Third-gender pronouns and binary-identified individuals

[feuervogel]

I read a blog post yesterday, an intro post from a guest blogger at feministe who usually writes over at Questioning Transphobia.

Queen Emily writes Don’t use third gender pronouns (eg “ze” and “hir”) on a binary identified person because it ungenders them. (Third-gender pronouns are also known as gender-neutral pronouns.) Then down in comments, she says, When someone uses “ze” to refer to me when I have explicitly referred to myself as a trans woman, it’s ungendering and cissexist to boot.

When I read this post by sohotrightnow, Queen Emily's post was the first thing I thought of, even though the writer of the problematic story (which I agree is problematic, and that is not the topic of this post; I'm not even involved in bandom) identifies as female.

The section that made me click the link to the writer's profile:

When I engaged promisethstars in discussion and tried to explain why this was bothering me, zie raised the point that the story is an AU, and argued that from zir perspective, there was no difference between making Gabe Saporta a Catholic priest for zir AU and making Patrick Stump a prostitute for another AU.

(You can see the wtfery evidenced by promisethstars in this quote, but that's not what I'm looking at.) I clicked the profile tag, and saw that Megan will occasionally "fangirl out." To me, that reads as "I identify as a girl."

Ungendering is a tactic used against trans-spectrum individuals by the media, academics, and radical feminists. I obviously do NOT believe that using "zie" to refer to a binary-identified cis-individual has anywhere near the emotional impact it does on a binary-identified trans-individual. But it isn't appropriate, either.

Or am I talking out of my ass here?

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the person who has the pronoun used on them does have an obligation to take into consideration whether the person who used a non-choice pronoun had an ability to know the person's preference and should reasonably be expected to be aware of it.

For example, when I was on IRC using a gender-neutral nick, there was no way for anyone just meeting me to be aware of my gender. When people used "he" in reference to me, it would have been unreasonable for me to take offense. It would have been reasonable for me to correct them (politely) and they should then take responsibility for using the correct pronoun, but I feel that expecting an apology would be unreasonable and they do not bear responsibility for hurting me, since it wasn't really reasonable to expect them to avoid it.

If somebody ignores a known and stated wish, I have a problem with it. But I am not willing to say that someone else's sensitivity is my problem if I make a reasonable mistake in a situation where I don't have much reason to know better. I'm all for respecting other people's right to choose their self-identification, but you just cannot expect strangers to know your self-identification until you tell them. They will get it wrong. Just as strangers will do other annoying things like mispronounce names or such. Someone who does that should be corrected, but you have to suck it up and not hold it against them unless they are unwilling to fix the mistake. Someone who repeatedly doesn't get your name right, that's a different matter.

If a good faith error impacts someone so strongly that they are deeply hurt, then they ought to work on those personal issues.

[feuervogel]

If a good faith error impacts someone so strongly that they are deeply hurt, then they ought to work on those personal issues.

Sometimes, a good faith error comes after the hundredth deliberate-asshole-"error", and it's the proverbial straw.

An analogy: a bunch of people kick a person in the shin, then someone accidentally steps on their toe. The pain of having their toe stepped on isn't lessened by its having been an accident.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

I don't know about their obligation. I think, when you're struck, you're not really obliged to stop and calculate how intentional it appears to have been and appropriately moderate your expression of pain.

I'm not saying you're obliged to beat your breasts and tear your hair, but when you hurt someone accidentally, you don't question whether they have a right to be hurt, you say "Oh, I'm sorry, that was accidental, I'll try to be more careful." If you offer an honest apology for what you've done, and someone still wants to berate you, that's probably out of line, but it's still likely less hurtful to you to hear it than to another person, to have real pain shrugged off. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding here - I'm not talking about holding anything against anybody, I'm just saying people have a right to say "Ow, that hurts" and get a response that acknowledges the hurt. Beyond that, it's all contextual, but that much is a given.

Maybe it's the Recovering Catholic in me, but one concept that stuck with me from early religion classes was fault vs responsibility. I'm responsible for the consequences of my actions. I have an ability and a duty to respond to the results of what I have done. I may not be the root cause of that outcome, because very little beyond yourself is entirely in your control, I may not be at fault for that situation, I may not have planned the outcome, I may not be in full control of the factors that create it, but I am responsible for my particular part in it.

