I should’ve been concentrating on reading a book.
But instead I sit here, at a modern day typewriter,
Asking, what do pronouns mean.
What’s the hidden meaning?
Do pronouns contribute to society or take away from society?
Do we as citizens of America understand what it’s really like to not feel comfortable in a said type of pronouns?
Or do we just feel uncomfortable in our own thoughts and use pronouns to cover it up.
Do pronouns cover our darkest, most dangerous, truth-telling secrets...
Or do we just hope and hope and hope that it will?

God, now that I finally understand what gender is to me,
I think I used she/her pronouns to conform,
And they/them pronouns to hide
And finally, he/him pronouns to accept.
To accept who I am.
To accept the “real” me.
To accept that I am different.

Gender is a ****.
Now bear with me, I don’t mean it in a bad way
I mean it as gender is elusive
Gender is tricky
Maybe with my words I should be more picky
But that’s not the point
The point is gender is something I cannot hope to begin to understand

Maybe gender is a universe
And within it we are all stars
Or maybe gender is an ocean
Not quite the Dead Sea where everything floats
And not quite everywhere else where everything sinks
But somewhere in between
And within it we are all jellyfish trying to string together a coherent stream of consciousness that somehow makes sense

And-see?
It’s getting away from me
I used to think gender was a binary
Male, female, *****, ******
Everything coincides so we all fit into this dichotomy
But that leaves no room for Alex who is sometimes Alex and other times Cassandra
Or Sasha who is somehow both at once
Or me who lays claim to no label, because all of them throw up a red light

There is one thing I do know as fact
Pronouns are not a privilege
They are a right

They, them, their:
Singular gender nonspecific pronouns
A customer came into the store today and bought twelve packs of gum
I didn't know what was on their mind, but
Maybe they wanted to kiss their lover full on the mouth while an orchestra of taste crescendoed around them
Caleb came into class today with two cupcakes
One for them and the other for their best friend who hadn’t shown up in two weeks
Claiming “She’ll be here today, don’t you worry”
And the rest of us lapsed into silence, knowing she was never coming back

She, her, hers
No longer will I suffer in silence as those I care most for
Call me something I am not
I am not your daughter, I am your child
I am not your sister, I am your sibling
I am not a girl
I am a nonbinary
I know it makes no sense
But if you just listen you might be able see
To escape the past tense
And start living in the future with me

No longer will we stay quiet
Duct tape over our mouths as we are locked behind closed doors
Buried beneath accusations of
Transtrender
Genderspecial
“You’re just pretending”
No longer will we stay silent
The wrong pronouns whipping our bodies into submission

It
Is not a pronoun
*******
Is not a compliment

You sit in the audience groaning
When will this queer shut up and go home
Isn’t it enough that we acknowledge your existence
But you don’t
I cannot count the times I have been misgendered
I cannot count the times I have wanted to speak up but didn’t
Knowing I would not be taken seriously

Now I will not be silent until there are no more stories of
Schoolyard oppression
Trans suicides caused by a “lesson”
I will scream myself hoarse until
Trans women can walk the streets in safety and
Bathroom means bathroom not
Execution
Remember this
As we are forgotten by our cis siblings
As we are told we don’t exist
As you, the cis  in the front row
Realize
That your daughter at home
May not be your daughter
At all

It was just a pronoun
It was just a mistake
I didn't mean to call you the gender people thought you to be
I'm still going through the change
I absolutely did not mean it
I meant to call you she
Not he
I know what you are now
You're a woman
Stuck in a man's body

Some introductory food for thought...

"Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen"
  - George Orwell

"There is only three states of being. There is slavery, tyranny, those are both forms of conflict, or negotiation. Negotiation depends on freedom of speech and you have to be able to talk to people if you are not going to fight with them or capitulate to them."
  - Jordan Peterson

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  - George Orwell


The key proponents of the Bill and it's context...
On the 18th October 2016, Bill C-16 received Royal assent in Canada, despite having a small, but thorough opposition, even from those within the LGBT community who felt that the proponents of the Bill did not represent their desires, but that of the most extreme and ideological spectrum of their community. A prominent figure in the opposition to the Bill was Jordan Peterson, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, who has dedicated a great length of time in study into the **** and Soviet regimes of the past, paying particular attention to the ideological and psychological elements of those periods, which has built his principles as strongly opposed to ideological thought, Postmodernism and Marxism, all of which were instrumental or played roles in the mass genocidal regimes of the early 20th century that began with the subjugation of ideas and speech.

