But that is the kind of language the Church of England is considering. No more He for God. The pronouns of the Almighty are going to be They/Them.

First, let me state the obvious: no one thinks the Judeo-Christian God is a man. Father is a metaphor, as is burning bush, fountain, lamb, shepherd, rock, river…  Words are inadequate to describe the author of life. But they are all we have.

And language can play tricks. Many languages assign a gender to genderless things. In Hebrew, the word “table” is masculine and “door” is feminine. The same in Russian. In French, both are feminine. But no one believes the door has a gender identity, still less a sex. That’s just how the language works. The fact that, grammatically speaking, God in the Bible mostly takes male pronouns doesn’t mean God is male.

But I do get it: language matters. And gendered nouns do influence the way we think about the reality of the thing to which they refer. And this can easily be extended to how we describe the almighty. Given that people of faith think of God as another way of talking about ultimate reality, the gendered nature of God language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority in the very nature of things. Patriarchal assumptions are reflected and reinforced and then projected onto the stars.

Equally, the gender of certain nouns can often seem to reflect some of the basic dynamics of sexual politics. Take the Hebrew word for both “womb” and “breasts”. They are both male. By making these words masculine, might this reflect a subliminal sense of ownership — that the language is somehow exonerating, justifying even, the perspective of the male gaze?

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Should we take this to mean that God reflects the projection of the male perspective upon the universe? In the beginning, perhaps. But, today, children aside, does anyone really imagine God as a man. Judaism and Islam are especially clear on this. God is beyond gender. They/them in reality, even if He/Him grammatically. That’s just the way language works.

Which is why conscripting the impossibility of describing God with human words into the culture war about gender identity is just mischief-making. Only those with a ridiculously naive and anthropomorphic view of God as a man with a white beard can be in any way disturbed by the observation that God is beyond gender. And if they have such a view, they deserve to have it disturbed.

All those many different words to describe God do have a theological purpose. It is to undermine one of the cardinal sins of the Bible: making God into a thing of one’s own image. To call God both a fountain and a rock – He can’t be both – is a way of saying something about God and taking it back at the same time. It is how mystical, technically cataphatic, theology makes its raids on the unspeakable. Occasionally giving God she/her pronouns is a perfect example of the way cataphatic theology can rightly undermine some sort of idolatrous, fixed idea of what God is.

Of course, with Christianity, things are a little trickier. Because here, Jesus is God — he is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1.15) — and Jesus was a man. Clearly he/him. Yesterday at General Synod, the cheeky reactionary, my friend Fr Marcus Walker, averred: “I just don’t think we should be misgendering God. He’s made it clear what his pronouns are — especially in his incarnation — so maybe we should just use them.” Funny yes, correct no. The incarnation of God as male tells us no more about God than his incarnation as ginger or dark haired. There is no read across from Jesus being a man to God being one.

“God is our Mother as truly as he is our Father,” wrote Julian of Norwich back in the 14th century. It’s hardly breaking news.

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But this is not saying we need to change “our Father” to “our Parent”. Heaven help us. Once in a while, perhaps, very occasionally, such an ugly phraseology might be useful in shocking us out of an over identification of God with human categories. But the language of tradition stands because it is a valuable way of apprehending the divine. Words should not continually interject themselves into our worship demanding attention; mostly they should drop away as attention is directed to the beyond. “Our parent” keeps us stuck to the ground, mired in the messiness of all-too-human politics and division. Leaden culture-war politics dressed up in a cassock is a sure fire turn off for people seeking something transcendent.

I do feel a little sorry for the poor old Church of England. Whatever we say is bound to be misrepresented. The Church is not changing God’s pronouns from He/Him to They/Their. Who are you, Moses asks the burning bush? “I am what I am” comes the unhelpful reply. God prefers the first person subjective personal pronoun. Suitably inscrutable. God, I/me.

But the military is far from alone in this new fixation with gender politics. If you haven’t yet been asked to declare your pronouns, it won’t be long. Sooner or later, your employer will suggest that you sign off emails with them, or announce them along with your name at the beginning of meetings.

Declaring our pronouns has become the most common way in which we are expected to pledge allegiance to the new identity-obsessed religion that has captured most of our major institutions. The likes of Nicola Sturgeon, Jeremy Corbyn, and Kamala Harris have all performed the ritual, but other figures have been less predictable. Who would have anticipated that Richard Moore, the Head of MI6, would suddenly decide to include “he/him” in his Twitter bio?

