A personal pronoun is a word that stands in for a name that has been already mentioned or is otherwise understood, thus “Taylor went to a coffee shop where she met her colleague Pat who told her about his new idea to increase sales at their software startup.” We all know what’s going on here, we can keep Taylor and Pat apart in our minds, and we understand that they both work for the same company. We can even tell the sex of Taylor and Pat, which helps immensely in making sense of the sentence. Why can we do this? Because language is conventional; we agree on the meanings of words. To speak English is to agree (among other things) to refer to a horse as a horse and not as a cheval, pferd, antelope or tualor. Don’t bother to look up the last example— I made it up entirely. If we didn’t agree what our words meant, we couldn’t use them. Furthermore, we must agree on the grammar and syntax of a language in order to use its vocabulary to say things that others understand. A language is a tacit and inherited agreement about what a shared vocabulary consists of, and about how that vocabulary is used and arranged into units of meaning. Evasion or, worse, flouting of the rules degrades or prevents understanding. Sometimes this is the goal, though hardly laudable.
So, pronouns in English are part of the common property of its speakers, along with nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech. Names, though, are a particular part of speech. They refer to individuals, for example, to Julius Caesar. It happens that two or more people may have the same name, but in every case the name is meant to refer to an individual and, even when a name happens to be given to more than one person, that name is not a matter of convention or agreement by the speakers of a language. The same is true of nicknames, stage names and bynames— that is, secondary names used instead of or in addition to a person’s real name. Benjamin Kubelsky is better known as Jack Benny. His byname causes no serious problems and, unlike trans activists, he knew he was a comedian.
Sir James George Frazer. Thoroughly Up-To-Date?
Source: Wiki Commons
Some time ago I watched an amusing and ill-thought-out video in which a teenaged girl in a blue wig and make-believe horns clapped her hands and sang a ditty set to a nursery school tune, the burden of which was “My pronouns are not optional; they are mandatory.” She failed in her struggle with scansion and rhyme but, in a sense, perhaps, she is right about pronouns. Her pronouns are she, her, and hers, as is clear to anyone who sees the video. She evidently thinks, though, that they are different; otherwise she wouldn’t try to bully the public into twisting the language. Whatever she thinks her pronouns are— xer, zir, or some other nonsense— she is mistaken. Such “neo-pronouns” (I use the term only as a courtesy) are not pronouns. They are mere bynames or nicknames she has bestowed on herself. If instead she insists that you use masculine pronouns for her, she is ordering you to abuse your language with a view not just to obscuring meaning, but to changing reality. More on this below.
Why do so many people suffer from the fashionable enthusiasm for misusing pronouns or for confusing bynames and pronouns? The answer, I think, is that we are seeing a recrudescent belief in the efficacy of magic words, in the idea that certain words can transform the things they refer to or even conjure a thing into existence. Historically, this has been a very common belief, perhaps even universal among what used to be called “primitive people.” I’m sure there’s a euphemism for this, though it escapes me at the moment. Let’s press on. More than a hundred years ago, Sir James Frazer, the pioneering anthropologist, discussed the belief in the magic quality of names. He writes:
“Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person.”
[J. Frazer, The Golden Bough (abridged edition) Chapter XXII. p. 244.]
The insistence of trans activists that only the pronouns that they choose, or that they make up, be applied to them mirrors the practice discussed by Frazer in The Golden Bough. Gender is a grammatical concept, not a property that applies to human beings. The postmodernists who apply the term to people are, at best, making a metaphor. Now, people lack other properties belonging to things that are not human, such as tense or square roots or logarithms, and in the same way they don’t have gender either. Pretending that people have gender is a useful metaphor for post modernists, at least to the extent that it advances their careers, but they are not dealing with reality. When postmodernists or their followers (consciously or otherwise) say that a person has gender, they are using a metaphor to imply something about that person’s attitude toward his or her sex.
To be clear, the magical thinking of the trans activist depends on a confusion between metaphor and statements that reflect demonstrable reality. But metaphors are not literally true; if they were, they would not be metaphors. So, we might say of someone, “He’s a cold fish.” But he’s not cold, and he’s not a fish. We mean only that there is something common between him and a cold fish which cannot be precisely stated. We often see this sort of thing on the labels of pretentious wine bottles where the product is described as earthy, with a touch of leather and notes of cinnamon and gym shoe, and so on. We understand when we read a wine description that we are dealing with a figure of speech; we know not to take the words literally. When trans activists misuse personal pronouns or “neo-pronouns” they are speaking, at best, metaphorically.
But when it comes to trans ideology, we are commanded to accept the magical efficacy of the metaphor of gender. From this point of view, the gender metaphor is taken to express a literal truth so powerful that it can transform men into women and vice versa. One natural consequence is that men must be allowed to compete against women in sports and shower with them afterward. The misuse of pronouns not only follows from taking the metaphor about gender literally, but, once established, leads back to it— it’s meant to deceive and it does. It’s meant to work magic.
Like the savage in The Golden Bough, the trans activist misuses pronouns in an effort to magically transform one sex to another. The trans activist uses “neo-pronouns” differently, but with equally magical intent— to erase sex entirely. Thus, “the real and substantial bond” that the savage believed to exist between the name and thing named has reappeared in the twenty-first century. The fervor and ferocity with which trans activists and their allies insist on the misuse of pronouns or the coinage of bynames to mimic them is to be expected. These linguistic corruptions are, to the trans activists, magic words used to conjure into reality what they wish were true, and they must be said by everyone if the magic is to work. Dissidents spoil the effect and undermine the new magical reality, and they must be bullied until they obey. Only when everyone obeys will reality change.
Ultimately the effort must fail, as it is founded on the subjectivist belief that truth is what an observer feels and not what exists independently of the observer. It is a belief based not on objective reality, but instead on how a person feels about reality, which is quite a different thing— strikingly so when a person’s subjective view of reality conflicts sharply with reality. Nonetheless, the failure of this magical thinking, though inevitable, may be a long time coming. We should fight it because of its pernicious effect on language and the thinking that depends on language, which is to say, most of it.
We see another example of word-magic in the dread with which “dead names” are regarded in the trans activist community. These are the names that trans men and trans women bore before transition, and it’s considered a devastating blow to them if they hear their “dead name” uttered. Curiously (or perhaps not) Frazer had something to say about this phenomenon as well:
“The custom of abstaining from all mention of the names of the dead was observed in antiquity by the Albanians of the Caucasus, and at the present day it is in full force among many savage tribes. Thus we are told that one of the customs most rigidly observed and enforced amongst the Australian aborigines is never to mention the name of a deceased person, whether male or female; to name aloud one who has departed this life would be a gross violation of their most sacred prejudices, and they carefully abstain from it. The chief motive for this abstinence appears to be a fear of evoking the ghost, although the natural unwillingness to revive past sorrows undoubtedly operates also to draw the veil of oblivion over the names of the dead.”
[Op cit at 225]
Trans people may not abhor the mention of their former names for quite the same reason as the primitives discussed in The Golden Bough but, like them, they don’t want the specter of their former lives invoked.
Trans activism appeared suddenly just a few years ago and, while it might seem novel and historically unprecedented, it displays the remarkably primitive quality of magical thinking. The proof is in the pronouns.
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