PLEASE REFER TO US AS NORMALS.

There can't be Polite Society without some tone policing, which might mean etiquette books or Manuals of Style, and there might even be room for some of those "Instead of this say this" guides that have given us more reason to mock higher education these days.

Such style guides, however, ought be responsive to feedback from the people who are being asked to comply with the guides.  Consider the history of what the Manual of Style once dictated to properly describe people with lots of melanin.  The polite word was "Negro," adopted from the Spanish, and always capitalized.  These days, we mostly encounter that word in the title of the United Negro College Fund, or in reference to a class of religious songs called Negro spirituals.  There are other sorts of spiritual songs, although, unless you're a choir director or a musicologist, you're heading for your favorite search engine to fact-check me.

During the push for equal procedural rights of the 1950s and 1960s, the style manuals changed, in part at the urging of people who would rather prefer to be described differently from what the Guardians of Style prescribed.  Thus, there was Black Power, and Afro-American, and African-American, and after all those changes, the current manuals of style translate from the Spanish, with the uppercase, as Black.  Fine.  People have agency over what they would like to be called, or how they would be described.

All that prologue by way of getting to a provocative suggestion.  I'm not sure what to make of Matt Walsh.  On the one hand, he's read and understood a lot of the culture-studies foolishness in order that you don't have to.  On the other hand, he's a highbrow provocateur in the style of Milo Yiannopoulos or Ann Coulter.  And he's not to be confused with Michael Walsh or Matt Welch.

He now has a radio show that I stumbled upon a few nights ago, and he was having some fun with somebody who checks all sorts of diversity boxes, trans-this and non-that, and "neuroatypical."  The point of the ensuing rant was to ask when Normals consented to being referred to as "cisgender" or "neurotypical."  You no doubt recognize, dear reader, the sort of faculty lounge circumlocutions depressingly common these days.  Yes, there might be good reason for transvestite to give way to trans-sexual to transgender, although I think the "crosser" locution is less fraught, but who gave writers of the manual of style the right to use "cisgender?"  It's an erudite-sounding construction redolent of chemistry class, or perhaps the Swiss railway timetable, but he didn't want it applied to him.

Per corollary to the disappearance of "Negro" from ordinary usage, people who object to being described in some way requesting a different locution is within their rights.  I'm inclined to extend Mr Walsh's arguments, particularly because that "cis-" often comes bundled with some sort of reason to scold people, such as for "cisheteropatriarchy" or "cissexism."  Push back against such usage.  Don't refer to me in a way I don't want to be referred to as a prelude to shaming me for doing nothing wrong.  Please refer to us as Normals.

Likewise, in mental health circles, "neurodivergent" or "neuroatypical" might have better effect in getting people to go to their therapist or use their medications, in preference to diagnosing insanity or paranoia or something.  That's within clinical settings.  I can't wait for the first defendant to plead not guilty by reason of neurodivergence, though.  (In the manner of Antonio orating over Caesar's corpse, the possibility of mocking the clinical terms, with or without finger quotes, also suggests itself.)  Outside clinical settings, referring to people as "neurotypical" as a prelude to a guilt trip is also nyekulturny.  Please refer to us as Normals.