When I attended grammar school, pronouns were rather uninteresting aspects of the English language. Nobody woke up in the morning worrying that maybe he had used he, she, or they improperly. They were self-explanatory. There were plural forms that were restricted simply to referencing multiple people without concern for the inner perceptions of each one. By and large, none of those words were anywhere near the forefront of human freedoms. Today, they’ve taken center stage.
A monosyllabic word that once served merely to avoid repeating someone’s name has become a political statement, a moral test, a declaration of identity – a tripwire in navigating interpersonal relations. Job applications include blanks to be filled in regarding the pronouns by which one chooses to be referred. These may include a preferred alteration of birth gender and/or respect for multiple personality disorders. To mention any of which is socially and politically incorrect.
The remarkable thing isn’t that people wish to identify other than as they were identified at birth, or even that they wish to be addressed in a manner associated with their choice. Human beings have always had preferred personas. The remarkable aspect of the current rearrangement of language is the expectation that others must treat one’s preferences as their binding linguistic obligation.
Rights are one thing. Authority is quite another. One should respect requests, but should one be forced to accept it as a duty. Somewhere along the way, courtesy stopped being enough.
A conversation about identity has become an issue of rights and authority which are intimately related. Authority is ‘granted’ by higher authority for control of what are considered to be rights. Authority is ‘governmental’, supposedly granted either by God as in the Devine right of kings expressed in the dedication to the King James Version of the Bible or as granted by an electorate of citizens in a liberal democracy. Governmental authority defines what is permitted behavior in the realm and how those permitted behaviors will be protected and enforced. Rights are no more nor less than behavioral permission, not control over the granting of permissions.
In the US a Bill of Rights guarantees what are the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, beginning with Freedom of Speech. These all derive in large part from the Magna Carta that was a landmark document in the year 1215 in which King John of England agreed to limit his royal power. It established the foundational legal principle that the figurehead of government is not above the law and those guaranteed basic rights such as due process. But at this juncture of our democracy, the top one percent of moneyed interests allow themselves to override constitutional limitations and a small percentage of citizens who see themselves as other than as described on their birth certificates presume to overriding our freedom of speech by shaming others to honor what one might think are his/her/their mere presumptions.
When I was young, there was a beatnik joke that went something like this: A beatnik was walking along when he heard a man moaning in a ditch. On closer inspection the man said, “Call me an ambulance.” Whereupon the beatnik responded, “Cool! You’re an ambulance.”
The applicability I see in this joke – and no, I don’t see everything as a joke – is that whether one perceives him/her or their self as the injured person or the beatnik who is at best an uninterested observer, their problem is linguistic. A mere misunderstanding of language. The injured man is clearly in need of an appropriate understanding of his/her/their predicament that should result in some sort of redress. The beatnik on the other hand has no problem of his own to be redressed and, although not necessarily devoid of compassion, is clearly at fault here. His fault is that he happened to walk by an injured man and didn’t understand the intended sense of the word “call’. If this had gotten national attention as an actual situation, a solution one might presume to have occurred could have been a change in the teaching of English grammar in schools nationwide to assure that no one would ever use the word ‘call’ when they intended to say, ‘refer to’. That would give the Beatnik no excuse other than, “He should have said ‘for me’.” But then we’d be into propositions.
The point is that such situations should never devolve into linguistic issues. The injury and what should have been done about it didn’t require words, but action. Incoherent moaning should be enough for natural human compassion to take over. Words can become an excuse for inaction. That’s the point. To assure compassion for another’s pain in nonconformal situations requires an informed understanding, not a revamping the way people communicate in their everyday lives.
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