But Can You Not See How Fascinating I Am?
From Montreal, via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, another feat of unrelenting pretension:
The proud author, Ms Julia Wright, a student at McGill University, is, we learn, a them – a paranormally ungendered being. And all is not well:
As one might, all things considered.
Well, as possibilities, the words neurotic and aggravating come to mind. And we could perhaps throw in hysterical, as a bonus, what with the whole hyperventilating-and-vomiting thing.
As for rudeness, pressuring others to pretend things on demand, despite the reality right in front of them, is not the most obvious recipe for civility and mutual respect. Some, for instance, will have come to realise that The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, is often a way to exert power over others, by making them say things, publicly and repeatedly, that they don’t for a minute believe to be true. There is, after all, the issue of probity.
And once you start playing The Pronoun Game, a game of pretend, it’s by no means clear how you might stop pretending before things veer into farce. Which, as we’ve seen, they very often do.
And then of course there’s the fact that the Pronoun Game is by definition a game all about you, but which others are expected to play, or are coerced to play, albeit in small, supporting roles. Not an altogether thrilling prospect.
However, Ms Wright appears unconcerned by such details – which affect other people, people who aren’t her. Instead, she returns to a much more engaging subject – namely, herself and her extensive list of feelings:
Again, as so often, one has to ask – exactly which player in this drama is doing the misgendering? The unnamed presenter who sees a young woman named Julia and refers to her as she; or the young woman named Julia who expects to be perceived as something other than she is? Indeed, as something that doesn’t exist. The kind of young woman who tells us, with an air of triumph, “I had been thinking about my pronouns daily for over two years.” As one does, when one’s mental wellbeing is not at all in question.
But ours is an age in which self-preoccupied young women are encouraged to boast, in print, of their unhappy compulsions, and to bemoan the fact that they appear to be what they are – no more, no less – and consequently struggle to seem complicated and fascinating. Specifically, a miraculously sexless being, “neither a man nor a woman.”
Probably. Not everyone wants to play.
Perhaps the word fad would be less offensive. Or tedious status-game played by the pretentious and insufferable. I’m open to suggestions.
It occurs to me that being surrounded by students and professors, for whom faddishness and contrivance are often the stuff of status, may not be entirely helpful on the mental health front. If everyone around you is playing the same game, and pretending the same things, and doing it competitively, you could easily lose your bearings.
Ah yes, the woe of not being immediately and telepathically perceived as “non-binary,” and thus being denied the status of terribly interesting. As agonies go, it’s pretty niche. But given Ms Wright’s apparent lack of interest in how her Game Of Self may impose upon others, I’m tempted to suggest that respect, a reciprocal virtue, may not be the most apt card to play.
Update, via the comments, which you’re reading of course:
Regarding this tearful pronouncement,
EmC adds,
Well, quite.
I suppose the drama above – all that time on the verge of vomiting – is what happens when you spend your formative years steeped in the Progressive Identity Hierarchy, in which straight white woman is somewhere near the bottom, barely above the universally disdained straight white man. Inventing some modish gender nonsense – and then publicly complaining about other, less sophisticated people failing to defer to it – may boost your social standing a little. And that does seem to be what these things are very often about.
Says Ms Wright,
Thing is, what we’re seeing looks more like a trendy paintjob on an old, familiar vice. The same old self-absorption and self-flattery. The same old desperation to be special, but without the bother of any actual achievement, which takes time and effort, and often rare ability. And so, identity, or pretend-identity, is the fashionable shortcut.
And here we are. All swollen with progress.
Heavens, buttons. I wonder what they do.
Once the workshop was underway, I ran to the washroom where I reassured myself that my feelings were valid,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VeaL_besyq8&pp=QAFIAQ%3D%3D
That.
In their spare time, Julia enjoys reading, spending time outdoors, and foraging for fungi.
Foraging for fungi is a pasttime where identification is important. Being too wrapped up in your own might cause you to miss elsewhere.
