While this may be just another “he said, she said” situation, a document released at the University of Tennessee suggests that it may be actually a “ze said, xe said” situation. Donna Braquet the director of the university’s Pride Center is asking faculty and students to drop using “he” and “she” in favor of using “correct pronouns” for particular students like ze, hir, zir, xe, xem and xyr to reflect a broader array of gender identifications. We recently discussed how the University of California has adopted six different gender categories for students. Braquet is now suggesting that faculty adopt the new array of pronouns (“dozens of gender-neutral pronouns”) and use whatever the student feels is appropriate.
Donna Braquet is associate professor and biology librarian with University Libraries. In fairness to Braquet, she is trying to have a dialogue about how to respond to the growing adoption of different gender identifications and fulfilling her role in working to make the university a more accommodating place. In that sense, I am not sure it is accurate to say that this is university policy, at least not yet.
Braquet insists that this is part of “making our campus welcoming and inclusive for all.” However, this could add a considerable burden for faculty, particularly in large classes. Bracket suggests “[i]nstead of calling roll, ask everyone to provide their name and pronouns . . . [so that] you are not singling out transgender or non-binary students.” She suggests “You can always politely ask,” she wrote. “’Oh, nice to meet you (insert name). What pronouns should I use?’”
Braquet adds:
“We should not assume someone’s gender by their appearance, nor by what is listed on a roster or in student information systems . . . Transgender people and people who do not identify within the gender binary may use a different name than their legal name and pronouns of their gender identity, rather than the pronouns of the sex they were assigned at birth.”
She admits that this can seem odd but she says that that is simply because it is new. As an academic, this would be a pretty daunting task for keeping track of so many options. I have a class of around 130 students. More importantly, I am still behind the learning curve on what terms like “xyr” mean, though Braquet insists that this is just part of learning the new lingo for a new age.
What do you think?
It could be easier if it were simply ‘you’ or/and ‘you there’.
Let’s have everyone all break the rules of grammar to express his or her particular prejudiced beliefs against expressing anything that even smells like it may be prejudiced in some way or another. Don’t like something? Best thing to do is to try to get everyone else to change, instead of adjusting to how things are. You control what you say. You can change how you normally say things. Good luck trying to get everyone else, who you cannot control, to change how they normally say things.
But changing the language in order to change how people think is the principle behind Newspeak and Doublethink, and George Orwell warned of this in 1949 with his book “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Even Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” began predicting similar social trends as early as 1932. No one can say they haven’t been warned.
p.s.
No, none of this means you “have to” dress your baby boy in a dress. However, this should mean as a loving and caring parent, should your baby boy grow up identifying with being a female, love and respect their decision and resist insisting they conform to YOUR norms.
Anyone here actually know any transgendered people? Anyone here actually know/understand the difficulty “normal” aka cisgendered people place upon the trans community to “conform”? Or, are many of the cisgendered folks here contributing to this pressure?
Max-1 – I have met a transgendered female who is still married to her wife. Although I do not know either of them well, both are lovely people.
I’ll use shim, sher and shit, and anyone that objects to the first two is obviously a shit.
Lisa, Back in the early 80’s my bride had a person on her caseload @ the Federal MCC in Chicago who was taking the same route as Jenner. The MCC is co-ed w/ male and female inmates awaiting trial. She had to decide where to put him/her. Decided he was a he since he still sported Mr. Johnson. It was unique back then, now those decisions have to be made all the time.
Aridog,
Check the Bible.
God is a man.
God is male.
God is thy Father.
Our Father who art in Heaven.
Modernity has us attempting to equalize that which is not equal by nature; by God.
Cavewomen did not knock men down and drag them off by their hair.
———-
I’m going to take a wild guess and say the law does not write itself.
Either men or women are going to write the law.
Either law is going to be rational or law is going to be irrational.
Either men will be free or men will be enslaved.
Either men will live with the consequences of freedom
or men will live with the consequences of slavery.
The American Founders chose freedom.
So if one of those inane new tags means male & the other female, how is the distinction going to change? All these idiots are doing is respelling he & her or male & female or which ever gender their stupid new terms apply to.
What kinda dope these peeps smoking? Stupid Bark or what? When they fell outa the stupid tree, they hit every branch on the way down…then they hit their heads on a big rock. Stupid is as stupid does…
What a waste of time & $$. Parents & students actually have to go into debt to get dumbed down these days.
