So there's a species of obnoxious going around where the very idea that there's choice about what pronouns you should prefer to be addressed by is a calamity and obvious error and ill intent and so on, and nigh-all of the pushback to that position is structured around politeness and self-determination and rights and so on.
This is a mistake.
So at one time, there was a religious dispute over protestantism; you can find a lot of economics and moral philosophy and history of religion and so on about this. That to some extent misses the point; it was a dispute about who gets to say what's normal, the prescriptive, enforced, social norm that decides who must be obeyed and who can complain and so on. (Hence the focus on who gets to claim the status of priest and speak for God; there is no arguing with God, so you must. It's a claim of authority when constructing social definitions.)
The material basis of the dispute is completely irrelevant; the point about the "only two pronouns" position is that people are defending their perceived position as someone who is an arbiter of the prescriptive social norm. They're quite willing to go completely Thirty Years War about it if they have to, because all their status rests on it -- their construction of status requires that prescriptive norm to exist, so without it, there is no status -- and band-forming primates don't put anything ahead of relative band status.
(I think it's entirely possible to decide that gender has no business in the public sphere; legitimately treating someone differently on the basis of gender involves negotiating sexual attraction, an inherently personal and private subject. Everybody is they outside that specific intimate context, and certainly in any public context. This is the Egalitarian Party working document part of this post.)
If you construct status differently, say on the basis of not being the problem, you can conclude that it's a problem of bounds, rather than norms. We don't know, and don't care, what normal is; figuring out what constitutes normal takes a carefully designed study and peer review and you can't get real-time results. You can much more readily say "these are the borders of polite society" and not worry about the internal distribution.
If you can avoid constructing your status as someone who decides what's normal; where you're placed in your local authoritarian hierarchy. If you can't, this whole thing is intolerable, and no matter how silly it looks from a perspective of facts, remember that the "only two genders" position is also a position that there shouldn't be facts, facts give incorrect answers. Then remember that the full failure mode isn't extra legislative paperwork or increased political activity, it's Thirty Years War. It's best to avoid presenting authoritarians with a prospect of success.
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”Pronouns to be addressed by” - no, it is about pronouns that you want to be used when being spoken about. I have never heard of anyone proposing to change ”you” to something else. If I am wrong about this, please tell me.
I do not really understand that there is a need for more than one gender-neutral third person pronoun, but I am willing to use whatever pronoun people prefer. If I can remember them. In my own language, there is as far as I know only one neutral pronoun alternative coming into use, for which I am grateful.
Even among our most precise creations it's necessary to incorporate some tolerance [1] to prevent the works from seizing up. Humans, needless to say, are far from precise copies of each other. Which is why working societies, like working systems, have to have a fair bit of room between "what I require of myself" and "what I require of others in a reciprocal situation." And that is necessarily a positive difference or at best you have a rigid hierarchy and at worst complete collapse. Which is why we by and large learn to let minor slights slide.
I'm old enough to have lived through the Mrs/Miss/Ms transition. Today there are still a few public figures who prefer to be addressed by the old convention; Hillary Rodham Clinton comes to mind. I'm sure, however, that she doesn't make a point of it when someone addresses her as "Ms Clinton" despite it being a violation of her preferred address on two fronts [2]. As Our Gracious Host observes, insisting on precise compliance with a convention -- any convention -- is basically a power play by either party and if common enough destructive to any society.
So by all means, call me "D C" as two syllables, by the first letter alone, combined with a vowel added ("Deece," as a high school friend chose to) or more or less any other pronunciation. Close enough for me to recognize it will do. Spelling likewise; first/middle, two-letter first, with or without punctuation. The Patent Office never seems to make up its mind from one month to the next but insists on my complying with their version of my name. Computers don't argue (nor do bureaucrats), not worth the hassle.
A functioning society necessarily incorporates a good bit of slack or grinds to a halt.