It does seem to be an obvious problem. I mean, once you’ve surrendered your judgement and agreed to play along, to pretend, then where’s the cut-off point? Where, exactly, does it all become too farcical, too silly?
Is back-pedalling allowed?
Foraging for fungi is a pasttime where identification is important.
See current mishap in Victoria/Australia. Truffles they weren’t.
By the way, while I remember, I expect to be busy on Friday, so no Ephemera this week. I know, it’s a crushing blow. I’ll give you a minute to compose yourselves.
Take two. I’ll put them on your tab.
Oh, and while things are occurring to me…
To register with the blog and thereby enable extra commenting options – including @username mentions and live notifications – scroll down to the black ‘Meta’ box at the very bottom of the page.
It’s free and quite painless.
However Ms Wright is far too savvy to fall into the trap of pretending to be black or even Japanese.
— Theodore Dalrymple
My identity is someone who doesn’t have time for this bullshit.
While I am doubtless being unkind to the vanishingly small percentage of people who have genuine mental troubles around all this trans stuff, my immediate thought when confronted by the likes of Ms Wright is, “just bloody well grow up!”
Isn’t there a country song, “What about me?”
OK…again…got tired of the drama so perhaps I missed something skimming over…these are two people setting up for a presentation, working together. At what point would third person pronouns have even been used? I suspect this belongs in my ever increasingly large file cabinet of Things That Never Happened. Dealt with similarly made up BS yesterday, not about pronouns but other forms of virtue signaling (most likely) made up lies. The problem, the reason all this psychosis goes on is because normal people, conservatives…”conservatives” even, are too chickenshit to refuse to play along.
my identity less deserving of respect.
Remarkable how quickly that implicit duty to respect someone’s identity will vanish when faced with a gun-toting Texan redneck who identifies as the last bastion of democracy.
Or, say, a fixer-sexual. Haven’t you heard? It’s a man who… straightens Lesbians via his exceptional bedroom skills. That’s my identity. Respect it, bigots!
I’d love to know what her dark triad scores are.
Some have opined that these people tend to excel in this area.
Ooh, new user registrations. How exciting.
Well, moderately exciting.
This. Being requires to play along with this sort of bloody obvious BS while also being required to pretend that it is normal is far, far more damaging and likely to send a moderately sane person crying to the restroom. Granted, the great majority of moderately sane people either use their chickenshit coping mechanism to with deal (or ignore) it, but the probability of real psychological damage in such a situation is far more likely to occur in the opposite direction.
Or maybe “Things That Did Happen, But Were Staged For Further Amplification And Repetition By The Media So As To Convince The Deplorables That Crazy Is Now Normal And Don’t Object Or Else.”
AKA, TTDHBWSFFAARBTMSATCTDTCINNADOOE.
Gonna have to hoist the BS flag on that one, “Last year I decided to hop on the band wagon” I’d buy.
Although apparently not bothering to go to any classes for the latter.
This ain’t it, chief.
IKWYAS, but ISTINH. NLTA.
I’ve had exchanges with dysmorphic (i.e., trans) people who also find the “non-binary” fad rather irritating, and indeed insulting. As if their… condition were being appropriated as a fashion accessory, the latest must-have. Contrary to how it may seem, there is a spectrum of views among the sexually dysmorphic, and this blog does have a handful of dysmorphic readers.
In which case, I suppose the question is whether feeling compelled to feign being “neither a man nor a woman,” and to feign fits of vomiting and upset when “misgendered,” and to do it repeatedly and in print, in order to impress friends, is significantly less bonkers than actually having those feelings.
It seems to me that the pretending, the bandwagon-jumping, doesn’t exactly scream balanced individual.
Isn’t the interwebs wonderful? We can now identify the terminally nuts. Kind of like a large red letter “A”…
I meet someone at the podium and talk to her. Under what possible circumstance will I say “she”? You say that talking to a third person about the person in question. I might say “Julia is helping me set up” but “she” is quite unlikely. So I call bullshit.
David,
I agree whole-heartedly.
