But they're My Pronouns!
Can't remember who said it: it was in a YT video on l'affaire Peterson, and we even got "they're a part of me, like an organ of my body", or some such. Cute or cringe, you decide. Hearing this, I reflected it was time someone put out a compilation of 21st century Magical Thinking superstitions, of which this proprietary nature of personal pronouns could be one, along with, say, The Patriarchy, or the Male Gaze - you know, the one which causes things and people evilly ogled to burst into flame, crinkle, self-destruct, be objectified, and all the other Planet Krypton stuff those remarkable laser eyes get up to as soon as you let them off the hook.
Is the proposed extension of the set of English pronouns achievable as a long-term goal? I would say yes, in principle, if restricted to a single additional set of non-gendered third person singular pronouns. However, I don't think it's either necessary or desirable, and I also don't think it will probably gain any serious traction, for a number of reasons, including in no particular order: the lack of consensus over how many sets of pronouns are needed, or which set to push into the classrooms; the lack of a unified movement or organization capable of creating such a consensus; the existence of a tidier and more parsimonious alternative in the form of they/them/their; and above all, the fact that customary usage of third person pronouns in most cases rules out effective policing. You sometimes get the impression that a lot of the more vociferous advocates of these non-binary pronouns don't understand what third person pronouns are actually for, since they frequently use words like "address" (as in "I expect to be addressed with my chosen pronouns"), apparently oblivious of the fact that we do not use the existing he/she pronouns to "address" people, but to talk about them, most often in their absence - which in turn means that any "misgendering" that might occur cannot be taken or pursued as an affront (if someone wants to refer to me as "she" or "it" in my absence, there's no reason I would ever get to know about it, and if I did, there's no reason for me to care, and if I did, there's no plausible way I could argue an intent to offend). It does not seem reasonable to try to control what people say in conversations from which one is necessarily excluded. So I think there'll be a lot of silliness and a lot of screeching for a while, before the whole thing dies a natural death. At least I hope so. (In part because the less legal scavenging and authoritarian posturing there is over the matter, the easier it will be for people to quietly adopt sensitivity to the other's chosen gender identity as a worthy addition to their social skill set, without feeling that they are thereby committing themselves to an unexamined, radical authoritarian ideology.)
Last weekend I think it was, I got into an argument (a reasonably polite one, I should perhaps add) on the subject in a Guardian comments section under an article about Peterson. My opponent, a self-described "qualified lawyer", took issue with my express opinion that Bill C16 was not only undesirable but a radical overstepping of existing jurisprudential norms. His arguments were, to sum up briefly:
(a) the legislation is desirable insofar as it seeks to prevent discrimination against transsexuals;
(b) it does not go substantially further than such existing legislation as the UK Equality Act 2010, and existing Canadian legislation that could likewise be interpreted as "compelled speech", relating to other protected groups. Also, it was unlikely to be misused in the way Peterson suggested, since the law was subject to the various "checks and balances" built into the system, including the requirement that judges interpret it in according with existing jurisprudential norms - thus preventing, for example, sanctions being imposed against people who had "misgendered" someone in good faith, as a result of a misunderstanding or a memory lapse. (Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure my interlocutor in that Guardian Comments discussion was a "he", or whether the username, which I now forget, gave any guidance on the matter. I use "he" simply because that's the assumption I made at the time.)
