Some of the most aggressive cultural propaganda today is coming from magazines for teenagers. The biggest crusade is about sex (yes, as soon as possible) and gender, where biology is completely negotiable, and incorrect or bizarre pronouns are nonnegotiable.
Teen Vogue Digital Editorial Director Phil Picardi declared: "For the past year or so, we've made a concerted effort to limit (and, eventually, banish) heteronormativity from all of our content ... we use gender neutral pronouns in almost all contexts. Our readers have appreciated the shift, and often help police our language."
Likewise, Seventeen magazine Executive Editor Joey Bartolomeo announced, "We want Seventeen to be a magazine where all girls feel represented and included, regardless of their sexual identities." The new orthodoxy was installed when the magazine posted a video on June 26 headlined "Trans Students Explain Why Pronouns Are Important."
First, a girl named Leah Juliett announces, "Just because I present more femme, doesn't mean I'm any less they/them." Another girl with the name C Mandler -- let's guess that using a period after C is a troglodyte move -- recounts telling her family over snacks: "Hey, guys. I'm non-binary. I don't have a gender."
Then the Facebook video stops -- for an ad break. Who says these propaganda lessons for children can't make a few bucks on the side? The advertisers included Hewlett-Packard, New York Life and WP Engine.
This is an "education" campaign Seventeen organized with GLAAD, and C Mandler is a GLAAD campus ambassador.
Juliett explains gender deconstruction in astrological terms: "In my opinion, gender is a universe. It is a broad spectrum of planets and stars and sky that truly cannot be contained into a binary. ... So when someone identifies with a pronoun, they're essentially taking their little piece of that broad universe and identifying with that." By using the "correct pronouns," you are "validating that yes, you are right in your identity, and you are important, and we are respecting you."
Validation of this nonsense is mandatory. Gender identity can change on a whim, but it must be deeply honored at all times. The transgender and "genderqueer" humans seem to live in a higher universe, a self-selected class of victims of pronoun-abusing "society."
Mandler continues the tale of snack time with family. She proclaims: "My pronouns are they, them, theirs, and that's a nonnegotiable, and they were all kind of like, 'OK.' ... I know, personally, when I get misgendered by strangers, it's one thing, but it's especially painful when it's people who are close to you. So when my parents misgender me, it's a knife in my heart because they're the people whose opinions matter more to me than anybody else's."
Obviously, the family's opinions do not matter. Only her opinion matters, and only validation is acceptable. She cannot imagine the possibility that parents who brought home a baby daughter might feel pain at this rejection of biology.
Juliett even takes exception to the term "preferred pronouns." They're not a preference; they're like a vital organ! She says: "It's also not a preference; it's who they are. You need to use those pronouns! It's literally an extension of my arm or my leg. It's just as much a part of me as a vital organ. My identity, although you can't see it, still needs to be validated just as much as you would validate the fact that I have five fingers or five toes."
The last metaphor the gender deniers should use is body parts to suggest that their pronouns are as defining as fingers and toes ... or breasts and genitals.