I am a woman but don’t call me she

“HI, my name is XYZ. My pronouns are she/her. What are yours?”

Apparently, this is how Americans are introducing themselves to new acquaintances.

This gender pronoun etiquette is fast catching on in the West, and if you think it’s a brand new fad, you must be of my generation and you’re quite wrong, my fellow Baby Boomers.

Back in September 2015, Harvard University was already allowing students to select gender-neutral options on their registration forms. These options can be the familiar “they”, but there is a growing list of “bespoke neopronouns” such as “ze/zir”, “fae/faer,” “bun/bunself” and “xe/xym” (Nope, I don’t know how to pronounce them either.).

It’s now commonplace in the United States for teachers to know their students’ preferred pronouns at the start of the academic year and for employers and organisations to ask staff to indicate their preferences in their emails and personal details.

The basis for this “new” way of identifying oneself is the belief that there are two genders, male and female, that are “binary” as opposed to “non-binary”, which is used to describe genders that don’t fall into male or female categories.

Therefore you cannot assume you know someone’s gender just by looking at them. So now there is a need to make sure you address the person you are dealing with using the pronouns that person identifies herself/himself/themselves with in the name of respect and inclusiveness.

So, say you meet a person at a conference who is wearing a name tag that says John. You will automatically think John is male and would subsequently refer to him as he or him, like telling a passing waiter to “Get him a glass of wine, please”.

Now if you were in the United States, this would be a no-no. A person may be named John but that person may not identify as male. Or female either. This person wants to be referred to as “they” or “ze”. So you should say, “Get ze a glass of wine, please.”

Welcome to the new world order of pronouns. In July 2018, I wrote a column titled “The LGBT alphabet soup gets thicker” (So Aunty, So What, The Star, July 25; online at bit.ly/star_lgbt) in which I tried to make sense of how gender identity and sexual orientation have changed, leading to the term LGBT, which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

Of late the alphabet soup has become even thicker with the addition of more letters. It’s now LGBTQIA+ for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, and asexual; and the plus sign, according to gaycenter.org, stands for “all of the gender identities and sexual orientations that letters and words cannot yet fully describe”, such as pansexual, two-spirit and ally. You can Google the definitions.

If you are gobsmacked, you are not alone. Perhaps most of us in Malaysia are not so clued in on such issues because LGBT etc is not widely reported in mainstream media in our largely conservative nation.

Seeking gender neutrality in language actually started with women’s rights activists wanting to break down stereotyping in jobs. As more women entered the workforce and assumed once male dominated roles, it didn’t seem right to refer to them as, say, chairmen, assemblymen or spokesmen.

Similarly, since the mid-1980s, women can choose to be referred to as Ms, which has emancipated them from having to use the titles “Miss” or “Mrs” that defined them by their relationship with men.

But now the push for gender neutral options has taken a peculiar turn. It has gone beyond sexism and into the realm of gender identity.

LGBT activists claim that they are finally getting the space, respect and acknowledgement denied to them in the past. To them, a person’s sex is not black and white, not binary or non-binary, not one or the other, but can fall on a spectrum.

People like Rocko Gieselman, who is gender-fluid and was born female-bodied, told The New York Times that “Every time someone used ‘she’ or ‘her’ to refer to me, it made this little tick in my head. Kind of nails-on-a-chalkboard is another way you can describe it. It just felt wrong. It was like, ‘Who are you talking to?’”

Singapore activist and non-binary individual Elijah Tay says that using the correct pronouns, especially for transgender people, is an acknowledgement that “I see you as how you see yourself”.

But critics like biologist Collin Wright disagree and argue that this gender ideology is regressive and is inflicting enormous harm on society.

He explains: “Proponents of gender ideology have completely decoupled the terms ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘boy’, and ‘girl’ from biological sex. Gender ideology teaches that the terms ‘man/boy’ and ‘woman/girl’ – and their corresponding ‘he/his’ and ‘she/her’ pronouns – refer to a person’s gender identity, while ‘male’ and ‘female’ refer to biological sex. While you may define a woman as a female human adult, gender ideology contends that a ‘woman’ is an adult of either sex who simply ‘identifies’ as a woman.”

Wright adds that gender activists believe that to be identified as a man or a woman requires embracing stereotypes of masculinity or femininity respectively, or the different social roles and expectations society imposes on people because of their sex.

This is deeply ironic because it is exactly this rigid stereotyping of social roles that feminists have been fighting for decades.

“The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t ‘identify with’ the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man. Instead, you’re considered either transgender or non-binary,” says Wright.

In other words, if a preteen girl in America acts like a tomboy (as I did at 11), she would be considered as having a medical condition (gender dysphoria) and possibly be subjected to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries that result in permanent sterility while consigning her to a lifetime of medical bills.

This is what’s happening in the United States, and what Wright means by inflicting enormous harm on society. He adds that the rejection of man, woman, boy and girl around sex-related stereotypes is “also threatening the safety of women in prisons, as well as compromising the safety, fairness and dignity of women and girls in sports, as males who simply ‘identify’ as girls or women are allowed access to these protected spaces”.

As I wrote in 2018, disruption has deeply affected humankind at its most basic level: the classification of human beings as man or woman. But as much as the conservatives and haters wish the world could go back to that simple definition, it is not going to happen. Neither will condemning them and denying them their rights make the gay community disappear.

Indeed, I am all for fairness and equality but a line must be drawn that cannot be crossed to prevent harm to women and children.

The gender pronoun issue hasn’t caught on here in Malaysia’s conservative society, and perhaps we can avoid the pitfalls of language gender neutrality because there are no gender pronouns in Malay and Mandarin.

As for this English-speaking Aunty, she won’t be asking anybody she meets about preferred pronouns. She will take it all on face value.

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.