I tend to use an analogy not unlike akiko's - If I step on someone's toe, it's not up to the person with a broken toe to go "Oh, he doesn't know that people just like him stomped my foot till my toes broke, I shall smile and ask him to be more careful so he doesn't feel too bad about it." They have every right to yell ow, and curse a bit, and get a sincere apology, and if they need to vent a little more after that, it doesn't cost me nearly as much as my accidental injury cost them. I certainly don't have the right to say "Oh, jeez, I only stepped on your toe, stop being a baby!" or get offended, or demand an explanation for why it should hurt so much. If they push it to legal action, or if they start accusing me of malice aforethought, I have a right to defend myself, sure - I'm responsible for my accident, not the broken toe, I'm not at fault for the whole pain - but immediately acting defensive and denying their pain is not a reasonably polite response to the situation.

There's a whole range of this sort of behavior, and it depends enormously on context. It's one thing to trip and accidentally step on a toe. It's another to stomp someone's foot. It's also another thing to, say, walk down a busy street carrying long lumber and constantly knocking people upside the head because you're not paying attention. There's different levels of responsible behavior for each of these, but you have to be ready to asses them on their context. The accidental toe-step is unfortunate, but it'll happen now again. The stomp is generally mustache-twirlingly evil. But if you shrug off every injury you cause carrying timber at head-height without paying attention as "just an accident, don't get upset", that's disingenuous as well. You could be taking more responsibility for that action and preventing issues better.

This got rather rambly, I apologize for that. I tend to try to overexplain things online. I think we're largely on the same page, I don't think people should generally be hounded for an occasional honest mistake - but I likewise think it should be acknowledged that the mistake will have markedly different impacts in different situations, and while you aren't at fault for all of them, you're still responsible in the situation, to the degree you're involved. It's up to me to modulate my reaction to the situation I've created based on my responsibility, not for the injured party to moderate the situation based on my imagined culpability. They're generally already bearing enough burdens without having to add to them.

[leora.livejournal.com]

Well, you shouldn't be stepping on anyone's toes anyway, so the analogy fails.

Should you acknowledge the pain? Sure. Should you state that you didn't mean to cause it? Yes. Should you avoid doing it in future, of course.

But I don't think that the speaker ~did~ make a mistake. And I don't think that's a true apology, because nothing changes in the speaker.

In order for it to be a real apology, I have to acknowledge a flaw in my actions, regret my actions, and act differently in the future.

In this case, since there was no reasonable way to know the correct pronoun choice and I chose incorrectly, I don't really see the flaw, nor a good way to avoid the mistake in the future. It would be awkward and clumsy in many settings to inquire about someone's preferred pronoun choice before ever referring to them. And since there is absolutely no pronoun choice that doesn't cause offense to some people, there is no way not to hurt some people. So, what behavior is expected to be changed? If put in the same situation, I'd make the exact same action. So, what mistake was made? That it turned out poorly is unfortunate, but all you can do is make the best decision you can with the information you have to work on, that that sometimes turns out poorly is part of life, but it does not make the decision wrong. It was the right thing to do. It just didn't work out.

That's why it is vital to know the circumstances, because if it actually was a mistake, if the person's preference should have been known, then that changes everything.

And I really do think people have a responsibility to moderate their reactions based on someone else's ability to understand what will be an issue for them. For example, I've been in social circles where tickling is considered friendly and okay and people will do it without even asking. I do not give people consent to tickle. Tickling me is not okay and triggering. However, if someone who does not know this is tickles me in a setting where they really did feel that they had cause to think it okay, then I will react moderately. However, I tend to try to inform people I get close enough to of this, because I do not want to be stuck in this situation. If someone who does know this tickles me without my consent, it is a completely different matter, because now they know they do not have consent, and I will not take the energy to not react more strongly.

But you can't go around holding things against people or randomly blowing up at them when they have no way of knowing that they are stepping on a landmine. If you need to do this, you need a great deal of help. I admit, help is often not available and even when it is, it takes time and won't help everyone. But there is an extent to which I hold people in public to a basic level of ability to act decently socially, and that includes keeping your extreme sensitivities under control. Anything set off strongly by correct behavior on someone else's part is an extreme sensitivity. But I won't hold it against you if you rant about incorrect behavior.

