Who is Sydney Zarlengo? Outrage after YouTuber uses pet training clicker to make family use 'correct' pronouns
A video by an individual, named Sydney Zarlengo (they/them), has come under fire after they gave an update on clicker training their family to get their pronouns right over the Thanksgiving break. In the footage, Zarlengo can be heard saying, "Thank you for all your love and care on my last post. Here's my update (sorry for the delay, my life is chaos) on how I clicker trained my family to get my correct pronouns now that I'm trans person."
In the Instagram video, which has over 25.7K views, they continued by saying, "So first of all, a lot of people were asking what treat I was using. If you don't know, for service dogs, when they do something that we like, we click that behaviour and then we give them a treat. I did not use it as a positive marker for my family because I'm not going to treat them for basic human decency. Instead I used it as a negative marker so every time they say 'she' I would click so that they would start to associate 'she' with 'their' and their head will automatically start self correct."
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However, the concept didn't go down well with many. a person commented, "Just because you have processing issues does not excuse your degradation of family. This is anout your entitlement." Another wrote, "This absolutely makes no sense. You want respect but then treat people like this..." One more commented by saying, "Let's treat people like dog while they are learning to adapt to a false narrative. Yikes." Another individual said, "The fact that you're forcing people to see things your way is a mental illness you have and using a clicker. If you want to be treated like human, why would you treat your closest loved ones like animals. You're pushing your delussion on others. You are wrong. I think you need behaviour notifications. And you live 15 seconds behind everyone jeez now we have heard it all. People shouldn't have to put up with your mental issues, especially when it is forcing them to believe in how your mind believes things should be."
Who is Sydney Zarlengo?
As per Zarlengo's official site, they are an actor, composer, media analyst, service dog trainer, and educator. They write music and make YouTube videos about their experiences being autistic, disabled, gay and genderfluid. They completed physical theater intensive at Accademia dell’Arte in Arezzo, Italy, and will be receiving a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 2023 with a double major in psychology and theater and a thesis in accessible theater education.
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