What it means is that if I announce that my gender pronoun is e.g. "thon" (or any other listed here) instead of the usual "he" / "she", you are bound by law to use the word "thon" when referring to me (or talking about me).
The alternative is this: you end up paying a hefty fine and risk losing your job (as rejecting this obligation now amounts to hate speech).
Sounds like a joke?
Well, it's not.
A new bill (called C-16) passed today by the Canadian parliament, enables just this.
And it seems that there is only one person standing up against this authoritarian absurdity - Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.
If you want to find out more about this fascinating fight, here are the videos:
- recent TV debate which offers a good introduction into the subject
- today's live debate taking place at U of T (actually it's hard to call it a debate - to me it looks more like an attempt to discredit dr Peterson by his own university)
Thanks for bringing that up! Funny: a lot of my fellow Canadians - typically of the Liberal bent - makes a big deal about being "citizens of the world." Well: in the eyes of the Youtube world, at least, Prof. Peterson is a genuine folk hero and the University of Toronto administration is a world-scale embarrassment...
This issue had its funny side. Over at the University of Michigan, a conservative student named Grant Strobl changed his preferred pronoun to "His Majesty"!
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/29230/
Lauren Southern also had some fun with this pronoun thingie:
I wasn't aware you could choose your own custom pronoun outside the official list.
Well, that's even better.
It seems the creators of Southpark now have a serious competition: the reality.
More and more people are calling Idiocracy a documentary. :D
For better of for worse, the English language is very liberal, i.e. it allows for its vocabulary to constantly expand. So the new trend for new pronouns isn't bad in itself.
What's terrible however, is when political powers force people to act certain ways while not endangering their life or property.
You speak about Canadian law; I would wager you're from that country? I'm from Quebec, and I can talk in minute details about the very fascist Bill 101, which imposes French as a commercial language (with very few exceptions); it must be at least 50% larger than any other language
I agree, if this became part of natural language phenomenon, there would be nothing unusual about it.
But here we have an act of law enforcing the way people are obliged to refer to each other. Unbelievable.
I have to admit: when I listened to the Orwell's newspeak by Mary Bryson (on today's U of T debate) I felt terrified. The mindset she (or he?) represents is the most horrible I could imagine.
Wow, that sounds very bad, thought it was just the USA going through a rough patch, sounds like more countries are going through different issues that are bad. Some where on the east coast I think North Carolina I heard they are forcing kids to use the bathroom based on the birth certificate not the gender they have identified themselves as.