Why I don’t indicate preferred pronouns,

and why you probably shouldn't either...

I should state at the outset that no one at my place of work has ever instructed me or anyone else as far as I am aware to indicate their preferred pronouns. So in that sense absolutely no explanation for their omission is required. However, a majority of people in some institutions—including my own—seem to nominate preferences. I imagine that most of them do so because it appears quite quickly to have become standard practice, though there may also be a desire not to want to draw attention to oneself and perhaps run the risk of being challenged. So for example, a friend recently told me that they didn’t nominate their pronouns, but that if instructed they would go along with it “for a quiet life”. Of course, some nominate their preferences because they feel they diverge from sex-based expectations; and others still because they want to support those who do and think that this is a creditable way to express that support. Indeed, amongst the latter some point “readers” of their otherwise unexceptional pronouns to online explanations¹, which usually proceed along these lines: ‘it doesn’t hurt you to do it if you’re “cisgender”, and in doing so it makes non-“cisgender” people feel safer nominating their preferences’.

My view of this is different. Firstly, I reject the attempt to forge an association between the use of pronouns and “gender-identity” through the concepts of “cisgender” and its implied contradictory “transgender”. I have argued at length here on Substack that the concept “gender identity” can neither eliminate “sex” nor stand in contrast with it. If it is at all useful, then—and that’s ultimately for others to decide—it has a status falling somewhere between that of sub-cultural and religious affiliations. Accordingly, directly or indirectly endorsing the “cis”/“trans” binary at best registers an acknowledgement that some people consider such affiliations/self-identifications important.

I don’t question the significance to the people making them of gender self-identifications any more than I do the importance to people of those other sorts of affiliations. There are Punks and Goths, Rockers and Mods, Eyelashes and Swifties who take their group memberships very seriously (at least for a time…). But like affiliations to these groups, gender self-identifications have nothing to do with biology and so they have nothing to do with the use made of pronouns to pick out people on the basis of their sex. Someone might contend that since they feel like a tall person that feeling should be respected and they ought to be described as “tall”; but feeling that you’re tall doesn’t make you tall, and it doesn’t put anyone under any obligation to describe you as tall. Indeed, if “tall” started being used in this way it would cease being meaningful because all its contrasting terms would become useless.

Trying to undermine the use made of pronouns to pick out people on the basis of their sex by validating the “cis”/“trans” opposition threatens more than just the “usefulness” of the oppositions he-she/man-woman etc. Indeed, it has consequences that take us well beyond that “at best” scenario. It encourages a worldview that denies the lived experiences of—primarily—girls and women in the past, now and throughout the world. In its small way it encourages some of those girls to think that the discomfort they feel within themselves about the way they are viewed is to be explained in terms of something that’s wrong with them and not with society. Granted, that discordance is presented in terms of a positive opportunity to “identify” as something other, something that will bring them to accept and even love themself. But encouraging people to feel better about themselves by looking inwards instead of outwards has long been a successful technique for getting them to feel better about their oppressors.

If you believe that assumptions are made about people (as they surely are) on the basis of their pronouns—and therefore their sex—then challenge those assumptions not the pronouns used. That’s real politics. Expressing your pronoun preferences, then, is not showing solidarity with an oppressed section of the population. Rather, it’s contributing to the oppression of a much larger group.

1. One colleague, for example, links to this site: https://medium.com/gender-inclusivit/why-i-put-pronouns-on-my-email-signature-and-linkedin-profile-and-you-should-too-d3dc942c8743