Dysmorphia, in my limited understanding, means people with physical/bodily features significantly different from the mean which are either inherent from birth or developed via a natural process. Such people deserve to be treated absolutely normally to the best of our ability unless, I imagine a very unlikely event, their behaviour takes conscious or unconscious advantage of their condition to make unreasonable demands on others
Some nutter mutilating their own body and then claiming inclusion under the heading is totally unforgivable.
Not entirely clear what “nonbinary” even means. Feels no sexual urge? Maybe see a doctor (a real one). Feel male sometimes and female sometimes? Do you (a woman) know what it feels like to be a man? I doubt it. There are plenty of women who wear nondescript clothing (bagging jeans and a t-shirt)–are they nonbinary? How in the world can the public know that a person is nonbinary?
More to the point, why should the public care?
And the rest of us shouldn’t have to play silly games just to make you feel special.
Contrary to how it may seem, there is a spectrum of views among the sexually dysmorphic,
I’ll certainly grant that. There are some transsexuals that have been vocal about keeping males out of female sports cuz, DUH, “male”.
My issue is entirely with the ideology that states “sex is a myth, gender is fluid and self-identified” with all the unacceptable behaviors, including the targeting of children, we’ve seen.
And, as I’ve stated countless times before when I’m confronting with the No True Trans response to bad trans behavior … there is no objective test to separate the “sincere” trans from the social one. Therefore, bug off and I will get no affirmation from me and stay away from kids.
I’m particularly annoyed at how the TQ+ warriors are latched like a lamprey on the LGB so when a woman challenges a male exposing himself to girls in the locker room, she and anyone else that objects is denounced as “anti-LGBTQ+”
Absolutely. Among others, the YouTuber Marcus Dib comes to mind.
Over the years, I’ve received several quite snippy emails telling me, in no uncertain terms, how “homophobic” I am. Which, as you can imagine, complicates my domestic life no end. What with all the seething I must be doing of an evening.
She is barely older than some of my prep school students. She’s a child, and so I’m wondering why publications would give her a seat at the grown-ups table.
And speaking of, these insufferable gender maniacs–whom I propose we should start to call magical beings, per Disney–not only want to commandeer pronouns, but it remains unsaid that they want control of verbs as well. Should not the correct form for a singular person of demented-self regard be, “they is”?
Too many acronyms. Meanings not immediately revealed by google searches.
Is NLTA ‘Not long ’til Armageddon’?
To tell you the truth, I forgot what that was myself. Either way, I like yours better so I’ll GWT.
Something for your trouble, barkeep.
Bless you, sir. May you never be disturbed in the middle of the night by an enormous moth.
I seem to have a blind spot for acronyms. I don’t seem to retain them, even the supposedly obvious ones, which I have to look up repeatedly.
I can imagine indulging a co-worker’s “pronouns”, if that person treated me and my other co-workers with respect, and—this is important—accepted that my use of whatever preferred pronoun is a chosen kindness on my part. A conditional gift of a polite fiction, not something surrendered up as if by right.
But Julia’s approach is to treat everyone else as a servant, with no right to speak about her as they please. As if freedom of speech and opinion is something only for “trans” people. And, of course, of course—the endless moral blackmail. This is where things cross from mere mental illness into moral evil.
People like this take positive pleasure in being a burden on others, and cursing them for the smallest failure to cater to them. I get the sense that if any of Julia’s co-workers objected to, say, big and burly males in women’s rugby, she’d try to get them fired.
This came to mind:
Members of other Designated Victim Groups have also been keen to exploit their unilateral leverage:
Needless to say, there are plenty more in the archives.
Coming soon: “Respect my acronyms!”
I am wary, however, of the neurodiversity-affirming movement and the zeal of some of its advocates, especially younger therapists. A perusal of their webpages reveals that many describe themselves as neurodivergent, or if that shoe doesn’t fit, as “neurodivergent allies.”
“they asked to see my tag”
So Julia is upset about someone using the wrong pronouns but is fine assuming the pronouns of the alleged offender.