[1] Call that a pun, I'm not sure it isn't precise
[2] "Rodham Clinton" is similar to the Spanish combination of surnames and in most English speaking cultures would be hyphenated; my daughter and her spouse for instance.
+AnnaH
English changed second person singular to "you" from something else, just rather a long time ago. English used to have the familiar/formal second person distinction that French and German still do; thee/thy/thou as the singular/intimate with "you" as the plural/formal. Which is why Quaker Plain Speech uses "thee", because that's personal and anti-authoritarian in the period Plain Speech was devised. (Also why it's "thy God" in Bibles of this period, because of course you have an intimate relationship with the divine.)
"Pronouns that you want to be used when being spoken about" has context. Your friends and family are a different category than government forms. The former can be expected to know your personal preferences and to abide by them, but the government all of can't (people change these on time scales the whole bureaucracy can't match), won't ("please address me as" forms are not going to work at a reasonable cost), and shouldn't (it's not a matter of appropriate government concern what you want to be called). So the government should have one category and use neutral pronouns for it.
+D.C.
The Patent Office never seems to make up its mind from one month to the next but insists on my complying with their version of my name. Computers don't argue (nor do bureaucrats), not worth the hassle.
Which is much of why I'm contending the government should have a singular construction of gender; hopefully politer than "hey you!" but that kind of thing. There aren't any circumstances where gender is relevant to the government, so it shouldn't be something the government expects on a form.
There aren't any circumstances where gender is relevant to the government
In countries with a functioning healthcare system that's just wrong. Any doctor who treats you commonly needs to know both your sex and gender, as well as a whole heap of other personal information. There are other government agencies who either need to know that or can reasonably claim to find the information useful (prisons, for example).
Names are a whole different ball of complexity, especially for government agencies that provide documents used as ID. It's grossly unreasonable to have every agency make up their own rules for names, because it creates people who cannot provide even two forms of ID with the same name on them. Specifically in Australia we have a mix of initials plus last name, full name, firsname lastname (etc), and each of those has different rules for truncation. And this all assumes no errors are made when entering data or exporting/importing it.
+Moz
Your doctor is NOT the government! Even if the government is paying for medical care, as is the case with functioning healthcare systems.
Medical records are personal and confidential and generally not accessible to persons you haven't specifically authorized to have them. (This is messy in practice and I can't think of anywhere that really gets it right, but the general trend is certainly towards greater medical confidentiality, and I think that's correct.)
Prisons, well, I'm generally for the abolishment of prisons. Other than that hopefully VERY limited case, which can be appropriately handled on a literal case-by-case basis, I can't think of anybody in the government who needs to care; you need services, you need succor in disaster, you need the rule of law, you need a common defense; none of these things are gendered.
Not sure how you're getting to names; names are arbitrary labels. Even the first-name-last-name convention is questionable. "full name" and "name of address" would cover it. The government doesn't need to bother with titles (Mr., Mrs., Dr., etc.) either. All those functions and services aren't appropriately class-mediated, either.
I fear you're using the US far right definition of government "a foreign body that is inherently bad and wrong", rather than a more democratic one "people working together to do things they can't do by themselves". I'm struggling to come up with a coherent view of what you think government is based on what you're writing.
Your doctor is NOT the government
No, they're just one tiny little part of the government. I'm not aware of a functioning, privatised (partial) healthcare system. Insofar as there's private healthcare in Australia it's broken, often badly broken, and generally by design.
I can't think of anybody in the government who needs to care;
So, prisons are out, healthcare is out, education is out (what do you mean kids want their gender presentation acknowledged?), tax is out (maternity leave?), the legal system is out (gender based crimes?), elected governments are out (Minister for Equality/Equal Rights Act?), we strip the internal legal and medical systems out of the military (etc) for the same reasons. Luckily Australia won't need to reform its border control system because they already have an "if in doubt, throw them out" policy and would be thrilled to add more ways to get rid of undesirables. State owned media will likely relish the opportunity to quit worrying about the gender of their staff (as will every other facet of the tiny shrivelled remains of the government after your purge).
