CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
89-year-old Dorothy Mcleary hasn’t heard from her dear grandson in quite some time.
She doesn’t know what she did or said, but her daughter has been ordered to notify the pensioner that Benjiman will no longer been visiting her nursing home until she can change her attitude towards gender identity politics and marriage
The issue, Benji says, arose while at a coffee a couple weeks ago, when his grandmother visited him in his inner-city enclave.
“There was a person walking her dog out front of the cafe… Minding their own business” he says.
“My bogan grandmother just came out said ‘SHE looked like an old friend of hers’ – I swear the whole coffee shop stood still in shock”
“I was like ummm… Yeah, Gran, it’s pretty gross to just assume that this person identifies as a SHE”
“It’s not the forties anymore – this was in a pretty open-minded area as well. No doubt Gran thought that SHE should also be at home with the KIDS!”
Benji says that he initially tried to gently approach the subject with his grandmother, but was offended when she turned around and told him to stop being funny.
“It was some really scary stuff. Almost psychopathic” he says, while rolling a Port Royal cigarette.
“Then she started with the whole marriage equality thing. Like, she actually told me she doesn’t agree with it. I was appalled”
“Anyway she told me that she was too old to understand the complexities of gender-neutral third-person pronouns that can refer to plural antecedents of any gender and, under certain circumstances, to a singular antecedent that refers to a male or female (but not inanimate) entities”
“It just had to cut her off then and there. I don’t need that kind of pig-headed ignorance in my life”
“It’s basically hate speech”
As a proud leftie, Benji says he is ashamed to be related to such a backward, close-minded neanderthal like Dorothy, who worked as a nurse in Darwin during the 1943 Japanese bombing raids.
“It’s not just the way she talks about gender issues” he says.
“You should hear the way she talks about the Japanese. It’s absolutely archaic”
“What did they ever do to her?”
