We as members of Christ’s Church must love our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters and accept them as fully as possible. Though, if they have had sexual reassignment surgery, they may be restricted from holding the Priesthood and holding some church callings (as outlined in the General Handbook on page 385) this also means that they absolutely can still hold many callings in the church and absolutely should be included in all its activities and fellowships. A friend of mine has said that he believes God would rather have a gay couple in church in an openly romantic relationship or a transgender person in church even if he or she has had sexual reassignment surgery and is openly identifying as a gender or sex opposite from his or her birth than not have them in church at all, and I vociferously agree. The reality is that all of us have different levels of ability when it comes to keeping the commandments and we’re all sinners. We all have a place in the great hospital that is church to be attended to by the Master Physician. God knows our minds and our hearts, where we excel and where we fail, and it is His judgment alone which determines faithfulness and valiancy in keeping the commandments of Jesus Christ. It seems likely to me that a transgender person who gets a complete sexual reassignment surgery but who is in every other way a faithful Latter-day Saint may be more valiant in his or her testimony of Christ, living it to the fullest of his or her ability, than the member who easily fits into church doctrine and culture with no challenges in gender, sex, or sexual orientation.
After reading all that it may be surprising to some to discover that I do not think members should be required by law or social custom to refer to someone by their “preferred pronouns.” This means not using the pronouns which a person prefers to be called (he, she, they, etc.) and instead using the pronouns which a person would most obviously be assigned based on their birth sex/gender. In this article I will first address why people believe you should call someone by the pronouns he or she prefers and then I will address why I think this is wrong, providing the argument for why someone’s preference doesn’t matter and why there is more at stake in this discussion than merely a question of social etiquette. What is at issue is how we see and understand the world itself.
The Argument For Preferred Pronouns
The foremost argument for using preferred pronouns is that not doing so is not only offensive to the transgender person, but actively degrades their humanity. As the LGBTQ+ Resource Center at the University of Milwaukee explains it:
When someone is referred to with the wrong pronoun, it can make them feel disrespected, invalidated, dismissed, alienated, or dysphoric ( often all of the above.)
It is a privilege to not have to worry about which pronoun someone is going to use for you based on how they perceive your gender. If you have this privilege, yet fail to respect someone else’s gender identity, it is not only disrespectful and hurtful, but also oppressive.
In the words of Dr. Robin Dembroff, a Yale Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University who also happens to be a transgender man (that is born a biological female but identifies as a male), refusing to use a person’s preferred pronouns is an attack on their self:
We should focus on what matters: whether and why we should (not) use particular pronouns. It is wrong to use pronouns that deny someone’s identity. This is enough to see why we should use gender-neutral pronouns for non-binary people. In fact, once we see the virtues of using a gender-neutral pronoun like “they” for some people, maybe we should just use “they” for everyone.
If someone wants to be called ‘they’ and not ‘he’ or ‘she’, why say no?
For many this is an issue of etiquette, calling people by what they prefer. For example, the Anti-Defamation League argues:
Because some people identify themselves outside the gender binary (gender binary is the idea that gender consists of two distinct, opposite and disconnected categories—male and female), it is important to make sure you know the specific pronouns people use, whether they use female, male or gender-neutral pronouns. Be mindful that the pronouns “he” and “she” come with a set of expectations and gender norms about how people express their identity. For many, these terms are limiting and confining so gender-neutral options are preferable.
…Using correct names and pronouns shows respect, acceptance and support to all students, especially those who are transgender, gender non-conforming and non-binary.
Let’s Get It Right: Using Correct Pronouns and Names
A Response and Refutation
To the claim that denying someone’s preferred identity is automatically oppressive, disrespectful and denies their identity, I’m going to have to disagree.
First of all, gender, as important as it is, is not all of a person’s identity. If identity means who we are in our totality then gender identity is merely one piece of the puzzle and rejecting one part is not rejecting the whole. This is true of any classification. A simple example: I can reject celery but still love vegetables. My rejection neither changes what celery is nor does it mean that I deny all vegetables. Humans are a mass of factors all of which constitutes our identities. Rejection of one part, even a large portion, is not a rejection of the identity or humanity of the whole. Another comparison: I am a Latter-day Saint. That identity is more important to me than any other part of who I am because of what it means about what I know of myself, the purpose of existence, and the future of humanity, to say nothing of the underlying nature of reality. To those who would retort that this is a voluntary identity and is therefore incomparable to gender identity I would respond that they obviously have never experienced the overwhelming power of Truth which accepts nothing but submission no matter what you would otherwise desire to believe. The fact that a voluntary identity is voluntary makes it even more important than gender identity because it is about who I choose to be which is far more important than my mere biological urges. Yet you, my friends, and billions around the world can deny it, even denigrate it, mock it, and reject it, but still feel that they love me. And they do. Why? Because it isn’t all of who I am and rejection of part is not a rejection of the whole.
