i have no sufficiently permissive character limit, and i must scream
a not-even-response that I spent way too long on to be willing confine to the aether
Today, Bentham’s Bulldog published a post in which he examined the mechanics of educational polarization, which featured a rather lengthy selection from a post Michael Huemer had written a few months ago, in which Huemer criticizes the practice of including one’s pronouns as a standard portion of introducing oneself as a “leftist shibboleth.”
The selection reads:
It’s increasingly common among woke elites to introduce yourself with your name and “your pronouns”. At a high school Ethics Bowl event that I witnessed recently, all ten of the students from the two opposing teams introduced themselves at the beginning of the round. Every single one of them included “my pronouns are …” or “I use … pronouns”.* Every one listed the obvious pronouns that you would have assumed immediately upon seeing them – the males (who all looked obviously male) said “he/him”; the females (who all looked obviously female) said “she/her”.
[*Only in one of the rounds. In the other rounds I saw, pronoun-reports were less unanimous. But all appeared to be from binary cisgender people.]
What were they doing? On the surface, they were helpfully informing the audience about their genders. But they weren’t in fact doing that, since their genders were visually obvious, and none of them was transgender or non-binary. Their genders were also irrelevant in any case, and no one had asked them about that.
Oh, but they were informing us about another group-membership characteristic. They were signaling their woke political orientation. Again, this is an approximately 100% reliable signal; no non-woke person introduces themselves with “my pronouns are …”.
…
Say you’re a liberal democrat. Say you show up at a new job, and every single coworker in your office has “Make America Great Again” bumper stickers. When they talk to you, they ask you questions that presuppose that of course you must be an alt-right republican, like, “Can you believe that Biden speech last night?” You would probably feel that you don’t belong there.
That’s probably how conservatives feel in nearly every classroom in nearly every university. And in the Ethics Bowl. And speech and debate. And the whole field of education. And every other area that woke ideologues have taken over. Because the ideologues will not stop constantly repeating left-wing shibboleths.
I must confess, I did not finish reading BB’s post. I have been a fan of Michael Huemer since first discovering his academic work some 10 or 12 odd years ago, and this excerpt was just so bafflingly-reasoned, from someone whose work I had otherwise so professionally respected, that I was powerless to do anything but spend several straight hours penning a criticism, at which point I learned that Substack will not let you leave 2000-word comments. It is reproduced below, unedited, obviously, because Jesus fucking Christ. Since it was originally supposed to be a comment, rhetorically it is directed at BB personally, but other than that stylistic quirk the argument is fully generalizable.
i'm aware that you're not huemer, and were just citing him to provide an independent example of the phenomenon that you're describing, so i know that you aren't necessarily committed to every aspect of his interpretation, and that this comment is essentially tangential to your post itself, but since 1) you did quote it approvingly, 2) i'm a longtime huemer fan myself and want to engage with his characterization, but the source post is now old enough that doing so there would feel like a faux pas, or at least likely go ignored, and 3) i know this is a subject about which you're neither an ideologue nor mean-spirited, so i'm going to press you on what huemer has to say here, because i think it's a pretty clear case of "when all you have his a hammer" wrt signaling as an analytic framework. in general i think a lot of things the woke left do get immediately brushed off as signaling without any honest effort to reconstruct a principled basis for whatever they might be doing, even when such a basis is pretty readily forthcoming.
