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Conservatives, Common Courtesy, and the Gender Police
Transgender issues seem to be a tricky thing for many conservatives. (And it’s only going to get worse.) For example, a conservative told me the other day that “Misgendering is not a thing.” If you’re not hip to the lingo, misgendering is when you call someone by a gender label other than what they identify as. Like, if you call a lady “sir.” And it can be done accidentally or on purpose. People who care about transgender issues tend to (rightly so) get worked up about it, especially when it is done intentionally.
They also get worked up about “deadnaming.” That’s when you refer to a person who has transitioned by their pre-transition name. I see both misgendering and deadnaming occur here regularly on Ricochet anytime someone brings up Caitlyn Jenner. You may not realize it, but both intentional deadnaming and misgendering are insensitive at best and offensive at worse.
Now, I understand why conservatives do this. They’re taking a stand to preserve what they see as objective reality. If you have a penis, you’re a man, after all. To deny that damages reality or something, so it must stop here and now. This far and no further. Ils ne passeront pas!
Yeah, okay. I could try to explain the difference between sex and gender, but that tends to fall on deaf ears among many conservatives. So let me pose a question to those who believe such: Who made you the gender police?
For those of you taking this stand, I suspect you don’t really want the job of being the gender police, because at the end of the day the only way to know for sure is to reach into someone’s pants and check.
Now, I don’t deny that minding everyone else’s business is a time-honored conservative tradition, but it directly conflicts with another equally time-honored and very American tradition: Live and let live. Still another conservative tradition this gender police mindset conflicts with: basic common courtesy.
There aren’t a lot of Freds in the world. There was only one other in my high school. And, unlike me, he wasn’t a Frederick, he was Ferdinand. But he went by Fred, and didn’t much care to be called Ferdinand, so that’s what we called him. This is pretty common. Lots of people go by names other than their birth names. To call someone by their birth name after they’ve expressed a clear preference to the contrary would just be rude. That is what intentional misgendering is: rude. It’s calling someone by the wrong term, even when you know better.
Intentional misgendering is also supremely arrogant. Setting aside transgender people, there’s a non-trivial percentage of people in our daily lives where you can’t easily identify their gender. There are men with gentle features, there are women who look masculine, and there are people who are androgynous in appearance, either by choice or because that’s just how God made them. When I encounter such a person, I stay neutral until I know what pronoun to use with them. The alternative is to flip a coin, take a guess, and make a horse’s ass of yourself if you’re wrong, embarrassing both you and the other person.
Look, you’re welcome to your opinions and far be it for me to stop you from expressing them. That’s not my goal. But when you intentionally misgender someone or deadname them, it’s disrespectful and discourteous. You don’t need to be the one person who tries to push back the tide. You’re not going to make the difference and not enough people care to make your effort worthwhile.
These issues are all in flux right now. It’s still going to be a few years before norms and customs settle down. But in the meantime, it’s no excuse for rudeness and discourtesy to make some kind of quixotic point. You’re better off being civil to people.
Published in General
The counter here deals with truth, reality, words having meaning, and not yielding the language to those who are attempting to use it to obscure truth and reality.
Fred, I’m not sure I see where you have been appointed the “courtesy police”- or were imbued somehow with power to adjudicate gender questions.
I agree that norms of discourse need to fall out, but as far as I can see, there are still exactly 3 categories: male, female, and tragic other (either unfortunate genetic accident or botched surgery).
Perhaps we should all read this instead of wasting space on this post.
That’s one question. The more important question to me is this: why is someone else’s reality/truth more valid and legitimate than mine? Shouldn’t it be rude for someone else to demand that I act as if their truth were more valid than mine? How narcissistic and authoritarian of them.
This is assuming, of course, that my truth/your truth is a valid paradigm. And people who would think it a faux pas to refer to Caitlyn jenner as Bruce Jenner most certainly do believe in the my truth/your truth paradigm.
