Gender-Critical Philosophy

Are ‘preferred pronouns’ a justifiable demand?

‘Preferred pronouns’ are cooperatively self-defeating, because they can refer to no other substantial meaning than the female/male-ness which they contradict, and have no other neutral perspective to found a moral justification upon.

2500 words (12 minutes)


Introduction: compulsion and coherence

‘Preferred pronouns’ will herein be taken as: when someone asks to be referred to as she/her or he/him (and possibly other similar gendered language), and the chosen terms do not match that person's female/male-ness. The question to then tackle is whether there is any moral/ethical obligation to comply.

The usual protestation against ‘preferred pronouns’ is that to demand compliance with them is ‘compelled speech’, but that alone makes for an inadequate argument. All ethical/moral propositions are essentially imperative – their purpose is to tell you what to do, to shape behaviour. And the imperative could, until shown otherwise, be right in this case. So objection to compulsion alone cannot be persuasive, or bear the gist of a legitimate challenge.

Instead, to make a case for or against ‘preferred pronouns’, we can look to one of the other essences of a moral proposition: universalisation, or logical consistency, realised as behavioural coherence, across agents. A valid moral rule is not merely some imperative, but an imperative for all, that makes sense as a system-wide/systematic behaviour. Do ‘preferred pronouns’ qualify by that?

Cooperative self-defeatingness

The fault of individual choice of pronouns is that it is behaviourally incoherent: it is self-defeating as a meaningful collective behaviour.

The collective dynamic is self-defeating

Consider this summarising example. If people freely choose to put ‘Dr’ before their name, according to no licensing, approval, or common pattern or practice, but merely by personal wish, then Dr would become meaningless: people would no longer see Dr as implying any other fact that they might have use in knowing. And then such a collective behaviour has pulled the rug out from under itself. The choice itself becomes pointless: once Dr means nothing, there is no worth in choosing to prefix one's name with it. Having a choice led to that choice being worthless; the practice is self-defeating.

Preferred pronouns work similarly. People only choose pronouns because they mean something, and they only mean what they do because they correlate with an objective feature – male/female. Deviation from that, deliberate or accidental, weakens the correlation, and so devalues the choice. If the terms are no longer used corresponding to that fact, they no longer mean anything about that fact – if anyone can say they are female/female, female/male would not pick out any particular feature. (And it seems possible that it would not need even 50% dissent from the rule to efface it as a meaningful pattern.).

The individual choice is contradictory

Anyone understanding the meaning, ie usage rule, must see choosers as contravening it. To understand a meaning, ie rule, is to know when it is disobeyed, so choosers will inevitably be seen as wrong: if it means something, the meaning works in each instance. You could force people to comply with choosers, but they can never believe it: they cannot at once know the meaning of the choice, and not know the meaning is being disobeyed in that case. And to emphasise: it is not that disbelievers are so because they wish to disagree, no, they have no option: even those who want to believe it cannot do so owing to the logic of the structure.

Pronouns are not a matter of individual choice, something claimed solely by declaration, with no dependence or correlation with any objective features. That is not how they work, or could work. If you mandate submission to individual choice, you try to force the impossible: you either undermine the very meaning of what is being chosen, or subvert the respect for that mandate. There is either no rule at all, or a rule no-one believes.

Is that the meaning?

The place to counter-argue is the meaning: that pronouns imply male/female, as earlier asserted: “People only choose pronouns because they mean something, and they only mean what they do because they correlate with […] male/female.”.

Initially that meaning seems fundamental and indisputable. The male/female use of pronouns is knowledge everyone practices every day, and has done since childhood. Everyone knows the meaning and everyone has the same meaning – one would think this must be amongst the surest meanings we have.

Instance question or rule question

Yet is there not still room for divergence? Everyone knows what ‘car’ and ‘motorcycle’ mean almost as surely, but which of those is the right classification for a quad-bike – that is not so clear.

But that example is not really the same as our pronoun problem: we could call this one an instance-question, not a rule-question. It queries whether an instance fits a rule, by asking if the instance is right or not – we know ‘car’ and ‘motorcycle’, but what is a quad-bike? While the pronouns-meaning counterargument aims to query whether an instance fits a rule, by asking if the rule is right or not – this person exists, but our categories do not fit them. The pronouns-meaning counterargument proposes we re-evaluate not the instances, but reconsider the classificatory rule.