This post seems to have been started by an example where the person was in a context where it was deemed just due social decency to take the effort to learn the correct pronouns, so it doesn't apply there. But I do think the situation is vital, and you cannot give people free license to always hold the person who hurts them accountable. People can be hurt by anything. It is not always my job to deal with your pain, even if I "caused" it by doing something completely innocuous that I had no way of knowing was a problem. Sometimes saying, "hello" to someone causes pain. Is that a mistake? Is that something to apologize for? What change in behavior should one make if one knows that greeting people means you run a percentage risk of hurting someone? Especially when not greeting people also runs that risk.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

Well, you also shouldn't be denying people's gender identities, so I'm going to say the analogy doesn't fail. I know I shouldn't be stepping on people's toes, but, y'know, I'm human, and sometimes I trip or don't see people's feet. It's that damn fallibility - like using the wrong pronoun, you know you shouldn't, but sometimes it happens. Like using the wrong pronoun, it's usually minor anyway. Except when it's not, like for someone who's nursing an injured foot.

Acknowledging the pain and stating that you didn't mean to cause it is the majority of what I'm talking about with an apology, anyway. If you don't regret causing other people pain, intentionally or not, then I guess, yes, it would be misleading to apologize. But I generally do regret hurting people, even by accident, even if I couldn't have known. Even knowing that I can't reasonably prevent it from ever happening with anyone else ever again, I don't think it rings hollow. Obviously, that's going to depend enormously on the audience and the situation. Context again.

Ultimately, I think we've got irreconcilable paradigms. It's hard to imagine myself in a situation where tickling wasn't considered intimate, but in that case, if someone knocked my hand away full force and explained they had issues, I'd apologize and try to be understanding, not expect them to convince me to stop less directly/violently. I'd honestly accept it as a reflex and move on. I guess I wouldn't stop the behavior in the context, but I'd stop it with that person, and that's the behavior correction I'd be including in my apology.

So, yeah, I'm thinking that's where we're hitting the wall. I thought I'd already said it, but I don't think holding a grudge over an honest mistake is justified either. I just think that having a strong immediate response is understandable and acceptable, and that "I'm sorry, I made a mistake, I know it can be an issue, and from now on I'll make sure to call you what you prefer." That's the correction you're making, not how you address everyone, how you address this individual.

In the end, people should be accountable for what they do. Yes, it's wrong to hold them accountable for more, but it's equally wrong to shrug off the responsibility. The correct approach in a given situation is somewhere in the middle ground, and it's going to vary by the context. So, yes, you can say "It's wrong to hate someone for saying 'Hello!'" That has next to no bearing on real world situations, though, so it's a bit of a strawman argument. If you can expect people to moderate their reactions to your actions based on how likely it is to be a simple mistake, they can expect you to moderate your reaction to their pain based on how likely your simple mistake was to be the 50th such "simple mistake" they've had to deal with today, that you might be the straw that broke the camel's back. You don't have to be a smiling, groveling punching bag, but you should acknowledge and apologize, because you did contribute to someone else's pain and we generally regret doing that.

[leora.livejournal.com]

You state, however, that you believe you did nothing wrong and will do the exact same thing again in the future and what you are sorry for is that the other person got hurt. I thought a "I'm sorry you got hurt by what I did" wasn't a real apology.

I'm just not seeing how this apology is in any way meaningful as an apology. Sure, change your actions with this particular person - we both agree on that. And sure you're responsible for hurting them if you do it again once you know. But I don't see how you even consider it to be a mistake when you go on to claim you'll do the exact same thing in the future when in the same situation.

It just rings very hollow as an apology and a belief in having made a mistake.

If there is some actual mistake here, then what is it and how can it be avoided altogether? I'm all for recognizing that this may be a common area of sensitivity. So, do you think you should always ask someone's pronoun choice before ever referring to them? What if you want to make a comment about someone in an online discussion who doesn't make their pronoun choice clear? What degree of research should you be obligated to do?