Secondly, just as no one would call a person rejecting my identity as a Latter-day Saint oppressive, neither is rejecting another person’s gender identity. The very opposite is true. It is when you try to shame, bully, or force others to accept your identity that you become oppressive. If I tried to use the law to compel you to accept my religion as true, whether you believed it or not, and to always speak and act as if it were, at least in public, then that would be oppressive. If I tried to shame you, denounce you, and emotionally bully you by calling you all socially acceptable insults, slurs, and slanders – that you’re a bigot, a theophobe, a privileged ignoramus – and tried to cause others to hate you, to convince them to fire you, destroying your ability to care for your home and family, and exposing you to communal and social shaming, that would be oppression. Refusing to agree with you and speak to you the way you prefer is not oppression. Trying to compel you to do something against your will, whether I am using the force of law or the force of social stigmata (and in many ways the latter is even more dangerous than the former), that is oppression. If you want to compel others to accept you preferred view of yourself or the world then you are the bully and the oppressor, not I. And it doesn’t matter how right, just, or true you think your cause is, bullies and oppressors always think they’re right.
I often think about what these first two propositions do to the people who believe them. In a rush to figure out who is the gold medalist in the Suffering Olympics we often teach people they have it worse than everyone else and that unless this massive change occurs then they are doomed to suffering and pain. No one has it worse than anyone else, we all suffer from illness, sickness, disability, genetic disorders, mental disorders, and death. Even for two people who seem to have the same experience – say two transgender people living in the same town with the same level of hate and acceptance shown them – the outcomes would be different because each of them has their own experience with what happens inside his or her soul and his or her head with his or her own body’s genetic dispositions. One may be just fine and suffer no long term problems while another may fall deep into suicidal depression based solely on issues tied back to genetics, for example. All of our experiences are unique and all of us suffer. But by constantly saying that a person suffers some immeasurable pain and burden which can only be ameliorated in a single way which that person will never fully achieve, you can make that person feel like there is no hope for his or her pain, that it is so big and vast that it is impossible to deal with, that they have no hope of being able to happy ever again. That in turn makes them want to kill themselves, because if that is all there is, then what is the point? These first two arguments are thus not just wrong, they’re downright dangerous to the very people they’re supposed to be helping.
Third, it is true that it might be an attempt at being disrespectful when you refuse to use another person’s preferred pronouns, but it is not an automatic given. Disrespect is as much about what is said as it is what gets said. You can speak in the most precise, formal, professional, and acceptable way and still act and speak in the most disrespectful way possible. Attitude and tone have as much to do with respect and disrespect as what is said. As a result it is also just as likely that a person is not being disrespectful of you when they refuse to use your preferred pronouns and the person who refuses to do so has all the respect for you in the world. Making blanket statements about which is respectful and which is not is simply false.
The most important issue here is the one most dismissed, the power of language. Dr. Dembroff for example, merely dismisses it as the pointless rules of grammar that need to be changed and others dismiss the language argument against preferred pronouns by saying that they are something easy to do of no consequence. These dismissals totally miss the most important issue here. The issue about etiquette is buried by the greater concern over the way you speak and think and what that does to your mind. Why? Well, the short answer to that question would be for me to simply quote V from V for Vendetta:
Words have power and carry weights of meaning, ideals, and conceptions about how we understand the people and the world around us. The words we enunciate communicate the very way that we see the world, the universe, and everything within it. Words are how we express the essence of truth and we cannot lightly, easily, nor truthfully speak words that require us to betray that truth.
The longer answer?
The Purpose and Power of Language
Language shapes the way we see the world and the way we understand it. The way your language frames concepts and ideas, changing the way you see reality itself from the way we conceptualize time to the way we see supposedly objective facts like color. This has been shown in the work of Dr. Lera Boroditsky, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego and formerly of Stanford University and MIT. In her article How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?, Dr. Boroditsky explains:
For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.