I’ll agree with you on deadnaming. If Jenner wishes to be called Caitlyn, then using Caitlyn when talking to Jenner is just polite. But avoiding misgendering is not just a matter of common courtesy. It is something that is being demanded and even legislated. If you’re forced to to it, then it’s not courtesy. It also leads to ridiculous statements like “She got her girlfriend pregnant.” There’s no need to be rude to someone to their face, but why should I be forced to lie just to support someone else’s delusion? It is possible to remain courteous and honest, and that’s the course I’d prefer to take.
Since it’s there in black and white, I’m going to assume that intentional means just that. However, that’s really not good enough for sensibilities of those with whom you’re concerned, is it? Do the perpetually outraged stop and wonder “Gee, I wonder if Person X really meant to offend.” I’m going with “no, they don’t,” because . . . never miss an opportunity to play the victim card and strike back. Speaking, that is, of common courtesy. Insensitivity is a two-way street. When I see more needed recognition of that from the “You can’t say that” crowd, I’ll pay more attention.
Yes, it’s rude, and it’s better to be civil. But laws that require the person’s preferred identity titles, and penalize the speaker for intentionally and repeatedly failing to use the proper term, are a classic case of the state compelling speech.
Social pressure to say something you do not believe to be true isn’t healthy, either.
When idiocy is inevitable, just lie back and enjoy it.
Fred,
I just want you to understand that I am an ambassador from the Planet Tralfamador. Before you address me by name, it is customary on my planet that you fall to your knees and kiss my right toe. Many earthlings object to this for some reason. They are rude and insensitive. Obviously, they are extraterrestialphobic.
Who appointed you intergalactic protocol police, I ask.
Regards,
Grand High Moog of Alpha Hizself
Jim
I think Ed G. gets it exactly right, and the original post gets it exactly backward. OP says, “Now, I understand why conservatives do this.” I don’t think you do. “They’re taking a stand to preserve what they see as objective reality. If you have a penis, you’re a man, after all. To deny that damages reality or something, so it must stop here and now. This far and no further. Ils ne passeront pas!”
On the contrary. I’m just speaking English, my mother tongue, the language I’ve been speaking my whole life. Very lately some college posers (at least the ones I know are concentrated around a college campus, I’m sure that’s not the only place you’ll find them) have appointed themselves the gender police, and want to tell me that I’m being “insensitive at best and offensive at worse” if I don’t suddenly unlearn my mother tongue and start speaking as they dictate. If I were less polite (certainly Ricochet is still a place for polite discourse), I would be tempted to tell them (and OP) to bug off and leave me alone (i.e., “Live and let live”). As it is, all I can say is that their invasive attempts to rewire my thinking and rewrite my language, all the while going through these contortions to tell me that I’m the one imposing my preferences on them, are exhausting.
(I commented this on another post recently. It seems to fit better here.)
Solzhenitsyn said it better than I could ever hope to:
Live not by lies.
Fred’s PSA to the members of Ricochet – Please do not point out that the Emperor has no clothes.
Try writing this post again without the conservative straw men.
I disagree. I think that the discourtesy is on the other side. This is easy to demonstrate with an extreme example.
From now on, all of you are to refer to me as “Your Celestial Lordship, the Friend of God.” In the third person, you are to refer to me (among yourselves)” as “His Lordship, the Friend of God.”
Names are negotiated. Using transgender pronouns and “transitioned” names is implicitly accepting the legitimacy of the entire transgender idea, which I believe to be not just a falsehood, but a deliberate and malicious propaganda campaign in support of a pathological ideology.
Thus, I will not call Bruce Jenner “Caitlin” and I will not call Bradley Manning “Chelsea.”
If you are offended, fine. I am offended by your insistence that we kowtow to this radical Leftist agenda. You know exactly where this leads, and exactly why this has become a significant issue. It is an outgrowth on the feminist attack on traditional sex roles, the homosexual and feminist attack on traditional sexual morality, and the entire postmodern attack on the very concept of truth.
This criticism does not necessarily the case for the very, very, very few people who legitimately have gender dysphoria. Personally, I’ve never met one, so it’s not an issue that I’ve ever had to face.
Basic common courtesy, Fred, is not insisting that other people adopt Newspeak. If you don’t see it as Newspeak, then I think you’re not paying attention. I respectfully dissent.