Of particular interest to me was this poster's insistence, during that discussion, that my proposed "rule of thumb" for approaching new legislation was impractical and absurd. The rule in question stated simply that when faced with a new law, we should always assume, while drafting it or while debating its alleged necessity, that it will one day be misused to the limit of its potential. I was genuinely surprised to find such a principle, which appears to me as elementary common sense, could be controversial: for me, it's as obvious as saying that if you manufacture a toy for small children, you have a duty to consider the possibility that a particular child may one day "abuse" the toy, by deciding to eat it rather than play with it, and take steps to prevent a tragic outcome in such a hypothetical scenario. I was told that the principle fails to account for the benign, mollifying effect of existing case law and "the judicial system" (equivalent to saying "yeah, but parents will be on hand to prevent the child from choking on those small detachable sharp-edged parts we've decided to leave in, won't they?"). This being Guardian Comments, time limits prevented either of us getting into a really deep discussion, but the obvious answer is that when one is trying to assess the potential for abuse of a new legislative initiative, naturally one should try to calculate this in the light of existing law, which acts as a set of constraints built into the system (no disagreement there): but having taken this properly into account, there is still a residual question regarding possible abuse, misapplication and unintended consequences, and these possibilities (which my interlocutor admitted could not be ruled out a priori) need to be weighed against the foreseeable benefits expected from the initiative. Like everything else, there's a trade-off, and hence, there's no substitute for dispassionate analysis and discussion of all the variables involved.
And if this is accepted, then what is arresting about the whole Peterson Pronouns controversy is that while one side was trying to mount an argument based on rational considerations of cost and benefit, along with questioning the dubious ideological underpinnings of the law, the other side simply refused to engage on those terms, and limited itself to mudslinging and furious, hypocritical denunciations of alleged "transphobia", the reverberations of which continue in the media right up to the present.
Ultimately, how one weighs up the costs and benefits of such a law may turn on some quite basic presuppositions about the role of government, societal pressure and individual responsibility. My interlocutor in that discussion, seeing I had gone for lunch, signed off with something like "So we disagree about the usefulness of governments in promoting social change". Precisely. For me, it is never the job of governments to bring about changes in social attitudes, though they may usefully respond to such changes as have independently occurred. My reason for believing this is that the one thing that all governments have in common, and which practically defines them, is the monopoly of force. This means in practice that every time a government wants to "promote" social change, while there may be a variety of ways it could theoretically do so, it will always end up resorting reflexively to force... and when governments use force, they tend to have all the sensitivity and delicacy of a bull presented with a display of fine Wedgewood pottery, or of a doctor proposing to perform heart surgery at a distance of a thousand miles, using an ICBM as a scalpel. Moreover, wherever a proposed "social change" becomes identified as a responsibility of government, this in itself is a fairly reliable indication that there is no universal consensus about the desirability of such change (since if there was, government intervention would be unnecessary: people would enact the change themselves unopposed). Put differently: the use of state coercion should, in a liberal society, be kept to a minimum and confined to dealing with consensually defined threats of genuine physical harm (among which possible "misgendering" via pronoun misuse cannot reasonably be included, even where it is clearly malicious and persistent; words, in themselves and without a transmission mechanism, cannot hurt people). Beyond that, the trade-off between the increased comfort and security of those people "protected" by the law on the one hand, and the full-frontal attack on the freedoms of the majority, including freedom to speak freely or to hold and express minority ideological views, on the other, rapidly becomes unconscionable and unsustainable, at least for anyone outside the ideological echo chamber.
Let's be clear: there are some very illiberal people out there, and they are the enemies of society. By which I mean: "illiberal" as in "wanting to exercise power over others, whether individually or collectively", where "power" means control (I've written about this extensively elsewhere, here for example), and "enemies", roughly in the sense that termites are the enemies of wooden constructions. I'm not suggesting that these "enemies of society" need to be silenced or crushed - on the contrary, I think we need to engage them and try to understand the roots of their insecurity, and try to win them over - but I do think that we need to be aware of the dangers they represent, and be on our guard against them. Now, while it's obvious that the ranks of "illiberal people" include the hypothetical transphobe who will attempt to use physical coercion, assault or other violent means to prevent trans people from freely expressing their gender identity, it seems to me that such reprehensible people are actually, these days, an insignificant minority in comparison with the much larger set of people who respond reflexively to the guilt they feel over their own unacknowledged prejudice by attempting to universalize their own dysphoria through authoritarian means, preferring to aggressively police the "politically incorrect" behaviour of others rather than facing their own demons... yea, even unto asserting possession of the pronouns chosen and used by others. (This well-known psychological proclivity to aggressive denial and harmful projection is why women are probably well advised to give vociferously "feminist" males, particularly the flaky ones, a prudently wide berth).
