Grammar and grievance

A tweet from Legal Feminist disagreeing with Acas advice on pronouns provoked a storm…

[image: taken from the illustrations to the Screwtape Letters]

Illustration from the Screwtape Letters

In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face…  You know the kind of thing: “I simply ask her what time dinner will be and she flies into a temper.” Once this habit is well established you have the delightful situation of a human saying things with the express purpose of offending and yet having a grievance when offence is taken.

CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (in which an experienced Devil coaches his nephew in the art and science of temptation)

The other day, Acas tweeted out the suggestion that putting pronouns in email signatures could help create a more open and inclusive workplace. Legal Feminist disagreed: 

There followed a storm of engagement, unprecedented for the Legal Feminst account: over 600k impressions, over 500 quote tweets and nearly as many retweets. I think the quote tweets in particular are revealing, and they are the main subject of this blog.

But before I get to that, I want to explain the context a bit; this will be old hat for many of my readers. 

The gender war: a quick primer

There are two sides in this war. They call each other various names, but we can call them sex deniers and gender criticals.

Sex denialism claims that sex doesn’t matter. Whether you’re a man or a woman depends not on your body, but on your inner sense of identity. A male person who says that he is a woman should be treated, referred to – and even thought of – as a woman for all purposes; and vice versa. Various things follow. If a man wants to join a support group for female survivors of male sexual violence, then provided only he says he’s a woman, he must be welcomed in. If a man with fully intact male genitalia wants to undress in the women’s changing area at the swimming pool, anyone who objects is a pearl-clutching prude and a bigot. If a mediocre male athlete wants to compete in women’s events and start breaking records and winning medals, the women should move over. If a male doctor wants to identify as a woman, his true sex is none of his patients’ business – even where intimate examinations are concerned. If a rapist decides he’s a woman and wants to be moved to a women’s prison, that’s his right too.  

Gender criticals think biological sex does sometimes matter: for healthcare, for safeguarding, for everyday privacy and dignity, for fairness in sport, and so on. They think sex is determined by whether you have a male or a female body, and that it’s no more possible literally to change sex than to change species. 

The attentive reader will have noticed that the “gender critical” viewpoint is made up of commonsense propositions that until about ten minutes ago no sensible person – whether on the political left or right – would have dreamed of contesting. The sex denialist beliefs are novel, and surprising.

Pronouns

So where do pronouns come in? 

This takes us to the manner in which sex denialism has been promoted. You can’t defend irrational beliefs with reason. By and large sex deniers don’t try: instead, their strategy has been to attempt to leapfrog over the usual campaigning, lobbying, arguing, persuading phases of bringing about profound cultural and legal  change, and to pretend instead that the desired outcome is already accepted by all right-thinking people – and to silence dissent by visiting dire consequences on anyone who questions that claim. That, I believe, is the whole reason for the vitriol and toxicity that surrounds this subject. Anyone who points out the absurdity of propositions like “some women have penises” must be howled down as a bigot, shamed, no-platformed, hounded from her job, kicked off her course, etc. That way, any doubter who lacks an appetite for martyrdom will be persuaded to steer clear of the whole debate – and insist if pressed that this subject is all too complicated and toxic, and they simply haven’t found the time or head-space to form a view. 

The more insidious part of the strategy is the first part: the pretence that the contentious  propositions that form sex denialism are already accepted without question by all educated, right-thinking people. Sex deniers make determined efforts to weave their claims seamlessly into our language and the fabric of our workplace culture, with the aim of converting contentious claims into the kind of tacit knowledge that doesn’t even need to be stated or formulated. 

Acas’s advice 

So what does Acas mean when it says announcing your pronouns can help create a more “open and inclusive” workplace? Inclusive for whom, and how? Your colleagues and work contacts will mostly know whether you’re male or female, if they need to. If you have an androgynous name and you particularly want to announce your sex, adding a title after your name will clear up any ambiguity with much less accompanying baggage than pronouns. But why do we even need to do this? Those who reply to my emails don’t need to know whether I am female or male. The truth behind pronouns is that their “baggage” is the point. The mechanism by which pronouns are supposed to make the workplace more open and inclusive is that they demonstrate your support of sex denialism, but without requiring you to say anything explicit. They bolster and entrench the idea that gender identity is more important than sex, while maintaining the appearance of a trivial, harmless courtesy. 

