Why Definitions Matter: Transphobia and Neopronouns
Too often, the term 'transphobe' is abused whenever someone uses neopronouns. It needs to stop.
All too often I’ve encountered people who casually toss out the label ‘transphobe’ whenever neopronouns come up in conversation. This invariably leads to the wrong people being attacked and called bigots. Tempers flare. Verbal abuse, targeted harassment, dog-piling, and even doxxing occur, in an effort to get the “offender” driven off of social media. None must ever dare use neopronouns such as xe/ze or hir, lest singular antecedents be treated as such instead of being erroneously referred to in the plural.
This lunacy needs to stop. It is destructive to the fight for LGBTQIA rights, especially now, when attacks by bigoted celebrities and politicians are becoming more intense and fascistic than ever. Erin Reed has reported on the various efforts to criminalize the very existence of trans persons and prevent them from even helping each other to transition.
Yet the overriding obsession with some in the LGBTQIA community is not these fascist, genocidal laws being put into place in the U.S. and around the world, but the use of neopronouns, to the point of derangement. One would think that these perpetual children playing at being adults ought to find constructive ways to fight genuine transphobia, but one would be wrong. Instead, they’re engaging in transphobia themselves and attack all who use neopronouns.
“What even are neopronouns?” you ask. Well, the answer to that is simultaneously simple and complex, as there is a wide range of them and which ones are used by a given person varies greatly from one individual to the next. Fortunately, there are plenty of sources to go to for information.
Human Rights Watch, among others, has a page describing what neopronouns are and how to use them. Another great source for learning about them may be found here.
There is a legitimate grammatical case to be made for why neopronouns are to be preferred over the misapplication of plural personal pronouns to singular antecedents. They’re impersonal, awkward, and have an obvious tendency to sow confusion as to how many persons are being discussed in a given setting.
Where, one can’t help asking, did the idea come from that the best way to demonstrate inclusivity toward the gender-fluid is to make they/them agnostic about number? To the best of my knowledge, no oppressed outgroup rails against the tyranny of being unitary. No one’s shouting, “Don’t dare say there can’t be five of me!” To address a gender issue by tweaking the way two workhorse pronouns address number strikes me as nonsensical.1
But there are also reasons why one should use neopronouns that go beyond the issue of proper grammar, which I’ll discuss here in this column.
You may be surprised to learn that there is division within LGBTQIA circles as to whether they are even appropriate (which is silly, because they undoubtedly are). But that division is entirely artificial, created and maintained by a zealous subsect of imbeciles who refuse to grow up and respect the rights, feelings, and identities of others—even within the LGBTQIA community—while petulantly demanding respect for their own.
For instance:
On the Twitter competitor Bluesky, an account called Aegis, a third party used by the site’s trust and safety team to avoid having to do its job of actually moderating, people who use neopronouns are arbitrarily placed on lists designed specifically to limit the visibility and interaction of those accounts placed thereon.
This began as part of a coordinated campaign by self-appointed moderators to quell actual bigots invading Bluesky from Twitter, which has been turned since the 2022 takeover of the platform by Elon Muskrat into a haven for Nazis, KKK members, and other assorted fascists.
In theory, this was a good way to help stem the tide of actual racists, anti-LGBTQIA bigots, serial sexual predators, and spam bots from taking over once Bluesky became open to the general public. In practice, it has led to flagrant abuse of the system by cliques of trolls, including site moderators, to engage in targeted harassment, dog-piling, and even doxxing.
As may be seen from the above screen captures, self-identified moderators engage in targeted harassment and doxxing of accounts in order to enforce their rigid, and blatantly false, application of the label of ‘transphobe’. Disputing the use of plural personal pronouns to refer to singular antecedents is not at all transphobic. These cretins know this. But they are petty and have a vendetta to press, so instead of acknowledging, self-correcting, respecting others, and moving on, they do this.
The problem, of course, is that there are legitimate reasons to use neopronouns over plural personal pronouns, reasons that are entirely ignored by these imbeciles. Those reasons have to do with transphobia—actual, not imagined—and abel-ism.
