Fatigued from this wrote:
When did people with mental health challenges, or emotional identity disorders , or non-traditional sexual preferences, take your pick, get to redefine the meaning of words in the English language for everyone else? Herein is the resentment so many have listening to Kara Goucher laboring hard to hit her they and them quota every time she’s talking about Nikki.
This business about pronouns is by far the most idiotic cultural thing I have ever heard of in my long existence.
Just run, good luck to you, and keep all the other crap about your existence to yourself .
It's not just about redefining words, it's using these redefinitions to reorganize society according to a set of ideas that have no basis in material reality. The people who do this claim moral superiority while bullying other people into silence; and the kicker is that the true believers don't realize that they're doing this.
Kara has to tread carefully and practice these pronouns becauase she is being asked to override, not just social conventions (as activists would have you belive), but the multiple sex-related cues that allow human beings to correctly categorize people in less than a second. Faithful execution of this task protects people from the mob and indicates moral virtue within this sphere.
I don't think Nikki is evil. She's just trying to make sense of herself using the most popular criteria available to her. Unfortunately, our culture is currently very identity obsessed and narcissistic. It's one thing to ask people to leave you alone in your self expression; it's another thing entirely to demand that other people reflect your preferred/idealized image of yourself back to you AND view THEMSELVES through the ideological lenses through which you view the world.
When it comes to track & field, I wasn't a fan of Shelby because I thought she was on drugs before she was busted. I'm not a fan of Nikki because it's hard to get behind somebody who wants to compete for women's awards but refuses to acknowledge that she's a woman. She's furthering gender stereotypes by suggesting that female masculinity makes one a different gender, and to be honest, she's not all that transgressive. The other thing is, I'm suspicious of Nikki's progression.
Slowly but surely, I'm losing interest in professional running. It seems like a lot of smoke and mirrors.