Being respectful shouldnt have to mean upending the language: Ted Diadiun – cleveland.com

CLEVELAND -- Kiel, Wisconsin, a little town of 4,000 souls located about halfway between Milwaukee and Green Bay, suddenly found itself as the center of the pronoun universe a couple of months ago.

In April, the parents of three eighth-grade boys at the local middle school were informed that their sons were being investigated for sexual harassment as described, sort of, in the 1972 Title IX legislation that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school that receives federal funding.

It seems that the boys had been accused of failing to use another students chosen pronouns they/them while addressing the classmate in a music class. Back in 1972, gender pronouns were well understood and uncontroversial, but todays world has become more complicated for everyone, including eighth-grade boys.

Mispronouning, the boys sin is called.

One of the mothers, Rose Rabidoux, thought it was a joke when she got the call from a school administrator. I really thought, Youve got to be pulling my leg, she told a local news show. The more he said, No, this is for real, the angrier I got.

With some help from a Wisconsin conservative legal aid group and a lot of outrage from the local community which unfortunately escalated to bomb threats the parents succeeded in getting the school district to abandon the investigation and exonerate the students in June.

But as Rabidoux said afterward, this dispute should never have been escalated to this point. And the ardor with which the school district pursued it presents some obvious questions:

How and why did we get here? Why did we allow this to happen to our culture?

Who had the authority to twist our language out of shape in the interest of trying not to offend anyone? When did we reach the point where you can be suspended from school, disciplined at work or shamed on social media for using words that have had unambiguous meanings throughout our lives?

Its not only pronouns. On an increasing number of hospital websites, women are not women any more. They are birthing people or menstruating persons or individuals with a cervix. Or, as it says on a Cleveland Clinic website, people with the reproductive parts associated with being assigned female at birth (AFAB) including cisgender women and transgender men and nonbinary people with a cervix.

Really? We have to go through all that so that someone doesnt feel uncomfortable?

An unsuspecting woman might be told that she doesnt have breast cancer, but chest cancer, as author Patricia Posner wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. The sensitive person no longer calls a mother feeding a child breast-feeding. Its chest-feeding, and the baby does not get breast milk. The child drinks human milk.

Getting back to the pronouns more and more lately, youre likely to get emails from someone with the senders preferred pronouns appended to the signoff. Youll not get this from me, but heres what it looks like: Ted Diadiun (he/him). As if you didnt know.

The Cavaliers have signed on to the program. Imagine getting an email from Austin Carr (he/him).

Go on any college campus and youre likely to see people wearing buttons that announce their preferred pronouns. If the school does not provide them, students can find them on Amazon.com with any combination of pronouns they wish and if the student is really ambivalent theres one that says, Fluid. So ask.

Ive got a friend who asked an obviously female student something about her project, and was gently corrected by a professor who said that they are working on such-and-such. My friend was momentarily puzzled, surprised to learn that it was a group project, but then realized Oh ...

The pronoun confusion has even made its way into the comics pages I had to read a June 20 Sally Forth strip more than once to make sense of it, because one person is saying, Have you seen what Riley is wearing today? Whats up with that? And Sally answers, I like their outfit. I think they had a cool style.

I thought she was talking about one person Oh

A reporter for The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com gamely tried to explain it all in a Page One story during Pride Month in June.

I think you have to go back to why are we doing it, the story quoted Monica Jackson, vice president of Inclusion and Diversity for Eaton Corp. Its about respect and understanding how people want to be referred to.

We can stipulate that this all started with good-hearted people trying to do the right thing to make everyone feel cared for and included and respected. There have always been people for whom gender is complicated, and who as a result felt like outsiders.

Kindness is not a bad inclination. However people view themselves or wish to present themselves to the world, that should be OK with you, me, or anyone.

But why this need to render the language meaningless in order to cater to a tiny percentage of the population? There are plenty of other ways to offer respect, and acknowledge each others humanity.

If Fred wants to be known as she, I guess I can get used to that. It doesnt make sense to me, but it doesnt have to, does it? It wont change my life, and if it makes Fred feel better, why not?

But they? Theres only one Fred. To call Fred they is forfeiting clarity in the name of what? Perhaps its the fault of our language, which does not have a gender neutral pronoun. If people want one, perhaps it would work. At least it is singular. But if you dont like that, pick your own.

Speaking of clarity, how many people are we going to offend if we refer to someone who just gave birth as a woman? Everyone knows what that means. Do we really have to say birthing person?

For women like me, it seems as if we are incrementally being erased in a rush of political correctness to ensure no trans person is offended, wrote Posner in her op-ed. I respect trans rights, but what about my rights? There is a death of common sense playing out in real time, and most women are quiet for fear of being attacked as bigots.

If you attack someone verbally or physically for who or what they are, thats bigotry. But how is it bigotry to employ language we have used and understood all our lives, but that a minority of people suddenly want to change?

It makes me think of the timeless quote from the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Everyone is entitled to their own idea of who they are, but we are indeed past the point of common sense when we can no longer agree on the simplest, most straightforward words.

Ted Diadiun is a member of the editorial board of cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.

To reach Ted Diadiun: tdiadiun@cleveland.com

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Being respectful shouldnt have to mean upending the language: Ted Diadiun - cleveland.com