason and evidence. According to sociologist Michael Schudson, “From the 1920s on, the idea that human beings individually and collectively construct the reality they deal with has held a central position in social thought.” In other words, truth and morality are derived from social convention, there is no appeal to a higher authority, and the mob rules.
As Jordan Peterson tells us, authoritarianism begins with taking control of the ideological and linguistic territory. In postmodern America, its about abrogating life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and replacing it with a subjective morality that claims rights for as many identity groups as possible. It means that you do not own your identity individually, the group you are assigned to owns your identity. As Hunter Hastings has written;
Society will become fundamentally different if we succumb to the superstitions of the social justice warriors. We will be forced to abandon individual responsibility, self-reliance, and traditional moral values, and replace these principles with dependence, collectivism and the high time preference of instant gratification.
Intersecting Identities
This could be the most insidious of all. This idea will rob each of us of our capacity for reason, determining our own purpose, and the confidence in knowing we’ll be able to achieve our values. Instead, we will be limited by the injustices manufactured in this irrational model. Social commentator John Belushi predicted this most eloquently in National Lampoon’s stage production of Lemmings in 1971: “If you’re not a black, homosexual, working class, woman – you’re an oppressor pig, and you deserve to die!
While the purpose of International Pronouns Day is primarily directed at the transgender and gender non-conforming community, it ignores the greatest minority on planet earth – the individual. It institutionalizes derision against individuals who do not conform, either unknowingly or intentionally, to their life-sapping, subjective morality. And where does it end? The possible combinations of intersectionality, meaning multiple identity groups in each person, are endless, and for what? To inform people that they cannot create and pursue their own identity without “help” from these newly created social conventions?
Tribalism’s Contradictions
A Google search of International Pronoun Day reveals that it is being promoted mostly on college campuses. As Walter Donway asks in his review of Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The Diversity Delusion, “Do you know that “identity politics,” pressuring academic fields toward obsession with victim groups, and driving out the mission of conveying knowledge, is besieging the American university?”
While the legitimate mission of universities is being sacrificed in favor of tribalism, here is what the pronoun celebration is teaching: Emotion and feelings matter, reason does not. The purpose of your life is to own a group identity and its grievances, and to resist. You have no chance without your group. Your self-respect cannot be earned through productive work and relationships, don’t bother trying. This is no different than the racism of lowered expectations that affirmative action inculcates. In both cases, the end game is to subjugate its victims to servitude to the ultimate collective – the authoritarian state.