The ‘intersex’/DSD line is often used in defence of trans identity, and it plays out in the same way. It appeals to obscure science of internal biological developmental mechanisms, and their outcomes sometimes being anomalous, and implies that trans-ness is also such a borderline case, an ‘instance-question’. But this is quickly rebutted. The features involved do not have this borderline/vagueness problem: trans people (as such) are not individuals with DSD, but are clear cases of one position in the classification claiming to be clear cases of another. So that instance-question approach fails, and gives way to a rule-question approach.

Other meanings are not plausible

So ought we to think that there is another rule, another meaning of pronouns, that will make sense for trans identities? You might express it prospectively and say: “Language changes. If it changes to expressing 100 genders, that would be good!”.

First, the proposition must be enough to also support the claim that the division by female/male is societally relatively unimportant, because that is what it will have to override. Maybe it should be, but historically, factually, this is untenable. Second, even if there were to be some other categorisation, why would it replace male/female? Indeed, we already have alternative categorisations: psychology, body shape, interest, and so on – which do not occlude or override others, but only have different importance in different contexts. There would merely be another rule alongside – and people are never going to stop seeing female/male-ness. Third, the purpose of the new rule is to claim membership of, well, … categories of male/female as they already exist! It is supposed to be a new rule, yet it somehow wants to be the old rule after all. One cannot claim a position in a classification by inventing some other classification; nor can one propose a new classification by claiming a position in an old one.

And how would we know or be able to make judgements on any of that without already having the concept of male/female? Here we get close to the kernel of the problem. If you try to formulate or explain any other kind of gender idea/classification, without referring back to, and depending on, female/male, you will find you cannot. So the very thing that this revision of meaning wishes to deny and override, it actually requires and is subordinate to.

The pronouns-meaning counterargument – that pronouns mean something else than female/male, or that they should deliberately be made to – springs an array of problems from the practically insurmountable to the logically impossible.

No neutral resolver

Right to ‘identify as’

Perhaps this whole issue can be nicely distilled into its minimal nexus of moral and factual.

Someone cannot have a right to, by merely subjective impulse, ‘identify as’ something. If someone identifies as the same as you, they are telling you what you are. But if they can tell you, you can tell them, hence contradicting their supposed right to identify themselves. ‘Identifying as’ fails formally: it cannot be any kind of right or any rule at all if it is contradictory.

‘Identifying as’ is only resolvable, as a collective behaviour, by coordinating to a neutral rule – an objective/shared fact. One might declare oneself to be something, but the meaning and truth of that declaration must be decided by its objective fact, because that is the only one we can be equally compelled to agree upon. And the only appropriate ground fact here is the well-established male/female meaning.

Duty to ‘be kind’

“But why can't you just be kind?” – this is what people will often reply. Though vague, it is subtly persuasive, yet is it justified?

Prima facie, this amounts only to: “why can't you just do what I want?”. This has no claim to moral respect – there is no special reason to comply – it is only a claim of self interest of one party. Anyone else can counter in exactly the same way: “no, instead why can't you just do what I want – ie, be kind to me?”. If one side is justified as-is, grounded only by its individual viewpoint, so is its opposite. So this reason either produces stalemate, or cedes to the status quo in not compelling anyone to start participating – so either way the ‘be kind’ rule fails since it has determined, and done, nothing.

Looking deeper, there seems one way to support it: to take it as implying that those requesting kindness do so justified by having an illness. Those people are unwell, and we ought to be kind to people who are unwell. Why does this have any strength? Illness is defined by divergence from some normal, and its amelioration is back toward that reference point of normal. It appeals to a neutral decider – normality – to resolve any conflicts of individual choice of action pertaining. And the renormalising may involve everyone else, not just the subject themselves: perhaps people will not a get a prosthetic leg, but instead, environmentally, stairs could be replaced with ramps. So the modification is not only to the ill person, but to their interaction with the world, to converge it back to yield a normal result.

The first problem here is that trans proponents largely disavow the status of being ill. Maybe that can be finessed from ‘illness’ into ‘developmental variation’ or such, but that will still lose the operative ingredient: a reference to normality and its neutral authority, and its way to a moral justification.

