Two Anti-Pronoun-Ritual Attacks

one trolling tactic and one argument

Many of us are running into pronoun declarations and pronoun exchange rituals more and more often these days. This nonsense started on college campuses but has quickly spread everywhere. I see it on name badges worn by retail workers, among other places. The ritual of offering and asking for pronouns is present in meetup groups and community meetings and some workplaces, especially large companies with active HR and DEI departments eager to justify their existences and salaries.

Many have written about this, and I highly recommend Colin Wright’s excellent essay on the topic of pronoun rituals.

In this post, I’m going to give you two attacks to fight it with: one trolling tactic and one argument.

A Powerful Trolling Tactic

There are places in this world that cater to this insanity so thoroughly that they offer products meant to facilitate the narcissistic performance that pronoun demands represent.

You can buy necklaces and badges with multiple pronoun choices and move them around as often as you wish—daily, hourly.

Being “genderfluid” is understood to be exactly that, a fluid state.

If you are being harassed for your pronouns, consider investing in one of these products and then holding the Woke to their own standards. Change badges daily, or even every few minutes. Change them in the middle of being introduced and force your Woke coworker to immediately correct himself. Then change them back.

If you can keep a straight face, this has the potential be very effective. If they ask you if you’re kidding or trying to make a point, feign ignorance. “What do you mean? What point could I be trying to make?” Make yourself an annoyance playing by their rules. If they express skepticism that your pronouns could change so often, ask them to clarify. What is the appropriate, non-suspicious interval for pronouns to change? Why?

If you try this, please email me. I’d love to hear about your adventure on the battlefield.

An Argument Against Pronoun Rituals

When I was an undergraduate, the pronoun rituals for classes were very department-specific. I spoke on panels in the education department a few times, sharing my experience as a student who received disability accommodations. Those always started with pronoun rituals, from everyone who spoke. (I never participated, which earned me confusing looks, ire, annoyed questions, etc.) Humanities classes were adopting them consistently by the time I graduated. Mathematics, my major, was a holdout. But in my senior year, a class taught by a graduate student (who, in a stroke of good luck for me, was supervised by my adviser) started off with pronoun rituals.

I was surprised by this reaction, at the time, but it actually made me very nervous. I did not participate, giving my name only, then deliberately turning my head to the next person, as if to say “your turn.” Later, reflecting on where the fear came from, I realized the source of my near-panic.

As in most universities, my courses in upper-level mathematics were mostly filled with male students. My department had a lot of female math majors, but almost all of them were future high school math teachers. As such, they took the core math major courses and then filled their elective hours up with courses to help them in that pursuit—courses in analytic geometry for a better understanding of the geometry they would one day teach, etc. As a math major intending to do other things, I filled my major elective hours up with statistics and coding, leaving me with mostly male classmates.

Upon reflection, I realized that the sex ratio in the room was the reason for my anxiety at the pronoun ritual. (I was not nearly as far in my PTSD recovery then as I am now.) Having me give my name and say “my pronouns are she/her” would essentially, in a room full of men I didn’t know and had no reason to trust, be forcing me to say: “Yes, guys—I look like I have a vulva, and I do! I confirm this fact for you!”

In my adviser’s office, I did not disclose anything about my PTSD or history with sexual assault. I did ask him to consider a hypothetical scenario (which, what with his not being an idiot, I’m sure he figured out was autobiographical).

“Hypothetically,” I said, “imagine a woman student. Already a minority in our department, as you know. Imagine she has a history of sexual assault and already finds it anxiety-provoking to be in rooms full of men she doesn’t know very well most of the time. Can you see that she might regard being forced to state her pronouns as essentially affirming what type of anatomy she posseses? I understand the good intentions behind this ritual, but can you see that there are some unintentional consequences at work, too?”

He did see. I don’t know what he did or didn’t say to his TA or to anyone else, but the pronoun ritual never came up for me again in that class. COVID ended my senior year early, sending me home to finish school online, so I don’t know what happened with pronouns after this.

If pronoun rituals are instituted in your workplace, consider making this argument. “I recently read an article by a sexual assault survivor who found pronoun rituals to be triggering of her PTSD, as they are essentially an affirmation that appearance and anatomy match, which isn’t something she wanted to announce to strangers, even indirectly. We should be mindful that there may be sexual assault survivors in our company who may feel the same.”

Everyone Can, and Must, Fight the Woke

Woke can be fought hard and directly and aggressively, and in many cases that’s the right tactic. But it needs to be fought on every level with as many tactics as possible. People who will never pay money to the Daily Wire to watch “What is A Woman?” might listen to an argument that pronoun rituals have unintended, potentially harmful consequences. Those who may never sit down and read JK Rowling’s words for themselves might have a conversation about just how often pronouns change, if someone is using them to seriously assert a gender identity, and that might cause them to consider—or even admit—that we are codifying delusional bullshit into law.

In the case of workplaces in particular, the “actually there’s a different class of victim we need to consider” tactic is both valid and an effective strike. Large companies will always be nervous about something that might cause legal consequences, but the HR ladies eager to signal their virtue will likely have to have the possibility that they are actually hurting people presented to them.

Woke is a religion as much as it is a mind virus, and the pronoun ritual is part of their sacraments. If the pronoun priests try to institute their religious ceremonies in your life, you should try to resist in any way you can. If you, like me, believe that there are two sexes, zero genders, and infinite personalities, you are an atheist in their religion. I hope one of these two tactics will be useful in your quest to exercise your right to be a gender atheist.

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