Towards the end of 1984, there’s a scene in which Inner Party member O’Brien asks Winston Smith to state how many fingers he is holding up:
“Four.”
“And if the Party says that it is not four but five —–then how many?”
“Four.”
In the eyes of O’Brien, this is the wrong response. Every time he says “four”, Winston is tortured. Finally he declares himself willing to say any number of fingers (“Anything you like! Only stop it, stop the pain!”). He does not do this immediately, though. For a while he resists, despite the agony.
Why does he do this? Obviously there are times when it matters to insist only one way of counting is valid. Say you’re following a recipe, or measuring out medication, or conducting a scientific experiment. Only Winston isn’t doing any of these things. What is the actual cost to him of not saying “four”? Clearly it’s important to O’Brien that he doesn’t say it, so why not do what O’Brien wants? There is no indication that Winston has been particularly obsessed with finger-counting up to this point. Isn’t it churlish of him to make a fuss now? Yes, the torture is painful, but there’s an easy way to avoid it.
If this sounds like a stupid argument — one which misses the entire point of the scene — Iknow it is. The issue is not finger-counting; it’s what it means to deny your own perception of reality, ceding “the truth” to someone with more power. To have to do this is particularly harmful when, as is the case with O’Brien, the other person’s “truth” is entirely self-indulgent, created with no attention paid to others (“sometimes [the four fingers] are five. Sometimes they are three”). True, there may be no discernible practical consequences to denying what you see before you. To do so still requires “an act of self-destruction”.
What, then, about calling someone “she” when what you see is a “he”? Is it the same sort of thing? The past week saw another “reasonable” man — in this case the journalist David Aaronovitch — argue that calling a male person “she” if he so wishes is just a matter of being kind. Yes, there may be times when correctly identifying a person’s sex matters. Say you’re running a women’s refuge, or setting up a female sports category, or running a lesbian dating app. Perhaps if the male person in question is sex offender it may be justifiable to stick with the “he”. But what if, say, it’s Jan Morris, writer, author of sex change memoir Conundrum and former “golden-boy newspaper reporter James Morris”? “What,” Aaronovitch asked women questioning his #BeKind logic, “does it cost you to have Jan Morris called a woman?”
As many pointed out, this is somewhat short-sighted. Calling any male person “she” necessarily makes it harder to defend female-only spaces and sporting categories because it creates the impression that you are excluding not men, but a particular type of woman. Yet even if that were not the case, there is quite clearly a potential cost to women when male people are referred to as “she”. That it may only be an emotional one, impacting on one’s psychological well-being, does not make it an irrelevance. Women’s physical safety, boundaries and access to public life matter, but so, too, does our own self-respect..
Aaronivitch’s position seems to be that this is just being mean (and perhaps ungrateful, given that he’s on the side of gender-critical feminists when it comes to the practical stuff). He goes on to suggest that feminists are only upset about pronouns now, in the age of trans activist overreach, whereas calling Morris “she” has been “the practice of half a century”. The framing of this as mere etiquette suggests it is akin to respecting another person’s religious beliefs or right to hold different political views. Or perhaps it’s more like saying you like a person’s outfit, or that they’re looking young for their age, even if you don’t think these things at all. A nice, non-aggressive trans-identified male would be upset to be referred to as “he” and his upset would be legitimate, given how important his identity is to him. As for the woman calling him “he”? What’s she got to be sad about?
Referring to male people as female because they wish it imposes … a kind of moral injury
At a time when the work of gender critical campaigners finally seems to be paying off, it seems we are expected to be magnanimous. We are clawing back our sports categories and rape crisis centres, are we not? No need to stick the knife in! What this misses is the fact that referring to male people as female because they wish it imposes — and always has imposed — a kind of moral injury. This is because gender is relational. Respecting someone else’s religious beliefs does not require me to share them; by contrast, using language which includes male people in the category “woman” — when I am a woman myself — forces me to express a view about myself which I do not hold.
It’s a view that says male-imagined femininity, not femaleness, is the thing that differentiates me from men. It’s one that completely erases the difference in power as I experience it. It’s a denial of my own inner life and rejection of sexist norms, and to go along with it is humiliating. Just because it is a form of humiliation that women are used to — and have been conditioned to accept in the name of kindness — does not lessen its cruelty.
In the tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie, who objected to sharing a changing room with trans-identified doctor Beth Upton, barrister Naomi Cunningham used the example of counting fingers in 1984 to describe the pressure placed on Peggie to accept her colleague as a fellow woman. The response of Upton’s barrister was to present this as her client being compared to a torturer, a response which sidestepped any consideration of Peggie’s feelings. The only person with a recognisable inner life is the male.
A woman’s right to prioritise her perception of herself, refusing to allow it to be overridden by male fantasy, is never a luxury. It is fundamental to there being any equality between the sexes. That women have used incorrect pronouns to “be kind” before is not proof it costs us nothing. It’s merely proof of how much we have given already and how much we are owed.