That’s why I think our tweet was right. The claims of sex denialism are far from universal: on the contrary, they are bitterly contentious. By putting pronouns in your signature you raise a flag that aligns you publicly with one side – and against the other – of the gender war. If you’re a Catholic pupil at a school in Glasgow where “No Pope!” is the standard greeting (I am not making this up – I have it on reliable authority that it’s an example drawn straight from life), you’re put to an invidious choice: either play along – or out yourself as a Catholic or Catholic-sympathiser. No doubt the greeting makes the environment feel welcoming and inclusive for the children of Rangers supporters; less so for young Celtic fans. 

Given the bitterness of the dispute – and especially given the many occasions on which gender critical individuals have had their jobs,  their livelihoods or even their physical safety threatened – being put to the parallel choice by pronoun rituals is not going to make the workplace feel open and inclusive for gender-critical employees.

An accidental behavioural experiment 

Are you feeling sceptical? Thinking maybe I’m overreacting, over-interpreting a harmless bit of politeness? I sympathise. When I first came to these debates, that’s what I thought, too. Why’s everyone getting so het up about language? Can’t we just be polite – can’t we use the words preferred by people who care passionately about words, and focus on what matters? 

If that’s where you are – re-read the short  extract from The Screwtape Letters at the top of this blog, and consider the manner in which the original tweet has operated as an accidental behavioural experiment. 

On the face of it, it’s quite a dryly techie tweet from a legal account, disagreeing with a bit of HR advice from Acas. But it’s had an extraordinary level of engagement: at the time of writing, nearly 700k impressions, hundreds of retweets and quote tweets, and nearly 3,000 likes.  

So what’s going on? Why has it attracted so much attention? 

I think the clue is in the quote tweets. They’re almost all hostile, and Twitter is a rage engine. Most fall into one of two categories: either words to the effect “What’s your problem with this trivial courtesy? Get a life!” or else “Ha ha nasty TERF bigots deserve to feel excluded and fearful.” I’ve done a rough-and-ready analysis, sorting about the hundred or so of these quote tweets into categories. I counted 66 that fell into the “ha ha nasty terven” category, 26 into the “harmless courtesy” camp –  plus two that agreed with the original tweet and a few I couldn’t easily classify. 

The typical HR response to any push-back against pronoun rituals is of the “harmless courtesy” flavour. Why, they ask, are you making such a big deal of this little thing? Why can’t you just be kind and polite like everyone else? Or at least not make an ungracious fuss if your colleagues want to be kind and polite! If you argue that pronoun rituals are an attempt to make a particular highly contentious belief system seem so mainstream that it can be treated as the default – and shame anyone who doesn’t subscribe to it – you’ll be met with polite bafflement. “What makes you think it’s that? It’s just a trivial courtesy that will make a marginalised group feel a little bit more comfortable. How much can it possibly cost you?”

This type of response was well represented in the sample I looked at. Here’s a typical one:

This is a perfectly understandable take from decent, well-intentioned people who haven’t given the matter a great deal of thought. But it’s hard to sustain in the teeth of the evidence provided by the other, much larger category of quote tweet. There are more than twice as many of these as from team “harmless courtesy”, and they make my case for me vividly – sometimes in unmistakably menacing terms. Here’s a small sample of that type: 

This was a reply, not a quote tweet

The first of these is admirably clear: “MAKE THE BIGOTS STFU [for the pure in heart, that translates “shut the fuck up”]. THAT’S THE BLOODY POINT.” 

This is the heart of the matter. A handful of responses of this type might have been explained away as the bad behaviour of a few hotheads. But the numbers involved make that impossible to sustain. 

A clear majority of the hundreds who have engaged with this tweet by quote-tweeting it are saying in terms that the point of including pronouns in email signatures is to make “TERFs” feel excluded and fearful. 

