What’s my pronoun? Ask Superman!

Transnation, meet Bill Saluga.

Saluga, a B-list stand-up comedian and improv performer (he died two years ago at 85), earned a modicum of fame in the 1970s and 1980s for his catch phrase, as cigar-smoking TV personality Raymond J. Johnson Jr., which began “You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay …” and kept going, virtually ad infinitum, offering other names by which people could refer to him. “Or you can call me Johnny, or you can call me Sonny, or you can call me Junior … “ And so on.

His Ray-Jay-etc. character was annoying but benign; he worked in comedy, after all. No one “Johnson” met particularly cared what he wanted to be called. Saluga’s act was an exercise in hyperbolic narcissism. But it resonated with many people because it seemed so realistic, based on men and women they had encountered.

It was an expression of unrestrained, linguistic self-infatuation.

Which is what the woke obsession with and insistence on pronouns – many of the progressive community’s own making – risks becoming.

For Saluga, it was shtick. But the woke crowd is serious; members of it insist on making known their unilaterally created choice of pronouns — which reflect their sexual identity — vocally and insistently, a movement that has caught on in academia. Its philosophy: reject my pronoun, and you reject me; reject my advice and you hurt my feelings; reject what I request and you are telling me that you don’t care.

That is understandable. It is hurtful and demeaning to have people you meet, or with whom you work or study, refuse to accept how you identify in the most fundamental way – your gender identification.

What is not understandable is why some people need to foist on the putatively unwoke-unwashed-unenlightened their linguistic choices without considering how profoundly PC or offensive or intrusive it may seem to people not familiar with the pronoun profferers’ social climate.

This subject is on my mind because I recently wrote a freelance article about a book written by an author with a female name, who by all appearances is a female, but identifies as a member of the trans community. I was criticized for referring to the author in my article with such terms as “she” and “her,” not “they” and “them,” preferences about which I was not aware.

Was I at fault?

I’m a guy — what LGBT nomenclature would refer to as cisgender; I identify as the gender into whose body I was born. My pronouns are he/him/his. Not that I need to state that when I meet someone, or when I fill out a job application or medical form. Unless someone asks me; and I hope that no one does. I don’t want to offend anyone who identifies on the LGBT continuum, but I don’t want to feed into the woke crowd’s spirit of triumphant self-absorption.

I prefer to be called Steve, not Mr. Lipman, even by kids, but I don’t insist on it, don’t criticize folks who ignore my wishes, and certainly don’t make it a sine qui non for a functioning relationship.

I shirk anything that smacks of narcissism.

“Hi, I’m Steve.” Isn’t that enough of an introduction?

Who cares what my pronouns are?

Apparently, a lot of people care about pronouns. This politicization of pronouns has brought a new focus to an old subject; the topic has been in the news lately, during the early days of the Trump administration – which considers the assertion of one’s pronouns contradictory to its values. Federal employees were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures, the Air Force panned preferred pronouns in its official communications, and the White House spokesperson said she refuses to acknowledge emails from journalists who list pronouns in their signatures.

In other words, the personal has become political.

In earlier generations, an overuse of “I” or “me” indicated a narcissistic personality, an unhealthy dwelling upon one’s individuality. Now we have a panoply of terms to make the same impression. Among them: per and xi and fae and bun.

My concern is grammatical. It bugs me when commercials and journalists and people in everyday conversations employ a plural pronoun when the antecedent is clearly singular. My elementary school English teachers would rail against such incorrect formulations … as they would against sentences that begin with “me and [fill in someone’s name],” another common violation of the rules of grammar (also a form of unintentional narcissism, putting oneself before others).

My concern is not a political statement, but mathematical accuracy. There’s singular (one) and plural (more than one). He/she are the former; they, the latter. When I am told that “they are waiting for me,” I look for a group of persons. Not one individual.

My concern is not theological, although as an Orthodox Jew, a member of a religion whose Scriptures speak of a binary sense of sexes and finds gender-neutrality a contradiction of traditional beliefs, I find it difficult to state that G-d made a mistake, putting someone into the wrong body. But my discomfort does not negate someone else’s reality; if someone considers himself/herself a member of a particular gender group, I accept that. I cannot impose my religious feelings on that person.