I fully understand what radicals are trying to do with the redefinition of the word “gender” and the supposed distinction between “sex” and “gender.” I understand that the idea is to force acceptance of radical departures from social norms.
This!!!
Reminds me of a time I called a customer in a big floppy hat “Ma’am”. He exclaimed, in a voice like Truman Capote’s (but a hat like Bella Abzug’s) “I’ve never been so insulted in my life!” I had not meant to offend him.
A decade later, I was dating a much younger girl (there goes my chance to run for Senate). Dropping her off in her dorm, a guy asked her, “Who is this? Is this your dad?” He had not meant to offend me, but he had. Looking back on it, I can’t really blame him. It made me realize the folly of dating a college girl after I had turned 30.
It takes a lot of courage to act and dress according to a gender that does not match the sex one is born with. I admire such people because they have to persist in the face of the disapproval of strangers. But I also think they have to realize that it comes with the territory. No one intends to offend, but noticing something peculiar is in our nature.
The guy who sings falsetto on Harry Chapin’s “Taxi” (“Baby’s so high that she’s skying…”) always sounds like a female to me. Misgendering is probably going to be with us forever.
Here’s one that I found both discourteous and bizarre, while checking in at a medical appointment. The touch-screen questionnaire asked:
What gender were you assigned at birth?
Are you kidding me? I said that I didn’t have a gender assigned at birth. I had a sex that was observed at birth. It made me want to say, do you want to observe it again to confirm?
So no, I won’t use made-up names and pronouns on the basis of some radical Left-wing notion that this is required by courtesy. I won’t call the North Korean monstrous dictatorship the “Democratic People’s Republic” either.
Fred, I think that if we yield the language on this one, the fight is over. The fight is not to oppress anyone. It is to prevent a radical and malicious attack on traditional values and morality. I think that you know this very well.
Drew,
Conservative straw men are a vital component of the vast majority of modern journalism. Please, Drew, have a little mercy. Many phony baloney jobs and salaries depend on the use of conservative straw men. Don’t be a killjoy.
Regards,
Jim
I hadn’t noticed how your last paragraph actually undermines your entire argument.
If things are in flux and the norms and customs have not settled down, then we don’t have a rule about how to be civil, do we now? Yet you insist that we go along with the radical view on this.
I do not believe for a moment that this is something the tiny number of people with an actual transgender disorder want. My source is Jordan Peterson, who says that he has had almost entirely supportive response from actual trans people. This is a campaign by radical Leftist, post-modern neo-Marxists. Orwell taught us, long ago, that control of thought through control of language is their principal strategy.
Just Say No!
Fred identifies as Emily Post. Is it rude to tell him he’s not?
In all seriousness Fred, this is an issue that affects, what, about .1% of the population at most? That’s about the rate of Kleinfelter syndrome in the general population, and gender dysphoria in children is a psychological condition which mostly self-corrects if left alone. That leaves a very tiny core of people born with both male and female genitalia (hermaphroditism) which generally does require surgical correction.
So, on this basis, we are led to believe that we must mutilate both our laws and our language in order to accommodate the feelings of people who (objectively) have a serious psychological condition? A psychological condition for which the treatment currently in vogue in the psychological community involves not treating the brain of those afflicted, but the amputation of healthy genitalia and the use of dangerous and powerful hormones which generates negative outcomes such as increased suicide rates and surgical regret.
But, other than that: Carry on.
Fred, the problem is with the law. No normal person wants to call a woman “Sir” or a man “Ma’am” if he can help it. Heck, a couple of years ago, we had a deputy sheriff come to our house. My wife and I couldn’t tell by looks or voice if “it” was male or female. We simply said, “Officer”.
No, the problem is when the left assigns 57 or more bogus genders, then creates laws with severe punishments for addressing someone wrongly without a priori knowledge. I look forward to the next Meetup in New York City when I want to be addressed as a “cis-geezer, hetero-changling, hybridopeteran age-challenged person.”
What I just spouted was nonsense, but how is it different from a “demiromantic demisexual, ver, vis, hirs, ze, xyrs person who will call the NYC gender police on me if I fail to ask ahead of time what stupid freakin’ pronoun the thing wants to be called?
