With everything changing so fast, it’s easy for a conservative to turn into a cranky old stick-in-the-mud who’s forever saying things like, “Get off my lawn!” or “Hey, stop taking all my rights and freedoms away!” or “If you steal my Trump for President sign again, I’ll rip your heart out with my bare hands and feed it to your children for supper.”
No one likes a fuddy-duddy, so we here at Klavan on the Culture occasionally like to try to help you get “hep to the jive” with some timely hints on how to live in our confusing modern world.
Today we’ll deal with pronouns. In the old days, pronouns were easy. Men were men and women were women and you could tell which were which by the fact that men had facial hair and said things like “Hey, honey, I’m home, what’s for dinner?” and women had bodies that made you forget your last name, and said things like, “I’m leaving you to go live with Jane, my Women’s History Professor.” Or maybe that was just the women I knew.
Anyway, in those old days, using pronouns was simple. If you were talking about a man, you simply used he and him, as in, “If he comes home and asks what’s for dinner one more time, I’m going to leave him for my Women’s History Professor.” And if you were talking about a woman, you used she or her, as in “She took all my money and went off to live with her.”
You may be able to come up with sample sentences that are more suitable to your own personal situations.
But today, men are no longer men and women are no longer women but frequently vice versa. And so you may find yourself at a loss as to how to describe people when they’re in the third person or whatever other sexual activities you may get up to. It’s not my place to judge.
So let’s turn to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource website where they deal with these issues, because I guess they have nothing better to do.
If you are referring to a man who identifies as a woman, you might want to use the gender neutral pronoun zie, as in the sentence “Wow, zie is one strange looking woman, isn’t zie? If that’s what zie thinks a woman is, I think zie may be kidding zieself.
If on the other hand, you are dealing with a woman who identifies as a man, you might want to use the pronouns ey and em, as in the sentence “Ey look, that guy has breasts. I is strangely attracted to em.”
Finally, if you are talking to someone directly and you can’t tell what gender they are, back away slowly while using the pronoun ve, as in the sentence, “Vy are ve in ze girl’s locker room. I vill call zie police on ve and zey vill take you avay viz zem.”
I hope this brief guide will help you come to terms with a new, beautiful, rainbow-colored world full of diversity and psychopaths.
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