Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll calls out DEAD-NAMING! THE WORST THING THERE EVER WAS! She writes:

If you live long enough, you will have the chance to hear astonishing things. Often, twice. Ideas cycle around like fashions. What was passe becomes “retro” and comes around again a couple of decades later. Hemlines go up and down. I remember when the fashion industry went to mid-calf and maxi dresses to FORCE fashionistas to purchase new clothes. When hemlines just kept going up and up to loincloth levels, a whole lot of young ladies, myself included, just kept cutting off and hemming up their old skirts and dresses rather than buying new garments! Or, even ROLLING them up if you were really lazy or went to Catholic Girls’ School. Old becomes new again. Only the coolest people can keep up.

For example, I have learned fairly recently that “dead-naming” means calling a trans person by the name he or she was born with and used for decades! Dead-naming is a GRIEVOUS sin which will get you Twittered to death in a heartbeat, and possibly sent to jail in Canada or in the U.S. if a Democrat ever gets in again, God forbid! So though we cheered him and honored him and put him on Wheaties boxes long ago, Bruce Jenner and all his accomplishments may never again be mentioned. Bruce Jenner is dead. Long live Caitlyn.

I try to call people what they want to be called. In real life (a place a lot of leftists rarely visit…), my name is Susan. My Daddy and a very small circle of my friends have always called me Susie, and that’s fine. In the last eight years, I have been called and will answer to “Ammo Grrrll” or even “AG.” Both my husband and Mama always called me Susan and that is what I was mostly called in high school. Nowadays, few married women take their husbands’ names. It makes addressing holiday cards a pain, but on the other hand, it sure makes finding your old female friends a lot easier. So though I have had my husband’s last name for 52 years, I would not pitch a hysterical fit if someone called me by my “dead” or “maiden” name! Because I am not insane.

Anybody know what the deal is with gay men and the formality they seem to prefer in names? Maybe your experience is different, but every gay man I have ever known – and remember, I lived in San Francisco just off Castro Street for several years – wanted to be called Robert, or Michael, or James. Never Bobby, Mike or Jimmy. A notable exception would be Pete Buttigieg. Though, I suppose if you are a gay man and Butt is already part of your name, adding Peter to the mix would be a bridge too far.

Here’s the thing, see. I’m sure there are still a few hardcore homophobes (a very stupid, inaccurate word, but what passes for “someone who is put off by or hostile to gay people”). But there are also very few people who don’t have a friend, a cousin, a sibling, a workmate who is, in fact, gay. And often it was observed that some of those people had stable, loving, long-term partners. Meanwhile, your heterosexual nephew’s marriage blew up before your check cleared for the set of sixteen silver shrimp forks you were forced to purchase from their Gift Registry because all the cheap stuff had already been taken.

You don’t have to be some kind of bigot to have had or continue to have serious concerns about the long-term effects to civilization of changing the millennia-old definition of “marriage.” Things that have been absolutely foundational to society should not be abandoned lightly. At the same time, you can also be a fair-minded person who thinks that Daniel and Kevin next door, who have been together for 28 years, deserve some kind of recognition of that relationship and some legal protection in the matter of hospital visits or inheritance.

But it’s academic anyway because that battle was lost. A massive societal alteration was decided by a total of five Americans – FIVE! — after being soundly defeated for the second time by California referendum, even in the Obama tsunami of 2008. And did the losers riot in the street, carry a beheaded image of Obama around, start fires, attack police or even (God forbid) physically attack gay people? No, they did not. Compare and contrast with what happened after the 2016 election when 63 MILLION voters and a yuge majority of the Electoral College upset the predetermined coronation of Hillary Clinton.

You know who committed virtual and actual violence after gay marriage won? THE WINNERS. Winning was not enough. People – well, not Obama, of course – but people, who a few years earlier had supported traditional marriage, were “outed,” fired and “canceled.”

And quicker than you could get used to calling Kevin’s partner Daniel his “husband” or, worse, his “wife.” another country was heard from. Yes! In the Diversity Olympics, ding, ding, ding, we now have a new Top Dog Winner: The Transgenders!! Move over, you boring old gay people, who are happy with your sex and attracted to others of that same sex! In the Brave New World of Intersectional Politics, that will no longer be allowed. Lesbians – you will now be required to date men with dangly bits who are wearing dresses and have decided that they are now women. Only attracted to real women? Tough noogies, bigot!

Woe unto the poor young salesclerk in a hardware store who “misgenders” an ugly, rude, clearly unhinged giant of a man who feels entitled to kick over merchandise in a store because he has accurately been called “Sir” instead of “Ma’am.” (As a woman with a fairly deep speaking voice, many is the time I have been called “Sir” on the telephone when making a plane or hotel reservation. Had I known I could pitch a hysterical fit or get someone fired because of it, think of the 15 minutes of fame I could have by now! Maybe even cash money!)

Which brings us full circle back to the dead-naming. Because to support the massive illusion of sex being just a fluid construct requires a Stalinist devotion to erasing everything that has gone before. It is of a piece, really, with the Taliban dynamiting Buddhist statuary, pretend “Palestinians” like Egyptians Yassir Arafat or Edward Said, claiming that Jews were never in Israel, and with the history haters tearing down Confederate statues.

In totalitarian circles, inconvenient history and unacceptable ideas that are declared Dead must never be resurrected. Likewise, if you say you are a woman now, then you must always have been a woman and woe be unto some Unwokester who mentions your past. I can sympathize because I used to be a leftist. I wish I could pretend it never happened, but I am more honest than that. I have friends who have been married multiple times; they have made peace with dead relationships and moved on. But, especially if there are children involved, they do not punish anyone who remembers they used to be married to someone else. Or even several someone elses. Because they are not insane.

We have entered a whole ‘nother surreal realm of Crazy. Nothing good can come of it.

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