More than just a tokenistic gesture
Urgent matters:
How can anyone be dim enough to think that because Jane Wellmeaning from Accounting signs herself “Jane Wellmeaning she/her” therefore the organization is “trans-inclusive”? What do the two even have to do with each other?
Nothing really; rather, it’s a shibboleth, a hoop to jump through, a symbol, a test, a genuflection, a self-advertisement, a blockade, a display of heightened sensitivity and (much as I hate to say it) virtue. Yes, it’s that stale trope virtue-signaling. It’s not a trope I love because it’s applied way too broadly and often, and in my view not always fairly. But this? It’s such a crappy and stupid idea in the first place, and so irrelevant to pretty much everything in the second place, that I don’t see what it can be other than virtue-signaling. Maybe it’s also meant to be signaling “inclusivity” and compassion and solidarity, but the more frantically the People of Pronoun signal with the Pronoun Flag the less able I am to take any of it seriously. On the one hand centuries of oppression, poverty, exploitation, and on the other hand…Delia here was assigned male at birth so please make her feel welcome.
Not to mention the plain absurdity of it. We might as well add our favorite conjunctions to our email signatures. Betty Benevolent, if/because/when. Putting your pronouns in an email signature makes no sense because people aren’t going to hit reply and say “Dear Her.” There’s no call for pronoun-identification in correspondence, because the subject doesn’t come up. Unsolicited irrelevant pointless information about The Self is not desirable in work correspondence, and applying social pressure to use them is just…I lack the words to say what it is.
They really want that Stonewall seal of acquiescence, don’t they? It’s a non-secret ballot where you get to vote against your self. Kiss the ring, or face the consequences. This self-outs all those who disagree. Are the activists who write to the boss behind your back to get you fired really going to care about your pronouns?
This was exactly my issue with Warren and Buttigeig during the primary, their need to add it to their twitter profiles to appease the anti-feminist gender nazis is absurd. I hope Biden picks a running mate who hasn’t succumbed to the pronoun police and their (it/whatever) garbage.
Couldn’t you just say you have no preference? How woke is that? “I will not be defined by a pronoun, so use whatever makes you comfortable.”
You must profess that you love God and renounce Satan (and all his works) publicly, or clearly you are a heathen of some variety. And if that’s the case, then you deserve to be burned at the sta—
Oh, wait. That’s how religious zeal works, not … What were we talking about again?
A friend of a friend has used this and find it works well: tell them you are (or identify as) gender non-performative and that being asked to nominate your pronouns is triggering / bad for your mental health.
He / you / our
A change that is purely cosmetic, with no impact beyond visibility, is definitely a case of virtue signalling.
you/youse/yours
Oh, are we all signaling now? Lemme try.
Most sexy majesty / please, take all my money / my SSN is [insert SSN here]
My pronouns: who / what / why (and, on formal occasions, whomst).
if/then/else
Gordon, your suggestion is very amusing.
Here’s what this makes me think of: not so long ago (in the mind of someone my age) it was all the rage to give girls androgynous names. Part of the reason for this was that sexism was (and is) alive and well, and a resume or application might be rejected based on an overtly female name. This kind of thing has been going on since, let’s say, at least George Eliot’s time.
Hmm, let me look this up… it seems like this trend is ongoing in Australia:
https://www.abc.net.au/life/why-parents-are-giving-their-girls-masculine-boy-names/10717012
I guess now there are two ways to read this: the more long-standing reason of helping young women gain access to male-dominated professions; and the newfangled degenderizationbabble.
In any case, if a woman has been given a name, by her parents, in order to help her professional development as, say, a software developer or an aerospace engineer (to name a couple of male-dominated fields), isn’t it asking a woman to self-sabotage by outing herself in a pronoun sig line? Would George Eliot’s literary career have taken off in the same way if Blackwood’s Magazine was required to identify her as female from her first publication there?
What is the purpose of this forced identification? Remember, only a tiny proportion of people imagine themselves as anything other than the male or female they were born as. And more than half of people are female, and still deprived of equality because of that. Forcing everybody to always identify themselves with gendered (or non-gendered, which, really, isn’t that still a type of gendered?) pronouns provides a degree of comfort to a tiny minority at the expense of a majority of people.
We should all speak Turkish. Or Japanese. Or any of the vast majority of the 7000 or so human languages that don’t have sex-based grammatical gender (and in most cases don’t have any grammatical gender at all).
And while we’re on the subject of pronouns, can we please start distinguishing between exclusive and inclusive first person plural? That would be far more useful.
