Gender pronouns in Canada

I happened to hear about this yesterday.

Link

There is apparently a new law in Canada which while ostensibly preventing discrimination against people based on their gender identities (transexuals etc.) apparently also requires people to use the preferred gender pronoun of any given person.
This includes new pronouns such as "Xu", "Hir", "Ze" and so on, which on some occasions can even be fluid - that is, different from day to day depending on the gender preference of an individual on that given day.

While anti-discrimination laws are a fine thing (YMMV), attempts to control language and impose mandatory speech are going off in a direction that is totalitarian. Am I missing something here? How has something this extreme acquired sufficient support in Canada?

That's insane if true.

SJW brigade has been enforcing speech codes on college campuses for years so it's really no surprise that they would take it to that extent once they had government power.

Whoooaaaa! There is, according to your source, a rule within the Toronto School Board (and this isn't the first weird thing that's happened there) and the Alberta Education Ministry that this or that be "respected".
Nobody's going to jail here.

You apparently are.

Hasn't.

Yes, totalitarian, stoooooopid, and utterly unproductive.

These are just extremist dingbats. Where I live there's a similar rule in force for everything published by the local authorities. All it does is make a freaking mess of the language. But this too shall pass.

The Nazis apparently attempted to re-Germanicize the German language, which was too polluted with Latin loan-words for their taste. So they agonizingly invented real Germanic words for common things that people used a Latin-based word for (nose, window, etc.).

Well, it didn't work. No, not even in Nazi Germany did people obey.

Language is utterly anarchic. Nobody controls it. Nobody can. Fashions come and go. The important thing to remember is that the stupid fashions (i.e. the unworkable ones) eventually go.

I'm Canadian, and I have no idea what @RickDeckard is talking about. To the best of my knowledge there is no such law.

And I'm pretty sure the majority of folks outside academia don't have a clue (or care), either.

Universities have always been a insular group of reality-impaired folks with their heads up their own arses. I'm not surprised.

Also, if it matters at all, the columnist from the link the OP has been completely discredited as a serial plagiarizer. It's actually quite the scandal that she's still writing for a national newspaper.

Another link

It's a national law, Bill C-16. Not some internal school thing. There are disagreement on its impact but "Penalties range from fines and damages to mandatory anti-discrimination training."

Oh, OK. It's not a law. At least not yet. From your link (emphasis mine):

Even if Bill C-16 receives Royal Assent, it doesn't do what you say it's going to do in the OP. It simply includes "gender identity" as another category for non-discrimination.

As I said, this isn't the first time that the Toronto School Board has shown signs of weakheadedness.

Fair enough. Seems Professor Petersen has his panties in a twist over not very much.

No, he's right to be concerned. But as I said, most of the nonsense that happens in academia is fantasy-land shit that has no bearing in reality.

My gender pronouns are "niggerkikefaggot" and "niggerkikefaggotself."

Your move, SJWs. Your move.

First I've ever heard of it.

Our students aren't perfect, but they certainly aren't the liberal shitshow that American campuses have.

An obvious violation of free speech rights.

Thanks for pointing out the obvious you drunk piece of shit!

this...
he's been getting support from Ezra Levant's "The Rebel Media", (a wannabe Breitbart "news" channel) who have in turn misrepresented this as a "freedom of speech" issue over the last several months.
I guess what's funny to me about this is the only context for using custom pronouns is to refer to someone in the third person. ANy complaint would have to be based on being offended on someone else's behalf. If speaking to them directly there's little opportunity or context to call them "xir".

unless you're sammy davis jr, they'll bust on you for cultural appropriation.

Hate to agree with you but it's sadly true.

Blowing things way out of proportion doesn't do anyone any good. It has not even become a law yet. Second thing is it seems to only cover people who are employed by the state and not allowing them to mock or insult a trans person by using the wrong pronoun. It does not have jail time and could result in fines or sensitivity training. It does not even seem to say they would fire people. If you deliberately did that in some private business you could easily find yourself fired and possibly fined or sued. You are not under free speech while acting as an employed agent of a company or the state. I might have missed where this applies to people outside of their employment.

If the whole article was written without the scaremongering it would be reasonable. How are you supposed to know if a person wishes to be referred to in the non binary until they tell you? Not to mention people make pronoun mistakes all the time. The law should be phrased to include malicious intent. The guy in question seems to have a thing about the non binary gender pronouns. It seems like he wants to insult them by not referring to them how they want to be. When he is just against it entirely it shows he is not reasonable. If he brought it up as a problem where society might not be prepared to identify who wants what and it would cause inadvertent violations for people who do not have a part phlegm going along then his point would not be so breitbartian.

The use of sjw really should tip people off that this is trash journalism and the product of Canadian deplorables.

