I have a lot of very left-leaning and a lot of very right-leaning people among my friends and family. And last night, I had a dream that I had an argument with one of my lefty family members.
In the dream, we were discussing someone famous who, upon waking up, does not exist. In my dream, this person was tall, wore a suit, and had a full beard. I reflexively referred to this person as “he”. My interlocutor corrected me: “She”.
In line with my personality, I said, “fine, she.” Then, very out of line with my personality, I said, “But you have to admit, you can’t wear a suit and a full beard and get offended if someone refers to you as ‘he'”.
As my family member began a lecture on the problematic nature of cisnormativity, the stress of the dreamed conflict woke me up. But with the security of realizing the argument wasn’t actually happening, this is what I would be too conflict-averse to say in person:
I do not have to justify why normal is normal. The tiny percentage of people who want everyone to focus on something that no one cared about for all of human history have to justify why we should care. And, as compassionate and agreeable as I am, the claim that “sometimes people who get their feelings hurt commit suicide” makes me feel exactly how they want it to make me feel. But thinking logically rather than emotionally, the point is completely backward.
Everybody believed in cisnormativity in the 1700s and no one committed suicide. Everybody believes in cisnormativity in Africa and no one commits suicide. But strangely, there’s only a gender-identity related suicide epidemic in the exact places and times when cisnormativity is being challenged.
Because suicide is not caused by things being hard. Humans were designed to struggle for our lives every day. And pronouns don’t matter when the crops are dying and the wolves are closing in. Suicide is caused by things being easy. Suicide is caused by people having too much time to worry about things that don’t matter.
Like most people, I will make small linguistic concessions to avoid rocking the boat. But cultural changes don’t happen by fiat. And the right-wing people, as crass and unempathetic as they might be, are correct this time: cisnormativity is normal. But people caring what pronouns strangers use to refer to them is extremely problematic.
As Stoic philosopher Epictetus is credited with saying, “People are not disturbed by a thing itself, but by the view they take of the thing.”