I’m not a fan of the pronoun thing either because like a lot of women, I don’t want to be harassed because of it. The silver lining might be that trans women will experience the same trash and can acknowledge they are truly having their identity confirmed. And part of being a woman is the appalling experience the online world can be.
On the girls being given male-sounding names, yet again women are moving over for men. I do wish there was a non-gendered title out there so I don’t have to agonize over writing to Mr or Ms So-and-so. Thankfully there are a lot of doctors in my world that make life easier. It’s one of the reasons I use the appellation myself.
I have one of those names that is more common with women, but has traditionally been male (and still often is in England, I believe). There are enough males with the name that you can’t automatically assume, though most people do. I have taken to submitting plays using my first initial and my middle name, which is thoroughly masculine, because women are less likely to have their plays read and produced.
Claire, I’m with you on the titles, and I ask my students not to call me by the gendered titles; having a doctorate helps, because there is an alternative. The other thing about women’s titles is that they are different depending on whether you are married or not married, with the not-married title juvenilizing the woman, and rendering her “spinster” if very old. The married title is a sign of ownership. I dislike Ms., and ask that my students not use it. So, yeah, Dr. is gender neutral, and it is the term I prefer for that reason.
As for pronouns: Her Royal Otterness works well for me. You may shorten to HRO,
I honestly don’t understand why we don’t revive the tradition of addressing people as e.g. M. Iknklast. Gets around the gender thing right nice.
@Iknklast
#14
Didn’t JK Rowling use her initials because someone told her boys wouldn’t buy a book written by a woman?
I think I heard that. And it fits with my experiences. I wrote a series of young adult fantasy novels; a “friend” expressed an interest, and I gave him a sample copy. He put it in a giveaway shelf; didn’t want a book by a woman with a female protagonist. Fortunately, someone else picked it up thinking their granddaughter might like a book about a 9-year-old witch.
@16/17:
That’s right, yes. She was told by her publisher that she should use the two initials and surname format so the books would appeal more to boys. She didn’t have a middle initial so she made one up.
But then her publisher also told her not to give up the day job because she wouldn’t get rich writing books for children.
I don’t know why I know this.
My boss (male) has recently added his pronouns to his email signature, and it’s made me realise even more how this is NOT a neutral act of general inclusiveness, however well-meaning the intentions. Gender is, after all, a hierarchy, and explicit status symbols within a hierarchy have vastly different implications depending on where you sit – consider captain’s stripes vs a yellow star. I’m in a very male dominated industry, there is no way on earth I want to draw attention to the fact that I’m the only woman on the team. Gender has no damn place in the workplace, and yet these cretins want it embedded?
Citizen and comrade have also been used as non-gendered titles.
Even before George Eliot, there were Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Currer Bell’s book was a smash hit before she and Acton made the railway journey from Halifax to London to clarify who they were and that there really were three of them and that it was most definitely Ellis (who hated leaving the moors so didn’t go with them) who wrote Wuthering Heights.
Somehow I don’t think addressing staff at my workplace as Comrade Name or Citizen Name would fly but it is very funny. Makes me think of Citizen Smith.
I do think we need a gender-neutral address. I liked What a Maroon’s suggestion of M. for writing but what would we do for introductions? I think it would sound weird to say M but I suppose I would get used to it.
This is something I thought about during the 2016 election. If Clinton had won, presumably she would have been addressed as Madam President? It just felt icky. And Bill would be what? Mr First Gentleman President? It’s archaic and stupid. The President is the president, their partner is their spouse and their family is the President’s family. None of this nonsense about First Family etc. And when they’re not President anymore, they should be referred to as ex- or former in the third person but go back to their normal title for direct address.
It sounds funny in a vacuum but in the right context it doesn’t so much. In the Resistance for example.
My work, which brags of its Stonewall endorsements, could adopt this – though I think most of the employees would take the piss.
As said, you address people by their names or you. If you are referring to them to someone else, they won’t see it anyway.
One of my “woke” (though very sweet) colleagues would embrace this.
Exactly, Min. Requiring that people include “their pronouns” in things like sig files isn’t an act that increases sexual parity, but an act that perpetuates patriarchal dominance. This is why this call by TRAs (who are mostly TIMs) is best seen as an instance of misogyny.
Yes, for someone with an ambiguous name, like mine, including pronouns would increase the number of people aware they are dealing with a woman, and that could have extremely negative consequences for me. For people with strictly gendered names, not so much.
