Pronouns in court
Another step into the sunshine of utopia: we now get to know what pronouns courtroom lawyers “use.” Well, we don’t, but the lucky people of British Columbia do.
In an effort to be more inclusive of transgender people, the Provincial Court of B.C. has created a new policy asking lawyers to provide pronouns when introducing themselves and their clients in court.
While some lawyers have already started including pronouns in their introductions, the court will now expect everyone to share how they wish to be referred to.
In a press release, the provincial court provided an example of such an introduction: “My name is Ms. Jane Lee, spelled L-E-E. I use she/her pronouns. I am the lawyer for Mx. Joe Carter who uses they/them pronouns.” (Mx. is a gender-neutral title.)
The stupidity kind of takes my breath away. Talk of “using” pronouns is gibberish anyway, and likely to be incomprehensible to many of the people who will hear such an introduction. “Using” pronouns is saying them yourself, it’s not telling other people which ones to say when talking about you. That’s not what “use” means.
Besides which people are there to pay attention and make important decisions. Pointless distractions are pointless distractions.
The court said the policy change will improve the experiences of gender diverse people in the legal system and would help avoid confusion and the need for corrections when someone is misgendered.
Oh yes, I’m sure that’s going to help avoid all confusion.
Wednesday’s policy change is a step in the right direction, according to barbara findlay, a queer feminist lawyer with more than four decades of experience in B.C. courts who does not capitalize her name.
I DON’T CARE. I don’t care what queer blah blah does with her its their howloo name. Nobody cares, really, but some people pretend to. In grown up world we don’t spend our time finding out about the little quirks of strangers, because we don’t have time or attention or energy to spare for such a footling pursuit.
I have–no, sorry, I was assigned–one of those typical Scottish names that starts with Mac and, in my case, followed by an upper-case letter, with no intervening space. I get all sorts of misspellings–most typically, skipping the “a”, but also adding a space between the Mac and the next letter, or not capitalizing that letter. For the most part I don’t care (“Mc” used to bother me more, but I’ve gotten over it), and only bother to correct it if it matters; e.g., if someone is looking me up in a database or putting my name on an official document. I really can’t imagine worrying about whether someone follows my orders about how to capitalize my name.
WaM, my father-in-law, who was a grade school principal, used to keep a list of the ways his name was misspelled. I could add several to the list. I also get it frequently mispronounced, though it is said exactly as it is spelled. I just correct pronunciation and move on, at least if it’s someone I am going to have a long-term association with. For casual meetings, it isn’t so important. As for spelling, the mail at work usually gets it to me, even with some really imaginative spellings, and spelling something that is a different word and doesn’t sound out to my name; my name is distinctive enough they find me. (That could be because I have a name from the Norman in a town full of Polish and Czech names; the abundance of vowels in my name probably helps).
Not capitalizing your name is either an affectation or too lazy to hit the shift key. Insisting others not capitalize your name is arrogant. To expect anyone to remember the proliferation of pronouns and odd quirks to writing the name confuses, it doesn’t clarify.
From now on, maybe I’ll just refer to everyone as “quib” or “jing” to avoid accidentally misgendering someone and hurting their feelings – oh, I’m sorry, I mean causing them real violence. Since quib and jing are gender neutral, no one should be bothered. And for the honorific, I just say Uck.
Wednesday’s policy change is a step in the right direction, according to barbarafindlayaqueerfeministlawyerwith morethanfourdecadesofexperienceinbccourtswhodoesnotcapitalizehernameand herpunctuationandspacingis
nonbinary and nonstandard.
Hur parlal eegul duz nutt eggsept spiling. They prepare their legal briefs.
Is Mx. pronounced mux or mix? Just curious.
She is free to put as many spelling and grammar errors into her correspondence as she wishes. She’ll look attention-grabby and unprofessional, but she is free to make herself look silly.
Oh for fuck’s sakes.
It’s about 50-50 whether a judge pronounces my name correctly even after I’ve said it. I don’t even bother to correct them, because it’s no skin off my nose, and I’ve got other things on my mind that getting persnickety with a judge. Who thinks they’re going to memorize everyone’s pronouns? Judges (and opposing counsel) are going to do what everybody does — utterly ignore these preening announcements except in those rare instances that someone announces a pronoun that doesn’t match their appearance and/or is some “bespoke” pronoun. In those instances you take note and do your best to remember it.
I really don’t see what this is all supposed to accomplish. If you want me to use the pronoun “xir” or whatever, then sure, I’ll do my best. Really, I will. But if you think having the other 99% of humanity announce “I use he/him” or “she/her” every time they introduce themselves is going to make “xir” stand out less, you’re kidding yourself. The same way that this lawyer’s “I don’t use capital letters in my name” thing isn’t going to be any less weird or pretentious if the rest of us start announcing “by the way, the first letters of my first and last names are capitalized.”
And while I don’t really know what the future holds for the trans rights debate, I am pretty confident that one thing that will not be happening is that 50 years from now, we will not have 20 sets of pronouns in common use. It defeats the purpose of using pronouns in the first place.
Yeah, pronouns (like other grammatical elements) are meant to be easily understood packages of predictable information; they’re meant to ease the load of communication on both the speaker and the listener (or writer and reader). There’s a lot going on in language, but much of it consists of tethering new information to known or easily inferrable information; for the latter languages provide a huge variety of tools, including pronouns in many languages (I hesitate to say all, or even most); for the most part those tools are short and unstressed, and allow us to focus our attention and effort on the new information. It would be tedious and counterproductive if we always had to say something like “The speaker of this phrase talk in the past yesterday talking partner past be Ophelia. Ophelia say in the past…” and so on. Designer pronouns defeat the very purpose of pronouns. I’m all for getting rid of the last vestiges of grammatical gender in English, but this ain’t the way.
And a similar point can be made about spelling, capitalization, and punctuation conventions. They’re conventions meant to help make written text more understandable. There’s no particular reason why proper names should be capitalized, but because that’s the convention that anyone who’s learned to read and write English (and as far as I know any language written in the Latin script) knows, following that convention is a courtesy to the reader.
I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s introduction to his song “We Will All Go Together When We Go,” in which he tells of “a fellow I used to know, whose name was Henry. Only to give you an idea of what an individualist he was, he spelled it H-E-N-3-R-Y. The ‘3’ was silent, you see.”
This all-lower-case stuff feels like that. “Ooh, I read too much E.E. Cummings as a teenager, and so to prove how modest I am, I want to have a special special name that is a pain in everyone else’s ass.” (Cummings, I know, did not insist on the uncapitalized form.)
WAM #2, my partner has one of those Irish origin names, O’Dea. Many online forms refuse to accept the ‘ as a valid part of the name.
I have also heard people coming across her name trying to pronounce it Odeeah. :-)
Roj,
Yeah, that’s why O’Bama had to change his name.
Hm… ok sounds good: I’ll take “the right honorable judge” as my honorific and “their honour” as my pronoun, thanks.
“Hi, my name is Colin. I use the pronouns he/him or she/her depending upon the sex of the person to whom I am referring. ”
Do you think that would be acceptable?
I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll bite. The trailing full stop in Mx. indicates it’s an abbreviation. As such there could be any combination of letters thrown in there with the M and X (although we can assume the M comes first). Some possibilities:
Moxie
Minx
Megapixel
Multiplex
Marxist
Banichi, Multiplex seems appropriate.
Ha! Good one.
Banichi, Mr. and Mrs. have extended pronunciations because they are shortened versions of actual words. Compare this to Ms., which is also a relatively recent invention with no preceding word history, and is pronounced something like m’zz.
But I agree that Multiplex is very appropriate.