The Bill's implementation is an amendment to the Ontario Human Rights Code that makes the refusal by an individual to refer to someone by their preferred gender pronouns a hate crime. It also brands discrimination by 'gender expression' with the same impunity. To those who do not understand what these concepts mean, essentially what the gender pronoun debate is, is how a minority of the LGBT community demand they be refereed to by different pronouns, and have their gender expression (fashion choice) protected by law. For instance, those who claim not to fit into the binary gender pronouns (he/she) and therefor don't identify as either a man or a woman, wish to be refereed to with artificial neologisms such as ve, they and them.

These demands, however, are not being made by the majority of LGBT people, but a small minority of people, mostly younger students who've been indoctrinated into postmodern and social Marxist ideology. This means that the Canadian government is taking the most extreme representation of a group as the representatives of the entire group, which would be like taking the **** Party as a valid representation of Germans, or the British Olympic squad as representatives of the standard fitness of the entire British public. This is a key focus of opponents to the Bill, like Prof. Peterson who recognises (being an employee of a University himself) that Bills like these are the result of borderline indoctrination in the Universities, and not the demands of LGBT people in general.  


The innate authoritarianism of the bill and it's Marxist/Postmodern motives...
Why are the proponents of this Bill innately authoritarian in nature? Well, as Professor Jordan Peterson makes the clear distinction, that unlike other forms of what is deemed hate speech in law, that enforces what you CAN NOT say, this Bill enforces WHAT YOU MUST SAY. As an example, Holocaust denial is considered hate speech, and so you can not express such a position, however, here you are now forced to speak words that you might not want to say, something far more Orwellian that one might be able to conceive when concerning a seemingly trivial enforcement, and having often spoken of gradualism, this is certainly not the end of the issue.

What is also concerning is that the supporters of the Bill are evidently ideologically motivated, in terms that their ideology (Marxist/Postmodern) is in itself authoritarian in nature, and as they fail to gain support by ideas, they suppress them. Law like this should not be able to slide through the apparatus of the State this easily, for it conveys on many levels a lack of respect for the generations of people who suffered under despotic rule for centuries until finally the rule of law gave them rights (and now we throw them away). It also shows to those more nefarious groups, that the public will not blink, even when you chip away at their right to speak as they choose, which I don't believe is a habit that should be maintained.


- a short essay by FabiusSideman

me and i and nobody
nobody and me and i
me? who?
"who, him? nobody"

her.
her...
somebody. (anybody!)
her......
....
she--!

her: "you."
me: "...me?"
her: "you and me."
...
me: "you and i."

her and i, me and her, her and i, me and she
us....
us!
it! (mhm, that.)
us, and that.

us! us, us, we, us, we, we, us
us and them, us and those, us and some
them and me?...
...
us.
us and them.
me, and her and them.
me and her...and them.
and him. him...
him?
me and him...me...and you.

...
...
...

"her and him..."
him? him!? HER AND HIM!?
ME!!!!

me:
her and him
her and him
her and him
her and him
her and him

me: "you and him?"
her: "me and you!"
me: "you and him!"
her: "you..."
me: "YOU AND HIM!"
her:
me: "me or him."
her:
me: "you and him."

...

us...me and her...
...
her. and him. it. (that.)
(that!? her and him!?)

me and i and nobody
nobody and me and i
me? who? (her...)
"who, me? nobody."

