Politeness at a Price: How Participation Fuels Cultural Shifts
Cultural movements often begin with small, seemingly insignificant changes. Just as a pebble can create ripples across a pond, small changes can also lead to widespread cultural transformation.
For the Movement, the small ripple is normalising sharing and using preferred pronouns. Even out of sheer politeness or fear of confrontation, participation normalises the ritual, and enhances the legitimacy of its underlying radical worldview, while simultaneously diminishing the legitimacy of one’s conviction and belief against the Movement.
Participation in the pronoun ritual tacitly affirms, validates, and advances the Movement’s coercive tactics and ideology. Over time, this can alter society’s dominant understanding of SOGIE, with far-reaching and foreseeable adverse real-world implications.
The Threat to Women and Children
Consider the impact on children’s health and well-being. Gender-affirming healthcare, promoting the prescription of powerful puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, coupled with the widespread overdiagnosis of gender dysphoria in minors, may become commonplace.
Children not developmentally equipped to make risky life-altering decisions may face irreversible medical consequences.
Consider the impact on women. Women’s spaces, like toilets and changing rooms, are at risk. Normalising gender fluidity makes it easier for malevolent individuals, with biological male components, to gain access to these spaces, endangering women. Don’t women have a right to privacy in their own toilets without transgender dogma calling them bigots for believing so?
Further, gender fluidity creates an unlevel playing field in women’s sports by allowing biological males to compete against women, disadvantaging biological female athletes.
Wrongthink: Disagree at Your Own Risk
Consider the impact on freedom of conscience.
People with deeply held beliefs against the Movement’s principles may be forced to endorse a worldview they reject through the pronoun ritual.
This coercion could arise from job termination threats, as experienced by a doctor dismissed for refusing to address a 6ft bearded man as ‘madam’, and multiple teachers fired for refusing to use their student’s preferred pronouns.
Worse, coercion could come from pronoun legislation positioned as anti-discrimination statutes meant to curb workplace hostility and harassment. For example, Washington DC classifies “deliberately misusing an individual’s preferred name, form of address or gender-related pronoun” as “unlawful harassment”.
Similarly, New York City’s Human Rights Law mandates employers to use an individual’s preferred “name, pronoun and title with which a person self-identifies”, regardless of other identifiable traits.
We highlighted this risk here as well:
Between Compliance and Dissent
Currently, in Singapore, coercion by legislation has been managed through the “tightly scoped” approach in the proposed WFL. We commend the Government for resisting calls from activists like AWARE, Pink Dot, Sayoni, and Oogachaga, for an expansionist inclusion of SOGIE as a ‘protected characteristic’ under the WFL.
However, legislation is not yet finalised. Moreover, Dr Tan See Leng, the Minister for Manpower, hinted that “a ‘pathway’ remains to expand the scope of these [protected] characteristics when the legislation is reviewed”. How Singapore will address the issue of pronouns in the workplace remains uncertain.
Will Singapore prioritise the hearer’s freedom from offence, following Washington and New York? Or will Singapore prioritise the speaker’s freedom of conscience, following other US states that have passed legislation protecting teachers from being compelled to use preferred pronouns?
Coercion by legislation aside, workplace social pressures amounting to coercion will likely increase. This will happen as more firms realise the benefits of Pink Washing, which is profitable for businesses when they align themselves with LGBT causes, succumb to activist pressures, or make well-intentioned but misguided attempts at inclusivity.
Considering the heavy costs to society, one is faced with two trade-offs.
Either play along to be perceived as courteous and polite but sacrifice the millennia-tested stable understanding of what it means to be human and how society should be ordered for a radical and evolving redefinition which threatens women, children and your very freedom of thought.
Or say no to being controlled by this new Transgender diktat, retain your integrity and conscience, and possibly pay a price for your convictions?
We think that being a friend to those who struggle with identity issues does not require the affirmation of their every demand, and that ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’ are inadequate reasons to affirm, legitimise, and advance the Movement through participation.
