The title of the late jurist Robert Bork's 1996 book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" never seemed more apropos than with the recent request by the University of Tennessee Office for Diversity and Inclusion that students use gender-neutral pronouns to describe themselves.
The former United States Court of Appeals judge described what he believed is a decline in Western culture and cast partial blame on modern liberalism's dual emphases on radical egalitarianism and radical individualism.
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UT students asked to use gender-neutral pronouns
Both radical egalitarianism and radical individualism are wrapped up in the university's suggestion to make it easier on "transgender people and people who do not identify within the gender binary," according to the school's Pride Center Director Donna Braquet,
In case you're not hip to all things Caitlyn (Jenner), gender binary is classifying gender into two distinct, opposite and disconnected forms of masculine (male) and feminine (female). None of that gray area of transitioned, transitioning, pangender, agender or genderqueer.
Braquet recommends that teachers, instead of calling roll, ask each student to provide the name they prefer to use - in case it's different from their legal name - and the pronoun the student wants to use.
That would include he or she, and - yes, there are others - the likes of ne, ve, ey, ze and ze, and those are just the subject versions. The object and pronoun versions include the equally made-up words nem, nir, ver, vis, em, eir, hir, zir, xem and zyr.
Most college students are still struggling with verb-subject agreement in the English language. Asking them to remember that the person on their left goes by the pronouns ze, zir and zir and the person on their right goes by xe, xem and xyr is a little much.
And imagine the confusion in science classes when the symbol of an element in the periodic table and a student who owns the same pronoun are the same. It has all the makings of a new "Who's on first?" routine.
Without descending in the argument of whether your birth gender is the one you must stick to, aren't there much simpler ways to handle this? A chat with the teacher before class could take care of nearly every case. Otherwise, students who are transitioning could go by whichever name and sex to which they are transitioning.
The use of the gender neutral pronouns is not mandated, the university maintains. But neither has political correctness shown it's going the way of New Coke.