Call me Meryl
For some reason this stupid banality from Laurie Penny, similar or identical to millions of others, has gotten on my nerves.
It’s banal, we’ve seen it a billion times, but all the same, it’s infuriating – because it’s so stupid. It’s not “basic good manners” at all, it’s a new and clunky and sometimes totalitarian bit of etiquette, which if pushed to the extreme becomes impossible to comply with.
No, actually, if “someone” tells you they would prefer to be called Napoleon or Hitler or Julia Child or Amy Klobuchar no it isn’t basic good manners to respect that. It’s the opposite of basic: it’s baroque and twisted and fanciful. It’s the other way around: people demanding to be called Something Special are making rude entitled onerous demands.
In a sense we probably don’t get to tell anyone else “how to identify,” whatever that even means, but anyone else also doesn’t get to tell us what special names or pronouns to call her him them. Basic good manners is not making extraneous demands of random people.
Also, you (general) don’t get to tell me what basic good manners are. That’s something I learn from my family and from my life as a whole. I consider it basic good manners to take the time to type in complete sentences with proper spelling and grammar when at all possible. There are those who tell me that doing so is rude.
“Go to Hell,” I say
And since when are basic good manners enshrined in law, the contravention of which brings to bear the power of the state?
The “basic good manners” regarding preferred pronouns might be analogous to the basic good manners regarding titles. “It’s Ms., not ‘Mrs.’” Or “That’s ‘Dr.’ Brown — I’m a physician.” Or even “That’s ‘Father’ Brown — I’m a priest.” And generally speaking we acquiesce, either to be polite or avoid making a scene.
But the analogy breaks down as soon as the stakes get higher. A lot of people have no desire to grant creationist Kent Hovind the degree he got from a university set in a ranch house, with a PhD dissertation which began “Hi, I’m Kent Hovind.” And clerics demanding cringing titles from nonbelievers may get more than they expected. And, as Seth points out, the power of the State isn’t brought to bear if you call Lord Whippersnapper “Whippy.”
And also even those situations in your opening paragraph can be handled well or badly, and can be seen as not worth raising in the first place. Many academics loathe the very idea of telling anyone “That’s DOCTOR” whatever, plus they say it’s meaningless outside the academic setting. One would have to be a pretty trumpish egomaniac to say “It’s Doctor” at a party or the like. And having to say “It’s Ms not Mrs” is why we wanted the Ms in the first place: men don’t have to deal with that so why should women? As you say, we may acquiesce, but that hints that it’s not all that charming to begin with.
(Did Kent Hovind really? That’s hilarious!)
Funny how it’s rude to the point of getting the law involved when ignoring someone’s demands for certain third person pronouns, but not rude at all shut up when it comes to calling people cis against their wishes. And if the rejoinder to this point is “yeah but you just are cis whether you acknowledge it or not”, then mine is “okay, but then McKinnon, Mouncey etc. are male whether they acknowledge it or not.”
And then police, apparently.
It’s basic good manners not to tell someone to die in a grease fire too, but that hasn’t stopped anyone.
The only pronoun I ever use to address people is “you”. I don’t know of any language where standard second person pronouns are gendered. If someone told me they wanted to be addressed using different pronouns my immediate reaction would be ask them what on earth they meant. And I look forward to the day someone first asks me what my own pronouns are.
All of the above, plus also too, we’re not telling anyone “how to identify”, for fuck’s sake. That’s up to them.
We’re saying we shouldn’t be compelled to pretend to think their self-professed “identity” is real when we don’t think so. That’s a different thing.
Banal and stupid is right.
Ophelia, Kent Hovind’s ‘dissertation’ is online here.