A defective mattering map
Never mind sexual violence, poverty, racism, corruption, Brexit, rising sea levels, disappearing coral reefs – let’s focus on PRONOUNS.
Schools in Brighton are to give out pronoun stickers to pupils in a bid to support transgender children.
The stickers, which are being handed out to pupils in secondary schools and colleges, are part of Brighton and Hove City Council’s pronoun badges campaign which aims to prevent “misgendering”.
The council’s badges indicate whether people would like to be addressed as “he”, “she” or “they” – and some are left blank to allow people to fill in their own pronouns.
Even if I thought people had a right to order the entire world to address them by a Special set of pronouns that don’t match the boring facts, I would still think this was idiotic. Even if I thought people had such a right, I would still think it was one of the most minor rights anyone could possibly come up with. Even if I thought the whole idea made sense, I would still think councils and schools and hospitals should not be wasting one second of their time on it. As it is, I think these people have traded in their brains in exchange for a vat of warm custard.
Trans rights campaigner Sophie Cook said misgendering, the act of addressing an individual by the wrong pronoun, can be particularly harmful to transgender school pupils.
But, for the bazillionth time, you don’t address people by their pronouns; “you” is not gendered. You only talk about people by their pronouns, and no I don’t believe it’s “harmful” to anyone to hear a “he” when xir wants a “she.” Not everything we don’t like is harmful; I get that they don’t like it but I don’t believe it’s harmful. I think that’s just part of the tedious melodrama that keeps getting ratcheted up into more and more lurid eMotional hisTrionics.
She told The Argus: “In these situations, you will have people up in arms. But quite frankly, what difference does it make to those people?
“It’s a great way of making people think about identities of the people they’re talking to.”
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh but what if we don’t want to be made to think about the identities of the people we’re talking to? What then, eh?
I know I certainly don’t want to be made to do any such thing. I’ll decide what to think about when I talk to people, thank you.
A city council spokesperson said: “The badges and stickers help raise awareness that you can’t assume someone’s gender identity and the pronouns they use. We know from a range of evidence that gender is more complicated than is traditionally recognised.”
Blah blah blah. “Gender identity” is hokum. You can “assume” someone’s sex, and sometimes you have to for safety reasons. “Gender identity” is a hobby and not something any other party has to pay attention to. You can assume what pronouns people “use” if you’re going to have a rational conversation in mutually-comprehensible language. The spokes means sex, not gender, and we haven’t suddenly learned that it’s More Complicated; that’s just jargon.
“We all define our own gender and we should respect other people’s identities and rights.”
We don’t all define our own sex, and there is no moral imperative to “respect other people’s identities” – that’s meaningless wokespeak, and it’s worthless.
They added: “We’re proud of being a diverse city, and the council is committed to equality and inclusion for all people, including our trans and non-binary residents. Our equality and inclusion strategy rightly supports those who are experiencing greatest disadvantage.”
There it is again! “Those who are experiencing greatest disadvantage” – who says that’s trans people? Who measured and issued a ruling, and where can we learn more about it?
Brighton and Hove Council has an illustration.
“My pronouns matter” – no, actually, they don’t. They really don’t.
By “harmful” they mean it challenges their fragile, carefully constructed sense of self and induces cognitive dissonance. By “harmful” they mean narcissistically wounding, like telling Donald Trump to his face that he’s just not very smart.
Nice shout-out to Rebecca Goldstein in the title, Ophelia.
Wonder what she thinks of all this.
My pronouns are #!$ and &?%, failure to pronounce them correctly makes you a bigot
Are students going to be required to wear the stickers? Or use the preferred pronouns? And how much did these stickers cost? Did that come from a budget that could be better used to address real problems? It’s not just time wasted here, it’s money.
So, if Trump “identifies as” a stable genius, I have to respect that? Or if Farage “identifies as” a man of the people, I have to respect that?
Or is it “gender identity” only that one has to respect?