Second, and more critically, being male, or female, is normal, not ill – half the population is each of those: there is no deviation to recover from. Any illness here is not in the physical state, but in not accepting it. So the justifiable treatment would be in fixing the non-acceptance, not anything else. If you want to modify your body, though it is already of the ordinary range, the national health service will not assist you. Again, the neutral reference point that will ground claims upon others has been lost.

Shared perspective

Let us make an abstract template for the moral proposition and its application needed here. First, there must be a shared goal or perspective, a way of judging in common; and second, there will be a precondition for that goal unmet in the people concerned. We have an agreed project, but some people are missing something to properly participate. So what is the shared view for our problem here?

Utilitarianism's maximising of aggregate utility might be an answer. But utility is not really summable across individuals, any more than mental images of chairs is. However, we could just look at the pragmatic inputs and outputs: giving those people what they want means they contribute back better – they are happier, so cooperate better. It could still be expressed in simple utility terms, as a balance of interests – they benefit more than the cost to everyone else. But, on the other hand, weight-of-utility will broadly disfavour such a small population, and what is the exact balance?

Or, as an alternative approach, just the notion of making everyone maximally human. So whatever shared goal of humanity there might be, it would be served by maximising each member. But is this not the same as the notion of normality that illness was measured from and sought to recover to? And this was already found not to work.

We are back to the start, and its problem of lack of way to clearly break the symmetry, the stalemate, of individual demands, because of a lack of neutral global viewpoint. What if the rest of the participants lose significantly from ramps and want stairs? It tends toward an equipoised conflict/stand-off once again. If considering your own countervailing concerns, you want to act otherwise, then that will be your right too. Who is to say any preferences do not count, or are not so important as any others? Deciding the balance is exactly the problem that this examination so far failed to find a neutral resolver for.

And ultimately we still have the structural behavioural incoherence explained previously.

Conclusion: no obligation

You have no obligation to comply with ‘preferred pronouns’. Maybe some choose to accede to them, but others are equally free not to. And furthermore, since they are behaviourally incoherent, you have some negative duty to not comply.

‘Preferred pronouns’ are not and could not be an isolated individual act, but only a collective behaviour: it would only work for any individual by expecting reciprocative actions from everyone else. It is a participation in word usage and meaning based on communal practice, and it is a demand on that community's individuals' actions.

Cooperative structures need a single principle shared by all participants, and to which they conform, not decide individually. The biological phenomenon of female/male dimorphism presents such a pre-made pattern, a neutral common fact, by which we can coordinate. But ‘preferred pronouns’ lacks such a shared substantial meaning – or at least one that it aligns with, not denies – so is behaviourally incoherent, and cannot be justified with moral authority as a claim upon others.

Supplementary points

The arguments here, of collective coherence of meaning, apply more generally: not only to pronoun/etc use, but to the related subjective identity concepts and behaviours that are rooted in and follow the same structure. (All these issues are at root the same.).

All systems should have some non-conformance, but it can only be seen and accepted as that – it cannot itself be made the rule. (This is half of a way out.).

You might say that preferred pronouns are like particular clothing that some might choose, and so can be defended in a limited way. By retreating from a moral proposition – a claim on other's behaviour – you can just claim that a certain set of people can agree to that practice, not involving others. So the solution is not a global rule, but a recognition of different preference-groups with no right over each other. (This is the other half of a way out.).

De-gendering language, obsoleting he/she/etc in favour of neutral alternatives, is a related but different suggestion. It would be a global project, not about individual preference; and would be a waiving not a conflict of information. It seems reasonable, but its problem is impracticality.

Further

For more authoritative thoughts see:


Metadata

DC: {
   title: "Are 'preferred pronouns' a justifiable demand?",
   creator: "Harrison Ainsworth",

   date: "2020-01-19",

   length: "2500 words",
   type: "article",
   format: "text/html",

   language: "en-GB",
   subject: "philosophy, morality, gender-ideology",
   description: "'Preferred pronouns' are cooperatively self-defeating, because they can refer to no other substantial meaning than the female/male-ness which they contradict, and have no other neutral perspective to found a moral justification upon.",

   identifier: "urn:uuid:F3AB751F-4127-4F5F-841A-166CC6EE29E8",
   relation: "http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/Are-preferred-pronouns-justifiable_avoa_2020.html",

   rights: "Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 License"
}