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LEFT WING LOONS Title: 'He' Didn't Commit the Crime... 'They' Did --- Preferred Gender Pronouns confound in Berkeley murder case. 'He' Didn't Commit the Crime... 'They' Did! Preferred Gender Pronouns confound in Berkeley murder case. Jan 16, 2017 By Charlotte Allen Pablo Gomez Jr. On January 6, a 27-year-old woman, Emilie Inman, was stabbed to death inside her home in Berkeley, California, and another Berkeley woman was stabbed on the street, allegedly by the same assailant, a UC-Berkeley student named Pablo Gomez Jr., who was arrested the next day and remains in custody. The grisly episode has, strangely enough, been turned into yet another skirmish in the “pronoun wars," a brand-new social-justice cause in which people who describe themselves as "gender-nonconforming" fight for the right to be referred to by their "preferred gender pronoun" or "PGP." This can be one of the standard third-person pronouns such as "he" or "she"—or it can be a pronoun spun wholly out of thin air, such as "zir" or "xe." The University of California-Berkeley has been in the front lines of surrender in this battle. In 2014, then-UC-Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, meeting with the campus LGBTQ Advisory Committee, introduced himself with his own PGP. And so it was with Gomez's arrest. Berkeleyside.com, an Internet news site at first used the pronoun "he" in connection with its report on the 22-year-old undergraduate—probably because his first name and mugshot would lead you to believe that he belonged to the male sex. But then, as Berkeleyside reported, "a friend" of Gomez "contacted Berkeleyside early Saturday to say Gomez Jr. uses the pronoun 'they.'" On his Twitter home page Gomez had called himself a "nonbinary, pan xicanx who loves dr pepper" ("xicanx" is a nonbinary way of saying "Chicano"). So Berkeleyside promptly swapped in "they" for "him." Not only did this make the news story on Gomez look confusing, but it made you wonder why the site felt constrained to make deference to an alleged murderer's PGP a more important priority than clear reporting. And who exactly was that "friend" of Gomez? A couple of days later the UC-Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, weighed in with its own PGP-deferential story about Gomez: According to campus senior Jessica Nunez, one of Gomez's classmates, Gomez stopped attending the class they shared early in the fall semester after an argument Gomez had started with the professor regarding the use of gender specific pronouns in course texts. She said Gomez resumed going to class again toward the end of the semester. "When (Gomez) was there (they) made (themself) present," Nunez said. "(Gomez) was very knowledgeable." In other words, the Daily Californian not only doctored its own reporting in the name of PGP-solicitousness but it doctored a quote. It's pretty clear from the parentheses above that Nunez, like most people, thought of Gomez as a "he" and a "himself." Then, after much derision on the Internet—especially by Ann Coulter—of the Berkeley media's solicitude for the feelings of an alleged violent felon, Berkelyside ran a January 12 op-ed by Jessica Schwartz, a "gender non-conforming 23-year-old chess teacher living in New York City." Schwartz gave the mockers, and specifically Coulter, a stern dressing-down: So what's really being expressed by this sentiment is that gender queer or gender non-conforming individuals deserve less respect than cis (gender-conforming) people. Not to mention the fact that Gomez being an alleged killer is just a convenience to Ann Coulter's bigoted agenda, which probably wouldn't allow Mother Teresa the right to gender-neutral pronouns. The they/them backlash is just the latest manifestation of the general discomfort with the knowledge that gender is not a natural truth; or in other words, that our genital and chromosomal makeups don't necessarily decide our personalities, presentations, behaviors, sexual preferences or social roles. And, for those of us whose gender presentations and preferences don't cohere to our assigned genders, "they/them" offers an alternative that feels good. Next Page Poster Comment: non conforming pc bot freaks Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: BorisY (#0)
Dirks is as nuts as Gomez and he's in charge of one of the premier universities in the country.
Put Pablo Gomez Jr. in a cell and let him work out the pronoun etiquette with Bubba.
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