I do struggle with this issue, since I don’t want to be the person claiming that language doesn’t change, when it so clearly has. I use “Ms.” in situations where it would be pretentious beyond belief to use “Dr.” I’m sure if I had grown up in another era, that would sound weird, obnoxious, or excessively precious to me. Frankly, I’m not sure how feminists as a whole came to a consensus on “Ms,” but I agree that people who care about these issues need to try to pick a single designation that can be adopted as an alternative to “he” and “she,” because, as others have noted, an “individual pronoun” is a contradiction in terms.
I also think that the concept of being gender-queer/agender is controversial enough that we should be able to question it without being accused of hate speech. If someone says “I am a male attracted to men,” I can’t very well say “no you aren’t,” because that involves a subjective feeling on the part of a person who isn’t me. If someone says “I am a biological male who has always felt trapped in the wrong body,” the same is true – although in that case, given that the person’s subjective feeling conflicts with certain objective qualities, I think it is worth considering the possibility of mental illness in certain cases.
But when it comes to someone saying “I am a biological male, but have never identified with being male. I don’t identify with being female either, but since gender is a social construct, I’m no longer calling myself a man” – well, that involves certain arguable assumptions. I can’t argue with “I don’t feel like a man,” but I can say “well, what you are describing is a limited notion of masculinity - you don’t have to feel like a man or act stereotypically male to be a man, as we define it. Despite new attempts to totally decouple sex and gender, when we use the terms “man” and “woman,” we are referring primarily to a biological designation - one that has come to entail a number of cultural assumptions, but one that still has a certain non-subjective reality.” Now, that person might argue that we shouldn’t be defining people based on gender/sex at all, in non-medical or reproductive contexts, and that might be a position worth arguing – but it is an argument, not a statement of an inherent identity that can and must be respected or accepted without question.
Now, that doesn’t justify being rude to people. Obviously, when I met my friend’s genderqueer sibling, I didn’t discuss this with them, and used the pronouns they requested. On a person to person level, that’s almost always going to be the decent thing to do – and yes, that includes calling students by their preferred pronoun (although I stop short of pre-emptively asking people for pronouns). But when it comes to larger discussions about gender and accommodations, then I don’t think it is unfair to question what seems to me to be a very ideologically freighted position.
just to see what is going on.