Even after I hit peak trans, I didn’t see the point in “misgendering” most trans people (like yes male predators need to be identified, but dysphoric people just living their lives..) But, and this may be mean, now I’m struggling to see preferred pronouns as anything other than one of the main culprits in the “nice” “harmless” denial of reality that walked us blindly into this homophobic, misogynist mess in the first place.
great point
this is something i’ve been struggling with myself lately. the vehemence with which certain persons will defend the idea of “preferred pronouns” make me think that trans activists themselves are of the opinion that the harmless pronouns are key to propping up their dogma.
i’ve noted, among those that i’ve met, that trans persons who aren’t transitioning for fetish or social credit reasons tend to be more relaxed on the matter of pronouns/dead names (although my sample size is extremely small).
As some people point out: you don’t go by pronouns. Pronouns are how other people refer to you, not how you refer to yourself. It’s language control. It’s a surefire way to be indignant toward other people and lecture them on adhering to your personal desires.
No offence to people who don’t go outside much (I’m one of them) but I feel like people often forget the distinction between real-life and online interaction on this subject.
People who introduce themselves with their pronouns do (unfortunately) exist, but they’re in the vast minority. In real life people just assume, and there’s rarely a reason for anyone to refer to you in third person to begin with. I’m not burdening my barber when he refers to me as a guy because I never told him to.
Online you don’t necessarily know what someone looks like so you don’t always know how to refer to them. Telling strangers on the internet that you’re a she/her because they have no reference how to refer to you otherwise is entirely different than, say, throwing a fit at a gamestop because someone didn’t call you ma’am.
No offense, for real, and your not going outside may or may not have anything to do with this, but the pronoun thing is absolutely a huge deal for a lot of LGBT young people, and I’ve been privy to a number of IRL conversations where people’s social ostracization or punishment was on the line because of accidental misuse of a pronoun and where people talked in hushed tones about deadnaming. It’s absolutely a matter of social control in these circles, including which pronoun you endorse for yourself. I have learned to live with involuntary “they” pronouns among certain people (and my partner lives with them being applied to me) because correcting it makes me look suspicious given how I look and carry myself and given that my partner is supposedly a trans man. When my girlfriend’s used a female name with people she’s had people challenge her by openly and repeatedly asking/testing her with “what are your pronouns”, as if there’s a right and wrong answer.
I move in circles with a lot of queer-type trans people and they are sensitive to it being even implied in some extremely abstract and frankly crazy pictures-pinned-on-a-board-with-yarn-connecting way that you might gender them differently than they see themselves. They are constantly mincing words among themselves to not offend each other and performatively, pre-emptively apologizing (and yes, this occurs IRL, and yes, it feels like a leftist cult environment) and it feels like if you fart you’ll cause them to break in half. Given that many of these people have very strange and often changing identities and presentations which are sometimes at odds with each other it IS actually often burdensome to remember and keep track of every individual’s pronoun set, new name, and particular gender triggers. When you enter a room and have to “they” someone who is by all appearances a slightly alternative-looking straight woman, “he” a female person with a bizarrely-shortened woman’s name who just started testosterone but who dresses like an updated version of a high school emo girl, and “she” a male person who looks and acts indistinguishably from any old skinny neckbeard, and the stakes are Committing Literal Violence should you mess up, it’s incredibly stressful.
By the way I HATE the insistence that there’s “no reason” to refer to someone in the third person in front of somebody– as someone who has to juggle multiple sets of pronouns for my girlfriend and who spent a very long time cringing at having to use “he” for her, I am unfortunately extremely aware of how often this happens. For example if I’m with a friend and my girlfriend, I will be discussing stories and aspects of our lives together that will mean I have to continually refer to her using her name or pronouns, which carry information about gender. Similarly with any situation where you regularly interact with someone, such as at work or at school; if my boss asks me and a coworker collectively what got done yesterday I’m going to have to give an answer that refers to what she did. These people all know what you’re doing if you use their name repeatedly instead of a pronoun, and they set up weird situations where they’ll ask you about other people in order to test how you refer to them.