Such examples are a reminder of just how far the virus of Critical Social Justice has spread. Earlier this month, it was reported that members of staff at the British Library were being encouraged to wear pronoun badges with “he/him”, “she/her” or “they/them”. Last year, Scottish civil service staff were being asked to sign off emails with their preferred pronouns in order to “foster an open culture that is supportive of the LGBTI+ community”. Even the BBC has issued guidelines to encourage its staff to make similar gestures, claiming that adding pronouns to emails is a “small, proactive step that we can all take to help create a more inclusive workplace”.

Many of the more vociferous criticisms of pronoun declaration have come from the Right, which has inevitably created the impression that where you stand on this subject is a matter of political affiliation. As with so many debates in the culture wars, the issue of pronouns has been misrepresented as a simple question of whether one is on the right or wrong side of history.

Activists insist that it is just a way to be inclusive and polite — and in many cases that is clearly the intention. Yet the genuinely liberal position is to oppose pronoun declaration, and it is worth outlining this case in full given that most of us, at some point in the near future, will be faced with the choice between explaining our reasons for refusing or capitulating for the sake of an easy life.

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When you ask someone to declare pronouns, you are doing one of two things. You are either saying that you are having trouble identifying this person’s sex, or you are saying that you believe in the notion of gender identity and expect others to do the same. As a species we are very well attuned to recognising the sex of other people, so, for the most part, to ask for pronouns is an expression of fealty to a fashionable ideology — and to set a test for others to do likewise.

In her book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce explains the notion of gender identity as “something like a sexed soul”. Some take the view that each person has an innate gender identity that transcends physiological considerations. The definition of “woman” is therefore as fluid as can be imagined, because a “woman” is simply someone who identifies as a woman. The obvious next question — “what is a woman?” — is often dismissed as transphobic, presumably because the answer inexorably directs us towards the reality of sexual dimorphism.

Yet gender identity ideology is simply not a belief system that most people share. I do not identify as male; it’s a biological fact, as mundane as the fact that I’ve got blue eyes or that I’m right-handed. I am not here talking about gender dysphoria — those people who feel as odds with their sex and seek to adapt either through medical procedures or the way in which they present themselves — but rather the notion that we each have an inherent gender that has nothing to do with our bodies. This is akin to a religious conviction, and we would be rightly appalled if employers were to demand that their staff proclaim their faith in Christ the Saviour or Baal the Canaanite god of fertility before each meeting.

In an article in the Metro this week, a young person who identifies as non-binary complained about being misgendered by doctors when seeking treatment for endometriosis, a condition of the womb. But for a medical practitioner, biological sex is an important consideration that cannot simply be wished away. In the article, the writer notes that one young doctor — who had just completed a trans inclusivity training course — “seamlessly switched to using ‘they/them’ pronouns” in their conversation, although why he would make the curious decision to start addressing his patient in the third person is not clarified.

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This point is often overlooked. Announcing one’s pronouns has little practical purpose in most scenarios, given that we do not refer to individuals by their pronouns unless we are talking about them, rather than to them. Moreover, even raising the question can be offensive. Julie Bindel has observed that women who reject traditional notions of femininity are frequently told that they “look like men”. To ask such an individual for her pronouns can be construed as a kind of attack, given that she will have struggled to achieve acceptance as a woman who simply does not conform to sex stereotypes.

Then there is the added complication of neopronouns. “They” and “them” are now routinely adopted as singular pronouns by the mainstream press, as though syntactically shambolic prose is a small price to pay for being seen to be “inclusive”. This usage has not caught on with the general public, but this hasn’t prevented staff at online dictionaries from updating their definitions in accordance with their new creed. No longer do they see their role as recording the inevitable evolutions of the English language, but rather re-engineering words and their meanings to suit their ideological preferences. On university campuses, it’s not uncommon for badges to be distributed during freshers’ week to limit the potential for faux pas. “My pronouns are he/him/his,” the badge might say, but it could just as easily be “they/them/their”, “xe/xem/xyr”, “ne/nym/nis”, “ve/ver/vis”, “fae/faer/faers” or “zie/zim/zir”. This kind of cryptic puzzle makes for quite the initiation.

Although no employers are as yet mandating pronoun declaration, there is something coercive about the request. An actor friend of mine recently told me that it is now common for members of a new cast to state their pronouns at the beginning of the rehearsal process. In such circumstances, he says, to refuse would be unfeasible. For one thing, objections to the practice are not very well understood, and you would be instigating a tense and lengthy debate just at the moment when the cast ought to be bonding. More seriously, a refusal would doubtless result in accusations of transphobia, and the actor in question would be unlikely to be cast in future productions. Who is going to scupper their own career over a couple of words?

