Lifted from the comments – which you’re reading, of course – regarding this rather animated chap and his gushing sisterliness:  

And if you ladies would rather not find Camp Creepy Manic Guy in your bathroom or changing room, this is, he insists, proof of your own “internalised misogyny,” and it’s “up to you to unlearn” your foolish female ways. Because, you see, it’s “patriarchy” when women don’t want to get undressed in front of a mentally ill man. To avoid said “patriarchy,” you must submit. To him. 

He describes himself, modestly, as a “gender educator.”

Update, via the comments:

Chappie above, James, is apparently an “actress.” And “annoyingly hot.” As you can doubtless tell from his pretty nails, which he seems to regard as some ultimate measure of womanhood, and from the numerous videos of him parading around in his underwear while somewhat tightly wound. And remember, ladies, our “gender educator” only feels like a woman sometimes. So those visits to your bathrooms and changing rooms could go either way. A comfort, no doubt.

Update 2: 

Somewhat related, this.

Lecturers at a leading university are being given guidance on neopronouns, which include emoji labels and catgender, where someone identifies as a feline.

The University of Bristol, since you ask, where staff are urged to perform this season’s modish contortions in “verbal introductions and email signatures.” Say, by starting each meeting and conversation, presumably every day, with an ostentatious declaration of their own pronouns, lest there be massive and widespread confusion as to which sex they actually are.

Bristol lecturers are also directed to neopronouns which include “emojiself pronouns,” where colourful digital icons – commonplace on social media – are used to represent gender in written and spoken conversation.

While not mandatory, but merely encouraged, one university employee who expressed objections has been “invited to a meeting with a senior diversity manager.” A nourishing mental experience, I’m sure.

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments.” The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.” Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline.” The word nyan is Japanese for “meow.”

Because if you’re bent on humiliating your employees, and unmooring them from probity and any lingering realism – and if you want to make them routinely dishonest and pander to delusions, narcissism, and competitive pretension – then hey, why not go all-in?

Bristol’s guide says that if staff make a mistake by using the wrong pronoun, “it is important not to become defensive or make a big deal out of it. Simply thank the person for correcting you, apologise swiftly, and use the correct pronouns going forward.”

Other, less dementing options are, of course, available. At the time of writing.

Also, open thread.

Further to recent rumblings in the comments, a tale about the perils of noticing things:

She describes the emails as “rather polite” and “relatively kind.” Her daughter had been a Girl Guide, and she herself had done some volunteering with the organisation. “I thought it was a really uncontroversial, uncontentious email,” she says. It expressed her view that “this person should not be in charge of young people.” (The Critic has seen the email and can confirm her description of it. It does, however, refer to Sulley as a “male”…)  

And that’s when a police officer appeared on her doorstep.

Also, open thread. 

In the comments, Mr Muldoon steers us to the latest mental rumblings of Ms Laurie Penny:

Ms Penny is, I think, referring to fellow feminist Julie Bindel, whose review of Laurie’s latest book is not entirely positive, and who chose not to refer to its author as a suddenly ungendered being. But the broader claim is perhaps worth exploring.

I can’t say that my own views on modish pronoun stipulation make me feel “cool and edgy.” If anything, they seem fairly self-evident and unremarkable, not the stuff of obvious scandal or sudden intakes of breath. And I doubt that anyone here is likely to feel “threatened… by the ideas of a more progressive generation.” Though Ms Penny’s tendency to self-flatter – her inevitable trajectory – does catch the eye.

Regarding rudeness, I’m generally polite by default, at least in person, and don’t go out of my way to needlessly put a kink in someone else’s day. I’ve had perfectly civil chats with people who regard themselves as transgender or gender-non-conforming or whatever. Nobody got upset. But what is often being asked – or demanded – is not a small thing, not in its implications.

Taken broadly, we are being asked to affirm, wholesale, a bundle of phenomena that includes not only actual gender dysphoria, whether the result of developmental anomalies or childhood molestation, but also autogynephilia, serious personality disorders, adolescent pretension, and assorted exhibitionist and unsavoury compulsions. The expectation seems to be that we should take these different phenomena, with very different moral connotations, as being one and the same thing, and then defer to them, habitually and uncritically. Which is asking rather more than can readily be agreed to.

This just in. Clown-self pronouns:

In this situation, I would make sure that I exclusively use clown pronouns to talk about Cypress, so Cypress knows that I see clownself for who clown is.

Please update your files and lifestyles accordingly.

If you would like Maybe Burke, above, to provide “personal growth trainings” – say, regarding how you may speak when transgender people both are and aren’t present – by all means, knock yourself out.

Apparently, we non-transgender people, almost the entire human race, are supposed to embrace the prefix cis and use it continually, habitually, in order to suggest that being transgender is in no way atypical, niche, or anomalous. And to erase distinctions between, say, actual women and trans women, i.e., men with mental health problems. And this is said by someone bedevilled by urges to control what others may say, even in private, and even to control what they may think. Which itself is rather noteworthy. One might say anomalous.*

Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker. *Added via the comments.