No. No I will not stop saying “heteronormative” because an imaginary voter might be put off by a word they don’t know. Ditto cisgender and all the rest. These are precise words. Third Way can go third themselves all the way somewhere where this is actually why people vote. Which isn’t here.
Agreed. This list is dumb. People are hungry. People don’t have homes etc etc. Folks gotta grow up.
I think the biggest critique of this silliness is that absolutely no Democratic running for election uses any of these words. Like, when's the last time Joe Biden said "heteronormative" in a speech?
What Third Way is saying is, white cis people are threatened by the existence of people who analyze white cis behavior, and as long as anyone does that, white supremacists will use that threat to attack Democrats. OK, sure, that might be true. So what? Tell a more compelling story.
As a scholar I am happy when talking to the public not to use specialist language. I talk about how we learn what people around us expect us to do and internalize it, rather than about how doxa becomes naturalized. I talk about gender being fluid, and biology being complicated. This is parody.
Yes. And within the academy, many of these terms are of course matters of active debate. Which can seem esoteric to outsiders because the debate is not tied to concrete outcomes. But the purpose is production of knowledge, literally "academic", not advocacy for a particular position.
Just stay away from these words and maybe throw in more racism and transphobia, and then Third Way will be happy.
Learn to say “real women” and “men competing in women’s sports”. Because that’s the threat to their way of life. Not immense increases in costs caused by tarriffs and cuts in services and the social safety net to fund billionaire tax breaks, and rising food costs as labor for harvest is deported.
If we do these things, then Republicans will finally vote for Democrats. Third Way has spoken.