I was at an academic conference last week, somewhere in America, where we were invited by our hosts to place a 'preferred pronoun' sticker on our nametags. "If you could pick one of those up during the next break, we'd appreciate it." The options were, 'He', 'She', 'They', 'Ask Me', and one with a blank space for a write-in. Coming from my adoptive France, I had heard of this new practice in my country of origin, but somehow I had convinced myself that it was mostly mythical. Yet there were the stickers, and there were all my fellow participants, wearing them with straight faces.
I did not pick one up. As is my practice at these events, I do not even wear the nametag that has been provided for me, so there would have been nothing to put the sticker on. But if there had been any direct and explicit pressure on me to wear one, rather than just a general announcement, I would have been constrained to explicitly refuse to do what was being asked of me. I would have been a conscientious objector.
In the future I will avoid meetings at which I know in advance, or I have a reasonable expectation, that there will be such stickers. I am strongly opposed to this convention, I think it is ridiculous and offensive, and I am only thankful that, for now, it is only a convention and not a compulsion. But the line is not so clear. It is not a compulsion for me to wear a sticker, because I am privileged and basically indifferent as to whether I ever get invited to an academic event again. The quality of my life is enhanced by not going to academic events, and reduced by going to them. If I can't go because social pressure would require me to wear a sticker, well, tant mieux. But this is not the case for younger scholars who are precariously employed. It is in part for their sake that I feel the need to make explicit my opposition to this practice.
The reasons for this opposition are simple. If to be cisgender is to be such that your gender identity as you experience it matches with the gender identity you are assigned at birth, then I am not cisgender. What it would be like to feel at home with your assigned gender identity is something I cannot even imagine, but I take it that whoever is at home in this way is an utter dullard, an unthinking fool, and definitely someone to avoid. I for my part cringe whenever I am called a 'man'. Even 'person' and 'human' seem rather too confining for my sense of the true nature of my being, but I usually let these slide.
At the same time, I take it that if we are, as Heidegger said, geworfene Entwürfe, 'thrown projects', then the fact that members of my society find it reasonable to call me a 'man' is part of my Geworfenheit, and not something it is within my conception of my life project to change. I do not feel like a man, but I also do not feel I have it in me to bring about, by my will and by my presentation of self in everyday life, any other social fact as to what sort of being I am. In other words, whatever my preferred pronouns might have been in some imaginary Rawlsian original position, I do not feel I have a reasonable expectation of others that they use them in my non-imaginary present position.
The fact that I do not feel this way is something very deep about my identity: the mismatch between what it is I feel I am, and what it is I feel I can expect others to recognise me as being. This mismatch is philosophically interesting to me, and it is also an unhealing wound at the core of my identity. Again, I suspect that anyone who does not perceive this wound in them, in some way or other, is an uninteresting, unthinking person.
I expect to be called 'he', because it is into he-ness that I have been thrown, but no, I insist, I do not 'prefer' to be called 'he'. I have a strong preference, in fact, that I not be expected to expect others to use my preferred pronouns, and it is a violation of my own sense of who I am to be called upon to state my preferences in this matter as if they were, to me, some kind of easy and painless and wholly worked out fact.
There will always be unthinking and uninteresting people in the world. But let us not enforce this way of being by bullshit new social conventions or, worse still, by oppressive new bureaucratic demands.
