Get Stuffed

I was about to subscribe to Stuff NZ when I read a highly subjective opinion piece by Stuff reporter /columnist, Kylie Klein-Nixon, and I put my credit card back in my wallet. 

 

Klein-Nixon's primary target was another Stuff OP published in the Manawatu Standard, by communications lecturer Steve Elers, in which he expressed his bewilderment over the array of preferred, newly constructed pronouns.

 

Now, I suspect Elers' motives for entering this current round of the language wars are not the same as mine, and I'd take issue with aspects of his rather light-weight analysis but Klein-Nixon doesn't do that, she just wants to indulge herself in a bit of a rant and thus does the issues a grave disservice – in my opinion. 

 

She attacks people like Elers for "being scared of words" (i.e. pronouns), in defence of people who she assumes are scared of being harmed by words like those written by "small-minded, mean-spirited, ignorant", "ill-informed drop-kicks". 

 

She manages the currently obligatory segue into what "uber-Karen, JK Rowling" has to say about the intersections between sex and gender generally, and the current protocols for treating trans kids in particular, and culminates her piece with a tub-thumping, rhetorical flourish:

 "...when a person who is dangerously impacted by the thing you’re selfishly, ignorantly, yapping about, tells you you’re hurting them, you don’t bash on regardless. You shut your fool mouth, sit the hell down and listen."

 

Klein-Nixon would do well to take note of, and address the political implications of the growing number of women who feel dangerously impacted by what they see as a heedless, ideologically motivated conflation of sex and gender, so I strongly urge her to take her own advice before putting fingers to keyboard next time.

And if Stuff wants my money, it had better sharpen up its act, i.e. more insight, less ideology.