Of peeing, pronouns and politics

By: Aphra
21 July 2024

A recent debate on The Standard about trans rights touched on a range of  issues – dead naming, the use of preferred pronouns, the actual incidence of sex self-ID related harm to women since the passing of legislation, access to toilets, and so on. If this was a 1960s British comedy, it would be titled Carry On Up The Cul-de-sac.

The issue of female-only facilities such as public lavatories¹ changing rooms, domestic violence and rape crisis centres, hospital wards and prisons has to be placed in both an historical and a contemporary context.

If men hadn’t imposed patriarchal modesty standards on women and girls, including absurd dress standards, and acted in ways that make many women and girls feel unsafe around them, we could all use the same public facilities.

If men didn’t rape and beat women, there would be no need for female-only domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centres. If male humans did not pose a variety of threats to female humans, there would be no need for female-only hospital wards or female prisons.

For a lot of women, it’s as simple as this: men created the problem with their patriarchal straitjacketing of women and girls via modesty standards, the legitimation of male dominance, and the largely one-sided use of physical and sexual violence.

That female-only provision was imposed on women by the very patriarchy which now makes women demand it for reasons of safety and dignity is an irony all people with a functioning political brain should grasp.

It’s beyond ironic that some men, purporting to be on the left, and in the name of trans inclusivity, immediately labelled women who are fearful of male violence as bigots, and with the same ideological sleight of hand, turned all transwomen, or men claiming to be trans, into saints.

It enters the realm of farce if such men get offended when they are called out for their hypocrisy.

Until the world is much safer for women and children, single-sex provision will be demanded by women, but it must be on our terms, not the terms of the patriarchal opportunists who are coat-tailing the gender-critical movement.

Sex self-identification by statutory declaration

Ideally, we should not have to worry about the possible abuses of a formal right to change one’s name and all official documentation by the simple mechanism of swearing a statutory declaration. Were all citizens people of good faith and common sense, the right to change one’s identity so easily would not be a problem.

With sex self-identification by statutory declaration an entirely new person is officially created whose prior identity is not just hidden behind legal barriers, it is further safe- guarded by a powerful ideological framework by means of which anyone who exposes the person’s old identity is deemed to be a bigot, or even to have committed a hate crime.

It is naïve to think that there will never be abuses of self ID, and it’s skirting the edges of a rigid dogmatism to see only actual or potential abuses.

The initiator of the debate claimed that trans people are owed an apology by gender critical feminists who argued that self ID would see an immediate increase in male violence against women and children, both by predatory transwomen and by predatory men opportunistically using the breakdown of formal and normative barriers².

It is a fact that some of the people arguing against self ID grossly exaggerate the dangers. They do so for political reasons and /or because they are genuinely anti-trans, but it is naïve in the extreme to deny the possibility that vexatious or predatory men will abuse the formal right to change one’s name and ALL official documentation by the simple mechanism of swearing a statutory declaration.

The legislation may not create more miscreants, but it will make it easier for them because it grants an easily accessed hiding place, and it erodes the normative barriers which have safe-guarded female-only spaces. That aside, in a world in which women already feel at risk, it increases anxiety.

No one with a functioning political brain should have needed to be told that the resistance to self ID was not initiated by the religious and secular right but they were quick to seize the opportunity to coat-tail the movement and to recruit from it.

As to the question of recorded abuses of self ID, Aotearoa-NZ has a very small population, ergo the number of trans people is tiny. A year for legislative changes to be felt is not long, and acts of voyeurism, minor assaults etc are often not reported by women, so the demand for an apology is premature.

On the other hand, if there is one lesson the anti-self ID activists should have learned from the trans rights activists, it is that extremism alienates a lot of moderate people, and the use of hyperbolic rhetoric and outlandish claims reduces political credibility.

Dead-naming

The debate also touched on the issue of dead-naming which is a term specific to transgender people. This is when someone refers to a trans person by their birth name instead of the name they changed to when they transitioned.

The emotive overtones of the term are deliberate, serving to signal the idea that trans people have been re-born. Their old self, with its gendered name, and associations with their natal sex, is dead. To dig it up and put it on public display is offensive and hurtful, and some activists want to see it made a hate crime.

Dead-naming is similar to doxing. Depending on the circumstances, it may be a form of doxing, which is the use of the internet to search for and to publish information about a person, usually with malicious intent. Sometimes doxing takes the form of exposing the real name of someone publishing behind a pseudonym.

The line between doxing and legitimate investigative journalism (legacy or citizen) can sometimes be difficult to draw.

Exposing the real or the original name of an influential fascist would not give any progressive person a moment’s pause.  (Leaving aside the fact that we live in an era in which the term fascist has been applied so mindlessly it has been emptied of political meaning.)

It is doubtful that anyone would object to the exposure of an active child sex abuser who was hiding behind a new identity, but the actions of some on-line vigilante “paedo-hunters” should make all defenders of civil liberties very anxious.

