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Another NYTimes bogus trend story

This piece from today’s NYT Sunday Styles section is a perfect example of why, if I didn’t feel obligated to do my part to put Ross Douthat’s and David Brooks’s children through college, I would cancel my subscription: A FEW weeks ago, Katy Butler, 16, updated her status on Facebook with an enthusiastic shout-out for Google+, […]

This piece from today’s NYT Sunday Styles section is a perfect example of why, if I didn’t feel obligated to do my part to put Ross Douthat’s and David Brooks’s children through college, I would cancel my subscription:

A FEW weeks ago, Katy Butler, 16, updated her status on Facebook with an enthusiastic shout-out for Google+, the social network’s latest rival. “Oh my God Google! I love it! I was signing up for Google+ and they asked me my gender and the choices were male, female or OTHER!!!!! Oh ya Google!”

Katy, a high school junior in Ann Arbor, Mich., first encountered “other” as a gender option at a meeting of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Allies (LGBTQQA) in seventh grade. “For those of us in the nonconforming gender community, it is great to see Google make the option more mainstream,” she said.

Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.

“You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”

P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”

I call bullsh*t on this. “A growing number of” is New York Times-speak for “we’ve heard of a few of these people, and we hope to find more of them.” I refuse to believe that this is any sort of trend at all. It’s about a dozen teenage weirdos and a Times cultural staff that lives in another world, not the real one. Honestly, I think that newspaper’s culture and magazine pages are a fine example of the principle that if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

“Ze”? “Hirs”? “LGBTQQA”? Please. How I would love to observe these poor Klingon-speaking, fringe-dwelling fluffernutters asking newcomers to their meetings to share their P.G.P.’s. They’re all from Remulak, a small town in France, sounds like. Jack Shafer, I’m sorry you’re no longer at Slate to call the Times out on their bogus trend story habit.

I have a serious point here, believe it or not. The Times aspires to be a paper for all of America. If you read the paper’s cultural coverage (I’m not talking about the arts, per se, but its coverage of cultural trends, ideas, and so forth), you’ll be struck by how utterly parochial it is. It’s like the people who make the news decisions there are all either gay men or graduates of gender studies or comp lit programs at universities that cost $48,000+ per year in tuition. Which is fine, to a point, but the tunnel vision these editors have is jaw-dropping, especially at a newspaper that thinks of itself, with justification, as the most important newspaper in the country. You expect this sort of thing in the Village Voice, which serves a niche New York audience. But from the Times?

UPDATE: Look, I don’t deny that transgendered people exist. And this blog entry isn’t a commentary on the phenomenon on transgenderism. What I deny is that there is suddenly a growing number of them who wish to make up words to accommodate their gender confusion, and incorporate those words into daily language, depending on what sex they wish to be when they roll out of bed in the morning. My supposition is that there are a vanishingly small number of people who do this, and more to the point, that the New York Times is irrationally obsessed with covering fringe sex-related phenomena. If a group of five LGBTQQALMNOP youth go to a gay rights demo dressed like apple trees, and send the Times a press release about it, the Sunday Styles section will write a story about “a growing number of LGBTQQALMNOP youth are embracing green consciousness as part of their activism.” That’s how the Times rolls.

Anyway, to the extent there are LGBTQQALMNOPTBHIUHGFJY people who are doing this violence to the English language, I wish they would stop. They may mutilate their own genitalia if they wish, but leave our personal pronouns alone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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