A tool that reinforces sexism
This is not good.
Quoting the rest.
One of the women already had pronouns displayed in her username. The effect of this was to create a really odd sense that the women had made a submissive gesture and the men had not.
In discussions at work about pronouns, the solution proposed to this has often been to ‘normalize declaring pronouns’ so that everyone feels they should comply with the request. So the women are attempting to ‘model’ this compliance. So far, so gendered.
When I have been in meetings where a man does declare he/him-ness, it simply exacerbates this sense of domination vs compliance. You have a woman underlining that she is a woman & a man announcing that he is a man. It underscores disparities & does nothing to dispel them.
I still do not comply, but this particular meeting was the first time I had felt the swivel of curious eyes on me for not announcing that I was a woman, while there were none scrutinizing the men who felt free to disregard the silly request.
It spoke chillingly to me about how pronoun culture is a tool that reinforces sexism and inequality. The men still spoke over the women and dominated the discussion too. So it was just like any other mixed sex meeting, except the women had signalled their submission first.
Indeed. That and more – the women look submissive and also credulous. The men look independent and also appropriately skeptical. What a godawful set of oppositions.
Pronoun culture is a tool that reinforces sexism because it’s derived from a life stance in which it really, really matters if you’re a man or a woman or neither or both. That’s because the premise is that being a man or a woman or neither or both is the very core of your being, and defines your humanity. Proponents cannot emphasize this enough, as seen by how easily they accept that suicide is an expected and reasonable response to being “misgendered” too often, or too thoroughly. You cannot even think of cultivating indifference, or a personality or interests or goals which matter more than your being a man or woman or neither or both.
It’s like being stuck permanently in an early stage of development, and it creates a social structure which also seems stuck.
The women obediently announcing their womanhood reminds me of those ancient cultures in which women would routinely begin their requests by saying something like “o honorable master, forgive me the unworthy woman who approaches you …”
Sastra, I love the concept “pronoun culture” and the way you describe it. Very well put.
Perhaps another stereotypical behavior contrast is in play here. The equally powerless male employees are arrogantly and recklessly ignoring the potential adverse consequences of defying the corporate diktat because of their innate selfishness, whereas the women are prudently and selflessly concerned about the potential impact on the household income of non-compliance.
I am proud to say that I, a vagina person, have never once given my pronouns, even when invited to do so.* That being said, because I work in a gender-wooed and gender-wed field, if the demand became too pointed I would capitulate. Thus far, I’ve gotten away with small acts of passive resistance, but I hate—positively loathe—the knowledge that I will someday be forced to participate in a quasi-religious ritual I find equally absurd and offensive.
I’ll add that I’ve encountered several men who have their pronouns displayed in their Zoom names, even without any call for them to do so. I recently ran into one young man, who I think is probably gay and is certainly not conventionally masculine, who had for a year or so been “he/him” but has now started going by “he/they.” It’s not only women in line at the Kool-Aid stand.
* In person, that is. I have run into two online forms that I could not submit without giving in my pronouns; I was tempted to use the “other” option to write in something like “any,” but I ultimately decided that in this particular context—both forms were work-related—I didn’t want to draw notice as a possible gender-dissenter. It’s one thing to act like you just happened to forget that part of your self-introduction, and another entirely to make the active effort to register of resistance—even extremely mild resistance—on a form. (I didn’t even contemplate filling out the form with the alternative pronouns I really wanted to give: “this/is/bullshit.”)
If I was told to say what pronoun I prefer, I would be tempted to say ‘it’.
Proffering pronouns conceptually depends on the view that “one’s pronouns” are (1) of critical importance and (2) self-determined and inaccessible to others if not publicly stated. (2) gets most of the attention, as it’s the more obviously wrongheaded notion. We know what pronouns are and how they work, because we’ve been using them since we started emulating our parents’ speech as babies. Seeing that these demands for announcing pronouns, which are not always even words, is easy and intuitive for most people with functioning brain cells not warped by propaganda and in-group loyalty. Unfortunately, the ease of opposing (2) means that (1) doesn’t get the attention it deserves, which is probably most of it.
For whom is the practice of presenting pronouns putatively important? Believers don’t claim that it’s important for everyone—except instrumentally. They don’t even claim that it’s important for them—except instrumentally. Pronoun declarations are solely for those who refuse to participate in the English language specifically and reality generally. All of us and all the “allies” become mere means toward the end of sating some ill-defined need of those who fall under the “trans umbrella”, because they feel that “their” pronouns are of utmost importance. By engaging in the pronoun farce, the believer signals submission to the feelings of those who claim trans and enby status. Believers naively respond to purported suffering without realizing that endorsement of the conclusion (i.e., pronouns are existential) tacitly endorses the premises on which the conclusion depends.
And what are those? Sastra summarized the belief structure nicely:
If one believes one’s gender and associated reproductive function to be one’s defining characteristic qua person, then pronouns map to the core of one’s identity (where identity refers to the coherent thing-that-is-I, not a mere self-conception). But even this is insufficient to motivate the conclusion that “misgendering” is an attack on one’s identity, a sort of metaphysical and not just metaphorical violence. To take that extra step requires the belief that gender is normative. Being male or female must say something about one’s worth qua person. Otherwise, to “misgender” would be no more troublesome than to wrongly describe someone’s hair color, height, age, or sports fandom. If one believes that being male or female entails something negative, then of course one will resist that label. The entire edifice rests on sexism, which believers and casual allies (at the very least) tacitly support by endorsing the conclusions that follow therefrom.
James R Baerg:
More entertaining is hacking the system. There is explicitly no input validation on people’s self-identified neopronouns, which means that the whole thing is vulnerable to classic code-injection attacks.
For example, in Unix-like shells (i.e., command line interfaces) multiple commands can be given on a single line by separating them with a semicolon. To list all files in the directory “stuff”, you could type
ls stuff
To clear the screen first, you could type
clear; ls stuff
So let’s say we’re getting the name of the directory from a variable $DIRNAME.
ls $DIRNAME
If $DIRNAME=”stuff”, then the command functions as we expect. But what if we set
$DIRNAME=”; (sudo nohup rm -rf / &> /dev/null &); clear; ls stuff”
Uh-oh. From the user’s perspective, the output is still just clearing the screen and listing the contents of “stuff”, but now there’s another command running in the background that won’t even stop running when the user logs out. In this case, it’s a call to recursively delete all files on the entire filesystem without prompting for confirmation.
We can play similar games with pronouns. The simplest thing is to declare “I/me/my/mine” and watch people try to make any sense at all. If you want sillier, you can choose something like “he is awesome. I’m quite lame. He/—quick, someone slap me—him”.
The possibilities are endless, because the whole thing is bonkers.
Nullius I think there’s a pair of words missing from “Seeing that these demands for announcing pronouns, which are not always even words, is easy and intuitive for most people with functioning brain cells not warped by propaganda and in-group loyalty.” I think “these demands” was supposed to get “are ___” after the interjection between commas. Are absurd, grotesque, wrong-headed…?
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Yeah, oops. Should have been something like, “Seeing that these demands for announcing pronouns are incompatible with what pronouns are and how they work,” I think. I seem to have a tendency to accidentally delete load-bearing clauses when I’m changing wording. My bad.
To be precise:
“Seeing that these demands for announcing pronouns, which are not always even words, are incompatible with what pronouns are and how they work is easy and intuitive for most people with functioning brain cells not warped by propaganda and in-group loyalty.”
I could and should have written that in a less involuted way, but it’s spilled milk under the bridge across the Rubicon at this point.