SamFox
Lisa N,
Sidebar:
Bruce Jenner is a mutilated male.
Bruce Jenner is a male with in deep psychosis and is decompensating.
Bruce Jenner is a male in need of perpetual psychiatric counseling and intervention.
Bruce Jenner is not a female.
Bruce Jenner will never be a female.
Bruce Jenner may mutilate himself but he will never alter or modify physical facts, definitions or language.
The political “left” will always attempt to misrepresent, inculcate, propagandize and indoctrinate.
Mass misrepresentation in media, as in this case, has an adverse effect, especially on certain young people.
Cases such as this should generate “EQUAL TIME” in the media for oppositional analysis and political opponents.
The entities that prosecute the “Caitlyn” agenda in national media should be thoroughly identified.
How many citizens naively don’t receive the “Caitlyn” episode as comedy?
“I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the Lola transformation, or seeing the Olympic Decathlon winner, who adorned the Wheaties box, banging a heater.”
Lmao! Caitlyn does posses the two most envious parts of the human body by both sexes. How the heck does one reconcile that!
Hskiprob is 100% correct. I’m 100% female and have no problem saying that.
I think Donna Broquet is a penis envy-er. Wishes she could stand and piss, instead of sit and pee.
Lisa N – the girl’s lavatories at the ASU Law School used to have standing urinals for women. They eventually took them out because the students could not figure out how to use them. The faculty was no help either.
You mean to tell me that discrimination is not the first step of freedom? What next, State marriages, State neighborhoods, State hamburgers, State sports teams, State cars, State vacations, State Snickers Bars?
Looks like it comes down to a choice of one: Freedom or Slavery.
Physical axiom: “The biological bipeds of identical plumages are gregarious.” What say you, Comrade Marx? Taking on the universe are you? All men are created equal (hypothetically). After that, they’re on their own. Merit will out.
That pesky freedom thing forces one to live with its consequences, one’s own characteristics and one’s “station” in life, all of which were provided by nature (i.e. “God”). By God, we communists will get rid of all suffering, including dirty looks and name calling, huh? Choice by the State, not human beings, rights?
We just can’t have freedom and self-reliance. We have “victims.” We conduct society for the benefit of “victims.”
Reverend Jeremiah Wright –
“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing God Bless America…no, no, no Not God bless America, God damn America.”
Thank you, Karl. We’ll take slavery over freedom any day, right?
No! Please do not spread this.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t the protocols in Latin say that the masculine gender could refer to male or female or whatever? That only when you intended to cite female specifically did you have to use the female gender? Otherwise any masculine pronoun could mean either gender. I had to take years of Latin in high school, but that was back in the Jurassic period, so I might not have it right now.
In Pig Latin “PC” stands for ickPrayuntCay. Get it? If so then you stand politically corrected.
Each person, male, female, bent, should be referred to as PC as the prefex. So the teacher would say: “PC Jones, what is the holding in Cook v. Lumm?”
What academia needs to do is petition to replace the very binding Preamble, Constitution and Bill of Rights (original) with the Communist Manifesto. That would allow it to be honest, forthright and consistent. It could replace the Washington Monument with a massive Hammer and Sickle Monument to Karl Marx.
The American Thesis of Freedom, Free Enterprise and Self-Reliance is ridiculed and disparaged, as the principles of communism – Social Engineering, Central Planning, Control of the Means of Production and Redistribution of Wealth – are glorified and inculcated ardently. Students believe that Welfare, Affirmative Action, “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Bank Bailouts, Economic “Stimulus,” a floated currency*, the Fed/Treasury Complex et al. are constitutional; if you can imagine that. I know the Founders couldn’t.
Ben Franklin, 1789, we gave you “a republic, if you can keep it.”
Ben Franklin, 2015, we gave you “a republic, if you can take it back.”
P.S. America was a “restricted-vote” republic in 1789.
* The constitutional currency (carryover of the Articles of Confederation) is a stable, gold-backed currency as a utility such as water or electricity – not a lucrative, variously inflatable football for the use of international bankers.
People won’t use these terms. It’s affected and weird. Differently gendered seems to be the cause celebre; fine, I’m in favor of people doing what they wish. They and their could cover it. The new gender taxonomy is one more thing that shows what an old fossil I am.
Jack – he, she and it should cover it.
Demonstrations of mindless stupidity are an unnerving tell for the low probabilities for an intelligent future America.
knay