Guest post: Language exists as a shared convention
Originally a comment by Steven on As they wish to be addressed.
There is a massive equivocation fallacy here.
We generally allow people to choose their own proper names. In our society, most people go by whatever name their parents gave them, but they can pick a different one if they like. As a practical matter, if someone introduces himself as “Fred”, I’m going to address him as “Fred”, and I’m not going to demand that he produce some document to prove that “Fred” is his “real” name.
Even when we happen to know that someone is going by a name other than their given or official or legal name, it is considered courteous–we generally extend the courtesy–of addressing them by the name that they announce. Perhaps the most commonplace example of this is someone who chooses to go by their middle name rather than their first.
Occasionally someone will claim some impractically long and grandiose name for themselves, and insist that everyone use it, but this is usually performative, and understood as such. (See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screaming_Lord_Sutch, also https://xkcd.com/327/)
Personal names in English are gendered, and trans people sometimes change their name to one that matches their announced gender rather than their biological sex. This can cause some confusion or awkwardness on initial introduction, but after a while most people find that they can roll with it, because–in the end–it’s just a name.
Pronouns are completely different. Pronouns are not like proper names. Pronouns are not arbitrary labels that people can choose. Pronouns are part of the language. No one owns or dictates or controls language (Académie Française notwithstanding). Language exists as a shared convention, embedded in the minds of all the people who use it.
Words mean what people think they mean. Really, they do. There is no other way to define or ascertain the meaning of words. When a man announces that he uses she/her pronouns, that neither makes him a woman nor changes the meaning of those pronouns to somehow encompass him. What it is is an implicit lie, coupled with a demand that everyone else participate in that lie with him.
Immediately, this breaks the language. It causes confusion and ambiguity as people contort their speech and their understanding to accommodate the lie.
But what these demands that people use the wrong pronouns really are are demands for submission. They are demands that everyone else do an absurd thing–and the absurdity is the point. If it were a reasonable demand, people might do it because it is reasonable. But it is absurd, and the only reason to do it is to demonstrate submission to the person making the demand. It is a kind of kowtowing.
We shouldn’t do it.
What about those who take pains to present as their “preferred” sex, so that the pronoun leaps into service? A trans identified female/trans man in my writing class a while ago had a beard and a deep voice and I probably would not have known were it not for the female name on the roll along with the male name.
@Mike B,
I think in the case of post-medical transition, extremely masculine looking females, the pronouns aren’t necessarily either demanded or requested. As you say, sometimes they “leap into service.” I’ve had that experience many times, and I think Ophelia Benson has also mentioned before that sometimes in the case of a female who’s well into transition and looks very male — bald spot, big beard, and beer belly — the masculine pronouns tend to come naturally on their own, and it takes a few extra mental calories to remember that the sex-based pronouns are feminine.
If anything, though, at the end of the day all this medical intervention in service of getting to the point of “passing” that the desired (i.e., opposite-sex) pronouns tend to “leap into service” does is call into question what the point of all of it was. It’s an extraordinary amount of work just to get to the point where people’s brains tend to unthinkingly default to an opposite-sex pronoun when they refer to you. Is a pronoun really worth that much? My sense is that by the time these women get to that point, they’re already halfway over whatever mental issue it was that caused them to chase such a goal in the first place. And as for men who chase “passing” womanhood, it’s even harder to pass as female when you’re a natal male, so I imagine the same rule applies, doubly so. It’s a youthful, unreasonable life goal to want to “pass” as the opposite sex. By the time one has amassed enough years to approach that goal, one has usually matured enough to move past it. But by then, it’s far too late to abandon the project.
Come to think of it, that probably neatly sums up transition in general.
Generally, people ARE allowed to change their names. But there are exceptions. Changing a name to hide a criminal past, for example, can properly be denied. If the purpose of the name change is to lie, or to commit fraud, those requests can also be denied. Lying about your sex, falsifying public and medical records are, in my view sufficient nefarious purposes to deny a requested name change.
People who change their names for non gender related reasons don’t generally (I think) try to retrospectively change history.
There is another turn of the screw when on top of the change of name the concept of deadnaming is deployed to try and force an effective rewriting of history, obliterating traces of the old name.