Matt Walsh: The Narcissism of Gender Pronouns

like there are different categories of people who who transition and we kind of talk about them like they're all the same but they're not and you can kind of break it down by age like there's the very young children a 5-year-old and we hear that oh my 5-year-old is trans that's a th% the parent just deciding they're going to do that to the child because no child is gonna no child even knows what that is so you have to you have to suggest that to them then you have the adolescent girls and you know Abigail shri's written about this in her great book uh and and there that's the social contagion they pick it up from society but then there's the older men who are adults and decide day that they're women and for so many of them this is a fetish I mean this is like the the thing we're not allowed to say or acknowledge but it's totally true that for most of most these older men who decide that I'm a woman it's a fetish it's autog gynophilus they're they're uh Enchanted by the idea of themselves as women and so now now we have to participate in your fetish like you you get off on the idea of being seen as a woman and I have to be I have to be a participant in that it's it's really uh degrading and to all of us you know that we're all being forced into this if you want to control people's thoughts Begin by controlling their words that's totalitarian thinking it was once completely foreign to America not anymore increasingly Americans are forced to use language against their will or even their conscience or be prepared to suffer the consequences and those consequences can be dire take for example the issue of transgenderism the newest civil rights Battle of our time a decade ago few people could even tell you what the word transgender meant today expressing the wrong opinion on the issue can cost you your business or job or both consider recent state and local actions punishing those who decline to use an individual's pronouns of choice people are forced to refer to others as Z or Co or Thon yes those are now considered pronouns what might otherwise be a courtesy now has criminal consequences in most contexts I would have no problem addressing others in any manner they chose and I'm sure most Americans feel the same but the Constitution's protection of free speech neither begins nor ends with good manners it extends all the way from rudess to meekness protecting those who hurl insults and those who would prefer to say nothing at all if the state can compel the use of certain words it can force those who differ into silence it can force its citizens to parot beliefs they do not hold if gender activists Prevail we may be left with a world we neither recognize nor like very much we won't be able to communicate our displeasure we will have lost the words I'm Abigail shrier for Prager University