Sweden’s New Gender-Neutral Pronoun: Hen

[…]
Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia. The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].” The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites.[…]

This again connects to how everything’s political. Yes, trying to change a natural language might be taking it a bit too far. But this piece points out quite a few things that can conceivably be seen as fostering inequality; it’s really interesting to see how maintaining a supposedly neutral/natural status quo becomes explicitly political in this situation.

Ultimately, for all the liberating ideals behind these attempts, as soon as they become part of an oppressive mechanism, there’s nothing liberating about them. As the piece says:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers.

(Full piece here. H/t to whoever shared this on Facebook!)

Everything you do is political, because not trying to change anything is simply working to keep things as they are.

There’s a song by Skunk Anansie called Yes, It’s Fucking Political. I don’t it hear often, but I’m hearing right now. When I first heard it several years ago, I don’t think I really understood it. “Yes, it’s fucking political! / Everything’s political!” Seemed kind of vague. I only really understood it a few months ago, reading an interview in unerzogen magazin with a couple who decided not to tell anyone outside the family about their young child’s biological gender. The point was made there with incredible clarity, and I’d like to argue it here.

But before I get to my main point, I’m going to start with the arguments that I think should be made in favor of staying out of politics.¹ Why should you bother to be political? Politics is dirty, filthy! It corrupts everyone who does it professionally, even the most ideological politician ends up going against their beliefs. And what’s worse, we simple citizens can’t really do anything about it, because  parties will only push agendas bought and paid for by their donors, and the rest of us can’t afford to get our agenda on the table. And who can even handle dealing with all the bad stuff going on? That kind of worrying can make you go crazy.

All of this, and more, is basically true.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that you don’t have any choice. You’re political, and it’s only a question of what cause you’re fighting for.

Everything’s political!

The reason is surprisingly simple: if you’re not consciously political, or if you’re consciously “neutral”, you’re simply doing your best to make sure nothing at all changes. The reality we live in is made up of a billion tiny choices people make every day. It’s practically impossible to make yourself aware of all of them. If you don’t try to understand the implications of your actions, you’re making a whole lot of choices in favor of the status quo.

Let’s say you’re a normal guy who doesn’t really like feminism. You believe that men and women should basically have the same rights, of course, but you don’t see what all the fuss is about. You’re probably oppressing women in subtle ways that are difficult to understand simply by the way you talk to and about them, even if the last thing you mean to do is oppress them.

Let’s say you’re like me (and most people in the Western world) and get your food from some supermarket, which is cheap enough for your budget but not so cheap you feel poor shopping there. Every time you buy food, you take home probably a dozen items wrapped in plastic of some kind. Each of those pieces of plastic, which you throw away without giving it a second thought, will outlive your grandchildren’s grandchildren. At some point in the next centuries, you can safely assume that at least one animal somewhere (maybe a small ugly one that nobody was going to eat, if you’re lucky) will almost definitely choke to death on it, or die because it blocked its digestion, or whatever.

These are just two tiny examples, and I’m wildly oversimplifying. Your individual action is tiny and almost meaningless. But with almost half the population slightly objectifying and oppressing women, you end up with a situation where a woman has to be really brave to speak out publicly about certain topics she believes in. And with billions of people throwing away a dozen pieces of plastic a week you end up with a whole island made of plastic, bigger than many countries, and growing all of the time.

These things affect your life, and you take part in making them happen, whether you like it or not. Practically every single detail of your life is affected by the tiny choices a lot of simple people make, taken together over time. Yes, it’s way too complicated to ever understand entirely. Yes, the chances of a single activist, you or me or even someone famous, really changing something, are close to zero. But we’re all, always activists for the status quo, and don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to complain about things while you’re working so hard to keep them the same?

Footnotes

1. Keep in mind this all applies to modern, Western-style representative democracies; the situation elsewhere is similar, but still very different.

I can understand this sentiment quite well. Some five years ago, Y. gave me a ride in his car; his self-definition as a male was new to me at the time, and indeed I had never had to deal with this situation before. I knew that Y. wished to be seen and treated as a man, and wanted to respect that, but it took me a lot of effort to start using the male gender for him.¹ I remember sitting in the passenger seat, struggling with awkward silences, and trying to figure out how to speak to him, until I finally got a male “you” out of my mouth.

Today I have only minimal difficulty respecting the self-definition of the transgenders. I also expect other people to respect their self-definition, as I expect people to respect self-definition in other aspects of identity. How is the case of Y. different from my self-definition as an Israeli? After all, just as Y’s biological gender contradicts his self-definition as male, so does my American citizenship (from birth, via my mother) contradict my self-definition as Israeli.

There’s something incredibly arrogant, even obnoxious, about refusing to respect another person’s self-definition. People seem to recognize this more easily when it’s an entire group’s self-definition that is in question – Israelis take offense at someone denying our view of Israel, or Jews, as a community with a distinct identity; Palestinians take offense at someone denying their self-definition as a nation. The examples of groups getting furious about others denying their group identity are endless (Basques, Afrikaner, and French Muslims come to mind). Yet the same is also true in reverse – it is awful to be persecuted for belonging to a group you do not identify with, as some Europeans with Jewish ancestors discovered under the yoke of Nazi fascism.

As anyone who has ever had a crisis of identity will know, changing your self-definition is not an easy thing, and few people are able to do it on a whim. If a person whose genetic heritage says “female” or “Jew” decides they are “male” or “Muslim”, you can bet on it being important to them, and you can count on them having come, in some way, to the conclusion that the new label is more appropriate to them as a person. Ultimately, as an outsider, you cannot know better than them which label fits, and presuming to do so – even with excellent evidence – is insulting and degrading. It is to say that their self-knowledge and self-determination is of less importance than your knowledge of their background.

Again, I understand that it’s difficult to adjust to changes in the self-definition of others, even when you don’t know them (as in the case of my acquaintences’ comments about Y.) It is especially difficult regarding transgendered individuals, probably because being openly transgendered is a relatively new thing in Western societies, and because the conventional, ancient view of gender is as a completely inborn, unchangeable property. The idea that gender labels are entirely a social construct – albeit one influenced by a basic biological fact – is a very difficult idea to swallow. I find it counter-intuitive. But I also consider it intellectually undeniable – though I lack the ability to explain it properly and convince you it is so.

Be that as it may, gender labels are just one example, and my main point remains: hard as it is, respecting an individual’s self-definition is just basic decency, and refusing to respect it is indecent and offensive. I have to stress that I am not writing this to condemn or attack anybody. I acknowledge the difficulty involved, and only want to argue for the importance of making the effort to observe this basic, though unconventional, decency. Comments are open if you wish to dissuade me from or berate me for my deviant view of decency – discussion is welcome, as always.

Footnotes

1. It’s important to note that in Hebrew, there are two different forms of singular “you” – one for males, another for females. The same applies to other pronouns, like “your”, as well as to verbs, like “like” – so I can inflect the sentence “Do you like hamburgers” one way for addressing a male (ata ohev hamburgerim?) and another for addressing a female (at ohevet hamburgerim?), but I have no way of leaving the sentence neutral as it would be in English.