Response to "The Importance of Pronouns" from doorcountypulse.com on June 8, 2023
This is a response to https://doorcountypulse.com/the-importance-of-pronouns/, and it also reflects on https://doorcountypulse.com/hello-peninsula-pulse/.
Dear Emma,
Supreme Court cases do not operate the way the Independent article suggests. Small details in a decision, tangential to the issue being decided, do not turn it into a landmark case, or even establish precedent. Rather, it is a decision's holding which determines whether a case is a landmark or not. The Independent is foreign owned and operated, but being a large outlet, they should know better than to put out an article like the one you linked to.
In the court system, pronoun policy is currently split at the appellate level, with the Sixth Circuit and the Seventh Circuit taking opposing sides. The Supreme Court has not weighed in on this yet, but the split makes it more likely they will choose to rule about it.
Besides this, Jonathon Turley writes at https://jonathanturley.org/2023/04/25/seventh-circuit-upholds-termination-of-high-school-teacher-who-objected-to-pronoun-policy/ that a currently pending religious accommodations case, Groff v. DeJoy, could "gut the underlying standard used by the Seventh Circuit in its ruling for the school district".
Links:
Sixth Circuit
https://www.opn.ca6.uscourts.gov/opinions.pdf/21a0071p-06.pdf
Seventh Circuit
https://adfmedialegalfiles.blob.core.windows.net/files/KlugeSeventhCircuitOpinion.pdf
Oral argument for Groff v. DeJoy
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2022/22-174
The results of a 2021 survey imply that the purpose of pronoun requirements are especially in order to get rid of conservative employees and civil servants. https://legermarketing.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Leger-The-Atlantic-Survey-Wokeness.pdf#page=10 found that Biden voters backed woke pronouns by a nearly 3 to 1 ratio over Trump voters. The table on page 4 shows that most people surveyed disagreed with woke pronouns: https://legermarketing.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Leger-The-Atlantic-Survey-Wokeness.pdf#page=4. It follows from this that you should not expect your article to be supported by most readers. If people aren't responding negatively to you, it may indicate that they stay quiet because they don't want to be targeted, rather than that they agree. The 14,202 Door Countyites which voted yes on Wisconsin Referendum 1 not that many years ago didn't just disappear when 5 Supreme Court justices ruled against them between eight and nine years afterwards: https://web.archive.org/web/20081127174554/http://elections.state.wi.us/docview.asp?docid=10049&locid=47.
Both Champaign and Indianapolis are large cities, which can draw on outlying areas to get workers, making up for having below-replacement fertility. Door County also relies on importing workers, but because it is not a large city with lots of political power, this is less reliable. In 2020, for example, the supply of foreign J-1 workers was abruptly cut off. Door County manages to get a consider number of immigrants from outside the county, but most who relocate for longer than a season are wealthier than people residing in Door County. They also tend to be older and not looking to start new families.
Instead, as larger-scale governing bodies destabilize Door County and break down its social fabric and economy, they can use former Door Countyites to solve the worker shortages in large metro areas. Support for transgenderism is a shibboleth for the economic interests of large metro areas. This manifests itself locally as a lower quality of life and an economic leakage to outside the county. An example of this is in the letter by Janet Wilmoth about having to drive to Green Bay to see a veterinarian: https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-emergency-veterinary-service-needed/.
Because it isn't a big city, Door County is especially dependent on its birth rate for its future. Its total fertility rate in 2020 was 1.533 lifetime births, well below replacement of 2.1 lifetime births. At this rate, each generation, without factoring for immigration or emigration, will be 27% smaller than the one before. However, since something like 30% to 40% of young adults leave the county, the effect is even stronger than 27%.
Transgenderism's concomitant drugs and surgeries tend towards sterilization, and towards making its subjects less attractive to the opposite sex. Assisted reproductive technologies are too expensive to be implemented on a broad scale. Transgenderism is a risk to Door County's future, because it could help push that 1.533 figure even lower. In this way, transgenderism is a demographic factor in the overall gentrification, just as unaffordable housing is an economic factor. Just as it is unwise to encourage unaffordable housing, it is unwise to encourage transgenderism.
