Pronouns aren’t actually that important
They are a proxy for something that really is, though
Every once in a while, I’ll come across an article on Medium that involves some liberal person discovering declared pronouns, whether they’re on name badges or Zoom meetings, and trying to deal with them. Usually that’s before deciding that pronouns are silly and an example of overreach (usually by the left) and declaring that they’re stupid and pointless and they’re not going to go along with it any more (and this is why the right hates liberals).
In some ways, they have a little bit of a point, because pronouns are not that hugely important, and declaring your pronouns, while nice, isn’t going to magically solve transgender rights tomorrow.
However, they’re also usually wrong, because most analyses completely miss the point of pronouns and what declaring pronouns is meant to achieve.
This is usually because pronouns are actually a proxy for things that are incredibly important. So important that they can literally be the difference between life and death.
Pronoun badges
Pronoun badges come from the transgender and non-binary communities. If you’ve ever had the experience of looking at someone and thinking “oh wow, they’ve transitioned really well” only to actually realise that, no, that person is pretransition and is looking for help, advice and acceptance and you just failed to give it.
Or you’ve ever assumed that that petite slightly butch woman over there will actually make a great man after transition, only to realise that, no, she’s just an abnormally small transwoman and really doesn’t need to have her male features thrown back in her face.
If those describe you, then you know why explicitly declared pronouns are absolutely great. In environments where people change sex and are transitioning both ways with different body types, it’s a nightmare to keep it all straight and not cause offense.
And if transgender people can’t cope, the rest of you haven’t got a chance.
It’s in the head, stupid
But it’s not just transgender people pushing for explicitly declared pronouns. It’s very important in the non-binary community, where it serves a different but linked purpose.
Usually non-binary people appear fairly solidly one sex or the other and many don’t want or need to change their bodies to make their body match their sense of themselves.
Rather, pronouns become something that cue you into what is happening inside a person’s head. Female pronouns for a man can cue in femininity, while they/them pronouns cue lack of gender or sex in a person.
It must be said
Languages control how we think when they force us to say extra things that may or may not be necessary at any given moment. English is pretty good because we’re not asserting the gender of bridges at any given moment, leading to weird discussions about whether we feel they should be elegant and soaring or squat a solid, depending on whether your bridges are feminine or masculine (German and Spanish…).
However, English does use gender a lot. In all actions, we need to know a pronoun and that forces us to know or assert a gender, and this is where it gets tricky, because if we have a language that asserts gender all the time and only has binary genders, it creates a language that is painful or dissonant for people who don’t ft the gender binary.
Dangerous Assumptions
Although using the right pronouns can allow a person to feel more authentic and happier with themselves when using words that fit better, using the right pronouns isn’t just for them to do.
Ensuring other people use the right pronouns is also hugely important because it prevents ascribing mental states to people that can’t feel them. If someone isn’t fully male using he/him ascribes thoughts feelings and motives that a person may not possess and that can be lethal.
If you want a real example of that, I am mindful of a legal case I ran into while watching a documentary on the legal system.
A little while back, the BBC created a drama TV program called Garrow’s Law, about a leading defence barrister in the UK who is credited with, among other things, the adversarial legal system used in the UK and the US.
An accompanying documentary explored the factual basis behind the show’s premise and one case stood out in particular. I frustratingly can no longer find the details (much though I tried), but the basic point was this:
A man was accused of killing another man. For the first time ever, a lawyer had the defendant take the stand. The man was described as lisping, a way of saying camp or effeminate at the time, and the jury immediately exonerated the man, considering him incapable of the crime.
It’s worth breaking the jury’s thought process down. In all likelihood, the jury had formed a picture of the defendant as someone who could kill a person, probably because they presumed his masculinity and linked criminality to that masculinity. However, the minute they heard him speak, they revised their picture of the man to include his femininity and that revised their perception of the likelihood of the man being capable of murder as much less, much like we consider women subconsciously to be less criminal than men.
Given that hanging was a punishment for murder in those days, the jury’s new mental model of this man’s though processes literally saved his life, while their old one nearly destroyed it. If the jury had been given the necessary information earlier, they might not have wrongly entertained the notion that the man might be guilty. And this could have happened if there were different pronouns to use and the correct pronouns were used from the start.
The Struggle
For many transgender and non-binary people, these struggles are part of our daily lives. It’s why we care so much.
For most people, the presumption of he/him and she/her work well and ascribe little that people are uncomfortable with. That’s why most people don’t need to explicitly declare their pronouns, and that’s fine.
But people who can’t see the point of declaring pronouns have never needed different ones and never suffered for having the wrong ones used. Declaring it all useless because you’ve never suffered (or never even met a transgender or non-binary person) is just a strong declaration of entitlement and that annoys me.