Anyone else wonder why the cultural Right is so deeply offended by the idea of treating other people with a basic level of respect?

Some of those pronoun choices are a bit confusing. The use of they to refer to a singular person is just going to mess up communication. You have to come up with a new pronoun if you want people to use it to refer to you as an individual. Not to mention these common pronouns are used to simplify language. Separate pronouns for everyone are called names. I could see a proper gender neutral term, but even I am not going to be able to remember who goes with which pronoun if you start going beyond that. There is a point where we have to go with language in order to keep up communications.

Those are proper nouns, more specifically.

All of this.

I've been in a couple groups that had an "ice-breaker" including what our preferred pronouns were. On one hand, it was kind of thoughtful, especially to those who are experimenting or whose appearance just doesn't make it obvious. On the other hand, some people found the question awkward because they weren't sure themselves and didn't want to impose on others, and in later times the expected answers would be "she/her/hers" or "he/him/his" etc. rather than "female" or "male" pronouns, because that apparently made things better.

On the third hand, it's just a weird-ass question to ask most people.

...

There seems to be a great rift here:

- There are people who have made their pronouns clear to others, and those others who protest and disrespect by using whatever pronouns they decide on regardless of that individual's wishes, and

- There are people who assume that those with pronouns possibly incongruous with their appearance or past will blow up at a moment's notice whenever the wrong pronouns are used, regardless of how intentional the mistake was.

How about a nice compromise: if someone tells you that these are the right pronouns to use for themselves, try and use those. If someone messes up, don't automatically assume they're being an asshole but just realize that language is a pretty innate and automatic thing to most humans and changing how it works can be tricky.

Perhaps some of these problems come from an expectation that everyone should be intimate with your personality when most people are not. If you follow the link in the article where it refers to another article about all the new pronouns you see the whole issue is jumbled up by idiots. First, the article that made all the haters bitch was an informative piece that described how linguists are trying to deal with new things. all linguists involved, and the author of that article, need to read the fucking dictionary they contribute to because gender identity is not the same as sexual preference. So mixing in all the identifiers of who people want to fuck just makes things much more confusing.

That brings me to my point. To use the proper pronoun should be something that can be done without intimate knowledge of a person's gender identity. To have to know if a person identifies as different genders on different days of the week is simply beyond he nature of pronoun use. Keep it simple. They are either male, female, or non binary. To toss sexual preference into the mix is getting way to intimate for conversation about people you may never meet or want to know the sexual preference of.

When I use she to refer to a person who identifies as a woman I am not specific. She might be frilly and really feminine. She might go more towards a tomboy attitude without being trans. She might be anywhere in between and change depending on her mood. I do not need the pronoun to identify how she is a woman, and I do not need it to identify how someone is not defined under the binary system. I know lots of people want to tell everyone about themselves, but it is not necessary to almost all the people who are using these pronouns, and if it is necessary for the listener to know how the person identified by the speaker feels go talk to them.

I'm all for fighting true sexism, and racial and other forms of bigotry. But I have to admit it's hard to even identify with this discussion. OK, I'm a white -- I mean yellow -- male heterosexual. So I'm freed from problems that others might face. Perhaps I live in some sort of bubble, but such situations hardly arise for me.

Of course we've all known people who just didn't seem at home in their assigned sexual roles. (A friend of mine in highschool was pretty effeminate and suffered mightily for it. But he always seemed to me more asexual than anything else.) So yes, once in a long while I deal with somebody whose sex is simply a tough call. So there I might have to do some verbal dancing. But it's extremely rare. And trying to "do" something about it, as @Tererun points out, brings the risk of seeming damn nosey, invasive. Anyway, the person concerned is probably used to people "dancing".
I try not to be awkward about it, and I hope I don't come across as somehow unkind. So I think I pass the "respect" test with the pronouns at my disposal.

Seems to me this whole business is a very Anglo-Saxon thing. Maybe other members living in non-Anglo areas of the world will say otherwise, but it took me a very long time to figure out what the hell LGBT even stood for. Not that I've heard any equivalent in these parts. It simply isn't that much of an issue.
And I should point out that my father-in-law has two adult children from an earlier marriage -- homosexual and lesbian respectively. So I have some insight into any serious obstacles to them living their lives as they see fit.

The pronoun thing is really a trans issue. If you arena lesbian or gay man you still have the same pronoun. Some gay guys will joke around with the female pronouns and say thing like you go girl to other gay men. However that is a thing that goes on within a supportive group. If they did not know you, or if they knew you as a hater using the feminine to refer to them would be an insult. Still gay guys are not identifying as female.

