Fairy pronouns? The gender fanatics live in fantasy land

Most of us thought it was bad enough when men started identifying as women. Now, it seems you can identify as a fairy – and adopt the pronouns to match. It’s almost enough to make you feel nostalgic for the bad old days of the early 2020s.

This is the tangle of weeds in which the Green Party now finds itself caught. In 2022, the party suspended Emma Bateman – former co-chair of Green Party Women – after she suggested that ‘fairy pronouns’ might be a product of grown adults playing make-believe. Bateman, in an impassioned speech given at Hyde Park, accused fellow Green members of capitulating to the ‘pronoun police’. ‘Every time someone says men are not women, a person with fairy pronouns literally dies’, she said derisively. She went on to wonder how much gender ideology the Greens were willing to ‘choke down’ before coming to the conclusion that ‘women are more than a feeling’.

Bateman says she’s been labelled an ‘anti-Semitic, eugenicist, fascist, far-right bigot’, and was found by a disciplinary committee to have breached the party’s diversity rules. The committee also pulled Bateman up for having dared to talk about the Greens’ official stance on trans in an ‘overtly sarcastic fashion’, using ‘antagonising phrases’. Bateman is now pursuing legal action against the party over her dismissal.

For anyone still confused about what it means to be a person with ‘fairy pronouns’ (yes, such people apparently do exist), there is no shortage of online handbooks available to help you keep up. Terms like ‘Fae / Faer / Fairyself’, as CNN’s ‘guide to neopronouns’ explains, are part of a broader set of ‘gender-neutral or nonbinary pronouns that are distinct from the common she, he and they’, supposedly offering ‘more freedom of identity’. ‘Fai has to drive fairyself to school’ is the example given by Pronoun Wiki, conjuring up images of Tinkerbell sipping from a Stanley cup in traffic. Other examples of neopronouns include ‘vamp / vampireself’, ‘ghost / ghostself’ and ‘cloud / cloudself’.

According to an opinion piece in Mic, identifying as mystical beings like fairies is an important step in the ‘ensuing gender revolution’. The piece urges us to let go of our ‘curmudgeonly confusion’ and start to ‘reconsider the assumptions that we make about identity’. Assumptions that are grounded in reality, you mean?

In suspending Bateman for making fun of fairy pronouns, the Greens have let it be known to the world that they live in a fantasy land. The hills they are willing to die on are mere tussocks to the average real-world voter. Much like Peter Pan, it’s high time the Green leadership grew up.

As for the fairyfolk who felt persecuted by Bateman’s remarks, I can only suggest they do their fairyselves a favour by heading outside, and touching some grass.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.