I hate the letters that spell your name
And I wish they weren't spilled
On every page of poetry I've written
Since the day we met
I wish your smile wasn't engraved
Into my brain and on my skin
So that I wouldn't see it every **** night
In images I used to call "dreams"
I wish I didn't need to write about
him or you or (your initials)
Because I've always hated pronouns
And I know I'd never be able
To muster up enough courage to tell you
Every secret held by my pen

I hate your ******* skepticism.
You sit and look at me from across an
Empty expanse of blood-red tablecloth that might as well be
The divide between galaxies.
I try to stay calm when you ask if
"Alternative" pronouns are being used
As a "social experiment" in GSA.
I look away.
My heart pounds.
My face flushes.
It is only for the sake of the young kids present
That I do not mutter any obscenities.
I take a deep breath.
I tell you, slowly, carefully, that
No it isn't an experiment.
They have chosen to use plural pronouns
They, them, theirs,
Just as legitimate as the "normal" ones, male and female.
Why should anyone's name be tied to
What they were born with between their legs?
You answer back in a long drawl that is so full I skepticism
I could choke on it's ignorance.
"Okay then."
Two words, two words that make me rethink everything
I think about you, my father.
I was filled with hope when I listened to
Tales of love and life,
Freedom to marry who you want.
You support gay rights, Dad,
But I'm left wondering:
Do you support all my friends?
The pansexual and gender-fluid and bisexual and homosexual and demi-****** and those who chose other pronouns?
What about the transsexuals and asexuals and third-gendered and pan-romantic and sapiosexual and queer?
I turn away before I reveal my hurt to you
I will not open up this can of worms again, I'm sure.
I thought I knew you.
Now I only know how much more I
Respect
Compared to you.

My use of personal pronouns
Puts me in my poem;
I can roll a rock with Sisyphus,
Be in a ceiling flame in Rome.

I can bring you back to life,
Sharing tales and tea;
Sitting there before my fire,
For all eternity.

I go marauding with Attila,
Walk with Neil Armstrong,
Fly high with Amelia,
Be a Beatle with my song.

My pronouns give me presence
In my lover's residence;
I'm just a specter she can't see;
A spirit roaming outside of me.

I can jot an I with you,
I could pen an our;
But that's just ink on my notebook,
Not as sweet as sour.

I can use my pronouns
To put you in my verse;
And then I lay my pen down,
I'm cursed, but none the worse.
You're just poetry to me.

I have a tendency to change the pronouns
in the poems I write.
I love him.
It used to be her.
He makes me weak.
She makes my heart flutter
a staccato panic against my ribs.
It's time I told the truth in my writing.

Why do I still change
her to him
In my writings?
Why am I ashamed to admit to the world
I'm in love
With a girl?

He came up to me this guy and introduced
  himself
"Hello", he said, "I'm You"
I looked at him uncomprehendingly, even a
  little afraid
I thought 'How can you be me, I'm me... not
  you'
It's like he'd come to take me over
He was after my pronouns
He wanted to own me
It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Or the Angel of Death, the Grim Reaper come
  to get me
I was about to take off running down the
  road
I thought "You can't take me, I... I'm already
  taken
Then I thought 'If you're me then who am I,
  I'm what then....
Maybe that was it, maybe I was a What now
And he... he was a What-not or a not-What
"You! You're You", I said back to him a little
   doubtfully
"You", he said again this time with emphasis,
  "You O'Brien"
I looked at him closely "You, you're You O'Brien" I said slowly confirming what he'd
  just said/told me
Then it hit me You!... Hugh the Borg from Star Trek (the Next Generation LoL), that episode the Borg collective Guy becomes an individual
"You're Hugh" I said greatly relieved, you're
   Hugh, Hugh with a H
It was like I'd been released 'So you're not
  me after all'.

When he'd gone though I thought, maybe if he had of being me he might have made a better job of being me than I did.

Where did you go?
I thought lifting up
A box searching,
Searching; for time

They said X would mark
Where I could find
Her heart resting
Right next to mine

But mine is me
And me not you
So she and me
Can be the only two

I dream about writing you a love poem
One that is not misted over.
One that is not about him
But you, my beloved,
Because you are the only thing that I have ever wanted and I am tired of being so shy.

But this is hard.
This is even harder than  I thought it would be.
I am staring at the her at the end of my first sentence and trying to figure out how it will sound when it finally breaks free from lips.
I imagine it will coat my ******* strange new liberation and we will both rejoice.

 I refuse to write of you equivocally
And blend you into a neutral they
Or let yet another poem fall to chagrin.
I will not let shame cast shadows on our glorious love
No declararion of the truth could ever be an aberration.