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It is often forgotten that many transgender people are opposed to pronoun declaration for a number of reasons. It draws needless attention to them when they just want to get on with their lives. It can have the effect of “outing” people against their will, particularly if they are in the early stages of their transition. It creates a false impression that gender identity ideology is the norm even though it is a belief system shared by relatively few. Most importantly, compelled speech is a fundamentally illiberal prospect, one that should always be resisted by all.

It is strange that the objections to pronoun declaration are so often construed as being “reactionary” when they are essentially progressive. Many who believe in liberal values will therefore feel uncomfortable in refusing to state pronouns at work. But until more people are prepared to make their feelings clear on this issue, it will continue to be misinterpreted as “a Right-wing talking-point”.

A refusal to participate in these rituals need not be antagonistic, and most employers will be happy to hear your reasons. There is always the possibility that you could be accused of transphobia or hate, but this is simply part of the coercive strategy. For all the awkward conversations that might arise, there is nothing Right-wing about standing up to ideologues who insist on imposing their values onto everyone else.

These were the opening words from the Labour Party leader at the Pink News Awards yesterday.

Corbyn hadn’t want to miss an opportunity to virtue signal — on International Pronoun Day, no less. He has impeccable trans-inclusive politics, even supporting the inclusion of men who identify as women on all-female shortlists. Corbyn’s self-appointed advisor on all things trans, Owen Jones, has made it clear to the Labour leader that in order to be on the “right side of history” one must put male-bodied trans women before actual women.

At the @PinkNews awards, @jeremycorbyn introduces himself by saying: “My name is Jeremy Corbyn, and my pronouns are he/him.” ??️‍? pic.twitter.com/WZcTy6VCoy

— Owen Jones (@owenjonesjourno) October 16, 2019

So, as the bearded, twice married father stepped up to the podium at the awards, Corbyn ensured that everyone knew that he identified as male, as opposed to either a woman (she/her) or non-binary (they/them, or ze/zim).

Most of my friends and colleagues block the extremely trans-woke Pink News site from their social media feeds because of the toxic levels of misogyny on its pages. But Corbyn’s words did make it through to the mainstream. They were widely reported by the wokeing class dudebros who were as proud as punch of their Absolute Boy.

But I don’t see anything to be proud of. Indeed, this obsession with pronouns is extremely worrying. Especially now the police have joined in. The same week that government statistics were released showing rape convictions down to a shocking 1.4% of those reported, Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke of Cheshire Police found the time to make a video to mark IPD, telling us that for many people, “Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal wellbeing.” So can being raped, but let’s get our priorities right, shall we?

Today marks #pronounsday – seeking to make sharing, educating and respecting personal pronouns commonplace. @pronounsday pic.twitter.com/pe9x9GWTJj

— Julie Cooke (@JulieCooke40) October 16, 2019

For all those lesbians who are constantly told we “look like men” because we refuse to wear make-up, high heels and corsets, and dress for the benefit of men, it is offensive and deeply anti-lesbian to now get asked “what are your pronouns?” We have struggled for years to win respect and acceptance as women — why should we have to spell it out.

There are women I know that look absolutely nothing like men, but who are called ‘sir’ in restaurants or stores, for the simple reason that they reject femininity. The lesbians I know have developed a sense of pride to be able to assert that we are women, despite the fact that we do not exist only in relation to men. To then be asked whether we are he/him or even they/them is ridiculous.

One woman I know who is part of an LGBTQQI+ choir was even put through an arduous and upsetting disciplinary process because she refused to wear a pronoun badge.

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The trouble with being able to choose your own pronouns is that it can be abused. If men aren’t identified as men, then they can no longer be held accountable for patriarchy and misogyny. And whether we like it or not, men are the ones to blame for the oppression of women.

Women, on the other hand, are unable, however much some of us may wish, to identify our way out of being oppressed by the male sex class. We cannot escape atrocities such as FGM, forced marriage, rape, or domestic abuse simply by giving ourselves new pronouns.

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My generation of feminists fought for the right of women to have single sex services in order to protect us from male violence. We also fought for equal pay, maternity rights and abortion rights, and we stand up against male violence. If men are freely allowed to identify themselves as ‘she/her’, what will happen to all those rights? Our ability to evidence our discrimination and oppression in relation to men will be slowly eroded.

Jeremy Corbyn, the man who took money from a regime that executes men for being gay can present himself as super-woke by telling us he, ahem, identifies as male. But let us also remember that this is the same man who made the ludicrous suggestion that a solution to sexual attacks on the underground was to assign women-only carriages. Does he not see the flaw in his logic? If such a thing existed, all a male-bodied sexual predator would need to do to gain access would be to wear a pronoun badge declaring that his pronouns were ‘she/her’.

My badge? Stop/This/Madness.

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