As I’ve stated many (many?) times here, to some concurrence, therapists for the most part are nuts. They generally are people with their own problems that they are trying to work out. Malpractice should apply to most of them but of course it doesn’t happen. Because reasons. This has been true for decades and decades yet it has only been the last few years that one could say so amongst even conservatives without the crickets chirping. Yet even now, it’s something the average person would still be in denial over. Much like suggesting that the general news media has a bias. Fingers go into the ears and the ImNotListeningImNotListeningImNotListening mantra starts.
Another reason to suspect it didn’t happen. I’m guessing Julia subconsciously used the generic ‘they’ because it was an abstraction of her imagination (i.e. lie). She just forgot she was lying. Of course I’m just guessing…Guessing.
“Life is like a box of chocolates, and babies are like jelly donuts”
Flora Gump.
Quick tutorial on the grievance game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhPUAVgHZc
Stupid girl
The edit gear mocks me.
If you are shit at remembering the names of people you don’t care about, whom you have just met, I don’t see how that’s unlikely.
EmC: “And the rest of us shouldn’t have to play silly games just to make you feel special.“
Nor should we have to shell out hard-pressed NHS resources to make you sound like something you’re not…
I suppose the above is what happens when you spend your formative years steeped in the Progressive Identity Hierarchy, in which straight white woman is somewhere near the bottom, barely above the universally disdained straight white man. Inventing some modish gender nonsense may boost your social standing a little.
And that does seem to be what these things are very often about.
Odd how the NHS doesn’t ask the plebes how such resources should be allocated.
(I’m not claiming the government on my side of the pond is any better asking the plebes about resource allocation for anything.)
If you don’t wish to post anything intelligible, a simple
That. Progressives are really good at creating new problems.
Well, don’t leave us hanging. The suspense is unbearable.
I think you can’t actually edit posts here.
If someone here can, that would be useful to know. (It could be due to my OS and browser combo that I cannot.)
Yes, you can. Click the little cog that appears, bottom right of your comment, when you hover the cursor over it. You can edit your own comments for up to 15 minutes after posting them.
This cog here.
The remainder would have been….
asdhhkjhgfdljkll
should suffice.
My apologies; after 64 years, I’ve finally managed to create 2 fractures near my left elbow. (I’ve never broken or fractured a bone on my body, to my knowledge, until last Saturday.) I’m typing one handed (at least with my dominate hand) but I probably would have confused ctrl-enter as a newline versus post-comment independent of my current temporary handicap.
Says madam,
Thing is, what we’re seeing looks more like a trendy paintjob on an old, familiar vice. The same old self-absorption and self-flattery. The same old desperation to be special, but without the bother of any actual achievement, which takes time and effort, and often rare ability. And so, identity, or pretend-identity, is the fashionable shortcut.
And here we are. All swollen with progress.
Indeed, that’s what I attempted to use. There’s an error message that I cannot read, but I am using an OS and browser combination that I sincerely doubt anyone else here uses, so I recommend that you wait for someone else to complain before losing any sleep over the issue. (I really don’t want to type the description one-handed a third time.)
Well, I’ve just edited your latest comment, above, and it worked fine. Don’t worry, I put everything back where it was.
We call you “our gracious host” for a reason, after all. Bows head. I thank you.
I know, the service here is outstanding. You don’t get this pampering over at Worstall’s gaff.
[ Post updated. ]
Julia Wright, 19
She’s a child
No, she’s not. She’s a legal adult, old enough to drink, vote, and die for her country.
She’s engaging in entirely stereotypical high school mean girls behaviour. “Ohh Emm Gee, Becky, can you believe her pronouns??”
Absent strong male authority figures that punish this kind of behaviour, this is what women do, regardless of their age. Men failing to hold women to the standards women themselves demanded is a big part of the reason western culture is in the mess it is.
Heh.
Says madam,
So we, the unsophisticated, should be rewarding ever-more demanding pretensions – and neurotically ignoring the evidence of our own eyes. A sure path to a brighter, fluffier tomorrow. You see, she’s “helping others by challenging their assumptions.” Which is so very good of her. And of course, among her peers, terribly high-status.