So I write this love poem to you.
I do not scribble you deep into the binding or dust you lightly across my untruthful words.
I want to stain these pages with the red ink with our love.
You are not my secret to keep anymore.
You are the color I want to paint the sky.

i'm in love with a boy
but i change my pronouns to say that
i love her
because of the ones who cannot do so.
because of the lovers who have to hide.
because of the injustice people have done to people.
we are all equal in birth, but live in an unequal society.
i am simply another girl who loves a boy.
no questions asked.
no awkward glances, no stiff hands to shake.
no glares, no whispers.
because i'm privileged enough
to be on the side of love that someone deemed
acceptable.
and because i don't agree with having to pick and choose who you get to love
based on their possession of particular parts.
you love someone for their energy, their personality.
the way they hold you in the night.
the trust you share, the bonds you make.
you love them because you are you and they are they.
she loves her.
he loves him.
she loves him.
he loves her.
or her. or him.
the pronouns
should not
seem odd
to us.
but our society majorly consists of
gritted teeth and
disapproving eyes.
and because of this,
because i love someone
of the opposite gender,
and because i do not
suffer from any hate,
i will quietly fight
the cookie-cutter
for you
with pronouns
and poems.

It all begins
With pronouns
I becomes the subject
Of my project
Adding you
And collectively we
I choose you and me
And I exclude the he and the she
Until I am certain of we

You and I pick verbs
actions

Inflect them to match
fit
begin narratives

Transitive verbs take objects

You touch
tickle
tease
taste
take skin
*******
lips
me with words

Words have become a clause
But still a simple construction
So, you tickle me where?

For this you need a preposition
To position your tickling ammunition
Do you touch
tickle
tease me ON my *******
*******
thighs
buttocks
****?

Do you feel me INSIDE my mouth
****
soul?
Positioning is envisioning.

Then you use adjectives
To modify descriptions of
Sensory inscriptions
So, gentle complements touch
Soft and passionate kiss
And you become superlative

And adverbs elaborate experience
expression
exploration

You fill me deeply
thoroughly
violently with all that is you

But adverbs can also mean time
Not sweet or cursed time
Or time denoting age
But timing is always important
And grammar dictates
That
Time adverbs are placed
As a beginning or an end
Like a lover's embrace

Thus,
This morning, you woke me with
A demanding "here and now! " and I will reciprocate this, tonight, I vow.

Conjunctions are sentence connectors
And sentences behave like detectors
Bodies balancing with and, but, or
Otherwise subordinate
And the scale tips towards
Conditioning hypotaxis
Making actions a complicated praxis

(before my mind can connect, you will have to pursuade it /pursue it)

But we coordinate conjunctions
Equally
I touch you
You touch me
Exploring
Exploding sensory functions

So, together we cry imperatives
Completing our ****** narratives

Moaning
Whimpering
Begging
Yelling: Please... bind me!
touch me!
bite me!
take me!
come!

Oh! Please, come!

I love the English language... ;)