You also point out the reality that these issues are not really an issue in some areas yet. It really is something you would encounter in more of an urban setting. I think the extremes where you have what the right refers to as SJWs ends up being in more of a university or artsy arena. You would also find it in places where young adults are the main focus. They are at that age where they want to express who they are to the world. It seems like when you get older you get tired of shouting it and you either wear it on your t-shirt or wait until people ask. For me trans is fine, but if someone wants to know me I probably fit bigendered. People who do not have contact with it are bound to find the whole thing a bit confusing.

I should say I have encountered well meaning people who are not trying to offend me having trouble with referring to me as she because they feel it is insulting. I would call it sexist but they seem to have the same trouble calling a woman by male pronouns. It does not seem to be a matter of memory either because they actually seem to struggle to use the right pronoun. People who are used to using male pronouns with me do not strugle, they just end up using them.

@Tererun may be interested in the programme mentioned below.

When I watch this, again I think "This is an awfully Anglo thing". The incidence can't possibly be any different in the population here than it is in North America, the UK or wherever. But I've yet to see it hitting the headlines.

Also, with respect to "gender complexity" they say "it turns out things are a lot more complicated than we thought". Well yeah, every advance ever made in science has shown the same thing. For centuries now. As the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington said, the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.

It's truly amazing how things have changed so quickly. Eight years ago, Prop 8 passed in liberal hippie California in the same election that ushered in our first black President, then was overturned five years later.

Hell, until @Nova came out as trans, I kinda saw all trans folks as those freaks shows you see on Jerry Springer. But story after story of younger and younger children coming out as trans along with knowing who Nova was before the transition and how she had prayed the trans away in vain changed my mind on that.

A. Source problem. Wente is notoriously anti-trans, bordering on TERF

B. "No one can deny that transgender people should be treated with the same dignity and respect as anybody else. So far, so good. The battle at the U of T is whether they’re entitled to their own pronouns as well. Prof. Jordan says no. Trans warriors – and the university administration – say yes."

Self contradiction right here. "Dignity and respect" involves specifically addressing someone as they ask you to address them. The minute You say "I refuse to acknowledge your self-identification" you have passed out of the land of "Respect" - you may well feel justified, you might even be right, but you cannot claim to still be engaging in respect.

To be clear, I struggle with the existence of non-binary people because I have enough trouble trying to get folks to understand the much simpler (by comparison) concept of "switching sides" and why one would want to. I can and do roll with the singular "they" because I'm committed to showing them the same respect I want shown to me...and even with all that I HAAAAATE the made up words like "hir" - and I edit myself to speak in such a way to avoid pronouns as much as possible in the VEEEEERY rare instance that the situation presents itself. So I get the awkwardness of it.

BUT, trans people altogether are at best maybe 1% of the population and non-binary folks are probably less than 10% of those - although they do seem to be a bit more out in the spotlight (per capita) than the binary trans folks. Point is, they are exceedingly rare and it always mystifies me when the 99% is bent out of shape about having to be civilized with the <1%

"He even thinks (heretically) that a large majority of the human race actually is gender binary, and that gender is inextricably linked to biology, and that our language should reflect that."

Here's where her veneer of "respect" begins to wear thin. Why? Because it is not heretical AT ALL (except to some very very fringy folks (most of which are not related to the trans community and some of which flat out hate us) to recognize that the vast majority (as I just said, ~99%) of the human race is quite binary and that tied aligned well with the physical plant. Moreover, of the remaining 1% the great majority are highly binary in their nature (just misaligned with their outward physicality) and in general, and to the same degree, language DOES reflect that. But this:

"“I don’t recognize a person’s right to determine what pronoun I use to address them.” he said in a video he posted to YouTube. “I don’t know what the options are if you’re not a man or a woman.”

And Wente's concurrence with it is revealing. If everyone who met her insisted on referring to her as him, if she was called sir and Mr. Wente SHE WOULD OBJECT and she SHOULD. But here she is, out of every thousand people she meets MAYBE ONE of those people would ask for gender-neutral pronouns. This is the personification of arrogant pivledge

"I, and we in the vast majority demand the authority to choose how we'll deal with you freaks and you'll thank us for even noticing you."

Not that she'd admit to any of that because she's already told you how respectful they are.

The article actually didn't make clear what the law is on this, but in places where their is some sort of official policy it is universally predicated on willful lack of respect (such as this guy is showing) and does NOT apply to casual or unknowing use.The policies are asking the employee (in this case) to conform to the expectations of the employer which is ENTIRELY reasonable.

For a personal example, there was an assistant at my local Walmart pharmacy who referred to me deliberately as "sir", I asked her politely not to do so - I did NOT ask for her to call me "ma'am" - just to NOT use sir. She told me to my face that given that she was raised to respect people she was going to continue to address me that way.

I had Bentonville tell her something different. If Walmart had not had an inclusive company policy, I'd have been at a loss for a recourse to correct her. But they did and do and her ultimate obligation was to comply with THEM, not with me.