Daghh... exams to write. More to say another day, as always.
Is the proposed extension of the set of English pronouns achievable as a long-term goal? I would say yes, in principle, if restricted to a single additional set of non-gendered third person singular pronouns. However, I don't think it's either necessary or desirable, and I also don't think it will probably gain any serious traction, for a number of reasons, including in no particular order: the lack of consensus over how many sets of pronouns are needed, or which set to push into the classrooms; the lack of a unified movement or organization capable of creating such a consensus; the existence of a tidier and more parsimonious alternative in the form of they/them/their; and above all, the fact that customary usage of third person pronouns in most cases rules out effective policing. You sometimes get the impression that a lot of the more vociferous advocates of these non-binary pronouns don't understand what third person pronouns are actually for, since they frequently use words like "address" (as in "I expect to be addressed with my chosen pronouns"), apparently oblivious of the fact that we do not use the existing he/she pronouns to "address" people, but to talk about them, most often in their absence - which in turn means that any "misgendering" that might occur cannot be taken or pursued as an affront (if someone wants to refer to me as "she" or "it" in my absence, there's no reason I would ever get to know about it, and if I did, there's no reason for me to care, and if I did, there's no plausible way I could argue an intent to offend). It does not seem reasonable to try to control what people say in conversations from which one is necessarily excluded. So I think there'll be a lot of silliness and a lot of screeching for a while, before the whole thing dies a natural death. At least I hope so. (In part because the less legal scavenging and authoritarian posturing there is over the matter, the easier it will be for people to quietly adopt sensitivity to the other's chosen gender identity as a worthy addition to their social skill set, without feeling that they are thereby committing themselves to an unexamined, radical authoritarian ideology.)
Last weekend I think it was, I got into an argument (a reasonably polite one, I should perhaps add) on the subject in a Guardian comments section under an article about Peterson. My opponent, a self-described "qualified lawyer", took issue with my express opinion that Bill C16 was not only undesirable but a radical overstepping of existing jurisprudential norms. His arguments were, to sum up briefly:
(a) the legislation is desirable insofar as it seeks to prevent discrimination against transsexuals;
(b) it does not go substantially further than such existing legislation as the UK Equality Act 2010, and existing Canadian legislation that could likewise be interpreted as "compelled speech", relating to other protected groups. Also, it was unlikely to be misused in the way Peterson suggested, since the law was subject to the various "checks and balances" built into the system, including the requirement that judges interpret it in according with existing jurisprudential norms - thus preventing, for example, sanctions being imposed against people who had "misgendered" someone in good faith, as a result of a misunderstanding or a memory lapse. (Speaking of which, I'm not entirely sure my interlocutor in that Guardian Comments discussion was a "he", or whether the username, which I now forget, gave any guidance on the matter. I use "he" simply because that's the assumption I made at the time.)
Of particular interest to me was this poster's insistence, during that discussion, that my proposed "rule of thumb" for approaching new legislation was impractical and absurd. The rule in question stated simply that when faced with a new law, we should always assume, while drafting it or while debating its alleged necessity, that it will one day be misused to the limit of its potential. I was genuinely surprised to find such a principle, which appears to me as elementary common sense, could be controversial: for me, it's as obvious as saying that if you manufacture a toy for small children, you have a duty to consider the possibility that a particular child may one day "abuse" the toy, by deciding to eat it rather than play with it, and take steps to prevent a tragic outcome in such a hypothetical scenario. I was told that the principle fails to account for the benign, mollifying effect of existing case law and "the judicial system" (equivalent to saying "yeah, but parents will be on hand to prevent the child from choking on those small detachable sharp-edged parts we've decided to leave in, won't they?"). This being Guardian Comments, time limits prevented either of us getting into a really deep discussion, but the obvious answer is that when one is trying to assess the potential for abuse of a new legislative initiative, naturally one should try to calculate this in the light of existing law, which acts as a set of constraints built into the system (no disagreement there): but having taken this properly into account, there is still a residual question regarding possible abuse, misapplication and unintended consequences, and these possibilities (which my interlocutor admitted could not be ruled out a priori) need to be weighed against the foreseeable benefits expected from the initiative. Like everything else, there's a trade-off, and hence, there's no substitute for dispassionate analysis and discussion of all the variables involved.