It is crazy and I am very aware not every trans person is like this, but unfortunately queer environments, progressive spaces where you are supposed to be a trans ally, and LGBT resource spaces are often like this these days. I deliberately stay away from these places but because of where I work (a gentrifying neighborhood) I find myself among people like this anyway. I’ve had at least three customers come in to where I work (a mundane store that is not LGBT related) wearing prominent pronoun buttons or necklaces. My boss told me a story about a regular customer (who is apparently nonbinary– I had thought this person was a lesbian) who yelled at a young girl for misgendering their dog, who is female but has a male name. The tiny neighborhood city library branch (which mostly is for the more regular folks in the neighborhood and the homeless people and drug users who need services or just a place to hang out during the day) has only trans children books in their LGBT section and they all discuss pronoun usage, discovery of one’s pronoun, and the harms and pitfalls of misgendering extensively. This is everywhere, and it does not do any good to pretend it isn’t– you might not have run into it (god bless you) but many of us have, even in extremely rural or decidedly “unwoke” places.
Lynne Cox is an accomplished American open water swimmer. Twice, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. Cox was the first woman to swim the Cook Strait and the first to swim the Straits of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope. Cox swam the Bering Strait from American soil to Soviet soil in 1987, at the height of the Cold War.
Look at her.
I know open water swimming isn’t really glamorous, but Lynne Cox is arguably one of the greatest overlooked athletes of the 20th century.
And quite possibly a mutant.
She can withstand water temperatures that you or I would die from because of her training and her body’s unique reaction to cold (you know how the blood will leave your fingers and toes when it’s cold, to preserve heat? her whole body does that, pooling her blood in her core and insuring her body temperature stays toasty where it counts).
She funded the Bering Strait swim herself, clearing out her bank account when she couldn’t get corporate sponsors. After she succeeded (to almost everyone’s surprise: if you get in the Bering Sea without serious gear you generally just die) Gorbachev mentioned her during treaty talks with Nixon: “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live.“
She wasn’t just the first woman to swim the Strait of Magellan. She was the first person to make it across.
On top of setting multiple world records, she swam a mile+ to the coast of Antarctica, in just a bathing suit, and did not die.
She’s swum over 50,000 miles.
And look at her. This is a photo from when she was young, at the peak of her career and setting records all over the world. She is a great athlete. She is a human who can do things most humans would die trying. I’m sitting here at 1 AM getting all teary eyed because this is the first time I’ve looked up a photo of her and I am so surprised, so gratified, so overwhelmed to find out that this world record setter, this literal superhuman, has nearly the same body type as me.
Since they wouldn’t let her be a fantasy creature in a video game, she just did it in real life, I guess.
Anyone who thinks there is just one athletic body type isn’t paying attention during the Olympics opening ceremonies.
Her body type is optimized for her sport. The shape of her body and the presence of fat both provide insulation to keep her core warm while she swims.
A lot of open water swimmers aren’t this chunky, but that’s because most of them are actually triathletes, and their body type is a compromise between the ideals for the different sports.
There really is no one way to be fit and athletic. For some reason, we tend to get ourselves hung up on the body type of track and field athletes, especially that of marathon runners (who tend to carry almost no extra fat) as the ideal.
Dude HOLY FUCK she’s a badass.
When Lynn Cox was training to swim the English Channel at 14, her practice regimen had her swimming off Long Beach pier from 3am-6am each morning and then going to high school. Her coach asked that she be excused from morning gym so that she could have extra time to shower and do homework. Her gym teacher refused to allow it because she believed that Lynn Cox was too chubby and too clumsy to be missing 9th grade gym.
And here’s a joyful, more recent photo of this tremendous athlete.
