F*** you!
No offense intended, but it seems a good phrase for getting your attention. I also use the phrase as entry point to an argument that may have you muttering those words back at me.
A New York Times column today by former Book Review Editor Pamela Paul trod the now-familiar ground of bitching about political correctness, language police, virtue-signaling and all the other supposed excesses of the progressives. She focused particularly on the “tragic” loss of humor implicit in concern over language.
Readers chimed in with apparent glee, reciting all the things they found ridiculous in the PC crowd. The most-recommended reader comment came from retired Dartmouth professor Hunter Greer, who also haunts the Valley News, a local paper in VT/NH for which I write a regular opinion column. Hunter’s complaint? Going to a charity event and become discomfited by the use of “neurodiverse” in lieu of “Down’s Syndrome.”
A good many readers waxed nostalgic about the late comic George Carlin with his fabled routine on seven “dirty” words. Others cited his politically-incorrect heir-apparent, Bill Maher, who just loves calling out the “word police.” A great many others rambled on about pronouns, making ha-ha fun at “they/them/theirs” while asserting their own non-bigoted bona fides. Many readers went so far as to claim that this contemporary iteration of political correctness is driving them away from progressive politics entirely.
To all of the above (except George Carlin, may he RIP), I cheerfully say, “Fuck you!” as a way of demonstrating my own capacity for political incorrectness. I don’t use the phrase gratuitously. I do so to make a critical category distinction. Profanity does not assault or diminish someone’s identity. Prudishness is not a progressive virtue. George Carlin did a lovely service by pointing out the absurdity in censorship, but I’m guessing that he’d honor one’s preferred pronouns.
While this bitching is not the exclusive province of the privileged, it is noteworthy that each person cited above is white and, with the exception of Pamela Paul, male. While not leading everyone to abandon the overall progressive cause, it appears that a majority of liberals/progressives worries that focusing on pronouns, “spaces,” gender identity, trigger warnings etc., is undermining the more important work of progressive politics. I predict that a good number of readers of this blog are in that camp.
I ask you to consider another perspective.
I find it odd that so many good people are threatened by -or at least irritated by - the small expectations or hopes of the powerless. Do the individuals who use “they” represent a threat to the majority’s social, political or economic standing? Do those who prefer “neurodiverse” to “Down’s Syndrome” pose a debilitating inconvenience of some kind? Is the fact that some young person is “triggered” by a certain topic enough to make you lose sleep? Does some tenured college professor really compromise academic integrity or his own position of power by honoring someone else’s sensitivity, even if he doesn’t understand it?
Among the most arrogant manifestations of privilege is the assumed right to decide what someone else is permitted to find offensive. Many if not most of the objections to political correctness have this flavor. “You are too sensitive!” “Publishing your pronouns is silly virtue-signaling.” “Why capitalize Black and not White!!” “That shouldn’t bother you!”
On the political right, this pushback is intentionally brutal and demeaning, but the resistance from the political left is more discouraging.
It seems inarguable that the language or other modifications requested are from individuals or groups who are most vulnerable, most historically disadvantaged, and least powerful. Please consider that what they seek is minor validation in a culture that has invalidated their experiences. What they hope for is to be distinguishable in a society where they have often been invisible. Cannot those who have long been silenced have a voice?
My practice is to accept and honor others’ experiences without using my privilege to question their validity. I call people whatever they wish to be called, and will try to graciously receive correction, although I’ll appreciate “correction” offered with equal grace.
For the life of me, I just don’t see what anyone has to lose. And there is so much to be gained through empathy.
Well, the phrase certainly got my attention. But, my hackles went down and away once I read a few more sentences. So many of those I know are only intermittently aware of the high perch from which they started solely by virtue of having been born to their parents. Most feel (and they are probably right) that they have worked hard all their lives, but then fail to blend their origins into explaining the status they've managed to achieve in society. Luckily, most of those with whom I have regular contact have been open to recognizing how deeply prejudice has been built into the structures of US life at all levels, and are willing at least to consider what we might do about it, and to support others who are taking action on various fronts.
Steve, you make it all sound so simple: on one side we have people of privilege, a group in which it appears I'm included regardless of my economic and class circumstances. On the other side are people from various groups who are disadvantaged and oppressed (by people like me, it seems) because oppressors won't grant even tiny requests.
Sounds awful. Until you see it in action or are in the middle of a situation brought about by, for example, saying the "wrong" word. And that happens even if there's truly no way to know what the "right" word would be.
Let's start with an older linguistic Catch 22. For a number of decades, there was a periodic shift in what was the acceptable way to speak about black people (or, depending on your current belief, people of color). As a kid in the '50s in northern New Jersey, my understanding was that "Negro" was the correct word. But not including the dreaded N-word (which to me sounds oddly worse than the word it replaces, as we are all aware when we see or hear N-word), there were other words that were in common use: "colored" and "black" among them. Then in the '60s, "black" seemed to become not only okay but preferred. This made people like my parents very uncomfortable due to how the word was used in some circles in earlier eras. I may be forgetting other words in other periods, but eventually "African-American" became the acceptable term (even if the person in question originated in, say, Jamaica). And in recent decades, "person of color" has come into use. Silly me, I'm still stuck in the '60s, so I mostly say, "black person" or "black people." There came a point where I was convinced that I wasn't going to ever catch on to what was okay and that the black people I worked with professionally and knew socially would correct me or at least show discomfort, irritation, or outright anger if my word-choice was offensive. After thirty years of working in schools in Detroit, Flint, Pontiac, and other places with a lot of black students, parents, and educators, I've managed to survive and even thrive without a single incident. No one jumped down my throat. No one objected. No one corrected me. And I'm not a particularly intimidating person, at least not physically. Maybe I "got away with it" because I was comfortable in my own language and somehow earned a degree of legitimacy that gave me safe passage in a potentially volatile linguistic area. Or maybe all privileged white males get that: but not from what I've seen.