For example, many autistic people use neopronouns because they can’t feel a connection to either the female or male gender binary like neurotypical people do. Neopronouns help autistic people exist in a way that is more comfortable and makes more sense to them, because their brains operate differently than the average person. Not all autistic people feel this way, but neopronouns are helpful for some.
Other communities of people who have various psychological disorders also find neopronouns helpful tools to navigate life and their identities. For instance, some people with delusional attachments or various forms of psychosis find neopronouns helpful because they do not feel a relationship to their humanity the same way neurotypical people do.
Neopronouns might help them create distance between their human body that doesn’t feel like a part of themselves by helping them dehumanize their identities. It can also give them space to exist outside of society’s set gender binary that they can’t relate to.
People with complex gender dysphoria also use neopronouns. Like the groups mentioned before, these new pronouns help transgender people like this exist outside of the societal gender binary of male and female they can’t connect with. People who experience gender outside of these boundaries can find connection in the new identity or space neopronouns create for them.
Over all, neopronouns help people with these specific challenges exist in a society that wasn’t built to accommodate them.2
I’ve put in bold face and italics the relevant sentence that, for the purposes of this column, needs the most emphasis. That actual transgender persons don’t necessarily feel comfortable being referred to in the plural is never considered by perpetually online trolls who appoint themselves as sole arbiters of what is and is not transphobic. As discussed in the above-linked video, this behavior represents an internalized form of transphobia because those indulging in it appoint themselves gatekeepers of terms used to refer to trans and nonbinary individuals. It also reinforces cis, especially heteronormative, bigots’ efforts to dehumanize trans and ninbinary persons as mentally ill, rob them of their individual identities by reducing them to the group with which they identify, and sow fear and hatred of the ‘Other’.
Falsely applying the word ‘transphobe’ to users of neopronouns also cheapens the word and robs it of all meaning, just as happened with the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ following 11 September 2001:
The word terrorism, strictly defined, once referred to any attempted exercise of power by a few over the many using terror: threats of violence designed to frighten victims out of their wits, into submission.3
Also:
When you start to use words like “terrorism” loosely, splashing all sorts of people with them – especially political opponents, calling half a country “enemies of the people,” going after parents in school board meetings, as this Administration continues to do, you misuse words.
For starters, you water down – change in dishonest ways – real legal meanings, suggesting law enforcement should follow politics into misapplication. That, all by itself, is dangerous.
Then, if words like “terrorist” are used to smear and frighten people into silence, stop people from speaking up, resisting radical change, reigning in progressive school boards, medical boards, keeping government accountable you defy statute law and the Constitution.
Yet this is what is happening. Rather than seeing crimes as crimes, offensive statements as permitted talk, recognizing passions percolate in politics, people care about society and children, those who speak are increasingly called “terrorists.” In many cases, they are actually prosecuted.4
It’s the same with the misapplication of the word ‘transphobe’ to users of neopronouns. By falsely applying the label, one is basically saying it doesn’t actually mean any behavior that reinforces fear of trans and nonbinary persons, but rather, whatever the abuser says it means, even and especially when the arbitrarily redefinition is inacclable to a given situation.
Like the fable of the shepherd boy who cried “Wolf!”, eventually losing his flock to a real wolf attack because the townspeople no longer believed him even when he finally told the truth, those who falsely label others transphobes for using neopronouns eventually find their cries falling on deaf ears once real transphobia surfaces. Hence, bigots find it even easier to dismiss genuine accusations of transphobia against them in, social, political, and legal circles—the last of which is particularly important as lawmakers crack down on trans health care and societal participation.
But none of this is important to the perpetually online gatekeepers, who place their own petulant infantile egos over the legitmiate feelings of all others, even within the LGBTQIA community. All that matters to them is their feelings, not the LGBTQIA community as a whole or to other individuals within. That is dangerous for so many reasons, not least of which is the backlash created against that very community from true bigots whose mission in life is to eradicate all non-hetero-normative elements from society.