My boss slaughters his egg chickens either every fall or
every other fall depending on how old they are when he gets them, on the logic
that the personal hassle and carbon foot print of getting chickens to lay eggs
in the winter is not worth it. As he was explaining this recently, a newer
co-worker asked how he hid that from his children. And
she’s new, which means she’s never had the delightfully goth experience of
watching my boss’s two charming dimpled daughters who are ALSO deeply unsentimental
farm children respond to you with utterly withering scorn if you ask them
something like, as I once did, “oh, what’s that chicken’s name?” The oldest
daughter, all of four years old at the time, told me in a firm,
Wednesday-Adams-talking-to-a-moron voice, “We’re going to eat them. They’re not
pets.”
My boss, who is gentle and does not respond to people with
scorn when they ask innocent questions, instead told her, “Oh, we’re pretty
open with them about the facts of life.
They know where babies come from and where chickens go.”
Anyway, that phrase haunts me and I wanted to share it with you. It sounds like some 19th century grandma saying.
When people say “prostitutes have unions, they are looked after if they want to leave, they help prostitutes leave if they want to and prevent trafficking, there are people out there monitoring legal prostitution, because legal prostitution is the way to go”
Here’s a little about “prostitution unions” in Australia. If this is what occurs in a pretty privileged country, then what the fuck does it say about the rest of the world?
“They are supposed to be a support group for prostitutes, so yes, they will provide condoms and things like that. And they get government funding for that in Australia. Although there are lots of corrupt unions, I never heard of a union that works to reduce the safety of the workers, but the Scarlet Alliance is opposed to mandatory STD tests for the prostituted and johns…I think all the johns should be registered, have mandatory tests for STDs. I think they should wear labels and be listed in back-pages of newspapers, with their names in full! The Scarlet alliance opposes these restrictions, they oppose mandatory testing. And if you want to leave prostitution, they turn on you and you become the enemy. If you go to the Scarlet Alliance and tell them « I don’t want to be a prostitute anymore, help me get out », they will villify you, and they will make your life hell—like they have done to me. At least, they are trying to do that to me.You might think it’s a sweeping statement to say : « they are all pimps », but the reality is that the majority of them are in management positions. They say things like « I’m a current sex worker », and people don’t want to call them out on that because it sounds rude to ask if it is true. These so-called « sex worker unions » globally call themselves things like « Current sex workers » and project managers for « migrant sex workers ». Is there anything more revolting than that? They are in management and « work » with trafficked women is what that means. They don’t help them get out of the sex-trade because they deny sex trafficking exists in general.They have been given a voice on the round table of the National Anti-Traficking Plan of Australia—where they say that sex traficking does not exist! And they call any person traficked for sex a « sex worker » or a « migrant ». We have a huge refugee crisis here, people need admission and housing and we have a hostile government who is not willing to admit vulnerable people in the country. But the Scarlet Alliance uses this opportunity to get more people inside. Of course most of us want to help the refugees, but when the Scarlet Alliance say they want to help the refugees, they just want to get more women in Australia —and then they are going : « great, we can look like we are Left wing and humanitarian » . They oppose penalties for anyone knowingly buying or selling a trafficked human being. I mean really people, get a clue!We just had a prostituted woman who was released after being locked in a cupboard for months, she could barely breathe, she was in Victoria where prostitution is legal. And when a lot of women come here, they think they come on students’ visa, but when they arrive, they are put in decriminalized brothels in New South Wales. They think they come here to learn English, but these desperate women are deceived and brought here to join the ranks of « migrant sex workers ». These Scarlet Alliance people are so awful and vile, there are no words to convey how awful they are. The government give them money, it’s supposed to be for condoms, and for sexual health check ups for us, and things like that, but in reality, they don’t give anybody who wants to leave that. All they do is take the money to spread the idea that trafficked people are « migrant sex workers ». If you were in a country illegally, and know that your family back home will be murdered as well, what would you do? Stay and keep your mouth shut. The Scarlet Alliance take this money from the government and donations, but if you want to leave prostitution, they will turn on people like me.”
