On Being An Unwoke Democrat: Of Indians, Pronouns and Transgender Clinics

 I support anybody being the person they want to be and feel they must be. But my question is: To what extent do I have to participate in supporting your self image?

--Dave Chappelle 

Having attended the New Hampshire Democratic Party state convention, having heard the wonderful Jamie Raskin confront, slam and otherwise undo Republicans in particular (Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Mike Johnson) and in general (Trumpists, Trumplings and other sub genera of Trumpies), I have returned home to Hampton renewed and reinvigorated, determined to say what I'm actually thinking, rather than silently self editing into demure quietude. 

Congressman Jamie Raskin

I'm determined to resist what used to be called "political correctness" and now is called, "wokeness."

One is the pandering, simpering embrace of identity politics, which may flatter a single group but alienates many more. The Cleveland Indians felt compelled to rename their team because "Indians" is now deemed derogatory. I agree with George Carlin that one owes it to a man to call him what he wants to be called: So Muhammed Ali gets to discard his "slave name," and you should call him by the name he chooses. And a group name which is, or has been meant as a slur, like "Kike" or "Nigger" should be abjured, by consensus. 

But insisting on "Native Americans" or "Indigenous People" is simply to insist on a misconception at best and a lie at worst. As George Carlin insisted, everybody is from somewhere else, except maybe the original human beings who walked out of the Rift Valley in Africa. But Native Americans did not simply materialize out of the soil on the Great Plains or anywhere else in North America. They clearly walked or boated to North America from Asia. They got here first, to be sure, maybe by hundreds or even a thousand years, and Europeans washed up later, and then displaced the Indians.

Quanah Parker

There is argument about the derivation of the word, "Indian" which, for years has been taught in history courses as the name Columbus gave the people he found living in the Caribbean, thinking he'd reached India,  but more recently claims have been made Columbus knew full well he had not reached India and the name came from In Deus, (Of God, or people of God).  History, of course, is one long argument, but it doesn't matter. The name was not used by whites to denigrate those who preceded them, as, say "Redskins" might have been said to do.

And to say, "I'm sticking with 'Indians'," is not to deny these stone age people deserved to be systematically murdered or treated savagely. Whether Phil Sheridan really said, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the sentiment was the same. Sheridan and Sherman understood to bring the Plains Indians to heel you had to kill all the buffalo, on which these cultures depended, and that the generals did, bringing in hunters and accomplishing a real genocide of animals, reducing a sea of buffalo, millions which covered miles of the vast Great Plains, to near extinction.

Having said all that, I'm sticking with "Indians."

Maga Trump Chump

I also don't like "native species" and "invasive species"  when it comes to plants and wildlife. Everything arrives, tries to successfully occupy a niche and either succeeds or does not.

So, as Democrats, let's not pander to "Indigenous People" and open our conventions with 15 minutes of drumming on tom toms. Let's just say we did them wrong and move on.

As for pronouns, no less than The New Yorker writes its articles using "they" to refer to a person who prefers to use that pronoun. I agree you call a person the name he or she wants to be called, but that applies only to proper nouns, to names, not to pronouns. My pronouns belong to me and so do your pronouns belong to me. I'm owner of what pronouns I use. As Chappelle says, the question is: To what extent must I participate in supporting your self image? Do I have to change a language pattern locked in since infancy, when I first learned to speak English, before I could even know I was learning anything at all? 

And lastly, while I cleave to the idea that every patient be treated with respect, and nobody should be belittled or made to feel badly about his or her sexual preference or gender identity--which is something which should matter only to those individuals, the idea that patients who present themselves to clinics for treatment of their gender dysphoria should be in control of what that treatment should be, without challenge is not just absurd, but it is inimical to the effectiveness of treatment. 

Now that a scholarly, dispassionate review of the experience of treating patients in the United Kingdom has been published by one of that nation's reigning and respected pediatricians, Hilary Cass, MD, is it alright again to ask whether we are doing more harm than good in our efforts to help?

Paul McHugh, MD

These areas of contention: Transgender , Woke acquiescence to demands for pronoun chaos and obsequious abjuration of words like "Indians" are losers for Democrats. 

Not only that, caving in to these misapprehensions is simply to embrace wrong thinking.