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?

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.

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"?

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.

How do I get over a long-term relationship breakup?

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

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.

Hello,hope y'all doin good, i came to Quora to share my strange story , a very weird one , a story when luck smiled at me ,maybe u will enjoy it , let's begin,have fun... A year ago ,I was a real porn addicted(btw I was 18) ,but never had sex before, I don't have a gf I didn't try to find one even ,always thinking to go to find a sex worker but then I just don't , everyday watching different bodies getting fucked and everyday enjoying. One day, I was watching porn, a big ass lady with big boobs ,just after seeing her the image of my female cousin poped in my mind, (let's introduce her : she's 35 years old , very big ass , nice boobs ,not very big but nice,always wearing tight clothes , she's divorced ) and I thought of me fucking her ,I never had sexual desires for her but now I do days went by and when I met her I was so horny ,I couldn't stay with the family cz my penis was clearly erected , I realized this is my first time I get horny for one of my family ,it not illegal in my country.well to make a long story short( if u want details just text me I will tell u 😊),I decided to give her signs that I want to fuck her,finally I decided to have sex and with my cousin , I thought it is the best beggining for me, i started touching her when I came across her in a narrow place , make her feel my hard cock when we hug , I thought it will hard and I will be ashamed but no , I felt nothing and she said nothing , probably she thought it was by mistake,anyways, I decided then to talk with her about sex, waited for her to be alone in a room and talk with her, I confessed everything about me watching porn and addicted..etc,she said it's normal and u are growing up and u must have sex,well at that time I was like whaaat????? Well I didn't control myself and asked her for sex ( horny like I Ve never been before) she said that she will think Abt it ,2 weeka went by then she called me ,telling that she reserved a room in a hotel and we meet tonight ,we met,and bruuhh, sex is great , I mean, I had to find a pirstitue ,what I was waiting for to have such a feeling ????, I will never forget that night, I started kissing her she was kissing hard ,she misses sex so bad , she sucked my dick and swallowed my semen ,I felt I'm in a dream , then when fucked ,her ass was very big and the anus was open ,didn't struggle to get my hard cock inside it , she was obviously missing sex , she was shouting ,fuck me yh fuck me , I go fast after every word until I cum , we did that 3 times , then we went to her pussy , using condoms I fucked her so hard the moans were higher , everything was perfect ,in the end I asked her to lick her body , licked pussy ,ass, boobs,then she sucked my cock until we sleeped ,all I know that she was dirty ,well before even having sex with her I knew she is an open minded woman , and a woman that looks that she donesnt know anything , but she knows everything, but never expected having sex with her ,well she was horny and that helped...but no one of us regretted that sex ever.. We still have sex from time to time ,and I started having sex with sex workers , joining threesomes..etc If u want pics of her text me.

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

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.

We finally may be able to rid the world of mosquitoes. But should we? - The Washington Post