for what it's worth, i am transgender (sorry). i'm sure many people categorically disbelieve it as cope when a transgender woman claims to "look obviously female," but i started anti-androgens at 19, am now 28, am almost always referred to with female pronouns and honorifics in public, and use the women's restroom without provoking so much as a second glance. (i live in a large city now, but from ages 8-25 i lived in one of the most republican regions of kentucky, so i'm comfortable assuming that most of them were probably not humoring me out of fear of violating the dictates of woke dogma). i've never had to make a point of enforcing my pronouns, people usually do just look at me and guess correctly, and on the occasions someone guesses incorrectly, they usually self-correct after hearing a couple other people refer to me without any intervention on my part. i say all of this not in an attempt to invoke any sort of identitarian deference, only to say that i personally find pronoun circles a little hokey, don't generally derive any sort of benefit from them, and am sufficiently familiar with intra-community debates that i feel able to say pretty conclusively most transgender people would not feel that anything of value had been lost if people stopped doing them. so to make myself very explicit, the point of my comment is not "pronoun circles are good and important, actually." if all transgender people took a vote, my expectation is that something like my view would be at least the plurality.
but i think huemer is seriously missing the point of why people do pronoun circles. i don't blame him, this is a reasonably popular misconception, since so many on the left believe that 1) having an argument for what you believe implies that you need an argument to believe it, rather than accepting its self-evident truth, as any good person would, 2) it also implies that you think there might be an argument against your belief, and one so compelling that it can't just be dismissed out of hand, which means that in principle you might come to be belief it, which also entails a failure to accept it as self-evident truth, and 3) why would you need an argument for what you believe unless you were trying to convey it to someone who doesn't believe it, and why would you even know or be willing to talk to someone like that? i certainly do not hold the epistemic habits of most pronoun circle defenders in much esteem, to be sure.
even so, though, I don't think it takes THAT much social, professional, or academic familiarity with woke 16-29 year olds, especially the extent you would expect of a longtime boulder philosophy professor, to either, in a best case scenario, actually encounter someone willing to make the argument explicitly (there were more than a few such people even in the department of my southern kentucky school in 2012), or in a worse case at least be able to reconstruct the argument from the various snippets of rationale that accrete over the years.
the argument, (which, again, I am not convinced by, I am simply recounting for the purpose of demonstrating that there exists a motivation for pronoun circle participants beyond "letting people know i'm a liberal") is this:
1) some trans or nonbinary people would like to go by pronouns other than the ones they would be assumed to use
2) it would not be fair to put gender-marginalized people in the exclusive position of having to proactively ensure they will be called the right thing at every encounter with every figure in a given institutional context (this is sometimes couched in terms of "forcing people to out" themselves, but i don't see how saying your pronouns are they/them stops from outing you as a they/them just because another person said his were he/him, but it is the case that absent pronoun circles they would bear the individual onus).
C) so, "cisgender people" (literal quotation of huemer's language for anyone who wants to whine about use of the word) should make an effort, and institutions should make a habit of encouraging them to, introduce themselves with their pronouns, such that the person using alternative pronouns no longer bears an unfairly unique burden. this will "normalize" it, such that no gender-marginalized person will be singled out in specifying theirs.
again, to be clear, i do not think pronoun circles are morally either necessary or urgent, and i am annoyed when i have to participate in them. but huemer i think misunderstands what's going on when he objects that all the participants were cisgender. that's the whole point. if all cis people always do it, then trans people are not being singled out when they also do it. it's an attempt at a creation of a norm. in fact, that tends to be trans people's (including my own) biggest problem with pronoun circles: how frequently people initiate them only ever when they notice there's a trans person around, such that it becomes a way of basically just announcing there is a transgender person in the room. so i think huemer draws the completely opposite inference from the fact that all the participants were cis. the whole point of the effort is that transgender are not singled out in having to specify the pronouns with which they wish to be referred.
again, you can think this is a really stupid endeavor to be bothering with, that's not the point, but the nature of the endeavor is such that an entirely cis group of people announcing their pronouns are enforcing a norm such that were a trans participant to announce their pronouns, they would not stick out. the cis pronoun-sharers are not just signaling that they are left-wing.
