BROADview in Brief
Just follow the rules and call them they...
It’s hard to believe we are more than halfway through October, and I have not mentioned that it’s LGBT History Month! October 11th was National Coming Out Day (students from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism wrote about how LA Unified celebrated the whole week), next week is Asexuality Week, aka Ace Week (no word on how LA Unified students are celebrating), and on the topic of gender, the third Wednesday of every October is International Pronouns Day. Many happy returns to those who observed the holiday. British trans science teacher Debbie Hayton was having none of it, however, and wrote Why I Won’t Be Celebrating International Pronouns Day for Unherd. On the flip side, writer Roxane Gay schooled a white gay male on both pronouns AND intersectionality in this week’s New York Times Work Friend advice column. Nice touch! Believers often tell us that everyone has pronouns, but I’ll note as a gender atheist that no, everyone uses pronouns. Many gender atheists use sex-based pronouns at home and gender-based ones at work to refer to colleagues as needed. Surprisingly (or maybe not), some atheists are so frightened of being outed in the workplace that they add pronouns to their professional email signatures and social media profiles, they introduce themselves as he/him at meetings…the full monty! Then they send furtive thank-you emails to those of us who publicly but politely refuse to participate in sharing rituals at work. Hunh? Yes, indeed, that’s happened to me, and perhaps it’s happened to you, too. Do you think it would make it into a Work Friend column?
While you never have to reveal your pronouns in the US, the law regarding whether you must use your colleagues’ is still in flux. Most public (i.e., government) employment cases seem to be breaking towards allowing employees to follow their conscience. At the beginning of October, Melissa Fine reported for American Wire on a Florida judge’s blistering ruling in favor of a Christian public school teacher who the Miami-Dade school district had fired for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns: “Advocates of transgenderism can be as doctrinaire as religious zealots these days,” Van Laningham wrote. “As this case demonstrates, adhering to the traditional view that gender is biologically determined can get a person excommunicated, from a job in this instance.” Nevertheless, the Catholic News Agency disclosed that the Health and Human Services Department under the Biden administration came out with new mandated pronoun guidelines for its employees this past week. We’ll see how that flies.
Private employment pronoun rules can be quite different from public employment rules, and FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has a good primer on the differences between the two.
At least using sex-based pronouns is not an actual criminal offense in the USA or Canada. The Daily Mail reported this week that the British Labour Party would like to have you arrested and sent to jail for two years if you use sex-based pronouns in public. JK Rowling has announced that she will happily head to the hoosegow if need be. Gee, in Australia, she’d only go to jail for six months and/or get a nearly AU$10,000 fine. They’re so much more reasonable down there! Happy International Pronouns Day Or Else?
What a world. If you happened to miss the Babylon Bee’s Coaches Struggle with Using Pronouns video from a while back, check it out and let me know if you think it’s satire or just a reflection of our current reality.
Here’s a quick round-up of the latest news on American court cases:
The Connecticut Attorney General is appealing a ruling against the state for failing to provide timely gender medicalization to an incarcerated murderer who attempted to self-castrate with nail clippers.
A new Idaho law requiring that transgender students use bathrooms and locker rooms based on sex will go into effect while a court challenge plays out.
A Washington, DC legal firm dropped a lawsuit against the school district in Virginia Beach when the school board moved to adopt Governor Youngkin’s new transgender student guidelines. The firm has threatened to sue any Virginia school districts that delay updating their policies. The governor’s guidelines outline that teachers and students have the right to use transgender students’ birth names and sex-based pronouns, that parents must approve name and pronoun changes, and that sports teams and bathrooms are separated by sex, not gender.
The Washington Post reported on the Wyoming sorority lawsuit with a profile of Artemis Langford, the transwoman/trans-identified male involved. The paper did not allow reader comments.
And in breaking news out of California, a judge issued a bench ruling on Chino Valley Unified’s new parental notification school board policy today. As you’ll recall, that policy had been put on legal hold last month. According to the Courthouse News Service, the judge ruled that while employees cannot be required to notify parents if a student tells them they’re transgender or requests to use cross-gender facilities, there’s an important part of the policy that can move forward: they can be required to notify parents if minor students request a formal or informal name change. You can pretty much assume that this ruling, like so many others, will be appealed…maybe by both sides.
In world news, the Times Hub reported that Canadian conservatives are having intense discussions on whether to include parental notification as party policy.
Elsewhere across the globe:
In Scotland, Shona Craven wrote in The National that the British women’s rights group FiLia held their annual conference in Glasgow last week, despite the “laughable” attempts of protestors to shut it down: “FiLiA unapologetically centres women, and in a move that some will find terribly unfashionable, encourages reasoned, informed and sometimes very robust debate among women who have faced far, far greater threats than a karaoke singer huffing and puffing in disapproval.”
Also in Scotland, the Telegraph reported that a transwoman/trans-identified male was jailed for twenty years for kidnapping and sexually assaulting an elementary school-aged girl: “A transgender butcher could not have abducted a schoolgirl and subjected her to hours of ‘sexual torment’ had he not been dressed as a woman, a judge has said.”
Graham Linehan covered the October 8th Let Women Speak event in Liverpool.
EuroNews shared that France had an “It’s Ma’am!” moment when a French gynecologist tried to explain to a transwoman/trans-identified male patient that A Cavity Is Not a Vagina.
The Siasat Daily reported that the Indian Supreme Court ruled that “a marriage entered into by a transgender person is in the nature of a heterosexual relationship and must be recognised by the law,” i.e., two people of the same sex but opposite genders can marry (this is important because India does not allow same-sex marriage in normal circumstances).
The AP noted that a Japanese family court decided it is unconstitutional to require transgender citizens to undergo surgery to remove their reproductive organs before allowing their gender (sex?) marker to be changed on government documents.
Today, I learned that the amazing Martina Navratilova shares a birthday--October 18th--with my late Great Aunt Jean, who was also a powerhouse. Thanks to a subscriber for sharing that info! How perfect that their birthday fell on International Pronouns Day this year. It would’ve made Auntie Jean cackle, and I bet it made Martina smile, too. I’d make a comment about Libra women, but I’m also an astrology atheist. Martina celebrated by straightening out the British Ju-Jitsu Association and their new transgender inclusion policy with one scornful “boycott these jerk[s]” tweet on X/Twitter. How does she do it??
Please share your thoughts below or through this form, and enjoy your weekend!
With many, many thanks for the research assistance of Alejandra Q.
Afraid to open the “cavity” link….excellent work, Kate!!
Not tonight dear. It's ACE week.