So back to the current issue. Unless someone is wearing a prominent ID badge that tells everyone what their preferred pronouns are, chances are pretty good that a lot of people, privileged or not, are going to use the pronouns that they have been raised for decades to associate with male or female depending on how the other person presents. For the majority of people, that will clearly be male or female. For some people, even before the current era, that won't be so clear. For some people, it may be clear except that the person will not concur with what others see. And so the opportunity for confusion and correction (which, Steve, often isn't particularly graceful and sometimes is outright hostile).
I could leave the issue right there, but I'm not going to. I'm going to raise temperatures and blood pressures a bit by making a couple of additional points. First, if I'm first meeting someone and am told that the pronouns I'm supposed to use are "they/them/their," it might not be terribly difficult on one level because I have no history with that person. So not using the pronouns I would otherwise have used based on my automatic perception of gender wouldn't be conflicting with prior experience with "them." My difficulty would be that "they/them/their" are plural pronouns in English. My seventy-two years of linguistic experience tell me that using a plural pronoun for a singular subject is wrong. But it's not my "grammar police" persona that objects: it's my pea-brain that wants some clarity in knowing who is being discussed. I've watched the show BILLIONS for years and for more than half the seasons a main character, Taylor, played by a non-binary actor, has been a non-binary person whose pronouns are "they/them/their." And I still get quite confused as to who is being discussed when it's more than possible that "they" refers to several members of Taylor's company, to Taylor and one other person, or just to Taylor, even when Taylor is in the scene. And have that exact difficulty in the real world. Having to pay extraordinary attention to the appearance of pronouns and then doing a translation when listening to others is difficult enough: trying to filter my own language in a way that cuts completely against my entire life-experience may not be trying to overcome literal "hard-wiring" in my brain, but it's damned close. And it's painful in a variety of ways, not the least of which is that "walking on eggshells" phenomenon that I never like undergoing. And I suspect virtually nobody does.
Interestingly, I read recently that another non-binary actor who has been in GAME OF THRONES and is the co-lead in THE LAST OF US does not have a pronoun preference (or at least doesn't find it difficult to accept different pronouns from others). I can't say that everyone should be that easy going, but I can wish.
Finally, I'll go where it's really dangerous to tread. I have come to wonder why I am expected to actively lie about people simply because they want to be lied about. There's an old anecdote I read as a child in which Abraham Lincoln asked members of his cabinet, "How many legs does a horse have if we call a tail a leg?" Various cabinet members agreed that the answer would be five. At that point, Lincoln relied, "Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg."
I think the pronoun issue is the same. If a biological male believes that he is a female (or says that he identifies as a woman), that in itself is none of my business. I can't and won't object to someone's self-perceptions or feelings. However, I don't have to comply with that perception. And I don't have to support what I think is a confused idea. I wouldn't go out of my way to try to disabuse the person of their beliefs, but I am not going to distort my own beliefs and perceptions in order to satisfy some politically correct code. To be specific, if someone uses pronouns that go against my beliefs about the person, I certainly won't be "correcting" that person. But if I use pronouns to speak about that person, I'm going to use the ones that my brain tells me to use. No hostility intended or involved.
Maybe there will come a point where pronoun issues and some other even more serious issues like single-gender safe spaces (locker rooms, bath rooms, changing rooms, hospital rooms, prison blocks and cells) and competitive athletics in sports where women have fought for decades to get equal treatment only to now be expected to compete against biological males who identify as female as if there's simply nothing unfair or dangerous about that) will be happily resolved in an equitable manner. Where women who object to some of the odd language emerging like "people with vulvas" to replace "women" won't be yelled at as "TERFS" and treated like they're horrible bigots. But right now, many states are taking an extreme position so that girls and their parents are at serious risk of legal penalties if they even ask the "wrong" questions about athletic competitions.
I'm afraid that most of what you raise in your piece is designed to trivialize objections and make those who raise them sound like whiny rich white folks living in gated communities trying to keep "people of color" from moving too close. And of course, some of those people might just be of that ilk. But most of the people out in the day to day world aren't rich or particularly privileged. Some might not even be white!!! And women who are afraid, not of trans men, but of MEN who may use the "you're whatever gender you say you are at any given moment and the rest of the world has to agree and honor that identification" laws to gain access to women's safe spaces for the usual sorts of reasons that many men have fantasized getting access to girls' locker rooms since junior high school days, do not deserve to be called bigots or hysterics and should not be forced to give up their sense of safety simply to satisfy a politically correct trend in some legislatures. There are solutions to these issues that don't entail hurting one group in order to satisfy another. And it's fascinating that many liberals who are absolutely appalled by Republican/conservative rolling back of women's reproductive rights are so blithe about seeing women's rights being legislated away as long as the impetus is coming from Democrats. To me, it looks like the world is turning into a Monty Python movie: https://youtu.be/4BsO7Hf-kdY