There's also a small issue with your private police and legal systems, because while they do care about gender that's often the same way Facebook and Google do... they target people based on them. A state unable to acknowledge gender or sex differences will not be able to limit that targetting, or do anything when it's brought up. Think France and their "the state is without religion, so everything from sexual abuse by priests to religious hate atrocities are beyond our purview".
I think you'd be better off with "the state should not discriminate against people based on gender, for the most part, except for affirmative action".
Actually, to the original topic, I agree that it is all about who gets to decide. But at the same time you're very definitely playing that exact game with your views on who gets to decide.
You might recall from aunty pope that people will play silly buggers with whatever system you come up with. It might be as trivial as non-alphanumeric characters in "she/he" or even more broken, non-ascii ones in "той или тя"... if people get to choose their pronouns you have to accept that some will not be English pronouns (this is, IIRC, one of the objections to ze/xir/they etc). And there will also be people who are deliberately difficult, like the artist formerly known as Prince.
Names come into it as a symptom of the same problem. It's not just Stilgherrian, Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Senior and Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad (those are all full legal names without titles), it's all the names that aren't easily mapped into any coherent system, so you end up with "full name" as the only option.
Does the state care about gender, pronouns or even names? Should the state care? Can the state not care without violating the rights (legal and human) of its citizens?
+Moz
The State formerly needed to worry about names (see Germany to this day) because it was the key for records that the State needed to keep. Non-alphanumeric characters not only didn't type well but also didn't have well-defined sort order. Along with other problems.
That's not really necessary now; the State can assign you a search key (SSN in the USA) and derive anything else it needs from that GUID (Guaranteed Unique IDentifier). That's not to say that all, or even most, do. But the necessity is gone and current binary character encoding covers pretty near everyone on Earth as far as personally preferred social address is concerned.
+Moz
Let me try this in somewhat different language.
You know how various languages have "grammatical gender", and that this tangles up with "grammatical case"? So you've nominative, dative, accusative, and so on? And that you sometimes get pronouns varying by case as well as gender? (and sometimes not; sometimes the language has demonstrative, relative, and interrogative or something rather than gender).
So let's talk about personal pronouns. You'd expect singular and plural. Let's combine that with "public" and "intimate" (formal/informal, business/social, polite/personal, the specific labels are not especially important here.)
And you've got first, second, and third person.
The standard modern English list is "I," "you," "he," "she," "it," "we," "they," "them," "us," "him," "her," "his," "hers," "its," "theirs," "our," "your."
If you split it into "public" and "intimate" pronouns, insist on them being personal -- applying solely to people -- and de-gender the list you might get:
Public personal pronouns:
"I," "you," "they" "we," "they," "them," "us,", "theirs," "our," "your."
Intimate personal pronouns:
All the public pronouns are available, but also whatever pronouns people want to use to describe themselves and their construction of gender. (Possibly "he" and "she"; possibly something much more creative.) It's not necessary to formalize these; gender is personal, subcultural, generational, and generally pretty fluid over generational time. Rather than trying to enforce _anything_, recognize that gendered relationships are not something that happens between individuals and a bureaucracy.
So your doctor needs to know your sex and your gender construction, but that's personal -- that's a specific relationship with this individual doctor, it's not "with the health care system" -- and still formal; your doctor calls you "they" (or whatever general formal third person singular pronoun is chosen). Your prescriptions may be informed by this knowledge but they don't have to reference it. (It's not like current prescriptions require the prescriber's medical reasoning!)
Similarly, your teacher definitionally does not have an intimate relationship with you; they use the formal pronoun. Some of your peers at school might use intimate pronouns, but which ones is not of public concern. Where I live, you get parental leave; it's still a bit gendered but it shouldn't be. (Ideally, the parents get to split something like 36 months as they see fit prior to the child's sixth birthday.)
