Grammatical gender and identity gender

What is gender-inclusive language?

Two strands of gender inclusive language seem to be salient for my current environment:

1. “Career stuff”. Are roles gendered? Does language exclude people, usually women, from roles? e.g. Actor/actress.
2. “Gender identity stuff” — does the use of some particular word impinge upon a given individual’s preference/need to enact a certain gender role?

This is about the latter. a.k.a. “What is your pronoun?”

tl;dr The request for gender-inclusive language for the gender non-conforming might be extraordinary in the context of normal politeness, but more ordinary in the context of talking to members of a population who are at elevated risk of psychological distress, and why did no-one explain this to me earlier?

As a former linguist-in-training, I am obliged to add pedantically that in English this question is asked about the 2nd person singular pronoun. By contrast, consider Thai. In Thai, the 1st person pronouns are gendered, mostly not the other ones, which means that I am constantly gendering myself, as opposed to gendering that person over there. This strikes me as a generally better system, as regards allocating maximum agency directly to the language users. Question: Does having Thai as a daily deliver benefits to the gender-incongruent?

As people are fond of noting, in English specifically this question is fraught because second person pronouns are the words that you use to talk about me when I am not in the conversation, and I have become a he. This is a tricky thing to have preferences about, compared, for example, to caring about how you address me, which we have all cared about forever. If you call me “arsehat” to my face, I shall be annoyed. Third person pronouns concerns are more like caring about how you describe my character to others, which is a delicate thing that we tend to accept more limited agency over. If you describe me as an “arsehat” to others, I am not going to be happy, but also there is a degree to which I must accept that it might be a judgment call on your part whether I am in fact an arsehat. Also, if I am even to complain about being called an arsehat, it implies that I am asking people about how you discuss me, which rather implies I am going out of my way to get offended or police your opinions in conversations to which I was not invited.

It is of course complicated. I do not think that policing second person gender pronouns is exactly the same as policing character descriptions, but it inherits some of the same icky feel for many people who are involved in it, and thus pronoun enforcement can have an unfortunate air of passive aggression. (“Why were you eavesdropping on me when I discussed you?”) This is one reason that it can become needlessly needlessly fraught discussion. I do not have any useful solutions for that, however.

Oh! although I should say that I think it is fairly easy for people who pass; I think that for most people, using a pronoun that reflects someone’s apparent gender is easy. When their gender presentation does not coincide with their appearance, people get tetchy.

Gender-inclusive language does not, however, restrict itself to pronouns. For example, there are guidelines regarding how gender identity itself is identified: Case study: LGBTIQ inclusive language guide is for Victorian Public Sector.

The LGBTIQ inclusive language guide is for Victorian Public Sector (VPS) employees. It explains how to use language respectfully and inclusively when working with and referring to LGBTIQ people. By using inclusive language, we demonstrate respect in both our workplaces and in developing and delivering policies, programs and services for all Victorians.

The details are fascinating. One item that leapt out was gender incongruence, renamed from gender dysphoria in this book because of the slow cycling of the Euphemism Treadmill. I wonder how this renaming has caught on. Gender-incongruent people I know have not yet got the memo that they are supposed to refer to themselves as incongruent and still tend to use gender dysphoria to describe their experience.

More arresting, the discussion of preferred forms of address:

Avoid asking people what terms they ‘prefer’. Having a ‘preference’ can sound as if it’s a choice and most people do not feel as if they have a choice in these matters. If you need to, you can simply ask people what terms they use.

There is a lot going on there. Let us assume that this document comes from real community consultation and reflects genuine, widely-held opinions.

For myself, I have a vague feeling that of sadness that someone describing their attitude as a preference delegitimates it, and that choices are somehow insufficient to justify the way we exist in this world; our selves are only legitimated if we were coerced into them? For me it feels good to be able to describe my own identity in terms of my preferences, my desires, my terrors. I wish everyone could have that.

Also, I am nervous. I will likely run afoul of preference thing at some point, because I am in contact with the discipline of economics and regularly I use the term “preference” in the economic sense, which includes every possible human way of evaluating alternatives. I prefer life to death. I prefer to avoid violence and despair. A preference can be existentially strong. I discuss peoples’ preferences, in the economic sense, about things like gender, so there is a landmine waiting for me right there, I understand, which I will step on one day when I forget that some parts of the community I might discuss entertain preferences that preferences be called something different for them when they are doing the preferring.

On the other hand, some gender-nonconforming people seem happy to talk in preferences. Some people have “preferred” pronouns and refer to them as such. I do wonder what the distribution of preferences-about-preferences is in the broader population. We can deduce that if there is a significant division in the gender nonconforming population about how to refer to the nonconformity in question, then the solution is to ask someone “If I were to ask you a question about gender identity, would terms would you need me to phrase it in? Do you request that I use the word ‘preference’ or something else?” Or maybe just “do you have any general advice about how to discuss gender issues in order to minimise the stress of the discussion? For example is there phrasing that you find triggering?”