Think about that for a moment. Language isn’t just the way we construct the sharing of information, differing between different peoples but essentially communicating the same facts. The language we speak, the words we use, change the very way humans engage in thought itself and even small, seemingly meaningless differences in grammar can totally transform our entire conception of the world. Far from being a meaningless exercise that can be easily dismissed as Dr. Dembroff (and others) argue, language and grammar have a tremendous effect on the way we see the world. To illustrate this Dr. Boroditsky gives multiple examples, one of which is of an Aboriginal tribe in Australia that describes everything around a person not as left, right, forward, or behind, but according to the cardinal directions – that is north, south, east, and west.
As a result when you do something like ask a person to pass you something you don’t ask them for the hammer on their left you ask them for them hammer to their southeastern hand. This kind of organization doesn’t just end with spatial organization, but with time as well. When asked to organize a set of cards showing a person in various stages of aging the Aboriginals organized them from east to west no matter what direction they were facing, whether that meant lining them up left and right, up and down, or diagonally. Because of the way these people though about space the entire way they conceptualized time is fundamentally different than any other peoples on the Earth. After giving this example of how profoundly their language affected the way these people thought about the nature of reality itself, Dr. Boroditsky continues:
How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?
One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we’ve taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think. In practical terms, it means that when you’re learning a new language, you’re not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking.
How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think?
In short, when we start to learn new languages it doesn’t just represent us learning how to translate what we already speak into new words, it changes the very way we think. It changes the way we think of reality and the world. And the bigger and more expansive the change in language, the larger and more expansive the change in our ability to think. She further illustrates this by giving examples of how languages define and classify colors changes the way people actually see and recognize those colors, and thus reality itself. Dr. Boroditsky finishes the article talking about grammatical gender, which is about how people classify and assign characteristics to different people, places, and objects based on whether the object is classified as being “male” or “female.” An example from English would be of how many people talk about their cars and boats as being female. Dr. Boroditsky gives multiple examples across languages that shows the differing ways that different languages classify objects effects the characteristics assigned to those objects and therefore how people conceive of the nature of those objects. On this she says, “Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people’s ideas of concrete objects in the world. …The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That’s a lot of stuff!”
Below is a TED talk by Dr. Boroditsky that I highly suggest on this subject as she explains it in more detail.
Now you may be thinking this is all well and good when talking about how we conceptualize time or space or color, but what does that have to do with gender? My answer is everything. Think about the Aboriginal tribe. If you went to them and told them that the way they organize time is crazy and contradictory and your much more streamlined and scientific way of aligning chronology was better and they should accept it, they would think you were crazy. Not just because you think you can tell them how they must think and react but because to them what you’ve just said isn’t science, it isn’t fact, it is nonsense. To them you’ve entirely detached time from the most objective reality they can observe -the land and direction- and thereby rendered it meaningless. Because of the way Russians classify color, Russians conceive of the world differently than you or I do and classify it differently than you or I do.
Even how we understand objective events changes based on our language. In her TED Talk above (transcript here, information is at 8:52), Dr. Boroditsky gives an example of a key difference between English and Spanish languages in this regard giving the example of a vase accidentally broken. The English language has a person breaking the vase. Spanish sees the vase as breaking itself. No one did it in Spanish because “did it” implies intent. Accidents simply happen. How the event happened is even viewed and remembered differently as people reconstruct the event from memory and talk about it with others. This has huge implications in many ways, for example determining intent is an essential part of criminal law and in English we assign intent through our language which in turn directs how we think about punishment. English speakers and Spanish speakers do not see the same world because of the way their language shapes the way they think and understand the world. Even seemingly objective events are understand substantially differently based on our language, which in turn effects how we structure our society. Language does that for everyone.
The study Language Environment And Gender Identity Attainment, carried out by Drs. Alexander Z. Guiora, Benjamin Beit‐Hallahmi, Risto Fried, and Cecelia Yoder has shown that the level of detail to which a language places an importance on biological gender effects the speed at which children develop and understand their gender. In languages such as Finnish and English where there is either a low degree or almost no degree of sex differentiation in the language children are slow to develop a stable gender identity. In Semitic languages, such as Hebrew, where all nouns are either male or female, sexual distinction is made in second-person pronouns in addition to the he/she third person pronouns, and even verbs are assigned a sexual distinction, a person is forced in just about every aspect of every day language to recognize and react to human gender. As a result of this they are forced to develop ideas of sex and gender much earlier in order to be fluent speakers of the language, which in turn forces them to develop their own stable gender identity in order to interact in the language itself. As the study puts it, “Thus, the child’s awareness of gender loading in language and its uses becomes a part of the materials that go into the child’s construction of the social world and his or her own place in that world.” (Language Environment, pg. 292) While it is not the only factor, it seems clear that our language and how we think about gender effects has a major impact on how we develop our own ideas of personal gender and how we think of others in the world.
