They joy of being a civil servant in Scotland has just
increased. The Scottish Government is backing proposals to encourage eight
thousand of them to take a pronoun pledge. Fortunately, this will not involve
abstaining from alcohol as previous pledges once did, nor will it involve polishing
wooden furniture. Rather it will merely involve adding a few lines to the end
of each email stating their preferred pronouns.
I’m not a civil servant, but I imagine if this takes off,
I too will face the task in the next couple of years of asking IT how I can add
a little message to each and every email I send. I will then face the challenge
of thinking of which pronouns to include in my signature.
I am tempted to go with it/they rather than she/her,
but I might try to come up with something really exotic. What about if I said
that my pronouns must be ooh/aah? Woe betide anyone who gets them wrong or in
the wrong order.
Other possibilities might involve using Polish words such
as Żółć and Źdźbło or alternatively I could insist that everyone addresses me
with Russian pronouns and uses them correctly in each grammatical case. This
would involve everyone having to make their keyboard capable of using Cyrillic
and learning sufficient Russian grammar to not get mixed up between ею and ней.
If all eight thousand members of the Scottish civil
service took just this sort of creative approach to their pronouns, then no one
would know how to refer to anyone and perhaps then the Scottish Government and
Leslie Evans might learn a lesson that they would not forget.
The absurdity of the idea of asking people to provide
their pronouns at the bottom of their email is that if everyone genuinely did
make up their pronouns and insisted that they be used in just that way by
everyone else, then the language of pronouns would rapidly collapse.
Pronouns are not subjective. They are not words I make
up. Rather they are words that we are taught as we learn a language usually as children.
If all the millions of English language speakers used different pronouns and
insisted on everyone else using them, we would simply be unable to do so. A
personal pronoun is not personal in the sense that we each get to make one up,
rather it is part of a common language and its use is determined by rules and
customs shared by the language community.
Writing emails is a completely unproblematic activity
because it does not usually require that I know anything about the identity of
the person I am writing to. The reason for this is that I rarely write to
someone using He or She. I use You instead. If I am writing a formal letter to
someone and I don’t know whether it is a man or a woman I write “Dear Sir or
Madam”. I then use You throughout the letter. There is simply no need to know
this person’s preferred pronouns. It is a non-issue.
I only ever use He or She when referring to someone
else (rather than to you) either in writing or in conversation. This too is usually
completely unproblematic. When I write “Boris Johnson was speaking in the House
of Commons and he fell over”, I don’t need to ask him about his preferred
pronouns. Rather I make assumptions based on his name and his appearance.
There might be the odd occasion when someone has a
first name, I am unfamiliar with when I’m not sure which pronoun to use. There might
also be times when I’m not sure whether a baby is a boy or a girl or more
rarely if someone is a man or a woman. In these cases, I do my best to avoid embarrassment
by not using pronouns at all. It’s usually possible to come up with a sentence
which avoids He or She. I might talk about “your baby” or “that person”.
Even with people who describe themselves as transgender,
the rules for pronoun use will turn out to be the same as for everyone else in
nearly all circumstances. The transgender person might insist that all zer colleagues
call zer ze or zer, but no one else will. Everyone else will judge zer based on
zer appearance and call her she if she looks like a woman and he if he looks
like a man. The preferred pronoun will simply not apply to anyone else, because
no one else will have learned it.
So, the only result of the Scottish Government’s encouragement
is that a few civil servants will have to learn a few non standard pronouns for
people who prefer them, but this will change absolutely nothing outside the
office. If I see a transgender person robbing a bank and he looks like a man I
will describe him as He to the police whatever his preferred pronouns, because
I won’t know them. I will judge by appearance, because this is how we speak. Language
is not subjective or a matter or preference. For this reason, asking about
preferred pronouns is peculiarly senseless. You are born with your pronouns. It
has nothing to do with choice.
The language of pronouns is so easy and
straightforward that a normal five-year-old will use the words correctly in
nearly every circumstance. If the Scottish Government’s civil service initiative
were extended to the whole population (it will be unless this nonsense is stopped)
then no one would know how to refer to anyone else without first asking them,
which given that we continually use He or She to refer to people we have never
met is clearly impossible. A simple linguistic task would be turned into a lifetime
of confusion, mistakes and microaggressions if the SNP had its way with everyone
having the right to complain if we got their pronouns wrong.
Leslie Evans’s scheme depends on 99.9% of civil
servants opting for the He/Him She/Her option. If they didn’t then no one could
remember how to refer to colleagues. It’s only if a tiny percentage chose non-standard
pronouns that the scheme could be workable.
So don’t object if you are “encouraged” to choose your pronouns. Rather let everyone pick the weirdest most wonderful, unpronounceable pronouns they can possibly make up. Insist that Leslie and Nicola call you Źdźbło and Żółć and get the pronunciation correct and they will soon think better of their encouragement.