Ted Rall: Elon Musk, Gender and the War over Pronouns

Ted Rall discusses Elon Musk, Gender and the War over Pronouns

The pronoun thing also feels irrelevant to people who live in communities where they not only don’t know anyone who is transgender or nonbinary, no one they know knows someone who is. Politics fail when they don’t connect to perceived reality.

Can transgender Americans achieve full equality and eliminate discrimination without a radical grammatical transformation? If not, there is only one way to get there absent the kind of wholesale cultural transformation that took place in revolutionary Russia and its attendant social pressures. Stop preaching and wage a patient, persistent educational campaign that convinces most citizens that a more complicated world is a better one.

I’m not optimistic.

Emphasis Mine

The pronoun issue is a microcosm of a social revolution. Individual changes in behaviour eventually becomes a societal one. Because the order of society is changed, those who consider themselves to be beneficiaries of the current order, will wage a vicious campaign to maintain their current status in the current order. The benefits of a new social order must exceed the cost of overcoming the resistance to change, and that benefit must be seen by enough people to be good enough to pay the cost, in order for the societal change to be implemented.