(As a side not, when groups like the ADL and people like Dr. Dembroff talk about the need to “progress language” by eliminating gender specific terminology it becomes clear that they are speaking from the privileged position of someone who speaks English in which gendered language is already so sparse to begin with. When you’re talking about languages such as Hebrew or Arabic where gendered language is imbedded in nearly every aspect of language and thought you’re no longer talking about a “small” change, you’re talking about completely smashing and re-tooling a language and culture older than anything in Western society. That kind of cultural imperialism is nothing less than the intellectual invasion and occupation of a different society, denigrating it because it is less like your own. Of course that kind of Ivory Towered arrogance is the explicit privilege of those who spend all their time theorizing about how society could be so much better if only their ideas were perfectly practiced by everyone and that they’re not is exactly the problem they see in their own societies. But enough digression.)
Again we see that our language, including seemingly “trivial” issues of grammar actually have a large impact on how we think, how we see the world, and what we see our relationship to the rest of the world as being. But this isn’t the only issue.
The Illusory Truth Effect
The study Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity carried out by Drs. Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino, was designed to test how the frequency of our exposure to a specific bit of information effected our belief in its validity. They wanted to test if humans where more or less likely to believe something is true based on how often they were exposed to the information which they were being asked to determine was true or false. After listing the number of ways that humans use repetition and frequency to do a host of important things in their everyday lives, the researchers state what they are interested in studying:
Frequency might also serve as the major access route that plausible statements have into our pool of general knowledge. That is, the more often you hear that 50,000 people live in Greenland, even if you do so in contexts that are explicitly ambiguous or equivocal the more certain you will become that indeed they do. Such was the logic underlying the present experiment.
Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, pg. 108
Notice that the statements they’re using aren’t just assertions of fact, they’re also ambiguous and equivocate, meaning they contain the same information but present it in ways that aren’t assertive of the information as fact. Think of the difference between, “There are 50,000 people living in Greenland,” and “I dunno, there might be 50,000 people living in Greenland, but I’m not sure” as an example of the difference. They’re suggesting that even when people get exposed to information in ways that aren’t assertive of the information as fact the repetition of that information makes it more likely that they’ll believe it anyway. The study concludes:
The present research has demonstrated that the repetition of a plausible statement increases a person’s belief in the referential validity or truth of that statement. …In the present experiments, the subjects’ judgments that repeated statements were more probably true than non-repeated statements occurred in a situation in which there was no verifying information available concerning the actual truth or falsity of the statements. Frequency, then, must have served as a criterion of certitude for our subjects. Indeed, the present experiment appears to lend empirical support to the idea that “if people are told something often enough, they’ll believe it” In particular, it should be noted that the increase in validity ratings with repetition was equivalent for true and for false statements, despite the fact that subjects succeeded in discriminating between them. Furthermore, the increase in validity ratings occurred for an extremely diverse set of statements, which suggest that the effect of frequency upon the rated validity of statements is a general rather than a context specific phenomenon.
Frequency and the Conference of Referential Validity, pgs. 111- 112
The consequences for this study on our understanding on human belief and knowledge is essential to understand. The more you repeat something, the more you have a piece of information repeated to you, the more you assert a belief in it, even if only temporarily, the more you come to believe it is true even if it contradicts something you knew as a fact before being exposed to the repetition. Eventually, even quickly, it becomes part of your schema and you become convinced that it is true and tend to exclude or even forget information that would contradict what you already “know” to be fact. This is the illusory truth effect and it has astounding consequences for what we are discussing about why some people would refuse to repeat or use preferred pronouns when they do not believe a person to be the gender the person claims to be.
