Us/Them

There is a thing that happens often in discussions about issues where a minority group wants to do something differently, and the majority group would prefer the status quo. The minority group says "let's do this change!" and [some portion of] the majority group responds with a version of "That's not fair! They don't get special treatment! If you reversed the roles this would never fly!"

As in:

We have Black History Month; where's White History Month? Nobody complains when men get objectified by women in a movie! Why aren't we allowed to have White Pride and Straight Pride, when they get Black Pride and Gay Pride?

Et cetera.

***

Everyone on my linguistics and gender-politics branches of Facebook have been talking about this kerfluffle for the past few days. (The kerfluffle being, a well-known linguist intentionally misgendered someone in a blog post about singular 'they', and then doubled down when people told him they were upset.) What I had to say about it originally was

"I have been following this desultorily, mainly with the reaction of "ugh more white men being jackasses," but this is a really nicely-written piece that both spells the problems out clearly and is applicable to many other parallel situations. The bike analogy is dumb though."

Then followed a facebook thread! This question arose (Hi Topper!):

"If I said I find the phrase "white male jackass" somewhat hurtful, would I be listened to and my opinion respected, or would I be told, for example, that the phrase is implicitly third person and there is no reason I should take it personally?"

I jumped to the conclusion that my commenter was setting up the "no fair!" situation from above, but it turns out that he was just exploring the boundaries around the naming etiquette being discussed. But it started me thinking about the "no fair!" response in general, and why it is so stupid.

Everyone* knows why it is so stupid. You can't reverse the situations because the groups' positions in society are not equal, so swapping individual cases doesn't solve the surrounding inequity. But here's the part I think many [majority-group-members] miss:

It is impossible to invent parallels that involve you, a straight white cisgender nondisabled man, because the world and the language are built around the assumption that you exist and are a member of society. There is no instance where you have to ask people to make accommodations for you, because everything is set up for you already. You like the status quo becaue the status quo was designed (or developed) with you specifically in mind as the end user.

We didn't have to add amendments to the constitution to give you the right to vote. You had the right to vote already. Who else would vote? We don't need a White History Month because all the history we teach everyone is white history. That's what 'history' is. You have always been allowed, and encouraged, to marry a person of the gender you are attracted to: it's the definition of marriage. You can get into all of the buildings, and understand all of the announcements, and read all of the signs, and use all the public amenities, because all of them were designed for someone like you to use. You have never had to ask anyone to change anything just so you could use it. You've never even had to think about it.

(I like this story/metaphor/parable on the same basic idea.)

(I was a little taken aback by my emotional reaction to this statement. Fighting assumptions and correcting misunderstandings and asking for help and requesting accommodations are all very emotionally draining. The thought of just being able to go out and use whatever public things I want without worrying about communication and planning ahead made me lightheaded. And then furious.)

Everyone else has had to fight and beg and argue to get you to let us change stuff so we can use it, too. Some of us are still fighting and begging and arguing. To change laws so we can vote, add laws so we can use the water fountain, overcome assumptions and stereotypes so we can get jobs, argue and protest and beg and fight so we can go to school and eat in the same restaurants and receive the same information and generally be included in the idea of what "society" consists of. 

Once upon a time, back in the 1900s, the standard pronoun used to refer to an unidentified human was "he". This was true even if the human might be a woman. The default human is male, so if we don't know, we'll go with that. Clearly. When (female) people started arguing about this, and suggesting a change, there was resistance. He or she is so wordy. We obviously can't use she for someone who might be a man.** They is ungrammatical. Let's just keep doing it how it is- it's so much easier! And it doesn't really hurt anyone. It's fine!

Change happens slowly, but it does seem to happen, and the default human is no longer automatically assumed to be male.*** An unspecified human is now he or she most of the time, with s/he as a runner-up and singular they gaining ground. The default human is either he or she, though- those are all the pronouns we have, to refer to individual people.

Except some people aren't. They don't fit in either gender bin and they don't want incorrect pronouns used to refer to them. Just like women didn't like being referred to as he, even in the abstract. (And just like most men would reject any suggestion of being called she.**) So, the people are asking, could we try to change the language so that it includes us? And they are getting more or less the same response from many people who are already default humans, mostly men- "the status quo works for me just fine, changing it would be way too much work, it's ungrammatical, let's just leave things as they are because it's much simpler that way."

And there is no way— it is fundamentally impossible— to create a parallel situation with the roles reversed. English, like nearly everything else in the world, developed in a society based firmly on the assumption that men are people. English already has pronouns for you. You are already the default. There's nothing for you to ask for, and no accommodations to be made. You can already use the language, and the world, as they are.

That seems like it would be nice! If we made some changes, everybody else could use them, too!




*Everyone I would talk to, anyway. Leave my bubble alone!

**This suggests to me that men actually do understand how uncomfortable it feels to be referred to by the wrong pronoun, whether or not they'll admit it.

***Grammatically, at least. For practical purposes, the default human is still usually white and straight and male, but that's getting better, I think. The default human definitely does not have any disabilities, and I'm not really sure if we're making any progress on that one or not.