Ministers of Equality/Egalitarian Conduct don't seem more difficult; you could even construct an objection to corporate conduct on the basis of "imposition of categories".
(You know the story about the orchestral auditions, yes? Really clear example of imposition of categories.)
Names come into it as a symptom of the same problem. It's not just Stilgherrian, Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff Senior and Abdul Rahman ibni Almarhum Tuanku Muhammad (those are all full legal names without titles), it's all the names that aren't easily mapped into any coherent system, so you end up with "full name" as the only option.
That's completely fine! I think that's better; you have your full name, and you have your name-of-address ("what do you want your co-workers to call you when they phone you?"), and that works. It stays away from the various programmer delusions about there being a coherent system under there somewhere, too.
Does the state care about gender, pronouns or even names? Should the state care? Can the state not care without violating the rights (legal and human) of its citizens?
The state appropriately cares that it does not impose any construction of gender; that there's a single standard polite/public/formal pronoun, which is used for everybody in a public context; that your name is not subject to someone else's notion of systematization; and that people are neither formally, corporately, nor informally acting to impose categories -- to construct a prescriptive norm -- on their fellows.
+D.C.
Yes! You have a True Name, and various references to the True Name (I would prefer things like SSN or Canadian SIN numbers and so on were references, rather than the True Name[1]), and everything else is just encoding. And Unicode is supposed to handle that. (It's not there yet; there are difficulties with various Indic scripts, for instance. But there's no technical bar to getting it there, or for doing things like "full name", "full name in official language", "name of address", "name of address in official language".)
[1] so if you suffer identity theft there's a straightforward administrative procedure to create a new one, rather than the necessarily difficult process to create a different True Name.
I don't think you can get a less sexist society by papering over the cracks with forced pronouns. Shifting pronouns might help, but it might be useful to consider the Ms title as an example before you get too excited... it hasn't displaced the "but who owns her" labels yet.
Public personal pronouns:
You have your list of pronouns that you approve of, and you demand that everyone use those, and only those. I get that. But... you're complaining when other people make the same demand (sometimes with a different set of pronouns).
that's a specific relationship with this individual doctor, it's not "with the health care system"
That's not how state healthcare works. At the most trivial level I have to show ID to use it in any non-trivial way (because we don't have universal state care, you have to be a citizen or otherwise eligible to get the tax-funded stuff).
Drawing a line and saying "Stross can get insulin anywhere in the UK, Moz's aunt can only get her HRT pills from that one pharmacist that she has a personal relationship with"... is just going to lead to a whole lot of unwieldy rules and the major thing we can be sure of is that edge cases will be killed by those rules. Random medical people not being able to (allowed to!) know the gender of their patients isn't a benign decision.
You know the story about the orchestral auditions?
Only in the context of gender being a really important criteria, and denying that importance causing a lot of problems. You can't both accept the difference blind auditions make and deny that the state has any business caring about gender let alone acting on it.
I think that's better; you have your full name, and you have your name-of-address ("what do you want your co-workers to call you when they phone you?"), and that works
So your physical driver licence is now has an area of ~20 square centimetres to allow a 6 point name to be printed. That's 5x4cm... and it's probably not actually large enough for everyone. I don't work for anyone with access to a list of Australian names any more but I did a few queries some years ago and 200 characters was not enough.
Worse, any government entity that embosses credit card sized things now has to stop, because you can't fit names on a card that big in a font that is large enough to emboss. That's the Australian Medicare card, for example. I fear bad outcomes if you had to have a working smartphone (your "electronic id") to get free medical care. We have enough problems right now just getting a single "eHealth record" for people who want one without trying to mass change people's names (Australia doesn't have an official language, but official documents have to be in low ASCII which causes transliteration and truncation problems).
That stuff means whatever country takes this approach is going to be incompatible with a huge set of physical infrastructure (can't buy a wallet online, for example), as well as causing problems when they travel. Sri Lankan passports are notorious for this, and many non-LatinA countries also print LatinA transliterations in passports (this may be a requirement?)