If so, why? What makes one type of self-identification more privileged than another?
Am I the only one who sees these as an unintentional yellow star? It’s the says to the world that one is super different than normal people and most definitely AIDS in other ingredients…
‘You only talk about people by their pronouns, and no I don’t believe it’s “harmful” to anyone to hear a “he” when xir wants a “she.” Not everything we don’t like is harmful; I get that they don’t like it but I don’t believe it’s harmful.’
Someone on another blog wrote a post responding to someone who compared pronoun business to deliberately and offensively calling someone by the wrong name, and I commented that while that can definitely be a deliberately insulting thing to do to someone directly (‘I can’t pronounce your ‘foreign’ name so I’ll call you Becky’) this is actually quite common in third-person speech. I consistently refer to someone who works in another office as ‘dogboy’, because I can never remember his name, and everyone I talk to knows who I’m talking about–it’s not particularly kind of me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t be thrilled to know I did that, but fortunately he’s not around and doesn’t know so it doesn’t harm him.
The good news seems to be that, anecdotally, the more the ‘establishment’ get into it the less cool it seems, and the kids are already getting over it and moving on to something else.
I wonder how much those badges cost the council…
I can tell you for a fact that whoever proposed these stickers has no memory at all of being a schoolkid. These stickers will be used, first and foremost, to bully other kids. The bullies will force boys to wear stickers announcing that he identifies as a girl and much, much mockery and physical violence will result. No doubt the same thing and worse will be done to girls.
There will also be liberal use of the sticker to accuse other people of bullying the bullies in the kind of reciprocal bullying that will be familiar to absolutely anyone on Earth who actually does remember their school days, whether they were victims of it or not.
It’s not just stupid, it’s a new vector for imaginative new kinds of bullying, which definitely can cause harm.
I think deliberate, repeated, aggressive use of the ‘wrong’ pronoun can be harmful, but only insofar as it’s basically just classic bullying. It’s the bullying that’s at fault and the thing that needs to be tackled, not pronoun use.
I meant to say above that the ‘reciprocal’ bullying will be something along the lines of “teacher, teacher, so-and-so won’t call me she”, getting so-and-so into trouble with the school and parents. There was a lot of that kind of thing when I was at school. Waves of it turned up about an hour after every new anti-bullying scheme was announced and we had to watch a video about unacceptable behaviour.
Meanwhile, in reality, transgender kids are bullied for being trans; the principle effect of that bullying is psychological harm; the principle means of that bullying is misgendering; and the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people.
“Not everything we don’t like is harmful; I get that they don’t like it but I don’t believe it’s harmful”
Thank God. Next time my son comes home in tears, I’ll take heart that none of this is actually harmful at all. Ophelia would know.
Meanwhile, in reality, I don’t doubt that trans kids are bullied for being trans and that’s shameful.
But it’s the bullying that needs to be addressed, not the pronoun use specifically. Do you think that if the pronoun use issue were fixed to your satisfaction the bullying would go away? It seems unlikely.
Fat kids get bullied because they’re fat.
Geeky kids get bullied because they’re geeky.
Ginger kids get bullied because they’re ginger.
Gay kids get bullied because they are gay.
Trans kids get bullied because they are trans.
Girls get bullied because they are too slutty/not slutty enough/both/neither
There isn’t a great deal of logic employed. If a fat kid loses weight, they’ll inevitably be bullied for that, too.
The common thread here is the bullying. The reasons for the bullying are largely arbitrary. It’s the bullying that does the harm and it’s the thing we have to learn how to stop. I think we’ve done a terrible job at this so far and we aren’t showing any signs at getting better. In my day we were instructed to tell our teachers and/or parents if we were being bullied and the problem would automatically be resolved. You can imagine how well that worked.
We’re doing a terrible job of teaching kids not to be cruel. I suspect that’s because it only takes a few cruel kids to ruin a whole bunch of childhoods.
