I'm looking for an answer from people who consider themselves "Gender Critical", or transphobic, or TERFs, and my question is this - Why would you refuse to use the pronouns someone wants? What does it cost you? Where's the harm?

I will always endeavor to treat people with respect. As a human being made in the image of God, every person is entitled to that. But that's also a two-way street. How much respect is being shown to women who are losing their sex-based rights because we're supposed to "be kind"?

As a bisexual woman who's in a same-sex relationship, I'm also sympathetic to lesbians who don't want to be pressured into dating or sleeping with men who claim to themselves be lesbians. And that pressure is real. Lesbians organize marches and rallies, and they're violently attacked for being "transphobes" with "genital preferences." Lesbian bars have practically gone extinct, in no small part because men demanded entry. And what of young women who feel a same-sex attraction? They're often being socially pressured into identifying as male or "non-binary," sometimes to the point of tragically lopping off body parts, all because identity trumps innate sexual orientation -- which can't even exist if we subordinate sex to so-called gender.

Why aren't there tomboys anymore? Because gender ideology says they're actually boys. By the same token, what does the word "lesbian" even mean if men, with male anatomy, are allowed to identify as such? And what happens to women who say to the men, "You don't belong here"? They're the ones who are shamed, insulted, villainized, attacked, ostracized, canceled. Not the men who are colonizing their exclusive spaces.

Why do almost all vertebrates have tails, but not apes and frogs?

You're asking what the harm is in changing the definitions of words until the only thing they mean is what you or I want them to mean. That's an invitation to chaos. If we can't agree on what words mean, language and communication will break down. We have to have a shared sense of linguistic meaning to have a language at all. Blue is not yellow, a dog is not a cat, and a man is not a woman.

There's also the not-insignificant matter of women's autonomy and safety at play here. Many trans-identified men unfortunately don't stop at wanting people to use feminine third-person pronouns. Wanting us to buy into the fiction that they actually are women, they demand entry into spaces that are for good reason reserved for actual biological women — spaces that women worked hard to secure for themselves. Men have no place in women's sports, women's locker rooms, women's bathrooms, women's rape crisis centers, women's prisons — for the simple fact that they are not women. That's not being mean or hateful. It's simply the truth. But if we're compelled to refer to them as actual women, then any justification for excluding them from women's spaces breaks down. Again, language and meaning matter. You ask what it costs. That's what it costs.

This is why words and their definitons matter.

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The result is that gay people, not just lesbians, are being shamed for who they are and effectively shoved back into the closet.

Pronouns are not fashion accessories for us to pick off a shelf. They're linguistic tools, meant to be a replacement for our names, corresponding in the singular third person to our sex. When you're speaking directly to another person, you usually use the second person, you. I'm generally not even going to use third-person pronouns unless you're not there, in which case you're never going to know anyway.

In any event, I'm not going to lie, much less be compelled to lie. Objective reality isn't up for a vote.

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