And if this is accepted, then what is arresting about the whole Peterson Pronouns controversy is that while one side was trying to mount an argument based on rational considerations of cost and benefit, along with questioning the dubious ideological underpinnings of the law, the other side simply refused to engage on those terms, and limited itself to mudslinging and furious, hypocritical denunciations of alleged "transphobia", the reverberations of which continue in the media right up to the present.
Ultimately, how one weighs up the costs and benefits of such a law may turn on some quite basic presuppositions about the role of government, societal pressure and individual responsibility. My interlocutor in that discussion, seeing I had gone for lunch, signed off with something like "So we disagree about the usefulness of governments in promoting social change". Precisely. For me, it is never the job of governments to bring about changes in social attitudes, though they may usefully respond to such changes as have independently occurred. My reason for believing this is that the one thing that all governments have in common, and which practically defines them, is the monopoly of force. This means in practice that every time a government wants to "promote" social change, while there may be a variety of ways it could theoretically do so, it will always end up resorting reflexively to force... and when governments use force, they tend to have all the sensitivity and delicacy of a bull presented with a display of fine Wedgewood pottery, or of a doctor proposing to perform heart surgery at a distance of a thousand miles, using an ICBM as a scalpel. Moreover, wherever a proposed "social change" becomes identified as a responsibility of government, this in itself is a fairly reliable indication that there is no universal consensus about the desirability of such change (since if there was, government intervention would be unnecessary: people would enact the change themselves unopposed). Put differently: the use of state coercion should, in a liberal society, be kept to a minimum and confined to dealing with consensually defined threats of genuine physical harm (among which possible "misgendering" via pronoun misuse cannot reasonably be included, even where it is clearly malicious and persistent; words, in themselves and without a transmission mechanism, cannot hurt people). Beyond that, the trade-off between the increased comfort and security of those people "protected" by the law on the one hand, and the full-frontal attack on the freedoms of the majority, including freedom to speak freely or to hold and express minority ideological views, on the other, rapidly becomes unconscionable and unsustainable, at least for anyone outside the ideological echo chamber.
Let's be clear: there are some very illiberal people out there, and they are the enemies of society. By which I mean: "illiberal" as in "wanting to exercise power over others, whether individually or collectively", where "power" means control (I've written about this extensively elsewhere, here for example), and "enemies", roughly in the sense that termites are the enemies of wooden constructions. I'm not suggesting that these "enemies of society" need to be silenced or crushed - on the contrary, I think we need to engage them and try to understand the roots of their insecurity, and try to win them over - but I do think that we need to be aware of the dangers they represent, and be on our guard against them. Now, while it's obvious that the ranks of "illiberal people" include the hypothetical transphobe who will attempt to use physical coercion, assault or other violent means to prevent trans people from freely expressing their gender identity, it seems to me that such reprehensible people are actually, these days, an insignificant minority in comparison with the much larger set of people who respond reflexively to the guilt they feel over their own unacknowledged prejudice by attempting to universalize their own dysphoria through authoritarian means, preferring to aggressively police the "politically incorrect" behaviour of others rather than facing their own demons... yea, even unto asserting possession of the pronouns chosen and used by others. (This well-known psychological proclivity to aggressive denial and harmful projection is why women are probably well advised to give vociferously "feminist" males, particularly the flaky ones, a prudently wide berth).
Daghh... exams to write. More to say another day, as always.
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