Here’s Why Asking for Gender Pronouns Is Like a Religious Test

Not long ago, people seemed to get along fine with using “he,” “she” and “they” without prior permission or advice. Pronouns weren’t considered “mine” or “yours”; they were understood as a linguistic shorthand denoting our sex, which wasn’t usually hard to figure out.

Bespoke pronouns are now in vogue, however, because many want the concept of “gender identity” to replace sex as the determinant of whether someone is a man, a woman, or neither.

Here’s a definition of “gender identity” offered by journalist Helen Joyce in 2018: “an innate sense of being a man or woman [or neither] that usually, but not always, aligns with biological sex.”

Even more, there is a “deceptively simple, quasi-mystical idea,” Joyce stated, that everyone has a “gender identity.”

“The brainchild of a few sexologists, trans-activists and academics, it has spread via lobby groups and the internet, and on liberal campuses. It is now becoming consolidated in practice and codified into law, with profound consequences—not just for people who wish they had been born the opposite sex, but for everyone.”

“According to this theory, no one can determine a person’s gender identity except that person, and no one else can challenge it,” Joyce pointed out.

And if your gender identity makes you a man or a woman, only you can know whether you’re one or the other – so only you can know what pronouns are “yours.”

“Gender identity” became normalized because it is a way to distinguish between the biological sex of transgender people and their internal sense that they are male or female.

But the idea that everyone has a “gender identity” isn’t a scientific concept. As Joyce and others have stated, it is a philosophical, quasi-religious idea promulgated by powerful groups.

As Doyle writes, it is “akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.”

Moreover, he wrote, “declaring our pronouns has become the most common way in which we are expected to pledge allegiance to the new identity-obsessed religion that has captured most of our major institutions.”

Similarly, journalist Abigail Shrier stated that when you give “your pronouns,” you “participate in the catechism of Gender Ideology – the belief that there are ineffable genders, unknowable to all but the subject.”

So the next time a university language guide, professor, or student leader asks you for “your pronouns,” you might consider following Shrier’s model.

“But – when asked,” she stated, “I will not state my pronouns and if you don’t believe in Gender Ideology, you shouldn’t either.”

Instead, Shrier simply stated, “When asked for my pronouns, I say: ‘I am a woman.’”

https://www.thecollegefix.com/heres-why-asking-for-gender-pronouns-is-like-a-religious-test/