If you want a textbook example of hysteria, look no further than the pronoun craze. Just a handful of years ago, this was never a thing. No one talked about it. It was as rare as Hunter Biden wearing pants. Then all of a sudden, it became a thing. It grew. It multiplied, even exponentially.
It was like mold or rabbits or Mitt Romney's family. And the reason for this is pretty simple: Kids create a craze that's about them, that brings attention to who they are, and why wouldn't they embrace it? It sure beats eating Tide PODS or reading a children's book written by Julie Banderas. That'll sell a copy.
Suddenly, it became compulsory, specifically for the people around the kids who had to play along. It wasn't just, "Hello, I'm Greg, and I'm a ze." It's, "Hello, I'm Greg, and if you don't refer to me as ze, I'm going to report you to the principal." Which is weird, because I should be out of school anyway, especially with the restraining order.
But what pronouns offered was an option for truly dull but needy people to gain attention and power over anyone in their vicinity. No longer did you have to do anything interesting or become knowledgeable in an area that might impress people. It was just me, me, me disguised as they, them or theirs, which destroyed language. Imagine telling your mom you're having a friend over for dinner, and she asks, "What time?" And you say, "Oh, they'll be there at 7."
And your mom screams, "I didn't make enough meatloaf for that many people." And then, of course, she starts drinking and crying and drinking and crying and the next thing you know, you're covered in blood and cake mix.
You see how it screws up basic communications, but it's worse than that because it's not about pronouns. It's about people, and people connect not through differences, but similarities.
And you never frontload a first impression like, say, at a job interview with a personal demand that makes it about you. Which is why I can safely say I've never met one interesting person who led with their pronoun because they didn't have to. But thankfully, this fad is dying.
People are waking up to this madness. Take the school system in Newport News, Va. According to a new school policy, the faculty needs written permission from parents to use a different name or pronouns than the ones on a child's official record.
Now, true, in the good old days, parents only had to sign a permission slip for field trips, not power trips. But at least now, parents have a say, which means if little Tommy has been brainwashed into believing he's a girl, you can't call him Tammy unless his parents say so.
And the school says nobody can be forced to use anybody else's pronouns. So you can't be coerced into this gender hokey pokey. God bless Newport News for having some balls or ovaries. I didn't check. They're kind of the same thing. But thankfully, the school recognizes that they don't have more rights than a child's parents and once that's done, you stop feeding the flames of a stupid fad because that's the nature of hysteria. It arrives, and it scares people into obeying, even if there's no foundation for it.
Human history is filled with examples. The Salem Witch Trials, the Monkey Men in India, the disturbing growth of recipe books by annoying morning people. Take the Dancing Plague of 1518 — began in Strasbourg, France, when one woman started dancing in the streets and didn't stop for almost a week.
Within a month, 400 citizens were afflicted with the urge to dance, often passing out from strokes, heart attacks and exhaustion. Authorities had no idea what caused this trance-like state, but they tried to exorcize this demon affliction by constructing a stage in hiring dancers and musicians, but by indulging it, it only made it worse. So the madness spread to Germany, Holland and Switzerland. I believe we have an example.
CNN PUBLISHES 'GUIDE TO NEOPRONOUNS,' EMBRACES GENDERLESS PRONOUNS LIKE 'LEAF, LEAFSELF, SUN, STAR'
Oh, they had tape of those times. Of course, they never found the root cause of this affliction. Does it sound familiar?
Well, just a few years ago, none of this pronoun crap existed. All we had was this pesky thing called biology. It just never even occurred to anyone to second-guess that, but by 2023, it changed and we indulged the change.
This performative identity theater flooded social media, which is the pusher of all pointless trends, and it infected schools and the workplace. You can get fired from your job for making the wrong guess about a pronoun, and it's literally a federal case to call somebody he just because he is one.
But the bigger story is that years ago, none of this existed, now it does because, like most trends, it's easily amplified. It grew fast because there was a low bar of entry, and it made people feel special, and feeling special trumped biological facts, especially among the young, who are already at odds with biology, especially if they have red hair.
And then sadly, you can't find a kid smiling with red hair, it doesn't exist. We looked, spent hours — and it saddled the rest of us with new rules and customs to accommodate the afflicted, but now we see the whole thing's artificial. We realize that pronouns are now like man buns: a trend that never would have happened if David Beckham just focused on soccer.
But the fact is, interesting people don't need to lean into their preferred pronouns. They are just who they are, but for a while, gender ideology gave the needy something to set them apart: I exist outside the boundaries of science, they declare, your gender binary doesn't apply to me, now do exactly what I say, or I'll make trouble for you. But the hysteria is waning. Perhaps the whole grift got boring.
GREG GUTFELD: RESUMES WITH NON BINARY PRONOUNS ARE THE PERFECT RED FLAG
One day, and let's hope it won't be long, everyone will look back on this era and wonder how a mass psychosis convinced so many people that biology doesn't exist, and we can go back to judging people by what really matters, how much money they make — because nothing is more gender-neutral than an a******.
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