“Until I’m told otherwise, I prefer to call you ‘they,’” wrote a Yale Law School professor in a Washington Post op-ed this week. Professor Ian Ayres explains that his new “default rule” of using gender-neutral pronouns until told otherwise keeps him from “misgendering” students. “I would never intentionally misidentify someone else’s gender — but I unfortunately risk doing so until I learn that person’s pronouns. That’s why, as I begin a new school year, I am trying to initially refer to everyone as ‘they,’” he explains. He goes on to encourage readers whose “preferred pronouns” are either he or she to adopt “he/they” or “she/they” instead “because it would give others the freedom not to specify your gender when referring to you.”
In other words, at one of the top universities in the world, a law professor would like all of his students, and for that matter, the population at large, to join him in a daily denial of the reality of male and female. To refer to someone as “they” until you have learned his or her “gender identity” is to pretend that humans are fundamentally gender-neutral. This denies an essential reality of what it is to be human. As Carl Trueman recently remarked in First Things, “when we decry pronouns that assume the reality of bodily sex, we are coming close to denying the universal truth that all humans are embodied beings.” To be human is to be embodied, and to be embodied means that we are either male or female — “he” or “she,” not “they.”
In addition to being a ridiculous attempt to ignore a fundamental reality of humanity, Professor Ayres’ pronoun policy is offensive. Is it really polite or respectful to pretend that you cannot tell if someone is a man or a woman? “Having to guess at someone’s gender” is only difficult if you’ve tied your brain in knots by attempting to abide by the cognitive dissonance of the sexual revolution’s increasingly radical gender ideology. Progressive pronoun games are nothing more than an attempt to force this ideology on the entire population.
Unfortunately, this absurdity is no longer uncommon, especially in academia. Students at Park Point University in Pittsburgh were recently informed that “action could be taken” against students who “misgender” or “deadname” other students or commit “pronoun misuse” at school. A spokesperson for the university explained that Park Point “expects every member of its community - students, faculty and staff - to treat each other with respect,” but compelled speech policies are deeply disrespectful. Demanding that students, staff, and faculty affirm a lie by using pronouns that do not match reality is an attack on First Amendment rights.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals recently agreed with this by ruling in favor of Nicholas Merriman, a philosophy professor who faced retaliation from Shawnee State University for refusing to bow to the demands of the transgender agenda by using feminine pronouns to refer to a male student.
Not only that, but pronoun policies are an attack on human dignity because these policies fail to recognize the value and dignity of human embodiment. Gender ideology is a flawed attempt to find one’s value, meaning, and dignity in a self-defined “reality” of one’s own making. But God’s truth offers something far better. In her book, Love Thy Body Nancy Pearcey writes,
There is a proper kind of self-love that comes from accepting God’s love. A biblical worldview grants value and dignity to our identity as male or female… What God has created has intrinsic value and dignity.
Calling someone who is struggling with gender dysphoria by “they” or by pronouns that are at odds with their biological sex fails to point them to any true hope or healing. Each of us is fearfully and wonderfully made either male or female, and each of us has intrinsic value and dignity just how God made us because he made us in his image. Encouraging someone to believe that they must deny, hide, or attempt to change their God-given maleness or femaleness is cruelty, not kindness.
Professor Ayres’ pronoun policy is beyond absurd. It is a failure to properly recognize the innate value and dignity of each of his students by refusing to acknowledge a fundamental aspect of human embodiment.
(Image: Unsplash, Sharon McCutcheon)