As it’s Friday, easy does it.
As it’s Friday, easy does it.
What, you think we are barbarians?
Safety first.
Oh, and speaking of competitive posturing.
I have seen such an error message, too–when I try to edit a comment shortly after posting. It seems that the solution is to refresh the page before editing.
Here is the error message.
It might say “You are posting something too quickly…”
In the old days people of this type would’ve accidentally fallen into fire pits, walked off cliffs by mistake or been eaten by badgers. Perhaps all three in extreme cases.
A google search of the WordPress site yields “you are posting comments too quickly, slow down”.
Probably does. As far as the software is concerned, someone posting several comments in rapid succession may resemble spamming.
I resent that.
Curiously, though, I do not get the error message if I refresh the page before editing the comment, even if I do this just as quickly. So there seems to be some quirk in the WordPress software which we will just have to live with.
It was a quick little joke in reply to Piper Paul kinda sorta mocking the we-talk-in-just-letters thing. Farnsworth’s post snuck in between just as I hit post. Sorry if it caused confusion, Francis.
True, but neither is she, were she an American, old enough to be elected to Congress nor any higher office, thus not old enough to have her ideas taken seriously. At least not by serious people. But the editors of whatever publication this was are, like most publishers, not serious people. Of course the left has preyed upon this naivety, etc. of the young adult crowd for quite some time now. It’s the reason she is even considered old enough to vote. Or dare I say of the right sex. But that’s a whole other can of worms.
It’s a WordPress thing and there’s no dashboard option to disable the throttling feature – which would be unwise, anyway. It does help to deter spam. My advice is to take a breath between comments. You are, by some margin, the most prolific commenter here.
I say that with love, of course.
Welcome to my world.
‘Spaff’ – a new term for the collection.
Something is clearly wrong with the commenting system. I wanted to edit that last & change one word & the artificial stupid says I’m posting too fast.
But . . . I can post a new comment with no issue.
Since we are Ephemeryless this week, apropos of nothing, I offer an advert from my Weather Underground instance this morning. Anyone know what a few of these things are for? I honestly have no bloody idea. I do like the soldering thing though, if I did much soldering.
It does have pleasingly vulgar connotations.
“You like me, you really like me!”
Which is why I often emphasize that various small fixes and enhancements are not necessary and the blog works darned well as it is.
Hopefully the comments are enjoyed and appreciated, even when not commented on.
To maintain my record, here is a great story which is completely off topic for this blog. A palate cleanser after the usual madness.
But many legal adults are not functionally adults.
I laughed and I’m not sorry.
Except you can’t because that stupid message that says you’re posting too fast pops up & will not go away.
Indeed it is. Would make a great movie. Any idea where this conveniently unnamed town is? I so want this to be true but certain vagaries don’t pass the smell test. Though other such details do sound likely.
And just for the record, no comment issues here. Though I’m generally using Chrome on an iPad. Since retiring I have no idea what the cool kids use but perhaps the issues are context specific? It might help to mention what platform/browser you are using when discussing.
[…] been pushed into fire pits, surreptitiously pushed off cliffs or staked out to be eaten by badgers.
FTFY
You can, but you have to wait a minute or two before editing. (The exact limit is unclear, but that’s the general idea.)
I hadn’t read of the refresh the page trick before I tried that.
Anyone know what a few of these things are for?
The top right pic is a set of collets for a Dremel[TM] tool
Heh. I have a Dremel. I rarely use it. And yet I did use it just yesterday, though not for anything art-y. Something I plan to get into later this year though. Didn’t realize there were so many different collets for them.
Anyone know what a few of these things are for?
L-T, T-B
Either a mold for Johnson cookies or something the gender confused stuff down their pants while in the queue for a Potemkinpenis;
Collets for different sized Dremel bits;
Exceedingly stupid leggings;
Soldering gun with solder feed;
A one handed grip tester for use in a car or something used for enhanced interrogation;
A tacky shirt, but I have no idea why the guy has a humbucker pickup stuck to the back of his hand.