The quote tweets have vividly dramatised both aspects of the technique recommended by Uncle Screwtape in the extract at the start of this blog: one group (Zoë Irene et al) boasting that they are indeed saying something with the express purpose of giving offence – while the other group takes on the role of maintaining a sense of grievance when offence is taken. 

Expressing loathing and contempt for those who hold gender-critical views may be fashionable; it even seemed to have a degree of judicial sanction until the first instance decision in Forstater was corrected on appeal. But the lesson from the judgment of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Forstater needs to sink in. Gender-critical beliefs are within the protected characteristic of “religion or belief” (so too, probably, is sex denialism); harassing or discriminating against your employees on grounds of their protected beliefs can prove expensive. One of the things to be taken into account by a court or tribunal in determining for the purposes of a claim under the Equality Act whether conduct has the purpose or effect of violating the victim’s dignity or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment for them is whether it’s reasonable for it to have that effect. The fate of this tweet could itself provide telling evidence. 

18 thoughts on “Grammar and grievance”

  1. What a cool clear head you have, to be able to analyse so much outpouring of vitriol. I am grateful you have done it because it provides evidence of what “be kind” really means.

  2. Thank you Clear and logical as per usual.

    I always feel incredibly apprehensive when I see that someone has listed pronouns. chiefly as they are characterising themselves but also others including myself to a set stereotypes which I find limiting. and deeply offensive. As a woman I most likely earn less than a male counterpart with the same experience so I’m not keen to list female pronouns !

    Whilst female by sex and deeply gender critical in that I believe in science. But thinking practically perhaps at least at work I should use the pronouns he/him as I suspect it’ll be more lucrative ? What do you think ? After all Eddie Izzard identifies as a woman except for work where he’s a man as they earn more.

    Naomi, I think I may have cracked the system.

  3. Would it be lawful for an employer to demand employees state any other protected characteristic – eg their marriage/maternity status, ethnicity, whether they are athiest, have a disability, are homosexual? Or that they reveal another status legally protected under IHRL such as trade union membership/political persuasion? Forcing anyone to share such personal information under duress is unacceptable and possibly unlawful. Not to mention, as Debbie Hayton points out, it is oppressive for trans people who are not ready to declare their status.

    1. I think it would be extremely ill-advised for any employer to make pronouns in email signatures (or at meetings, etc) mandatory – though, to be fair, I don’t think that’s what Acas was suggesting. But I argue that employers shouldn’t even “encourage” pronoun announcements, and should probably positively forbid them: because having employees flag their ideological allegiances in this way is calculated to produce a fractious and factionalised working environment.

      1. I definitely agree re the active encouragement to put pronouns in emails etc as surely it could count as harassment of people who did not hold gender identity beliefs, particularly if the encouragement comes from someone senior? I think of it as someone who wears a cross to show their personal belief (or even as a fashion statement) then that is fine but I doubt if it would be permissible for them to actively encourage others to do so in work time.
        However, I also feel pronouns in email signatures are used as symbols of belief (particularly when someone has a name that clearly shows their sex and so the pronouns are totally unnecessary)- so if they are allowed then why not say a symbol that represents gender critical belief? Is treating gender identity and gender critical belief differently a form of discrimination?

  4. An article in The Atlantic (which I was unable to retrieve, but I didn’t try overmuch) made the case that creating a custom for including pronouns in email sigs can put some transgender people in an uncomfortable spot, namely, those who have yet to publicly transition, by forcing them either to declare their felt-gender before they wish to do so, or, with every email, to repeat a lie.

    For someone not yet publicly transitioned, every day is, perhaps, a concatenation of lies of sorts, but what does it serve to force closeted trans people to make false declarations repeatedly, every day?

    I don’t see this as knock-down argument against pronoun-in-emails, but rather a possibly overlooked unintended consequence that might feature in a creating a nuanced, inclusive, reasonable protocol.