I simply want to deal with a person without an immediate notification of his or her gender i.d., without condemning that person’s choice (I understand that the person does not view it as a choice, but as an in-born fact) and without being condemned for my perceived lack of understanding.

Isn’t that level of acceptance sufficient?

Tell me what your preferences are, but don’t preach at me, don’t judge (or misjudge) me for not catching on, for retreating to known pronouns.

If you want me to accept you, then accept me.

To cite that eminent 20^th-century philosopher, Popeye, “I yam what I yam.”

Who am I to tell someone that he/she is not what/who says he/she is?

But who are they (plural) to tell me what pronouns I can use to describe them, particularly if their physical appearance clearly suggests one gender or if I have known that person for a long time as a member of that gender group?

In my Jewish circles, we call that a great chutzpah.

This trend towards non-binary pronouns is particularly tricky in Hebrew, which, like many languages, is heavily gendered – hee is she, hu is he, gender possessive endings on nouns are the norm, and so on. In response to the movement to gender-less i.d.s. there is a movement in Israel to make Hebrew “less gender-specific,” the New York Times reported, and the Academy of the Hebrew Language has found itself “arbitrating between linguistic anarchy and societal change.” And, an instructor at the University of Colorado Boulder initiated a “Nonbinary Hebrew Project,” which introduced “a third-gender grammar systematics” – for example, ateh “instead of the current options [for you] of atah as male singular or at as feminine singular.”

The Times of Israel quoted Gabriel Birnbaum, senior researcher at the Academy, as calling the nonbinary system “not worth considering.”

That’s the Jewish angle.

To cite another faith group, author R.M. Stangler wrote in Crisis Magazine that “for Catholics, the movement for new pronouns is at heart a mission to elevate the self to Godlike status. Transcendence of the self – the quest to move past human preoccupations in the service of something higher – is completely abolished in the world of new theory and new pronouns.

“If you reject God-given biology, and reject the terms that reflect that biology,” Stangler wrote, “you are indulging in the most egregious kind of solipsism.”

Phrased more harshly than I would.

I have no problem, as difficult as it may be at first, calling someone born into a female body “he” or “him” (both singular designations) or vice versa, if that is what the person prefers. It’s a matter of simple respect. I cannot imagine how painful it must be to have one’s feelings, one’s perception of self-reality, one’s stated preferences, rejected or ignored or mocked.

But I cannot call that person “they” or “them.” It’s a matter of accuracy.

As for the new crop of artificially created terms, zir and ve and ey, and so on … are we supposed to recognize them as authentic additions to English? Are we supposed to intuit how to use them in a sentence, or in addressing people with whom we interact? Are we supposed to consider them appropriately descriptive of people deserving of respect?

And “it.” That’s not patronizing?

My parents, when they several years ago hosted some friends who were born in Hungary, felt insulted – left out of the conversation – when their guests occasionally talked between themselves in their native language. Which my folks did not understand.

That’s what people who speak in terms of xe or zem are doing; they’re speaking in a foreign language that most people don’t understand.

Who’s insulting whom?

I speak a few words in a few foreign languages, but wouldn’t think of doing it around people who don’t know those tongues. It’d be plain rude.

Why make someone feel left out?

Outside of lefty, academic circles, who knows what these new artificial terms mean, or when or with whom to use them?

If these invented preferred pronouns aren’t confusing enough, I’ll up the ante.

If pushed far enough, I plan to adopt mxyzptlk as my pronoun of choice. That was the name of one of Superman’s arch-enemies (to be precise, Mr. Mxyzptlk), an impish little trickster figure from the “fifth dimension” who would appear occasionally on Earth, bug the bleep out of the Man of Steel, and return to his home dimension only when tricked into saying his name backwards.

I don’t know how you pronounce his name forwards or backwards. How do you pronounce eirs or tey?

If my choice doesn’t make any sense, do hy or ze?

If other people get to choose their manufactured terms of address, which surely baffle many outsiders, why can’t I?

If they insist that I employ language that I find unwieldly, why can’t I?

Mxyzptlk can be my new pronoun. It makes as much sense as zie or emself.

My intention is not to mock or denigrate, but to point out the preening pretensions of people who act as if sensitivity to feelings flows in only one direction.

I hope using mxyzptlk will bug people who insist on making me declare my pronouns. And make them think.

Call me satisfied.

Just don’t call me Ray.