DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Don’t Say ‘Hey Guys!’ in The Workplace Anymore, advises CNN Money.
You can’t just clock in and focus on your job anymore, identity politics now dictates how you introduce yourself to a room of colleagues.
Julia Carpenter, CNN Money writer specializing in gender in the workplace, listed ways to avoid accidentally misgendering a coworker.
People who “identity as non-binary, gender non-conforming or genderqueer prefer “they/them” pronouns to reflect their identity and gender expression” but “for many workplaces, making space for non-binary people is tricky, because some people may prefer certain pronouns but present themselves in a more masculine or more feminine way.” This confusion can make coworkers, “misidentify them without even realizing their mistake.”
As Thomas Sowell wrote over 20 years ago in The Vision of the Anointed, on the left’s sustained attack on “The Generic ‘He:’”
Trivial as such crusades may seem, they have been very successful in changing the way people talk in the media, in academia, and in government. Not only is the generic “he” taboo in many quarters, the speech controllers have pressed on to new conquests, attacking such words as “layman,” “craftsman,” “actress,” or “matron,” which violate their unisex view of the world, and also proscribe such phrases as “to master a language” because it uses a sex-specific word. These examples are from an official guidebook put out by the Australian government, which shows how far such crusades have spread. An American guidebook, distributed internationally, declares that there is “a perfectly scientific, completely foolproof, and highly theoretical model for avoiding sexism on the job.” As so often happens, pretensions of “science” are the last refuge of those who offer neither the evidence nor the logic that are integral to science.
The net effect of all this is that young women, especially in educational institutions where they are bombarded with radical feminist propaganda, are led to believe that every use of the generic “he” in books of the past is proof of disdain or hostility toward women, when in fact such usage simply avoided cluttering up the language or forcing writers into strained constructions and awkward phrases. In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.
Time-Warner-CNN-HBO is rapidly going full Airstrip One. In addition to articles advising on the newest advancements in woke pronouns and gender theory, Lena Dunham is happy to play Central Scrutinizer* and dox the daylights out of any employees she overhears speaking doubleplus ungood crimethink.
Exit question: Is “Hey You Guys!” still acceptable, or is Rita Moreno the next person on the CNN dox list?
* Sorry to cross the streams between Orwell and Zappa.