In my previous job I was involved in hiring graduate students as summer interns in a field that has a large number of people from east Asia. With Chinese and Korean students it was almost always impossible to tell from the name alone whether the student was male or female; even native speakers would say that they couldn’t be sure if they didn’t see the Chinese characters. So communicating with them by email was often a conundrum; we’d have to look for clues in their application materials (letters of recommendation usually helped, if they had any) or look online, or guess (probably 75% of the applicants were female), or just address them by their first names. I really would have much preferred a gender-neutral title.
@18
Somebodies a secret harry potter fan!
:-)
@27
TAKE IT BACK
;)
We actually used to have a male title that was the analogue of Miss: Master. No one uses it nowadays, of course, but trivia and whatnot.
I’ve never understood the resistance to “Madam President”, except that it really should be “Missus President” to mirror “Mister President”. Madam is properly the mirror of Sir. So if we said “Sir Secretary” that’d be one thing. And I’ve never understood the resistance to “ma’am” in that context, either. It’s always baffled me when a female character in a movie or show or whatever shuts down someone’s calling her Ma’am and insists on being addressed as Sir. Like … That’s just silly.
@What a Maroon #12:
Oh, and as for languages and grammatical gender, technically speaking, Japanese is more gendered than English, in the sense of gender roles. There are modes of speech, particles, and constructions that are men-only and women-only. And I mean beyond the universal stuff that languages do, like intonation differences between the sexes. Beyond that, Japanese is no more free from grammatical gender than English, because …
English is remarkably bereft of grammatical gender. Rather than tracking a syntactic property of words, our pronouns actually track a semantic property of those words’ referents. In English, we say, “The dog wet his/her bed,” based on the actual sex of the dog. In gendered languages, pronoun choice is determined by the words themselves, irrespective of facts about the world. It would be more accurate to say that English is sexed rather than gendered, I think.
@28
Come over here and make me. I’ll give you a scotch for your trouble.
@Nullius in Verba
The word president is ungendered. Why render it gendered? Mrs President (or Miss or Ms President) irritates the hell out of me. This is why I prefer the British way of doing things. When talking to the Prime Minister you address them as just Prime Minister e.g. “Prime Minister, why are you such a scumbag?”. In print, you would usually say “the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was asked why he was such a scumbag.” Once out of office, you relinquish any claim on the title.
You’re right about most things in English. But some things are gendered for no apparent reason. Ships. Cars/Motorcycles, baseball bats and other sports equipment (seemingly at random). We anglophones are weird. It’s sort of mean that English is becoming the lingua franca when it’s so difficult to learn for speakers of other languages with our inconsistent grammar and random pronunciations for words with a common spelled element e.g. rough, dough, bough, through, thorough
I once had an Italian coworker who was trying to cancel her cellphone contract. “I want to cheese my contract,” she kept saying. The poor man at the other end was baffled, we were all baffled listening to her and trying not to die laughing as she got angrier and angrier that the man wouldn’t do what she wanted. Eventually, she hung up and spat out a string of Italian expletives. When she calmed down I asked what the problem was. Then I had a brainwave – I asked her if she meant cease. She did. I’m not sure why she was pronouncing it that way (since most ‘ce’ words in Italian are pronounced as “ss” with a flat e: cessare, cento, cenare). She was a strange person.
@Claire: Pedantically speaking, “Mister President” doesn’t gender the word “president”. The title depends on the referent of “President”, so the most one could say is that the title genders the president but not “President”. It’d still be more accurate to say that it sexes the referent than genders it, I think. By this interpretation, it’s not a matter of altering a meaning; it is instead adding information. (The interesting bit to me is when we choose to introduce what new information.)
I’d push back a bit on the gendering of inanimate objects as being a peculiarly English thing. It, too, is less gender and more sex, albeit metaphorical rather than literal in this case. It’s just anthropomorphizing objects and personifying phenomena, which is universal across all human cultures. What imaginary sex a speaker sees appropriate to the thing in question reflects his or her place in a culture. I know people who refer to cars as feminine, but I also know those who opt for masculine terms, and even those who don’t go in for the anthropomorphic language at all. The English words themselves have no gender, but the anthropomorphized imaginary does.
To a certain extent, cultural knowledge and linguistic knowledge are, of course, inextricable. Just try to say hello in Irish Gaelic for an example of that. Nevertheless, I think it worth the effort to distinguish the two as well as we reasonably can.
Wheeeeee. Linguistics. It’s fun.
