Goody Jamil and a Study in Scarlet Letters

“What would Nathaniel Hawthorne write?”

Robert Walter Weir, Embarkation of the Pilgrims, 1857.

I had been drafting Mad Libs based on Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and the blurred lines between the avocado and the human species, but I had to pause. Something far more pressing and surprisingly delicious happened, like a ray of the stupidest light. Indeed, Jameela Jamil “misgendered” a singular “they/them”—that is, a “nonbinary” person.

According to chronically online people, as we know, this kind of thing is basically dancing ‘round the may-pole, per that old time religion of Puritanism. Or, at least, one may imagine Goody Jamil walking the scaffold for mob “social justice”—or whatever the plural they call it these days. It must be noted that “nonbinary” must be written out, for one Twitter user alleged that “NB” means “non-Black.” Imagine living a life defined by these arbitrary conventions around language. I cannot bring myself to …