As Local Authority employees, many of us will be used to receiving emails from colleagues proudly declaring their pronouns as part of their signature. If your organisation is anything like mine, you may well have been encouraged to do so at some point by an email from the Equalities Team or LGBTQ+* staff network. Occasionally this is accompanied by a link to a Stonewall web page or similar telling us “Why pronouns matter”.
If you’ve ever checked these links out, they tend to start by explaining how kind it is to validate people by using their chosen pronouns, followed by encouragement for us all to introduce ourselves by declaring our pronouns and to add them to our emails. Doing so, we are told, will help trans people to feel comfortable sharing their pronouns and demonstrate ‘allyship’ with trans people. The Stonewall page finishes by noting that the term ‘preferred pronouns’ is no longer used because “someone’s gender is not up for debate”.
Now, I’m going to leave aside the whole issue of using the chosen pronouns of people who want to present differently from their biological sex, and instead concentrate here on the distinct question of whether we all should be declaring our pronouns as a matter of routine; something I don’t and won’t do.
Declaring your pronouns isn’t just a matter of being kind to people who are trans. Doing so also involves buying into a whole bag of underlying assumptions that I don’t share, think are mistaken and ultimately have implications that are neither good nor kind.
Declaring our pronouns is based on the assumption that whether we are men or women (he/him or she/her) is something that we can choose; that it’s a subjective matter based on how we identify rather than the facts of our biology. This idea is part of a body of thought that is seeking to systematically replace sex-based understandings of men and women with identity-based ones, and to give these identities primacy over sex in public life.
But I, like many people, think that our biological sex really is important. Many aspects of our society are organised around whether we are men or women and, in many cases referenced by this distinction, it’s our sex that matters, not subjective self-image. Biological sex obviously matters for reproduction. It also matters when accessing medical care, as some conditions only affect one sex and others present differently in male and female bodies. For many people it matters in terms of sexual attraction. As a gay man, I am same sex attracted and it’s simply false to say my sexuality can be accurately redefined in terms of gender identities. It matters in terms of fairness in physical activity including participation in sport. Anyone who has gone through male puberty has huge advantages in most sports which are well understood and include factors such as muscle mass, lung capacity and the skeletal structure. It matters for safeguarding and understanding risk around single sex spaces too. Almost all violent and sexual crime is committed by men and the data from multiple countries is quite clear that this pattern of risk varies on sex-based lines, not according to how people identify.
For all these reasons and more, biological sex isn’t something we should allow to be erased and replaced by subjective identities. To do so has results which aren’t at all kind, as we have seen now far too often. We have seen women raped and sexually assaulted by males in women’s prison and crisis centres. We have seen men taking prizes away from women in sport, undermining the whole reason for having these categories in the first place, to the demoralisation (and sometimes risking the safety) of women and girls. We have seen prizes and positions set up to encourage the participation of women and honour their contributions being taken by men who think their subjective identity justifies them taking advantage of initiatives designed to address centuries of sex-based discrimination and marginalisation.
If it seems overly dramatic to link these things to the use of pronouns, we need to remember that the decisions over who should be allowed in prisons, or in sports competitions, or access to rape crisis centres etc have all been recommended and made by public servants like us. People whose job it is to set, enact and enforce policies. Officials who arbitrate fairness and assess risks.
All these things have happened because someone with authority in public institutions thought that being a man or woman is something people get to choose rather than based on their biology. I imagine most of the people making the decision thought they were being kind at the time.
If it seems overly dramatic to link these things to the use of pronouns, we need to remember that the decisions over who should be allowed in prisons, or in sports competitions, or access to rape crisis centres etc have all been recommended and made by public servants like us. People whose job it is to set, enact and enforce policies. Officials who arbitrate fairness and assess risks. All these things have happened because someone with authority in public institutions thought that being a man or woman is something people get to choose rather than based on their biology. I imagine most of the people making the decision thought they were being kind at the time.
While I’ve argued that biological sex really does matter, there are some things that we really shouldn’t be eager to associate with our core understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman. What I’m thinking of here are cultural stereotypes and social norms around masculinity or femininity. How people dress, who they find attractive, their mannerisms and behaviour, etc. Many gay and lesbian people who don’t conform to these stereotypes have spent many years resisting the idea that being camp somehow makes them less of a man or being a butch lesbian makes them less of a woman. The women’s rights movement has involved more than a century of women refusing to be defined or limited by such stereotypes and norms. The success of women and LGB people declaring their rights had led us to a place where we thought we’d won the battle to say, “I won’t be defined by stereotypes; there are many ways to be a man or a woman.” Now, we are faced with a movement of people who say it is identification with these very stereotypes and norms, or our performance of the social expectations around them, which is all that matters in making us men or women.
Preserving sex-based distinctions and understandings of men and women requires us to be able to clearly identify and refer to these distinctions. It requires us to recognise their importance and not allow them to be eclipsed by subjective understanding or ‘gender neutral’ terms that are designed to erode recognition of their significance. Pronouns in email signatures may be just a small part of this, but they matter. The concerted campaign to change our language use around sex-based terms hasn’t been an afterthought. It’s been a deliberate attempt to manipulate the way we think about ourselves and each other. An attempt I intend to resist.
*Note: Depending on time of reading, I may have missed a few letters here.