Pronoun use isn’t the issue here. It is cruelty, likely passed down from parents. I don’t mean to suggest that specific prejudices don’t play a part, prejudices against trans people included. But I’ve never in my life met a bully who sticks to a single issue.
I’m very sorry indeed that your kid is being bullied, Kevin, but pronoun stickers are about as far away from the solution as it is possible to get.
Kevin, I echo latsot. I was not trans, and in fact was a somewhat feminine girl when I was in high school (I say somewhat because we were poor and I couldn’t afford accessories or even make up most of the time). I was bullied for being poor. I was bullied for having the “wrong” accent (mine is sort of a mix of all the places I lived before I was ten, and therefore not clearly identifiable, but it was identifiably not Okie). I was bullied for being ‘smart’. I was bullied for being shy. I was bullied for the fact that my dad raised pigs. I was bullied for going to the wrong church. I was bullied because I was a female – in fact, that was the number one reason I have been bullied in my life. I was bullied because I was not aggressive or particularly strong, and that made me safe to bully.
I came home in tears a lot (metaphoric tears, because I’m not much of a crier). I have been verbally, emotionally, physically, and sexually abused through much of my life. The answer that was given me was “get over it” or “it’s your imagination”. I empathize with your son, I really do, because I’ve been there. I just don’t see anyway that using a ‘correct’ pronoun to identify him will solve the problem. I do not think passing out stickers would solve the problem. And forcing people to recognize him as a boy will probably only make things worse, because believe me, children can find lots of things to bully other kids for while making it (though maybe not believably) not about trans.
This is a simplistic answer (or really, non-answer) to a complex problem. It will solve nothing, and as latsot says, will open the door for whole new forms of bullying. It will divide our schools further into cliques.
Kevin @11 –
How do you know the principle means of that bullying is misgendering? Serious question. Do you think the bullying would stop if the school made and enforced a rule against calling a kid “she” instead of “he” or vice versa?
Kevin:
Again, I don’t want to belittle your son’s torment, I’m sure it is awful. I hope you and he can find a way to make things better and I wish I had some advice.
I don’t. I have memories of being threatened every day for a decade or so with being beaten up after school. Every single day the bullies told me they would get me outside school and kick the shit out of me. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. There was no defense. There were usually five or six of them when they decided they’d beat me. I couldn’t avoid them, the bus was the only way I could get home and there was only one stop.
That’s only the physical violence, though. Throughout the same time the same people and the people who didn’t want to be on their radar and some people who were just horrible people anyway spent all day every day telling me how unacceptable I was in every way. It was relentless, day after day after fucking day. The reasons were mostly that I was poor, wore hand-me-down clothes from my ten-years-older brother and (high five iknklast) came from a pig farming family, even though about 50% of families thereabouts were farmers. Of course, one day I completely flipped out, having had enough. Ambulances and local authorities re-writing of what constitutes violence in schools were involved. Needless to say I was bullied even more after that: they wanted another Carrie episode. That is exactly what I mean when I say that kids exploit whatever they can when they bully and the specifics are less important than the general.
I’m sure this sort of thing is similar to what your son is experiencing. His treatment is disgusting.
But I think you can see that I was treated that way because I was different, not because of the specifics of the difference. You can ask practically anyone and they’ll say the same thing. Justifications for abuse are what you probably want to look out for. I doub’t you’ll see anyone here doing that.
Bad idea, especially in secondary schools (11-18-year-olds). They’d might as well just hand out ‘Kick Me’ stickers. The only kids who might actually benefit from this are the ones who might get temporary relief from their bullies, said bullies having new, clearly visible targets to focus on. The stickers aren’t there to make others aware of an individual’s gender identity, but kids being the feral beasts they are, the bullies will simply make the leap of logic that anybody sporting a sticker is obviously trans, and will mistreat them accordingly. There will be far more kids bullied for being trans than there are actual trans kids.