These guidelines are all manageable, in themselves and in isolation, but they are clearly extraordinary compared to the baseline of western understandings of politeness, and many people find them irritating. Few domains of human engagement have so much meta-negotiation about how they should be discussed, at least in my experience, even weighty ones. If I am investigating a career change, or miscellaneous life altering surgery, or considering having a child, all these things are ones that I can typically simply discuss, without a pre-negotiation phase about what words are OK to use to describe these significant events. What is special about gender nonconformity, which necessitates this extreme care and subtle etiquette?

There are circumstances where being extremely careful about pre-negotiating words are indicated. Some of the circumstance mains that have this expectation of pre-negotiation are, for example negotiating child custody after relationship breakdown, discussing and seeking help after physical abuse, mental illness and so on. These are domains where it is worth spending time working out how to communicate before attempting to communicate, because the people who are likely to be doing the communicating are likely to have anxiety and trauma associated with the need to have the conversation. Putting it that way, to me, makes it seem much more reasonable to ask people if they “pref” “preferences”.

Gender nonconformity is not, as far as I am concerned, a mental illness in itself. In fact, I reckon it is not likely to be any one “thing“ at all, but a whole collection of things that tend to be clustered together in public discourse. And some of those things that cluster with gender nonconformity at a higher-than-average level are mental illnesses of various stripes, distress, anxiety, trauma etc.

Sure, the indirect and circuitous means of talking about desires-about-desires and preferences-about-preferences and needs-about-needs can be frustratingly idiosyncratic, complicated, and ceremonial. But maybe they can seem reasonable if we remember that we would like to be kind to our fellow humans, then part of that is that we should be alive to indicators of those humans are at elevated risk of distress. Even if the majority of the gender nonconforming were to be chill and uninvested in language games, we can imagine that it is likely that a significant minority are liable to be triggered by anything less than extraordinary effort in conversation.

Which is to say, I understand subtle linguistic manoeuvring as throwing a bone to the riled and distressed amongst the wider gender nonconforming population, which I think is something we are comfortable as a society in doing. Say I am at a party and I see that someone by the drinks table is standing alone, and that their posture is hunched, their eyes are downcast. They might be enjoying themselves and everything is totally fine and they just happen to have weird posture. On the other hand, their body language could indicate that something bad has just happened and they want help. Or that they are feeling weird and the last thing they want is to talk to someone. Without more information, I cannot know. I can know that when there are some indications that maybe someone is distressed, I should be cautious in how I behave around them, for both their sake and my own.

I think an unusual gender presentation is like that person with the odd posture at the drinks table. An unusual gender presentation is correlated with psychological distress, so it is worth behaving as if that is a possibility. It does not necessarily mean that the gender nonconforming person is distressed, but that presentation is an indication that they are at higher than usual risk of being distressed. That correlation arises for many reasons, I imagine. Gender dysphoria/incongruence itself sound pretty bad, from the reports of people I know who experience it. Being exposed to bigotry for gender nonconformity is surely distressing. There are likely more things going on too that I do not know.

And as with all other such externally-visible indicators of possible psychological distress, it is reasonable to behave cautiously and delicately around a person exhibiting such indicators, until there is an information that the person in question is not distressed, and then I can relax. Until then, I should behave in a way that minimises the risk of distressing them further. And I! I should take care, when attempting to deal with someone who has been traumatised, in that they can present a danger to me too. Dealing with traumatised people is complicated. They can be unpredictable; they can lash out. We have possibly all at some point been the person who lashes out at people around us when we feel threatened ourselves.

It is compassionate to be cautious, that is to say, in situations that look like they might be dangerous, for any parties involved.

None of this is to say that the gender non-conforming are necessarily feeble or dangerous or any such thing; merely that it is good to interpret those precious hints about risk factors as such, and to be cautious. The same applies to the gender conforming who can also be traumatised, and display disk factor of their own; we mentioned a few above. If someone displays a trauma risk factor of any kind, it is reasonable to be cautious around them. Someone who is incentivised enough to journey into the shitshow of prejudice and vexation that is nonconforming gender presentation presumably had a string motivation to do so, and that motivation might be something very distresssing.

And that is why I do my best to respect the ritual of gender pronoun exchange, even if to me personally that ritual is empty: For some people that ritual is a courtesy, but for people in distress it mitigates the danger of aggravating their distress. For people who have been through an extraordinary and difficult experience, there might be extraordinary requests they need to make, and that is OK.

Hi, I’m Dan. I regard myself as male, and you can refer to me using whatever pronoun you see fit.