I was at an academic conference last week, somewhere in America, where we were invited by our hosts to place a 'preferred pronoun' sticker on our nametags. "If you could pick one of those up during the next break, we'd appreciate it." The options were, 'He', 'She', 'They', 'Ask Me', and one with a blank space for a write-in. Coming from my adoptive France, I had heard of this new practice in my country of origin, but somehow I had convinced myself that it was mostly mythical. Yet there were the stickers, and there were all my fellow participants, wearing them with straight faces.
I did not pick one up. As is my practice at these events, I do not even wear the nametag that has been provided for me, so there would have been nothing to put the sticker on. But if there had been any direct and explicit pressure on me to wear one, rather than just a general announcement, I would have been constrained to explicitly refuse to do what was being asked of me. I would have been a conscientious objector.
In the future I will avoid meetings at which I know in advance, or I have a reasonable expectation, that there will be such stickers. I am strongly opposed to this convention, I think it is ridiculous and offensive, and I am only thankful that, for now, it is only a convention and not a compulsion. But the line is not so clear. It is not a compulsion for me to wear a sticker, because I am privileged and basically indifferent as to whether I ever get invited to an academic event again. The quality of my life is enhanced by not going to academic events, and reduced by going to them. If I can't go because social pressure would require me to wear a sticker, well, tant mieux. But this is not the case for younger scholars who are precariously employed. It is in part for their sake that I feel the need to make explicit my opposition to this practice.
The reasons for this opposition are simple. If to be cisgender is to be such that your gender identity as you experience it matches with the gender identity you are assigned at birth, then I am not cisgender. What it would be like to feel at home with your assigned gender identity is something I cannot even imagine, but I take it that whoever is at home in this way is an utter dullard, an unthinking fool, and definitely someone to avoid. I for my part cringe whenever I am called a 'man'. Even 'person' and 'human' seem rather too confining for my sense of the true nature of my being, but I usually let these slide.
At the same time, I take it that if we are, as Heidegger said, geworfene Entwürfe, 'thrown projects', then the fact that members of my society find it reasonable to call me a 'man' is part of my Geworfenheit, and not something it is within my conception of my life project to change. I do not feel like a man, but I also do not feel I have it in me to bring about, by my will and by my presentation of self in everyday life, any other social fact as to what sort of being I am. In other words, whatever my preferred pronouns might have been in some imaginary Rawlsian original position, I do not feel I have a reasonable expectation of others that they use them in my non-imaginary present position.
The fact that I do not feel this way is something very deep about my identity: the mismatch between what it is I feel I am, and what it is I feel I can expect others to recognise me as being. This mismatch is philosophically interesting to me, and it is also an unhealing wound at the core of my identity. Again, I suspect that anyone who does not perceive this wound in them, in some way or other, is an uninteresting, unthinking person.
I expect to be called 'he', because it is into he-ness that I have been thrown, but no, I insist, I do not 'prefer' to be called 'he'. I have a strong preference, in fact, that I not be expected to expect others to use my preferred pronouns, and it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact.
There will always be unthinking and uninteresting people in the world. But let us not enforce this way of being by bullshit new social conventions or, worse still, by oppressive new bureaucratic demands.--- Justin Erik Halldór Smith "My Preferred Pronouns?" {HT Jessica Collins}
On Friday, I went to Kings College (London) [herafter KCL] to attend a fascinating talk by Emily Thomas (Durham) on the novelist-activist, philosopher, May Sinclair. It was the second time within a week that I had to be at KCL. Due to increased security, it's become quite difficult to enter a KCL building. In some buildings all doors are locked/opened with a employee pass. Earlier in the week, in a in a different building, I got stranded on a floor between the elevators and the doors to the offices (where the seminar room was). After knocking fruitlessly on a glass door, I was saved by a helpful KCL security guard -- who was doing a rounds, checking for fire because the smoke detectors were not operative --, who let me into the floor, and then escorted me to the WC not because he deemed me a security threat, or so he said, but because without a pass I would be locked in the bathroom. I was told that the security exists because of terrorism and to prevent theft of computers and electronics;* while I found the latter plausible, I have a sneaky suspicion the main purpose of the measures is to keep street people from using facilities/premises. Anyway, on Friday i was given a big visitor sticker. This sticker lets me into the main building of KCL and allows KCL security guards to identify me (since I a lack a proper badge) on a particular date. The sticker does not open any doors.
Here I was on a university campus -- which I consider my natural habitus by now -- and told I do not quite belong (a visitor is meant to leave, after all). I knew I was being overly sensitive, but Friday had been one of those days where I awoke more tired than I had felt before I went to bed. All morning I had minor mishaps, and was disgruntled. The cause was not mysterious: I had vivid dreams about my dad, including an incredibly realistic re-experience of his last moments (which I witnessed) with me holding his hand.
