The rise of the phenomenon of people giving their preferred pronouns is in my view little to do with telling you something about the person ordering you to use them and much more to do with compelled speech. Those who promote the idea of preferred pronouns are basically telling people they are interacting with to disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes, to use the words ‘he’ when ‘she’ would be more appropriate and vice versa. People forced to use preferred pronouns and in some cases forced is the correct word as in some environments preferred pronoun culture is indeed compulsory, are in effect being ordered, on pain of legal trouble, loss of employment or being thrown to the hateful mob, to lie. A man with a beard for example under the pronoun culture could demand that you call them ‘she’ even if it is completely and one hundred percent obvious that the person making the ‘she’ pronoun demand is a man. This many sensible people would obviously see as denying the reality of the evidence in front of you.

But as Brendan O’Neill says in his truly excellent piece on the pronoun cult over at Spiked, the use of pronouns has taken on a quasi-religious aspect. A person can show their loyalty and adherence to the elitist cult of progressivism by using the pronouns demanded of them whether that is obeying others demands for particular pronoun use or using preferred pronouns for themselves.

Mr O’Neill said:

………pronoun pronouncements are an ideological statement. They’re a loyalty oath to the ideology of woke. They’re a very publicly tugged forelock to the cultural elite and its belief system. And this is why no worker, whoever they work for, should be pressured to declare their pronouns – because no one should ever be compelled to bow down to doctrine, to genuflect to other people’s beliefs.

Mr O’Neill is correct. The use of pronouns by people, like President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who cannot in any way be described as individuals whose gender expression is vague and can be quite clearly seen as a man and a woman, is to show adherence to the cult of gender identity. If all this pronoun nonsense was voluntary then it would just be something that normal people could laugh at but as Mr O’Neill said there are a growing number of employees both in the public and the private sector who are being forced to go along with the identity cult and put pronouns into their email signatures and other company or organisation documentation that contains their names.

The pronoun cult is everywhere. It’s even hit the Metropolitan Police as I found when I was cleared of a speech crime recently. The officer who was to bring back the goods seized by the police as part of the investigation had pronouns on communications such as emails and letters. If the pronoun cult is in our oldest police force and pronoun adherence is being forced on officers then it is a sign that this problem is well spread.

I agree with Mr O’Neill that this pronoun imposition must be resisted. It must be resisted because it is an imposition. It is a similar position to a business employing lots of people but one where the management insisted that every employee, mouthed a key statement of a religious creed and the staff had to do that whether or not that individual staff member actually believed in this particular creed. It would be completely unacceptable in my view for example for a Jewish employer to force their Christian staff, who my definition mostly believe in the concept of the Trinity, to say the Shema, the key statement of Jewish belief in an indivisible deity. It would be forcing people to make a statement of belief that they didn’t truly believe in. Forcing people to declare their preferred pronouns is not really that different from forcing people to declare against their will that they adhere to a particular religious path.