    To my mind, the pronoun-in-email debate falls in a different category than questions such as “transwomen in rape crisis centers”. Where the latter trades on a mistaken conflation of gender and sex — the separation of which, I’m hardly the first to note, was an opening salvo in the trans movement — the former (pronouns) seems to me to be contested on the basis of a “slippery slope” argument. That is, including pronouns isn’t objectionable in itself, but rather, for what is it claimed to signify. “Give and inch and they’ll take a mile” would appear to be the concern, and not an entirely unfounded one, based on the analysis of the response to the original commentary on the ACAS statement.

    Even so, because bright (enough) lines are possible and necessary with respect to appropriate sex-based segregation (prisons, sports, medical care, and others), finding a mutually acceptable compromise on the pronoun question is an opportunity for good-faith conciliation. After all, calling people what they call themselves is a reasonable principle, and allowing people to choose their pronouns can fall within those bounds.

    (There are still conditions: anything beyond the “singular they” is likely so unusual that interlocutors won’t remember, even when making honest effort, so those making outre pronoun choices will have to practice compassionate tolerance xhemselves.)

    One suggestion: have a declared and material percentage of organizational leadership explicitly refrain from including pronouns in email signatures, expressly to create a safe space for those who wish not to make such declarations. For example, instead of the parenthetical “(she/her/hers)”, an italicized and performative declamation of the form “pronouns excluded to create a safe space for those who might wish to choose likewise.”

    Awkward and cumbersome, to be sure, but since when has that been an insurmountable barrier? We can get used it, I’m sure.

    After all, a choice is only a choice if it is possible to choose it.

  5. My gut is heavily against the encouragement of announcing one’s pronouns when it concerns gender identity. BUT, with my previous sentence in mind, it could be really helpful if a person’s day to day title were encouraged in email sign off. When I’m sending a formal email I hate using “sir” – it cringes me the hell out, but if all I know is a person’s initial, I’m kinda stuck. I did for a while use “madam or sir” which felt very awkward.

    Yours

    Ms H Peach!

  6. How about a company that issues ID badges (worn at all times) with pronouns printed right below the name? [this is not a hypothetical; it is a current practice in some corporations.]

    I am amused at the fretting over pressure thus imposed on anyone indecisive about coming out. How about the pressure on the majority indecisive on whether to risk lynching by a Woke mob if they decline from participation in this pronoun madness?

    Also:

    “You can’t defend irrational beliefs with reason. By and large sex deniers don’t try: …” shout-down follows, etc. James Lindsay’s lecture series on Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance,” drills down on this aspect with incisive analysis.

  7. Not all beliefs are beliefs you like, you know. And there is a precedent, in a different jurisdiction, of an employee being outright fired for straightforward expression at work of belief you, as feminists, probably don’t like. (I don’t like it either and support the right of the company to do what it did).

    The person was James Damore, the employer was Google.

    Would you think he should have been protected? Or would you agree that people with his views, while quite within their rights to hold the belief, should not be allowed to express them at work, and that the belief that women are suitable to all the dame work as men should damn right be the default, whatever about protection of other beliefs?

    1. I think he was perfectly entitled both to hold and to express these views. The confident and grown-up way of dealing with people saying things you think wrong is to explain why they are wrong. Witch-hunts make you look as if you’re not confident of your arguments or evidence.

      1. Damore expressly stated that women as a class were too stupid to do developer work and told all his fellow employees that (a) this was so and (b) the reason for his own lack of progression. No different from saying all individual members of any class of person are too stupid to do X. He created an intolerable and discriminatory atmosphere at work. That’s why he was sacked.

  8. The “typical HR response” might be the be kind it’s just a courtesy type but we don’t all think like that. There’s a (very) small group of us on Twitter who feel otherwise. We would welcome other HR people of a gender critical persuasion to join us and add to the conversation and discussion.

  9. The comments about religion and school in Glasgow show much ignorance. The conflation of religion, politics, football and sectarianism hd been conflated and misrepresents the complexity of centuries of politics. This is irresponsible and the author should remove it and do some proper research before making such slight and naive remarks.

    1. If you explain what the problem with the analogy is, I will think about whether I am persuaded. For the moment, it seems to me fair to point out that pronoun rituals, like the greeting “No Pope!”, are calculated to make only one side of a polarised debate feel safe and included.

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