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I had hoped to steer clear of this most vexing and vexatious of topics.Time will tell how successful my new year's resolution to widen my focus will be but in the meantime, needs must when the pronouns drive.

I wrote something in response to one of the now ubiquitous Tik Tok videos posted by young, mainly white, middle class people who have adopted various permutations of trans-gender identity to position themselves on the oppression hierarchy. This particular example took youthful self absorption right up to the level of full-blown narcissism.

"I am stitching this video to give further clarification –  again – because cis people keep asking stupid questions –again – I’m fed up with it I go by any and all pronouns – this includes neo pronouns I’m non binary not gender fluid – my preferred pronouns are they/them however I go by any or all pronouns because I know if I go by they/them I will face misgendering and I don’t have the mental energy for that so if I go by any or all pronouns people can’t deliberately misgender me. If I have told someone I am non binary and they refuse to use any pronouns other than she/her I will get a little bit annoyed..." 

In response to those who think this is something the grown ups have to accommodate, I wrote elsewhere: 

Youth subcultures are often alien and inexplicable to older people - that's the whole point of them. This current non-binary phenomenon is a youth sub culture, a form of social contagion fuelled by social media and US-style hyper individualist, aspirational culture. 

The tyranny of neo-liberalism's cult of the individual dictates you must BE and you must MARKET the best possible and most distinctive version of yourself. But humans instinctively ‘clump’ so young people want to be seen as different but not in total isolation – hence the proliferation of sub-sub cultures. And subcultures always develop their own forms of language and subcultural signifiers –  a facility with which signals belonging to the sub group or sub-sub group – or in the case of gender identity, sub to the point of literal absurdity.  

Usually subcultures don't want outsiders to use their language or adopt their style – let alone impose any of it on others – it defeats the purpose. 

To me, there’s a world of difference between the valid demands of people around use of language which serves to enable/strengthen forms of legal discrimination and bigotry, and the demand for others to use individually or small group tailored third person pronouns. What this young person is doing is play acting oppression – appropriating the real struggles of people with verifiable disadvantages arising from legal discrimination and wider/deeper forms of oppression and economic exploitation.  

This is a phenomenon largely of the anglophone world for the simple reason that in some languages, gendered pronouns are the least complicated part of a gendered language. If these young people did not speak a language which has only gendered third person singular pronouns, they would be trying to change the way the entire language signals contrasts of person, sex, number, time, place etc. And of course these demands for a bespoke set of third person pronouns are accompanied by other, wider, changes to the use of language which challenge some very deep rooted beliefs which run across class, race, sex, age etc.  

What this results in is a loss of focus on the fact that at the centre of this burgeoning forest of bespoke gender identities,  always was, is, and probably will remain, a group of people for whom this is not remotely a style choice or a sub-cultural attachment of the moment, but a real, crippling sense of alienation – a disconnection between the objective, material body, and the subjective sense of self.   

It’s like if being disabled became ‘cool’ and something to aspire to being, and a load of people started claiming that being a bit myopic was on a “spectrum of visual disabilities” all of which have equal validity.  

Bottom line for me is – neo-liberal identity politics in general, and gender identity politics in particular, are part of a stage managed process of ideologically breaking down all forms of mass resistance to economic power.  If that makes me an old school economic determinist - then so be it. 

The issue of bespoke pronouns is actually a smokescreen for far more foundational political shifts. Just as we should all be alert to what is actually going on in the economic and political backrooms around the covid pandemic, we should be keeping a very close eye on who really benefits from the divisive power of gender identity ideology.

Take the question of who can be a mother or a father. 

Can those terms really be a matter of a self determined identification into a bespoke gender identity?

Is calling a man who is married to another man, a "husband", the same as  calling a biologically female person – the sex which gestates new life –  a child's father because that person identifies as male?

Does a penis become a differently structured vulva/clitoris, and testicles, external ovaries, if the person they are part of identities as having a female gender identity?

Have we collapsed and lost sight of the central distinction between biological sex and the ideological wrapping of gender as a set of socially constructed or conditioned roles, attributes etc?

And by doing so and by elevating gender identity in this way, have we done any favours to those who are legally discriminated against, oppressed, and/or hyper-exploited economically on the basis of their social class, their biological sex, their ethnicity or culture?

The start point for all this surely is what is gender and what is a gender identity? The simplest take on this is also the most profound – there would be no such thing as gender without the foundation of dimorphic sex.