Putting It All Together
The way you use language determines how you see the world. It plays a huge part in constructing how you approach people, places, ideas, even the very nature of humanity and reality itself. Including gender. And how you see gender impacts everything it touches. It shapes how you define humanity, how you see other people, how you are supposed to interact with them, your relative purposes in society, marriage, bonding, friendship, parenting, and so much more. Think about anything in society that impacts men and women and gender has some influence on it. I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say you cannot conceive of the purpose of human civilization without gender concepts. And asking people to change their thinking on these subjects is no small sacrifice, no meager effort. These are huge earthshaking changes you’re asking people to make.
I can already hear you say, “I’m not asking people to do that. I’m just asking them to be nice.” But the illusory truth effect means you are and what is more by doing so you’re attempting to make them think like you..
When you ask people to repeat something they believe to be wrong again and again and again, even if only out of politeness, what you’re doing is subtly manipulating them. You’re placing an idea in their head that their concept of gender and everything connected to it is wrong and the more they repeat that idea the more it seems to be true to them. The more people around them repeat it to them the more it seems true. Instead of doing it just to be nice they slowly over time come to believe it and accept it, which then in turn challenges many of their other concepts as touched on above. And then, convinced that they’re right and perhaps not even be able to recognize that their opinion or belief has changed, they try and get others to do the same as you did with them. As Dr. George P. Smith put it:
Just as viruses infect cells, ideas infect our brains when we read, listen or observe what others write, say or do. Inside our brains, these “viruses” not only proliferate, but also change. They undergo “mutations” when we change them in tiny, localized ways; and they experience promiscuous sex when multiple ideas of separate origin mix up with each other in our brains to engender new offspring ideas that are mongrels of multiple parentage.
Then when we in turn write, speak or do things, we release our ideas out into the environment, where they can infect new brains. Ideas, like viruses, thus proliferate at prodigious rates, changing at prodigious rates as they do so.
Ideas are like viruses, writes Nobel Prize winner George P. Smith. They need community spread.
Ideas are viruses and have perfected replication to the point that we don’t even realize we have been infected until we have been changed by them so that we can become their carriers. (Genesis by Bernard Beckett is a fantastic sci-fi book on this idea that is well worth your time). And the world we live in today, with an unending mass media where any and all ideas can be promulgated at once and the popular ideas can spread to billions in a matter of hours, is the perfect vector for spreading not just viral videos and viral memes, but viral ideas. Perhaps the reason people have so rapidly come to adopt the beliefs about gender and transgenderism has less to do with how “progressive,” “scientific,” or “correct,” those ideas are and more about how those ideas have been presented positively in mass media. The constant mass repetition through mass media spreading the viral idea until it infects and converts the masses to its belief system. Take the case of homosexuality for example.
Within the last few decades the majority of Americans have changed their view of homosexuality, from something morally and ethically wrong to something morally and ethically right, more quickly than at any other time and any other thing in history? Why? In an NPR program on the subject, Dr. Michael Rosenfeld, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Stanford argues it is because the AIDs crisis of the 1980s made homosexuals appear in a much more positive light, that their suffering brought them sympathy, and then Bill Clinton’s campaigning on homosexual discrimination as an issue of civil rights made their cause popular. In other words, the mass media changed the way it reported on the subject and as positive presentations of homosexuality began to proliferate the way people’s views on the subject changed. This is also why homosexuals adopted the language of marriage in their strategies to win civil rights court cases. Activists saw marriage as, “an engine that would pull many other rights behind it… [because] If we could claim the language of marriage, we would be claiming an engine of transformation, a vocabulary of shared values – love, commitment, family, inclusion, dignity, respect – that would help non-gay people better understand who gay people really are and allow us to share equally not only in marriage but in everything.” In other words, they saw a vector for viral ideological infection, one that would allow their ideas to incubate in the minds of the masses, co-opting their own beliefs and transforming them into the means by which to promulgate the activists’ beliefs about how homosexuals should be viewed and treated.