Also: ID numbers need to be two part, or electronic. The USA has comprehensively failed to make SSNs useful to find people, or prevent them being used as ID. Without a crypto signing type "secret number" that seems to be inevitable. But at least a new system could easily avoid the US problem of re-using numbers.
+Moz
My physical driver's license has a magnetic strip on it with my entire driving record. Embossed cards haven't been a thing here for twenty-odd years.
Adding a "card name" to the form, with "and it has to fit" set of constraints as materially constrained and letting people fill that out does not seem difficult if physical space, low ASCII rather than Unicode, etc. are problems. Though the problem there is much more the low ASCII.
ID numbers need to be several-part (so you know who accessed it, too), and electronic, sure, but that's not technically challenging; the implementation is, but the "how do we do this?" is solved.
+Moz
[Orchestral auditions]
Only in the context of gender being a really important criteria, and denying that importance causing a lot of problems. You can't both accept the difference blind auditions make and deny that the state has any business caring about gender let alone acting on it.
Well, kinda backwards.
The effort to make the auditions truly blind -- put down the carper runner so there's no heels-tapping on the floor to identify women prior to the playing-from-behind-a-screen, etc. -- was achieved with support from parties who made it an explicit quid-pro-quo that after this, there was going to be a public admission that men were better musicians and all this inclusive nonsense, harmful to the advancement of pure and excellent music, would stop.
The results were not at all what those parties expected, as is now well known, but the point here is that information causes change. If you want the bias to stop operating, it is remarkably effective to remove the information it operates on, at least if you do it in a context where the information you do want evaluated is available.
Gender is made up. It is not material and it's not meaningful outside its creating social context. Saying which social context are legitimate is not an appropriate function of government. ("you can't murder" is an appropriate function of government, and thus defining "murder"; that's bounds-of-conduct. "A real man shall own a car" is not an appropriate function of government.)
If you take your prescription to a pharmacist, and it's a legitimate prescription from an actual doctor (and not a forgery or out of date or all the other stuff they check for), the pharmacist fills it. That's not a gendered interaction. "You may find" side effects lists are generally printed, because they're generally pretty long. The verbal high points can totally be phrased in the subjunctive.
What your pharmacist can't do is look up your medical history; they can't do that now. What any random doctor can't do is look up your medical history; they have to be your doctor to do that. That doesn't actually change anything in the current system hereabouts except removing the "Mr./Mrs./etc." salutation ticky boxes from the form, and hopefully with it removing some of the pre-categorization that's such a problem with effective diagnosis.
I think we're describing the same orchestra thing in different ways, you're seeing it as "hiding gender helps people" and I'm seeing it as "gender is really important to a lot of people".
Having a "department to prevent involuntary categorisation" ... one key part of what government does is deal with bad actors. Most legal systems are patches on patches on patches as rules evolve to deal with exploits as well as new developments. So this whole "no public servant or government agency may {something} based on the gender of the person"...I think you need to nail down exactly what {something} is much more tightly than you have, in more situations, and take account of bad actors more than you seem to be.
If it's just "address someone using a gendered pronoun" that's possible, and not especially harmful even though it's going to upset a lot of people (ie, tricky to the extent the government is democratic). But beyond that I think it's increasingly problematic. We already have sex=male prisoners claiming to identify as gender=woman in an effort to get put in a women's prison both for genuine and malicious reasons, so saying "we ignore the gender part" is going to be fatal for some people.