Or even if you think replacement fertility is unrealistic and unachievable, consider that when the age structure of a population gets too unbalanced, it is harder to take care of the elderly. The struggles at Scandia Village are an example of this: https://doorcountypulse.com/scandia-village-up-for-sale/. Or should elderly people just be relocated far away, or as some think, even euthanized? Every sterilization for the purpose of giving a cross-sex appearance is a step in the wrong direction.
It follows then, that someone who refuses to use preferred pronouns might not be a horrible bigot who gets perverse satisfaction from it, but rather, someone who loves his or her community and wants it to have a future. Such people may even be willing to personally be on the losing side of a litmus test for the collective good.
The sponsors for Open Door Pride are listed at https://opendoorpride.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/THANK-YOU-TO-OUR-2023-SPONSORS-2-1024x576.jpg.
Some of them, such as the Miller Art Museum, Door County Community Auditorium, Peninsula Music Festival, Northern Sky Theater, have benefited from, and can expect to consider benefiting from, public, tax-funded support. Because taxpayers come from all sorts of political backgrounds, these organizations should have avoided all political activities, aside from lobbying for particular things directly related to their organization.
An example of the political trust vested in the Door County Community Auditorium is described in https://doorcountypulse.com/struggle-for-a-stage-door-community-auditorium/. But like Disney in Florida, they are engaging in partisan activity, betraying that trust. Institutions which benefit from public funding should be non-partisan and impartial. Public money should not be spent on group-think.
Most of the sponsors are local, but Carrie Busse Shorewest Realtors and Napalese are from Green Bay, the Avenue Art & Company is from Appleton, and Marketini Media is from Madison. They get to influence Door County while their cities benefit from Door County's emigrating young-adult population.
I'm not sure if this has been covered in your classes so far, or privately by your boss. If so, bear with me as I restate it. The Pulse has a different political makeup among its advertisers versus its readers. That it is a free paper tends to result in a readership which is inherently less educated than the readership of a subscription newspaper. I used to know a man who had once ran a free paper, but sold it. He was a conservative. It had a lot of general-interest content, nothing political, and especially featured ads for alcohol. Free papers tend to be read by people who read occasionally rather than regularly.
Occasional readers are less educated than regular readers, and the level of education corresponds to the political alignment. This means that natural readership of the Pulse is more conservative than the overall population of Door County. For people with a regular reading habit, the Pulse competes with a number of subscription outlets, while for occasional readers the Pulse has less competition.
Yet the Pulse isn't dominated by gas station and liquor store ads. Unlike many other free papers, its advertisers run more towards the left. This makes sense, because presently Door County has a disproportionately left-wing visitorship. One factor in the loss of right-leaning tourists may be in marketing decisions over recent decades has shifted. Right-wingers from the Chicago metro area are probably drawn more towards state parks in Indiana and other Door County alternatives. Local businesses geared toward tourists, or even seasonal residents, will probably be well-served by advertising in the Pulse.
This leaves the Pulse in the situation where it is to the left of its readership, but still financially sustainable. Its leadership must be aware of this vulnerability, as the Pulse's podcast tends to be to the left of the paper. That it sometimes leaves its readership behind is exemplified how, in the recent midterm election, Ron Johnson did not return any answers to the Pulse's questionnaire, while his Democratic opponent did. Door Countyites voted for him anyway, by a margin of only 75 votes. During the 2022 election it seems that a number of Republicans intentionally spurned media outlets over left-wing bias. To the extent that they did so, and won office anyway, this served to send a message to their base that they were unwilling to be manipulated by left-wing media. It could even be seen as a plea for fair treatment in the future.
Instead of pronouns, there are other topics out there. Recently, a large firm was paid a lot of state money to write a report which claimed that "Potawatomi was chosen in honor of the tribe that had lived in the area before ceding its land to the US government in the 1830’s."
Link:
https://widnr.widen.net/view/pdf/infpwyoyy2/GRAEF-Potawatomi-Tower-Concept-Report.pdf#page=9
You could write an article debunking this, and explain what really happened. I think it would be well-received locally, though maybe not by the DNR. Had you written an article about how pronouns should always be biologically honest, that would have hurt your chances of getting a job someday as a journalist in a large metro area, but I don't think debunking Graef would hurt you. With some effort, you should be able to find other topics which are win-win for both your future career and for Door County. Although this is a social relationship, were it a biological relationship instead, this would be "mutualism" rather than "parasitism" or "predation".