Kids who bully others have never been swayed by stickers. This campaign is more about the image that the council wishes to project, and a cynic might well think that with Brighton being the ‘gay capital’ of England, is being done with an eye to the next round of council elections.
latsot, I came from an area that still pretended to be a rural community, but in fact it was a large metropolitan area on the edge of Oklahoma City that probably couldn’t even call itself a suburb anymore since it is now basically self-contained and many people don’t see any need to go to ‘the city’ for anything. In spite of lots of rhetoric towards farmers, the only things it was okay to raise in my neck of the woods was horses and dogs. Yep, rich town.
But at least we can agree that pigs are the best mammals.
Some diversity events at academic conferences are starting to employ these stickers. I can imagine that attending the event but opting out of sticker usage can out you as gender critical, which is a big no-no for many of the young liberals who are administering these events.
I consider diversity events and improving diversity and equity in science very important, so it frustrates me that I feel a twinge of hesitation to attend over the gender-fluff pageantry. Personally I opt out of such visible badges of being woke, because it all seems like posturing-better to back up convictions with action not fashion. I imagine that since I’m male, though, I won’t come under nearly as much scrutiny as a woman who opts out of using the stickers.
Yeah, latsot, I’ll agree (though as you know I am partial to otters).
Studebacher Hoch, I suppose it would definitely be a no-no at these conferences to wear a sticker that announced “Out and Proud…TERF”? Yeah, probably get you killed.
For clarity, by stickers I mean stickers that state preferred pronouns.
Studebacher Hoch @ 20 – That’s the thing – the way all this hyperventilating nonsense is making the whole of the left look toxic plus deranged. I hate that.
It’s possible to use a child’s non-preferred pronouns in order to be cruel. Cruelty, picking on a child for being different, is wrong. It’s also possible to use non-preferred pronouns because one sees the child’s sex and doesn’t agree with transgender ideology.
I have no doubt that the latter can be very painful for a lot of gender dysphoric children, but I don’t think the answer is to force people to go along with a belief system they don’t share.
@Lady M:
Stop brilliantly summarising in a couple of paragraphs what the rest of us take like nine bloated posts to say. You’re embarrassing us.
Thank you, latsot. Praise from Caesar. *blush*
#11 Kevin, further to latsot’s #13
I was bullied despite being the largest kid in class, purely because the popular kids were cliquish and used any avenue of attack they could against me. A child can be bullied for absolutely any trait, including traits that are not real but are made up by other classmates. Is the solution to bullying to go after those individual avenues of attack piecemeal? Or is it to go after the climate of bullying some schools are plagued with?
Forgot to mention, I would suggest that the ur-reason for bullying is simple unpopularity. I was not not friends with the group of kids that had been at that school longer than I, and the crop of kids arriving at the same time as me discovered that a surefire way to increase their popularity was to join in the teasing of the unpopular.
[…] I’m still chewing on Kevin’s formulation. […]
On the topic of bullying, the stickers are also a way to market “trans” to kids — any kid who says he or she is trans is told that they can emotionally blackmail and control (via adult punishment) the behavior of others. And what is the teacher to do if Bobby says Jane misgendered him and Jane says she did not? Which kids gets believed? Which kid gets punished?
I wish I had screen-capped the tweet I saw once where a Mom said when her daughter was bullied for being a tomboy, the school officials said there was not a lot they could do about it. When her daughter was bullied for being a lesbian, same story from school officials. When she claimed to be a “trans boy” and was bullied, the school officials started coming down on the bullies like the hammer of God. What bullied kid won’t see that and do a little thinking?
Anyone who thinks that they can resolve bullying by informing the bullies of the correct pronoun to use for their victim has fundamentally misunderstood the concept of bullying. And all the bullies need to do is use the preferred pronoun and give it just the right emphasis and and tone of contempt, and there we are, they’ve made an insult out of it. I used to work with someone who wouldn’t use the name of whoever she was currently picking on, and the amount of venom she could inject into the word “she” was staggering.