Kids these days make me sick. Too much time spent on IT. What’s IT you say? Well IT is the only thing that is not. IT is in but really IT is out, like a drunk left in his ***** passed out on the couch. The ultimate cool the epitome of breathtaking, and your left taking this out of proportion. What is so important? I mean really I don’t understand the importance. A synonym for the learned: imperative or even essence. That is the idea of something but your left holding nothing. Not even a burnt out flame like the lack of heat from the passion in your heart. Does it need to start…once more? A muscle unused is abused and left to consume itself. You incite cannibalism! Munching on ourselves to feed our soul lost in this dangerous world. You’re too tough to ask for directions, too stupid to read a map, or too naïve to think you are alone in this? What is THIS? THIS is just IT after THAT. THAT is simply free thought. Yet the brain sits and rots in your cranium. That’s a fancy word for skull. The helmet, not to keep thoughts in, but to let them become mature and flow down into a puddle between my feet. You see this and harmful words escape your mouth and say I ****** myself. I think not; if my head is leaking that means my thoughts cannot be contained. In pain I see the young adults of our time reading line after line of the same crap we are feed everyday of our lives. A lie, a lie I scream from an empty room, a classroom. There are entities inhabiting the same plane, yet in the same they are not here. So far away lost in this digital age. I agree you cyborgs need entertainment all the same; however, the smile I receive from seeing the moon in the middle of the day is the found on your face when someone likes your page. A paper trail untraveled by so many and misplaced in cyberspace. I walk at night to see the darkness, and you see only the lit up text message from your lazy boy recliner chair. I am convinced you’re not all there, but that’s not your fault. I blame it on the generations. I do blame you because you succumb to IT. There is that funny word again that carries no weight, but wait it can mean so much. IT is the idea of reality and your losing touch. Thus, there’s a word I don’t think gets used enough. Thus, reality is known only by how well it is defined on Wikipedia or an online dictionary equipped with spellcheck of course because without that how would we know the right way to spell. Well, well in my lap a newborn child fell. Not crying, not smiling, I’m not sure if it was even breathing. This baby, helpless and fragile, is society. We as an assembly need a babysitter for our whole lives. Why? Why live without experiencing life? Why be content with any answer that was given, not found. You have to search to find and in time life’s chorus line will start and so will the tears. The so perfectly phrased line will place fear in all who understand. How can we understand when all left standing is man? Man a fragile thing like a mansion on the beach. Sand ******* up the existence of all the living. I want to introduce a new word: WHEN. WHEN will we not take the so-called facts as face value and attempt to discredit them with logical thinking. WHEN will we move the rudder instead of waiting for the tides to change? WHEN will we place IT on it’s own head and explain something we know to someone else. Learning is gained not by blindly memorizing facts, like my mac, but by forming an attack on the disbeliefs. Hopefully to hone an opinion and be ready to defend IT, and I mean in every sense of the word. IT is the idea of reality and your catching on. Leave the bottle of forward thinking, and begin to chew on the backwards and sideward food your not use to.  Open the mind and heart to be restarted by learning. Thought is the jumper cables to this world’s battery dead from leaving it’s lights on all night, and now late to work for it wouldn’t start. Roughly 6 billion, 775 million, 235 thousand, and 741 people on this earth and we still don’t feel part of IT. Have we lost IT, have we tossed IT overboard? The only savior to the sickness and now it is sinking to the bottom of the sea to be discovered like a lost treasure. A gold doubloon used to measure the currency of our time. The state of our States is left to us to state whether we hate or don’t care about the shape we’re in, a sphere, a bubble, a circle with no beginning or end. Nowhere to start just have to keep moving in the same general direction or be swept away by the undercurrent. Drop your anchor and disturb the flow, stop the overused pattern. Turn the cycle of a circle into the turning of a wheel and use that to drive. Finally to take a destination of you’re own and truly think of the cosmos. To place you’re cognitive mind into motion and here the notion that there is more to THIS then IT.

There's a dusty book on an old chestnut bookshelf,
'Love' scrawled across the spine in golden letters.

Everyone has read it's secrets and taken them to heart.
Everyone has tasted it's nectar and gotten drunk on its words.

Everyone has prayed to its truths.
Everyone has promised to abide.

Verse I: She will love him.
Verse II: He will love her.

She-him, he-her.
These pronouns are tattooed in my eye lids.

These pronouns course through my veins.
These pronouns are stuck in my throat.

I'm choking on a normality I've been force fed,
my insides burning with society's expectations.

As I prayed every night for the man of my dreams.
As I confessed ever boy I had ever kissed.

As I looked at him and felt nothing.
As I looked at her and felt everything.

My fingers skimmed the pages of society's bible,
the pages slicing apart my fingers and leaving blood in the margins.

When my friends placed the rosary around their hands,
and I placed my hands in hers.

When I looked into the words being taken so blindly,
and my body created antibodies for every lie I had contracted.

And I stared into the verses, washing them away with angry tears.
And I threw the book into the fire, watching as the flames made their final edits.

And I looked into her eyes, and I tasted her lips.
And I let everything about her become everything I know.