I don’t want to end up in an NYC jail, so maybe I’d better just stay the heck out of The Big Apple. It’s too bad, because when I was stationed in Connecticut, me and my friends would drive there many times, and we always had a blast. No more.
In my life, I think I have interacted with about four people who were definitely trans-something. I don’t have any problem being courteous, so long as there are genuine goodwill and reciprocity underlying the interaction, but I refuse to be press-ganged into perpetuating this nonsense.
I will not wear a badge stating my preferred pronouns, I will not put my preferred pronouns in my e-mail signature, and if anyone begins his conversation with me with “so what are your preferred pronouns?” I will be strongly inclined to reply with something snide.
And I am not “cis,” that is not an actual thing. Like the vast bulk of humanity –past, present, and future– whose identity is largely in accordance with their genitalia, I am the norm.
“You will be made to care.”
And if not, it’s off to room 101 with you.
Do you love Big Brother yet?
Fred, it is a delight to disagree with something you wrote that isn’t about President Trump. I’m looking forward to coming back and responding at greater length. I may actually do it in another post, which I’ve been considering for awhile, the gist of which is that:
So-called transgenderism is mostly a fad, and an unhealthy one. People who partake of it voluntarily risk being rude by unnecessarily creating uncomfortable ambiguity; they are setting themselves up for mediocrity by embracing the cop-out of nonconformity rather than facing the challenge of living up to masculine and feminine norms; they’re setting the truth-versus-fiction bar to a preposterously low level by pretending that being born male or female doesn’t mean something fundamental about a person; they arrogantly presume that, though they don’t care to comply with social norms of gender presentation, they nonetheless insist that I comply with their preference when it comes to labeling; and they’re rejecting the basis for natural and healthy parental and familial roles in favor of their self-indulgent sexual fantasy. The transgender movement is foolish and destructive, and we do people no favors by pretending that it’s normal or that it serves any beyond a tiny sliver of the population well.
— H.
Sorry. I’m not going to play along with the delusion.
I am not sure gender is a thing. You are identifying as a particular sex not a gender. If I am a man and I want to be seen and treated as woman that is what I am. Not sure what gender does in the modern sense except to obfuscate the issue.
When someone legally changes their name it always rude to call them by another name for whatever reason. They changed their name common courtesy says use it.
So if someone says to me what a thrill it was to them to know that a woman beat all the men in the 1976 Olympics to be the the greatest athlete in the world, proving women are just as strong and athletic as men. What does one say? Should we take away Caitlyn’s gold medal because it was illegal for a woman to participate in that men’s event? If a man says to me I am presenting myself as a woman and would like to treated as such. That is something easily accommodated. When a man says he is not a man at all and can get pregnant we are dealing with someone not in touch with reality.
Not really. Before the culture war started on this issue basic common courtesy was on offer for every party. No one has ever proposed genitally tests before someone enters some bathroom. We would have liked all parties to feel comfortable and men that could pass as women could quietly use female bathrooms being extra careful so as not to offend anyone. Today it have been pushing on an open door to get single gender bathrooms installed and some special accommodations made people in our medical system transitioning or dealing with such issues. This is the road taken. Instead it was a made a political issue.
Misgendering has been a scourge for decades
From now on, I am Napoleon. Sire, to you. And don’t forget to send your tax money. Otherwise, I will out you for incivility. I really am Napoleon.
Incidentally, simply using the fashionably incorrect pronoun gender — for example, calling a cis-male a her — isn’t sufficient for the sexually woke: they also insist that you acknowledge that being willfully mistaken about your own sex is “normal.” Don’t think that merely going along with the he-is-a-she-is-a-he role-playing is going to satisfy anyone: it doesn’t stop until Bobby has Two Daddies and They’re Both Trans-Women and That’s Perfectly Normal is in every elementary school library.
Because these silly people know that most of us actually do like to be polite.
( PS “cis” is a new prefix that just means “real” )
I’m perfectly happy to call Bruce Jenner “Caitlyn” to his face if I ever meet him. But that’s about as far as I’ll go.
Other people’s mental illness is not my problem.