Transgender commentator Julia Malott says she opposes compulsory gender pronoun use and believes it isn’t good for trans people to deny their biological sex.
In an interview with True North, Malott explained that while she “unapologetically will use the pronouns that people want me to use for them because I understand how that can feel good…. and mostly I want to respect people, [but] doesn’t mean I’m comfortable mandating it for somebody else.”
Malott is a transgender woman from Toronto who is concerned about the state of politics surrounding gender identity and ideology.
She has a blog called Alotta Thoughts where she shares her perspectives about various transgender issues. She has also spoken at school board meetings and attended protests against the teaching of gender ideology in schools.
“It’s not illegal to be a jerk. It’s just maybe not gonna make you a lot of friends,” said Malott.
Malott explained in a recent YouTube video that “when someone experiences gender dysphoria and undergoes transition, they’re looking to be identified as their affirmed gender rather than their biological sex.” However, she believes “finding your affirmation from pronouns is not a good or healthy thing.”
“When I first transitioned, I received ‘she/her’ from everyone in my friendship circles. These were kind and loving people who wanted to support me in my transition. That being said, they would slip up and call me ‘he/him’ from time to time. Why? Because my voice was low, because I’m tall and have some masculine facial features, and because quite honestly, in many cases, they had known me as Jason for many years prior and were suddenly expected to switch to identifying me with a new set of pronouns and name.”
As for those who deliberately choose to use the opposite pronouns, Malott told True North she would rather have a conversation with them rather than get really upset over the matter.
“What I’ve found is that taking that position means I basically never get ‘he/him’ because people, for the most part, aren’t jerks.”
“Even people in this gender critical space, they’re concerned about being compelled. And when I come along and say, ‘look what you feel and what you want matters too, let’s just do what you’re comfortable with,’ almost always, people call me ‘she/her’ because they don’t feel like they’re denying reality.”
There was, however, a time when Malott did not think this way, and would get really upset when people referred to her by the wrong pronouns.
Being called by the wrong pronoun “might throw me into a cycle for a few days where I’d be emotionally thrown off. I wouldn’t want to go and see that person anymore or chat with that person because I was uncomfortable with them,” she explained.
But thanks to the help of a life coach, she came to realize that she was denying biological reality.
“I wanted to be female, and at this point I was imagining that I was. I had created this facade (where) I am female, just like all the other women.”
“I realized how easy it was to just construct this differently for myself and say, ‘I am biologically male, and people are gonna see that, and that doesn’t mean that they dislike me, that just means that they see that.’”
“Thus, I don’t need to be bothered by that.”
A recent poll conducted by Redfield and Wilton Strategies on behalf of Newsweek found that almost half of U.S. millennials believe that not referring to someone by their preferred gender pronouns should be made a criminal offense.
In Canada, the Ontario Human Rights Code gives protection to gender pronouns, and several publicly funded colleges and universities consider not respecting pronouns to be a violation of human rights policy or a form of harassment – as previously reported by True North.
Activists have also claimed that biological science rejects the “sex binary” and that biological sex is being used by people to “justify transphobia.”
