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Amy Hamm: Don’t let the Globe and Mail call you a bigot over pronouns 

Another attempt to shame people into compliance

Late last month, the Globe and Mail ran a column titled, “Still struggling with pronouns? Some of it is grammar. The rest is you.”

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The thrust of author Leah Eichler’s argument is that when people mistakenly use the “wrong” pronouns for transgender identifying persons, it is rarely an issue of “grammatical habit,” and more likely reflects an inner, discriminatory bias. For others, she argues, “misgendering” is a way to deliberately express one’s “internal biases.”

Amy Hamm: Don’t let the Globe and Mail call you a bigot over pronouns  Back to video

Eichler wrote that “creating or changing words has always been political and this unwavering belief that a vocabulary is a solid thing usually masks a conservative agenda,” and that “grammar is still brandished as a respectable way to endorse people’s discriminatory beliefs.” The U.S. Constitution, she points out, refers to the president as “he.” Eichler asserts that, during Hillary Clinton’s 2015 presidential run, this led to the resurrection of an op/ed debate “about whether a woman could not become an American president.”

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