The same, I would argue, is happening here. Preferred pronouns are not simply a matter of etiquette or even respect (though it is never explained how shaming someone into saying things they do not believe is supposed to be respectful of the person being shamed.) The issue is that language is the means by which you can co-opt the very way in which people think, a vector for inserting your ideas into the minds of people. If you can get them to repeat and hear your idea enough times, such as the claim that homosexual relationships are the same as male/female marriages, then you can get people to believe these ideas. Even if they knew these ideas were false beforehand the way that repetition makes something part of the thought and belief process a person has, their schema, the more the idea changes what they think and believe until they come to know that utter falsehoods are truths, even when they previously knew such beliefs were objectively wrong, and the more you can convince them of your beliefs as truth. You may not be able to get someone to say a man can become a woman based merely upon the individual’s claim to be such or that gender is merely socially constructed and can therefore be altered at will. But if you can alter their language (and thereby their thinking and their understanding of reality) and get them to merely speak as if transgender ideas were true, as if this man had now become a woman, the more easily it becomes to convince them that is true, especially as they hear it from others. This is true even when they are hearing it from people who say it is false, because it is the repetition that convinces people something is true not the actual veracity of the claim itself.
(Side note: I personally think this is why so many people become “more liberal,” in college. It isn’t that leftist political and social ideas are actually more correct, it is that they are surrounded by people who are constant drilling those ideas into their minds and through repetition and the manipulation of language people become convinced of the truthfulness of what they’re being told. It is the illusory truth effect in action.)
In his novel dystopic novel 1984, George Orwell has his main character Winston muse upon the power of the Party to manipulate people through language because what mattered wasn’t the validity of objective experience but what the Party declared to be true, the proverbial example of which is the ability of the Party to declare that 2+2=5. Winston, recoils in horror at the thought that the mind could be so manipulated and rejects it. (1984, pg. 102) Later in the novel, Orwell destroys this belief of Winston’s when, after being captured, he declares that the Party cannot control the mind or memory and his captor, a man named O’Brien, responds:
On the contrary, you have not controlled it. That is what has brought you here. You are here because you have failed in humility, in self-discipline. You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one. Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane.
1984, pg. 314
In their own way those like Dr. Dembroff are telling us what O’Brien tells Winston here. Reality is subjective, gender is subjective, and what needs to be done is an act of personal humility. We must give up our ideas of gender because society has determined that they are wrong and what society determines is fact is fact, what society says is reality is reality. To fight against it is not to declare the truth, it is not to stand up for what is fact, it is insanity. It is the insanity of the liar, the deluded, the bigot, the transphobe, and it must be annihilated. The easiest ways to this are to infect the masses with the ideas which one wants to see become dominant in society through the manipulation of language and though constant repetition. If the person insisting in continuing in their thoughtcrime by using their Oldspeak gender terms and refusing to adopt the Newspeak on issues of gender and sex, if they won’t engage in self-destruction and rid themselves of such bigoted lies then they must be punished as people unfit for “democratic society,” for the Party. Through their punishment other thoughtcriminals are forewarned about their continued heresy and the ideals of transgenderism are once more affirmed and repeated to the masses. The ultimate goals is that we, like Winston, will win the victory over ourselves – our “outdated” and “dangerous” beliefs – and come to love Big Brother, that we will come to love and accept the ideologies of transgenderism.
Thus, in a very real way, it all comes back to reality control – using language to change the way people conceive of the world around them in order to control what they think and make it align with what those doing the language manipulation want people to do.
Resisting The Infection
Preferred pronouns are an infection vector for convincing people of the truthfulness of transgender activist’s ideological claims about sex, gender, and society, and the more we hear them, see them, and say them, the more the illusory truth effect makes those claims seem true. So how does one resist this? How do you refuse to be infected by the idea and hold to the view of reality and society that you hold because you believe it to be true? You refuse to give in to the idea. You refuse the infection and oppose those who try and force the infection upon you. After all, you don’t just arbitrarily believe what you believe. You hold your view of reality because you believe it to be true. Nay, you know it to be true. You’ve spent years, perhaps decades, gathering the evidence and having first hand experiences that confirm the veracity of your worldview, your reality. So why should you give on the truth? Refuse the ideological infection from the start and it can never replicate itself inside of you. One simple but important way to do this is to resist using preferred pronouns and persist in speaking according to your beliefs.
Now, I’m not assigning guilt or accusing anyone of anything, not personally or directly. The whole point of viral ideas is that they co-opt us into being spreaders. So, this isn’t like there is some evil conspiracy at work, it is simply the nature of how the whole thing works, including basic functions of human biology. And there is obviously a lot more in play here. I think this discussion in the video below between Drs. Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson about the general psychological traits of political rightists (“conservatives”) – namely that they measure higher is psychological levels of disgust and therefore want definitive borders and definitions around both physical places and concepts – and political leftists (liberals”) – namely that they are measure higher is psychological levels of openness and therefore are a lot more comfortable to shifting and changing borders both on physical space and in ideas – has a big influence in this area as well. After all, what is the argument on the issue of gender and gender pronouns even about if it isn’t an argument over definitions and boundaries? And all of it is heavily psychologically based. Telling a political rightist to just open his mind and change his gender definitions violates basic psychological foundations of who they are, likewise for political leftists. That is a huge thing to demand from someone, “Just change your entire psychology!” Easier said than done.