As with most things, the legitimacy of exposing a person’s original or true name hangs in a balance  – between the actions and motives of the person being exposed, and the motivations of the exposer.

There is no simple wrong or right but there sure as hell is scope for hyperbole and unscrupulousness.

Preferred pronouns

Linked to dead naming is the use of preferred pronouns as a statement of inclusivity towards trans people. Opponents see it as virtue-signalling – by stating your preferred pronouns on your correspondence or social media accounts, you are telling everyone that you respect the right of all people to decide which pronouns others should use when speaking about them³.

Some languages are heavily gendered; some are gender neutral. English sits in between in that it does not have gendered declension other than in second person pronouns. In heavily gendered languages writing in a gender-neutral way is a monumental task and one which will meet with a wide-based resistance.

In the drafting of official documents, the widely used rules now are to use generic descriptors, titles, and gender inclusive words; to not use feminine or masculine pronouns at all, including such couplets as she or he, or s/he; by using they ; by using a definite or indefinite article to replace possessive pronouns; by repeating the noun, or writing in a way that a pronoun is not needed.

This prescription is drawn from Canadian government recommendations for English; there is another set for French. The preferred pronoun orthodoxy is a product of the trans rights movement, but it flows from other linguistic changes in the modern era. It leaps far past the demands of second wave feminism for a move away from the masculine default.  Some see as part of an attempt to erase the very idea of there being two sexes.

The women’s liberationist demand for the use of generic or gender-neutral job titles, for example, excited a now scarcely believable level of angst amongst a lot of men and sadly, a lot of women also. Not using terminology which is offensive to people of colour or to people with disabilities also met with strong resistance.

It can be argued that the move into a convention of signalling one’s preferred pronouns in written communications is simply a continuation of the progressive move away from a centuries old tradition of using the masculine as the default.

Defenders of PPs argue that it’s also a good thing for people other than the trans community; people with gender neutral names, for example, or people with names the majority population are unfamiliar with. There is some validity in that argument, but it is a post hoc justification of a demand that was made in a way a lot of people resent.

Where a demand causes resentment, you can ignore it, you can decry or demonise the people feeling it, or you can find constructive ways to engage with it with the aim of defusing it.

On the surface, the signalling of PPs is voluntary, and it is claimed it is merely a courtesy, and no one would suffer adverse consequences if they refused to comply. That is startlingly disingenuous. There are powerful pressures to comply with what has become an orthodoxy. It is true that employers could not make it a formal condition of employment or  sack someone for failing to do it but there are many ways in which pressure can be brought to bear to ensure conformity in the workplace.

Most people tend towards conformity. It is partly why social contagions occur. Peer pressure alone is a powerful motivator for both action and inaction on a given issue. Many people’s working lives are stressful, and some are highly precarious. As a result, many live in fear of losing their employment or not getting another job if they become unemployed.

Large enterprises, public and private, are top heavy, with layers of managers of various stripes who are focussed on pleasing those above them and justifying their own jobs. Those managers have a stake in promoting conformity in the workplace. They can ensure only compliant people are employed, and they use such things as appeals to the importance of being a “team player”.

Saying “no” to a thing which signals you are a “team player” is way harder than just going with the flow. On a societal level, social contagions regularly occur as do subcultures, the latter often as expressions of resistance to wider cultural norms. Social contagions can be motivated by anything from a common anxiety/fear, an emotive belief in a cause, &/or the impact of a charismatic individual. When a subculture is gripped by social contagion, cult-like behaviour can result.

With trans rights, the legal/social change pendulum was moved a long way by small incremental changes without most people noticing until the big push for self ID by statutory declaration which necessitated changes in legislation.

Feminists, mostly on the left, questioned the implications of  self ID for women’s sex-based formal and informal rights. They faced an immediate and powerful barrage of hyperbolic rhetoric and threats mainly from within the ranks of the self-proclaimed politically progressive.

The virulence of that initial response provoked a counter-reaction in which some GC women and male allies joined hands with religious and political forces whose interests are inimical to women’s rights as framed by women’s liberationists. That right wing coalition then ramped up its own hyperbolic rhetoric and threats.

In the poll tax demos in London, when angry young men and anarchists were battling police, there was video footage of a group of young people huddling in the middle of Trafalgar Square holding up a bit of cardboard on which they’d written: “Why don’t you all just fuck off!!”

Given we are facing unprecedented threats globally and with the Coalition of  Chaos, domestically, many of us feel very much like those kids. It’s time to stop and think – who benefits from this absurd division? It’s not women; it’s not trans people; it’s not impoverished people; it’s not Māori, and it’s not the beleaguered environment.

Notes

• TeWhareWhero writes about the politics of peeing in public here.
• TWW writes about the erosion of the social compact which created normative controls over access to female-only spaces.
• I must admit when I see she/her; he/him, they/them or other form from the pronoun hinterland, I make a judgement about the person, and I am forced to have a stern word with myself about not judging someone by superficial criteria.

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