Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker and a New York Times opinion contributor, thinks conservative white men care more about pronouns than transgender people or liberals.
Don’t laugh. She really means it.
White male conservatives care more about pronouns than any leftist or trans person I know. It’s truly unhinged.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) July 15, 2022
Spiers’s remarks come after Fareed Zakaria declared that Democrats need to become the party of building things, which is “a lot more important to most Americans than using the right pronouns.” Zakaria, who is neither conservative nor white, received backlash for this statement from various left-wing figures, including Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
The backlash was so great, in fact, that the Washington Post altered the headline of Zakaria’s piece to remove the mention of pronouns.
Addressing someone by the name/pronoun they prefer is free, easy, and kind. Using them builds community and belonging. Democrats can walk and chew gum. We can fix roads and build bridges while also making it a little easier to go about your life. That’s called freedom.
— Chasten Buttigieg (@Chasten) July 15, 2022
Talk about obsessive.
Between Zakaria, Buttigieg, the Washington Post, and Spiers, no one involved in this spat is conservative. That would be enough to prove that Spiers is projecting the Left’s intensity on the issue on to conservatives. But there is a far more alarming issue that shows just how the absurd demands of transgender activists have consumed the Left.
President Joe Biden’s proposed changes to Title IX would make using the wrong pronouns to refer to a student a form of “sexual harassment.” According to the Washington Post, schools that do not “ensure” that students “are addressed by their correct pronouns” would be “subject to investigations and risk losing their federal funding.”
The idea that “misgendering” someone is sexual harassment is already playing out in schools. In Kiel, Wisconsin, three eighth graders were targeted by their school district with a Title IX investigation for sexual harassment. Their high crime was refusing to use the grammatically incorrect “they/them” pronouns to refer to a female student. In Virginia, the Fairfax County School Board voted to approve suspensions for students as young as the fourth grade who “misgender” classmates.
Previously, New York City threatened fines of up to $250,000 for employers and landlords who refused to use the preferred pronouns of employees and tenants, including phony, made-up pronouns such as “ze” and “hir.”
California similarly threatened a fine of up to $1,000 and a prison sentence of up to one year for nursing home workers who refused to use the preferred pronouns of residents. The Democrat who wrote the bill said that “deliberately misgendering a transgender person” is “straight-up harassment.” That bill has been held up in the courts for years and is pending before the California Supreme Court after a lower court found that it violated the First Amendment.
The Left is hanging sexual harassment investigations, fines, and jail time over the heads of people who do not let the government dictate to them how they are allowed to speak. The Left has picked a culture war over transgenderism and pronouns and is pressing to use the weight of state governments and the federal government to impose speech restrictions on people.
But if conservatives find this objectionable? Well, then they’re obsessed, according to Spiers.
If you’re wondering what they’re doing, it is probably whatever they are accusing you of.