This is why liberty, that is freedom from political and social domination to believe and live as you choose as long as you are not violating the ability of others to do the same, is so vital. The appeal of liberty is that everyone thinks all other people are just absolute morons. No joke. It seems that if you disagree on any idea of equality, sex, gender, race, economics, religion, class, whatever, you’re a bigot, racist, moron. Even if those differences are minor you’ll still find someone to hate you for it. The only concept that keeps us from murdering each other over our different worldviews is liberty. It is the only concept that even introduces the idea of détente into the conversation. Because the reality is that we aren’t all going to rectify all our conflicting worldviews. Especially if that worldview is based in philosophy or religion, the two ideas which sum up the total of human knowledge. And if we assume the other side is populated by crazy, intolerant, fools then giving them any sort of power to do something about that is only going to lead to social discord on a mass scale and to a lot of people being hurt and even killed. Which means we have to make sure governments are small, the result of which is that people are freer. A small government with few powers does not have the strength to compel millions of people to obey its commands against their will, either for or against what you believe. It is only when we give the power to others to “perfect society” at the point of a gun or with the swing of the sword that things turn towards the absolute tyrannical.
The hardest part is that both sides may be right. Yes, studies have suggested that as many as 88% of people who identify as transgender at one point will eventually “desist” in identifying themselves that way. But that means the remaining 12% persist in identifying as transgender. But if gender is a social construct then the meaning of that 12% relies entirely on how you construct gender identity in society. If gender is a social construct, then building a society where the universal truth is that there are only two genders means that there really are only two genders and those who identify otherwise still fit within the binary gender paradigm no matter how they feel about their experience. That other people experience otherwise doesn’t change the facts of reality. Just as the reality that some people being born without hands doesn’t change the fact that humans have hands, being born outside of the typical gender experience of the majority of people doesn’t change the nature of human gender nor disprove the theory. On the flipside, if you want to construct a society where there are sixteen genders and one of those is your spear then that may also be true.
In either case I’m not a jerk for not wanting to compromise what I believe for what you believe. And you’re not a moron for seeing the world completely differently and thinking others should accept what seems obvious to you. The person who is the jerk is the one who wants to compel the other to act in a way contradictory to their reality instead of working out a détente that both can agree on, even if that means constructing a Neutral Zone both parties can agree not to violate. Being free of the State and its ability to coerce others to comply with your opinions can only make the world better and help both sides live in peace without adopting the ritual, beliefs, or speech of the other in the same way that Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a free society can live in peace without adopting the beliefs of the others and without seeing the opposing views of others as dangerous attacks on their own personhood and beliefs.
All of this is incredibly important when we are talking about the Gospel, because the Gospel is nothing but ideas- ideas about who and what we are and where and what we are becoming. Instead of betraying those ideas in order to make others comfortable we must stand for them even when it makes us uncomfortable. From a Gospel perspective, I think this is straight forward. From The Family: A Proclamation to the World we have this truth:
All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.
If we are to teach this great truth we must not quibble. We must not back down from the Gospel. This doesn’t mean we have to be jerks. But it also means we must insist on living the Gospel in all our thoughts, words, and actions, as much as we possibly can. Like Isaiah we must realize that when we say or do that which promotes immorality we become men and women of “unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5) and this defiles us as the Savior taught: “It’s not what goes into your mouth that defiles you; you are defiled by the words that come out of your mouth.” (Matthew 15:11) We must not allow ourselves to be manipulated by a society which insists on demonizing us for not using its approved words, phrases, and ideas, for not thinking and acting in the ways of which it approves. If we do so the repetition of those ideas and language will begin to transform the way we think and act, we will begin to believe the philosophies of the world over the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For those who bow to worldly ideals and believe all gender constructs are merely social constructs this may be alright, but we know better. And it is our duty to share that knowledge, to persevere in “the enunciation of truth,” to the best of our ability, and not shirk no matter what the cost.