Dear Editor,
I obviously can’t prove it, but I’m convinced that the personal pronoun movement played a larger role in producing Trump than most people think. To many outside academia, the idea of personal pronouns sounds both silly and like an attack on deeply ingrained customs. The fact that the use of personal pronouns was forced on people in many environments, with college professors being fired for not using them, made things even worse.
The idea that “the left” was running around trying to force everyone to change their language under threat of penalty was exactly the kind of thing that might lead millions to write off the entire left as a bunch of privileged fools more interested in semantics and punishing those who disagreed with them than in addressing any of the practical issues slowly strangling much of the country.
Incredibly poor choices of rallying cries exacerbated this. “Defund the police” was never going to work in a country full of people who fear each other. The former House Majority Whip James Clyburn said in an interview with CBS in 2020 that the slogan “is killing our party, and we’ve got to stop it.” Likewise, “woke” was meaningless unless you already knew what it signified and, as they say, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. The vagueness of the term allowed it to be used by the right as a catch-all pejorative for anything perceived as liberal overreach.
So many self-inflicted wounds. So much damage.
I am sympathetic to nonbinary people living in a society that often views them as freaks. But the personal pronoun movement will not increase acceptance. It makes communication more difficult and hands your real enemies a mighty weapon against you.
Lee Russ
Bennington, Vt.