Personally, I’m offended by the phrase more than just a tokenistic gesture. What’s wrong with just ‘token’ gesture or, if a bigger word is really necessary, more than just a tokenism?
I get so angrified when I see such misusification of languageable words or phraseologicals substitutising for intelligental thoughtings.
Claire @31, ex Prime Ministers retain the honorific Right Honourable after they leave office (at least in NZ). God knows why. Even Prime Ministers I’ve kind of liked haven’t been entirely honourable. I mean, they’re politicians, so by definition…
Nullius in Verba,
Grammatical gender is a technical linguistic term referring to classification of nouns, usually with an often tenuous grounding in real world distinctions (male/female, human/non-human, animate/non-animate). There are of course differences in how people of different sexes use language, but those aren’t (necessarily) grammatical gender. I don’t know enough about the specifics of Japanese to say for sure whether it has grammatical gender, but what I’ve read suggests it doesn’t. But anyway, replace “Japanese” with “Basque” in my original comment.
As for English, yeah, it’s more complicated, and both you and Claire make some good points. Back in my undergrad days when I was studying this my professors made a point of distinguishing between sex and gender in grammar, along the lines that you describe. So in that sense English for the most part doesn’t have grammatical gender, except in cases such as those that Claire describes (and of course to the extent we have grammatical gender at all, it’s only marked in our third person singular pronouns). What’s a bit unusual about English is that we make a three-way distinction along two axes. First, roughly speaking, there’s a human/non-human distinction (though animals often slip over to the “human” side), with non-humans represented in the singular by “it”. Then of course there’s a male/female distinction among humans. There are good theoretical reasons to distinguish between sex markers and gender markers, but that’s a fine point that often doesn’t make much difference in everyday conversation, which is why I tend to refer to “sex-based grammatical gender”.
But things get even murkier in interesting ways when you explore how English is used. For instance, it’s perfectly normal to use “it” to refer to people in certain situations (think of a doctor at birth announcing “It’s a girl!”, or a stereotypical response to a knock at the door: “Who is it?” “It’s Chris!”). And of course whatever you want to call that three-way distinction gets lost in the plural, and, as is well know, singular “they” is perfectly normal in certain situations (“Someone called, but they didn’t leave a message.”). (Which leads me to another point: we don’t really have a singular/plural distinction in English; it’s better described as a singular/non-singular distinction. But that’s for another day.)
Anyway, language is a lot messier than our metalinguistic language lets on. But surely you can agree with me that we need to distinguish between inclusive and exclusive “we”?
@Rob Interesting. No, in the UK, the Right Honourable honorific is reserved for members of the Privy Council. Prime Ministers are appointed to the Privy Council (along with much of Parliament almost) and I believe it is a lifetime appointment. But they can step down and therefore the honorific would no longer apply. It’s stupid, the Privy Council is pretty much vestigial by now. Fun fact: Prince Philip is the only member not appointed by QEII. He was appointed by her father, KGVI.
Rob @30:
I’d rather have a butterbeer…. NO, WAIT… *damnit*.
Claire @31:
I find the deference of “Mr President” or “Sir” seriously creepy. I’m not really comfortable with “Prime Minister, why are you such a scumbag?” either, when plain old “Why are you such a scumbag?” would suffice. It’s not as though there’s any confusion about who the question is being addressed to and if there were, “Hey, scumbag” would be perfectly unambiguous, especially at the moment.
Prime ministers and presidents are not people or offices to revere.
Bwa Hahahahaha
@latsot ah man, you made me almost choke on my tea! :-D
I quite like the juxtaposition of respectful start followed up with rude question. You get their attention in a press conference or a media scrum, and then boom! Very Dennis Pennis. But in general, I see it more of an attempt to get their attention than as much respect as the holder of the office imagines. Our press are a little less restrained because when nobody practices access journalism politicians have to scramble for interviews more than the other way around.
It’s not the good old days when Jeremy Paxman was on the prowl. He used to put the fear of God into interviewees because he usually was unrestrained in asking straight questions and badgering a little bit. His most famous interview is with Michael Howard where he kept asking the same question and showing up his weasally answers. I miss Paxman.
@Claire
#31
Individual English speakers may “gender” certain words, but “ship” does not have a gender in English.
I think that we should take an idea from Nintendo, and give ourselves a title by combining two words from a pair of randomly-generated lists. For example, “My name is Tigger, and my title is ‘Total person’; it says so, on my passport”. That’s all anyone really needs to know about me, although it is actually a lie (like all titles, really; social fiction, every one). Like most people my age, I am missing several of the bits I was born with.