As an aside, my first romance and her mom taught me some principles of dream interpretation. In their approach, all characters in a dream are you (I mean the person dreaming) and represent different features of or wishes for you. Spatial features and narrative of the dream are then used to provide structure to the interpretation. If I followed their approach, then I could see that in the dream I was identifying myself with my dad's death looking on at how he/I have passed.
The single strangest thing about mourning is that from one moment to the next loss can feel pungently and suddenly real, and simultaneously surreal. Death slips through my fingers.
I had a forty-five minutes to kill before the talk, and so I decided to re-read Seneca Letter 33, which, I had decided, I was going to use in Friday's Digression. It's an interesting letter because Seneca here -- as elsewhere (recall) -- is a strikingly modern thinker, who treats progress as something to be discovered by individual thinkers. I was amused that one of the rhetorical tricks of the letter was an attack on historians (like me) who merely retrace steps on familiar paths (via vetere), and who are kept around as a source of stale maxims or insights to be memorized, but who can't guide folks onto the path of wisdom which needs to be carved out at each place and moment in time. While I was heading the seminar room for Emily's lecture I noticed the visitor sticker again, and I thought of my dad's youth and the Jude/Jood badges he had to wear.
That afternoon, I was struggling with my Digression. I wanted to do justice to Seneca, but reflection on my dream was interfering. The words I was writing were my familiar blog persona, but not quite true to my feelings. I wanted to be distracted by facebook where I noticed a critical discussion about Justin's post (which I have quoted above). I read Justin's piece, and I was impressed how he could make Heidegger's insight into the human condition seem so natural (as opposed to pretentious) and link it with his own vulnerability. In our culture, how many men would admit to themselves, let alone to others, I do not feel like a man. Of course, I recognize sometimes it's easier to say something to unknown strangers -- I am a blogger, after all -- than to oneself (or other intimates).
Justin is such a good and funny ('straight faces') writer that his rage became palpable. I wondered if the rage was directed at the hosts or, more psycho-analytically, was directed at self. (The previous sentence may be more informative about me than Justin.)+ You may wonder why I call him enraged. It's an interpretation, of course, but when I reread his piece, I noticed he actually never manages to state the reasons for why the practice he is objecting to is "ridiculous and offensive." Since Justin is a terrific philosopher, and one of our best public writers who is ordinarily in complete rhetorical control of his toolkit, the oversight makes me think it is a genuine mistake caused by intense passion.
Let me give an example of Justin's art. Notice how the first sentence we are immediately put in a familiar place, "somewhere in America," that is at the same time not anywhere defined. Justin is engaged in a distopian rhetoric here (where the mythical is made to feel very real and scary).++ It turns out that adopting a national identity ("my adoptive France") is much easier than a preferred gender. That's a striking claim because in our time, for many others (refugees, migrants, etc.) obtaining a French identity is literally a dangerous enterprise. I say this not to trivialize Justin's point, but to emphasize it. Personal identity, the true nature of one's being, are existential matters, often beyond choice and (despite some metaphysicians' assertions) no trivial matter at all.
Okay, let me return. Justin makes many interesting and pertinent observations -- that transcend (ahh) his own struggle with identity, but the closest he comes to stating an objection to the convention is this: "it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact." But whatever the convention is -- to what degree it is objectionable -- it is really not obvious that it presupposes (for its intelligibility or its normal functioning) that stating such a preferences in this matter would be either "easy and painless" and/or "wholly worked out fact." Given that two of the options are, (i) 'Ask Me', and (ii) a blank space for a write-in, it strikes me that the conference hosts don't need to be thought to make any such assumptions.
I do not mean to deny that Justin is right that a convention of public tagging/stickers will be felt to be compulsory to many. And he is also right that senior luminaries will find ways to escape the ways in which the convention is meant to stick (see what I did there?). But if the convention is worth having or not -- and at many conferences folk are often asked to wear name-tags, including tags that secure entry into the convention center [and we often have the option to adopt names and tags in a professional context] -- requires a more dispassionate analysis of the uses/abuses and benefits/costs of it than Justin offers.
This is not the moment to contribute to such an analysis. After all, my post has gone on longer than Justin's original post (or Senecas's Letter 33 in Latin),** and I lack authority. Yet, in returning to his post today, after a week-end in the country, and reading the comments on it, I may better understand his reaction. He writes in follow up comments, "the insistence that I am 'cis', by people who do not know me and do not know what my inner life is like, [is experienced] as aggression." Identity attribution is always and, in our world, necessarily caught up in boundaries, and boundary policing. This means they run many dangerous risks; but as Justin signals (adoptive France) and his commentators remind him, identities, chosen and imposed, are also the clay, often the un-curable matter, with which our lives are formed and so also possible affirmations worth holding on to, sometimes, despite our intentions.
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