Ontological Totalitarianism

Context

In the context of the discussions around 'pronouns' and 'compelled speech legislation', opposed by feminist scholar Jane Clare Jones.

URL = https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/08/ontological-totalitarianism-by-numbers/

Principles

1. Human beings have a right to freedom of conscience and belief.
2. Human beings have a right to their own perceptions.
3. Humans beings have a right to speak in a manner which expresses their own conscience, belief and perceptions – providing that speech is not an incitement to violence against another person (see 14).
4. The only pronouns one can prescribe to oneself, ethically, are ‘I’ and ‘me.’
5. Third person pronouns are granted to you by another person.
6. Pronouns function as a ‘recognition procedure’ in order to instruct someone else how they are to recognise someone, often in the absence of, or in contradiction to, observable cues.
7. Asking someone to use certain pronouns is a request that they perceive or recognise you in a certain way.
8. Prescribing pronouns is a diktat that another person perceives or recognises you in a certain way.
9. Prescribing pronouns and enforcing that prescription is an act of coercion which violates people’s freedom of conscience. This is ontological totalitarianism.
10. Resisting coercion is not bullying.
11. Ontological totalitarianism may well be bullying.
12. Recognition must be freely given if it is to meaningfully function as validation.
13. Coerced recognition is both a violation of people’s freedom of conscience and is functionally worthless as validation.
14. Resisting coerced recognition is not an act of violence – literal or otherwise – nor an incitement to violence.
15. Trans people who are visibly gender non-conforming are subject to violence as a result of the policing of patriarchal gender norms.
16. Feminists do not police patriarchal gender norms.
17. Violence directed at people who violate patriarchal gender norms is an artefact of patriarchy, not an artefact of feminism.
18. Many feminists believe that sex and gender are analytically distinct, and do not believe that the performance or identification of a person’s gender changes their sex.
19. This is a matter of our perception of reality and a matter of political conviction. It is not a pretext.
20. Blaming feminists for patriarchal violence against gender non-conforming and trans identified people is empirically baseless political strategy which serves as an instrument of coercion.
21. People refusing to validate your identity may be painful.
22. Something being painful is not conceptually identical to it being a moral harm, structural violence, or an act of oppression.
23. Not getting our needs met is sometimes painful.
24. Sometimes our needs don’t get met because other people also have needs, beliefs, and interests.
25. Thinking you must always have you needs met and refusing to understand why other people may not meet your needs, is narcissistic entitlement.
26. Narcissistic entitlement is the refusal to recognise the needs and interests of other people.
27. Narcissistic entitlement is the opposite of mutual recognition.
28. Mutual recognition is the condition of possibility of justice.
29. Ontological totalitarianism is a political manifestation of narcissistic entitlement.
30. Ontological totalitarianism is antithetical to the conditions of possibility of justice."

(https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/08/ontological-totalitarianism-by-numbers/)