I ignored the teachings I had once treasured and wrote a book for myself.
I learned to be unfaithful, and put my faith in her.

for Sally, Bex and Tonya, Denel and my beloved

<>

gods do not seek forgiveness,
or comprehension,
desertion, desecration, ascension
or condemning condescension

but how how they crave
just a good conversation,
to get a word in edgewise,
a nice chat,
entrée à, la tête-à-tête,
entre deux, deluxe-amis

a casually talking,
absent of
words of need and beseech,
reason and causality,
and no I or We pronouns,
sans enunciations and annunciations,
false hopes for incarnations, incantations,
set asides for life's grievous aches
all human requests, and some of God's commandments
for now, set aside,
annulled

just a talk,
some repartee,
but mostly an open ear lent,
an early morn quiet listen
over tea (he/she) and coffee (me),
paying attention to
both sides of an interactive story

as recompense for my willingness to be,
his engaged counter party,
my mourning gloomier cloudiness,
quick exchanged for instant,
rising sunshine warming glorious

my vista
of a bay dancing
to Tchaikovsky Swan Lake ballet music,
deftly inserted between
an Agnus Dei and an Ave Maria

mood music he said,
and we chuckled,
he/she was god and orchestrated
my tastes,
Adele et Dudamel,
comprehending my undesirable apprehension,
by granting my needy wish for
poetic inspirational composition contentment

all exchanged,
for just a good listen,
no judgements, in either direction

I am the god of love,
the one who makes you weep,
when you study your beloved's rising chest,
each uplifted breast heaving,
a confirmation blessing,
that her life is present
for at least the next second,
ready for your magi adoration

be not fearful,
this day we talk only,
as I pass by,
I have no business to conduct,
on your island of sheltering redoubt,
but to engage and unburden
for even gods
are required to confess,
and aging godheads do adore
a human shoulder
upon to rest,
a great invention,
(If I may say so myself)
and to whom better to address
than my only love poetry
poète personnelle

here he off-guards me
with a favorite injection,
Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings,
music so sweet that it never fails
to weaken my knees,
sweeping my eyes unto weeping
priming me with this first coat of
sounds so elementary soothing

he half-bows before me and says,

forgive me human, for I have sinned

in Dallas and Nice,
just this past week,
with forays here and there,
doing god's work

read your bitterness and struggle,
anger and forgiveness all in one crust,
furious curses and wails so plaintive,
my heavenly musicians weep from jealousy,
at the cries emanating from the fired fury song
of human hearts torn and love plundered

I am the god of love

and

the god of pain and all that is the

anti-love

(and to make me better understand,  
Schindler's List score, so sweetly,
he plays for me,
to clarify the atmosphere,
that death and love -
and the courage of understanding,
so oft go hand in hand)

write me a love poem for me,
no hymn or sonnet do I require,
for love is essence of forgive,
there is no perfect union,
that cannot stand,
with out this emotion of
conciliatory intermediation

tell me you understand
that the scales
of bereft befallen,
disparate chance interrupting randomized,
must periodic perforce
sometimes weigh more,
than the good of simple

balance tip that creative god spark within,
of which you write,
away from my bloodied, unsightly hand

write me one more love poem
a frisson semi-sweet and cleanly neat,
of good things sad,
but worthy of remembrance

you are not the first for this bequest to receive,
other poet's before and after,
will Jacob-wrestle with my angels,
battling to find the...

no matter

"my love to thee is sound sans crack or flaw"^

let your love poem
to me
be of whole healing,
for these disarrayed feelings
cannot forever persist,
the perfect balance you desire
is not on your Earth existent,
unobtainable

these cracks and flaws must and will come


and yet

love poems
will be our common language

and then he/she left,
leaving this poem behind,
born from my mind, yet,
carved on my skin,
written with the nib of my rib,
sealed and signed,
future undefined,
but dated upon my
cleansed hand's lifeline,
hand held outstretched
as if to say

“and yet"

Conjunctions creak, the adverbs ache,
nouns bear more than they can take.
Verbs are screaming for Ben-Gay
while pronouns atrophy away.

Adjectives have lost their bite,
possessives just give up the fight.
The subject's upset, naught agrees,
which weakens metaphoric knees.

Contractions all together moan;
the objects better left alone.
Ah, life is at a frightful stage
when poets and their poems age.