Why, the nuns made him do it when he was only 4!
Is it, as the South East Technological University (SETU) claims, “unlawful” to refuse to address someone by their preferred name or use their chosen pronouns? It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. But it is bad manners – and deliberate discourtesy is not a trivial matter.
I don’t understand why anyone has a problem calling people by the names they prefer. I’ve been doing it almost all my life.
If Fintan O’Toole really doesn’t understand then he hasn’t been paying attention. Easy for him, isn’t it. Women, on the other hand, have compelling reasons to be wary of men who order us to call them “Nellie” while taking over our spaces and even our feminism.
It started when I was four. I entered the junior infants’ class in the Marist convent school in Crumlin. I discovered that I had to call nuns Sister even though they were not my sisters. I learned that the head nun had to be addressed as Mother, even though I had a mother and it wasn’t her.
Uh…yes, and that’s quite creepy, and not something to hold up as a shining example of “what could possibly be wrong with this???” Convent schools are not self-evidently a good thing, and ordering small children to use religious terminology when addressing the teachers is also not self-evidently a good thing. I, for one, think it’s a bad thing.
When I was a kid, I accepted these rituals of nomenclature out of a sense of religious duty.
Exactly, and religious duty is not something that should be imposed on everyone (or for that matter anyone). People have a right to refuse religion. That’s a much stronger and more necessary right than the “right” for a man to be called Betsy.
There’s an obvious imbalance of power between teachers and their students. That places a particular onus on the teacher not to abuse that power and on the school or university to make sure that the student is treated with respect.
So Colette Colfer, the lecturer at SETU who has objected to the university’s gender inclusion policy, is right to question the university’s implication that “staff and students at higher education institutions [are] required, by law, to use a person’s preferred pronouns”. But I think she’s wrong to go further and claim that requiring staff to use a person’s preferred mode of address “could result in discrimination against those who do not subscribe to gender identity theory”.
It really couldn’t. If I call the SETU chaplain Father because that’s what common courtesy requires, I am not subscribing to the teachings and beliefs of the Catholic church.
Yes you are. That’s the problem. That’s why they do it. Most professions don’t do that. Very few academics are pompous enough to demand the “Doctor” label on all occasions, and the same goes for judges and medical doctors. Computer scientists don’t even have a title to refrain from demanding. If the church can make everyone think it’s a polite obligation to call them Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, then that’s a big head start on getting us to grovel in other ways. We’re free to think we comply just to be polite, but the reality is it’s way more than mere politeness.
Same with calling men Betsy.
How about a man who identifies not only as a woman but as a nun? Would Mr. O’Toole be happy to call such a fellow “Sister” on the basis of his self-identification?
This example doesn’t even demonstrate the thing he is arguing for: titles aren’t names or pronouns. The point he is trying to make would be better made if those nuns had made him call them Brother and Father, as that at least would entail a counter-intuitive gender swap.
We as a species are very good at inventing convoluted social hierarchies, and very bad at asking “Now, what will sociopaths do with this?”
@tigger, you’re too right. I hope someone told four year old Finlan that just because he’s supposed to call someone “Doctor,” it doesn’t mean he has to let the man give him a medical examination.
Holms, another thing wrong with his analogy…did the nuns have to call him by his preferred name/pronouns? No, they didn’t. When I was in school, a kid would be called their ‘legal’ name…in other words, the name on the roll. If a student complained, too bad. That was their name, and that was what they were going to be called. And that wasn’t even nuns; I never went to anything but public school. And kids had to suck it up. If their name was Eugene, but they wanted to be called by their middle name, let’s say Lee, they were stuck with Eugene.
I actually am glad teachers don’t do that anymore. I called my students the name they preferred, though in only two cases was it an opposite sex name, and in one of those cases, it wasn’t really obviously opposite sex, since both males and females I know have that name. But if “Marie” wanted to be called “Anne”, I called her Anne.
The thing is I wasn’t forced to, and I didn’t have to deal with the demands of a huge class of non-binaries or trans. There were only a couple I dealt with, and they were enormously polite about it. Almost all preferred names were some sort of nickname, or a kid with an ethnic name that Anglicized it (perhaps to make it easier ot say; we had a large Czech population in town).
While I am glad teachers will call students by their nickname or middle name, I am not glad this is being extended ad absurdum.
And pronouns? That didn’t come up very often, unless students were working in teams. I never had to deal with that, because I called students by their names. I simply did not use pronouns for any trans student. It saved a lot of grief. I refused to use the singular they/them for a student when teaching English; it’s a bad example. No one noticed, because I always used her name.