Why It’s Vital to Keep the Traditional Pronouns

 Men and women fill each other’s lives.

Each is the source of the greatest and most intense pleasure that can be experienced by the other. And because of this, the human race is perpetuated.

But there is much more:

Every man has a mother.

Every woman has a father.

Many men have one or more sisters.

Many women have one or more brothers.

Most men have a wife.

Most women have a husband.

Many men have one or more daughters.

Many women have one or more sons.

And then, of course, there are also grandfathers and grandmothers, grandsons and granddaughters, and uncles, aunts, nephews, and nieces.

These relationships add up to an enormous part of the lives of most people, requiring an amount of time and providing a level of satisfaction comparable to and often surpassing that connected with work.

If anyone with a strongly held fantasy of belonging to the opposite sex is to be regarded as an actual member of the opposite sex, then the very concept of the opposite sex is destroyed. Opposite to what? Opposite to a feeling that one belongs to the opposite sex, a feeling that allegedly then determines the reality of one’s sex?

On this basis, the opposite sex to a man who “identifies” as a woman, i.e., feels, that he is a woman, and is thereby regarded as an actual woman, is, violà, another man. So a man becomes the opposite sex of a man. Thus, the very concept of opposite sex is destroyed.

If feelings and fantasies are to replace biological reality as the standard for determining membership in a sex, then all of the above relationships between the sexes are rendered null and void. There is then no difference between men and women, between mother and father, between sister and brother, between husband and wife, between daughter and son. For on the basis of mere fantasy, any of the instances of any of these concepts can be transformed into its opposite.

If one’s father can be one’s mother and one’s mother can be one’s father, then the concepts “father” and “mother” have no basis for existing. And, likewise, none of the other concepts of familial relationships can have any basis for existing.

In seeking to abolish recognition of the biological basis of the distinction between the sexes, the pronoun movement reveals hatred of sex and a desire to obliterate it. It seeks to remove sex from our vocabulary not only with respect to pronouns, but also all other distinctions between the sexes. Thus, for example, we are no longer to speak of waiters and waitresses and of policemen and policewomen, but of “servers” and “policepersons”—anything to get sex out of the picture, anything to find a substitute for any reference to the distinction between men and women.

Acceptance of fantasies concerning membership in the opposite sex as a standard, and their imposition on those who do not share them but who are nevertheless to be compelled to participate in them, by having to use special pronouns to refer to those who are consumed by them, is certainly one of the leading mass insanities of our time, or any other time. It is proof of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the greater part of today’s academia and media, of our so-called “intelligentsia.” As Ayn Rand saw decades ago, the world needs “New Intellectuals”—a new intelligentsia—to replace today’s clutch of amoral ignoramuses that have misappropriated such once dignified names as “professor,” “teacher,” and “journalist.”