What your pharmacist can't do
Clearly we live in different worlds. It might be that in Canada you get wheeled in to the emergency department and they can't look up your medical records, but in Australia and Aotearoa they can and do. Likewise you go to pick up a prescription the pharmacists can (and possibly must) look at what other drugs you're on and any warnings in your record before dispensing. Press release on how much easier the eHealth record makes that process:
https://www.myhealthrecord.gov.au/news-and-media/my-health-record-stories/vital-tool-pharmacy
If you want the bias to stop operating, it is remarkably effective to remove the information it operates on
Only in very specific circumstances, with a lot of effort. Which is worthwhile, but you seem to be taking that example and wanting to apply it outside the context where it can work.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/519431/storage-capacity-for-a-magnetic-swipe-card
Looks like your "complete driving record" is at most ~1600 bits. I suspect it's actually just your ID number and a few key details so it's vaguely useful offline.
Also, only for now: https://forums.redflagdeals.com/new-drivers-license-has-no-magnetic-strip-1070285/
Adding a "card name" to the form, with "and it has to fit" set of constraints
But yes, obviously no actual government ID card is going to have your full name printed on it, that would be silly. Much more sensible to let people make up a new name for each form of ID*. I already have issues in some places with my name not meeting various requirements (but not Australian government ones). Being able to get government ID saying "Bob Smith" would help me a lot. I am thinking of doing the legal name change again to get one that better complies with the implicit requirements of both countries I am a citizen of, just to make dealing with them easier. "Stilgherrian Is Compliant" fits into all the systems much better than "Stilgherrian" the mononym (and adding a last name of Null is Not Worth The Hassle).
* again, bad actors.
+Moz
Let me try to pull this out of the weeds.
There's no such thing as fraudulent gender. While gender gets listed on the forms, people will act like there is such a thing as fraudulent gender, because there are people who won't fit in those categories, for arbitrary categories.
Gender isn't real in a charge-or-gravity sense; gender is constructed, and functional gender is constructed on fairly small scales. (It's not like every social context constructs "man" and "woman" the same way!) Structuring the system to create this notion of fraudulent gender is a needless source of harm. (Same idea as trying to enact a just patriarchy; you can't, and trying just moves the harms around, it doesn't abolish them.)
For an analogy, consider food; there may be recommendations about what it is healthy to eat, but the effort of regulation and law goes into making sure what's sold as food isn't harmful. That's setting a boundary -- if you sell it as food, it has to be fit for human consumption. Inside those bounds, it's not a matter of public concern. (There are plenty of people who want it to be, which extends the analogy with gender.)
Same thing with names and gender; it's appropriate to set bounds (so no trying to detach any of your names from your GUID or use a name attached to someone else's GUID for fraudulent purposes) but there's no need to control any of it in the strict sense of control. People can have the name and the gender they prefer; there's not much need to care about specifics.
Since there's a core systems choice between success and control at these scales, picking success is important.
Interesting conversation.
Using current cases as reasons future notions can't work is always going to be a fraught exercise. The example Moz used of 'male' inmates identifying as 'female' to get into a female prison assumes the only thing that changes is government interaction with pronouns.
A better option would be eliminating the need for prisons in 98% of the cases by either changing the contexts and (best option) ensuring the precursors of crime are handled better. In the rare cases incarceration is needed why not design such facilities so that they are gender neutral?
Much of the issues with current prisons are that they are in practice unfunded and unserviced mental health facilities, and that they are intended to be punitive and painful in order to serve 'justice' - which in most cases is a fig leaf for revenge. Combined with a social imperative not to spend money on them and they become miserable crime incubation facilities as much as anything else. Leave aside the whole prison/slavery for profit structure extant in at least 2 major countries at the moment as worst case examples.
Much of crime is rooted in untreated mental illness, especially if you define addiction as an untreated mental illness (which it absolutely is above all else).
So the problem being expressed is rooted in the weaknesses of another system, which also need to be expressed. A solution to a problem of gender violence in prisons is not to insist on a particular definition of gender used by government, but rather to insist on resolving the issues in prisons while also removing harm from government interaction with gender.
There is no reason prisons can't be gender neutral, if constructed and operated with that in mind. And not constructed with 'throw away the key' as the primary goal, with 'maximize profit' and 'minimize costs below what is humane' as the secondary goals.
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