there are several reasons to believe this is the case, actually. first of all, the left is not monolithically pro-trans. some of them will sometimes enter into "enemy of my enemy" alliances of convenience with right-wingers, but go back 20 or 30 years before trans issues were politically salient and virtually all of them would have been described as on the political left. sure, the pro-trans left will describe the gender-critical left as reactionary non-leftists, but like, that's what maoists have said about marxist-leninists, marxist-leninist about trots, and bordigists about all of them. that's just how political sects operate. there is internal dissent within the left such that volunteering your pronouns cannot count as a shibboleth therefore. if we want to want to say that it's a shibboleth for being a pro-trans leftist, rather than an anti-trans leftist, it feels like we're getting pretty close to "it's something done to advance a trans-related cause by people who believe in it." there are also those on the center or the right who believe in respecting chosen pronouns. leslie green, having signed a public letter alongside kathleen stock that a UK charity was stifling academic debate over trans issues, is clearly no pro-trans ideologue, but he still thinks transgender students should be called by their chosen names. (if you want to argue that it's the announcement rather than the acceptance and use of the shibboleth that's the pronoun, that seems extremely ad hoc and tenuous to me, but making only the trans students volunteer names and pronouns is exactly what the cis students were trying to prevent).
mostly i think i've made the most rhetorically coherent version of my argument, so to close with a couple errata: huemer saying that the participants' genders were irrelevant seems so plainly ridiculous. were their names irrelevant, too? they introduced themselves with those, and he had no complaint. does the nature of the competition never involve referring to another participant using a pronoun? how you want to be referred to is relevant in any situation in which you are going to be referred to, and i think huemer, who i do not believe harbors any real animus for transgender people, and is too intellectually honest and perhaps too libertarian to seriously try to argue that transitioning is categorically wrong or bad for society or whatever, is trying to come up with as many content-neutral reasons as he can that this practice should not occur, and while "it's irrelevant" would have been a good one, it's just plainly not true in this instance.
finally, i think the whole "how would you feel?" rhetorical exercise is both condescending and myopic. like i said, i lived in kentucky for the better part of two decades. my parents are both canadian supporters of the liberal party. all our neighbors are republicans, all the other kids' parents are republicans. sometimes you bust each other's balls about politics, but mostly people just want to grill and it doesn't really come up. deeply religious conservative family friends love and treat me the same as they ever have. has huemer really never heard of people sending their kids to catholic school as non-catholics just for the education? you literally take classes on christianity every day and go to church once a week. it's not exactly a traumatic experience. or hell, before we lived in kentucky, we lived in utah. kids would literally ask what religion you were on the playground to try to convert you to the LDS church. and yet i remember my time in the state fondly! i just don't get where this idea is coming from that being surrounded by institutions and people that deeply disagree with you about things is some kind of intolerable existential torment. millions of people do it every day, have for centuries, and will for millennia. it really, really is not that alienating. the fact that he could even pose "imagine if your colleagues had nice things to say about trump" as some kind of thought experiment tells me this is a self-imposed filter bubble problem. your coworkers have nice shit to say all the time, you just say some banter back and you keep moving. if he wants to make an argument about the importance of ideological diversity, then make it, but don't go into maybe the most famously liberal profession in the world and then act like no one else understands what it's like to work with a bunch of coworkers who disagree with you politically (and in most working-class environments, not via shibboleths).
last year, my dad mentioned to me at dinner that HR had said something about people needing to add pronouns to their email signatures. he wasn't complaining or exuberant, it was just something transgender related that he shared with me as a piece of vaguely relevant small talk. his pronouns are still not in his signature. not out of an active refusal, just because it was some HR bullshit that didn't actually matter to his job. and that's how probably 90% of people who receive such requests react. they either do it because it's some trivial HR bullshit and who cares, or they don't do it because it's some trivial HR bullshit and who cares. people just want to grill, i cannot imagine anyone who does not spend their leisure time talking about this stuff on the internet feels put upon at all.
again, sorry, i realize this is strictly non-responsive to most of your actual argument, it just stuck out as such an obviously inadequate argument from a thinker whose work i've always rather enjoyed that i just had to interject.