Mx-ing it up

Posted by Ganymede


A version of this post originally appeared in May 2012 at http://deconstruction-site.blogspot.com.

Mx (title, pronounced /məks/, by analogy with "Ms", or /mɪks/, as in "mix"): a handy alternative to those peskily gendered and status-specific titles "Mr", "Mrs", "Ms", "Miss". Variant form: Misc (from "miscellaneous").

I'm due to give blood again soon. So, like a good person, I went to blood.co.uk and tried to book myself an appointment via the webform. Then I remembered what the webform looks like:

Note that mandatory field right there. If you want to cut down on faff (both for you and for the blood service) when you give blood, you have to - have to - be comfortable being addressed by one of Mr, Mrs, Ms, Miss or Dr.

I think I'll just drop in and hope they've got a bed free. And so, I expect, will any Professors, Reverends, Sisters or Imams who turn up.

This might sound petty or facetious. After all, not many people feel distressed to the point of self-exclusion by being forced to identify themselves as either Mr, Mrs, Ms or Miss (not even the ones who would prefer to be acknowledged as Dr). But I, as it happens, am one of them. We're a minority, but there's quite a lot of us. We even have our own national campaign.

Here's a fun fact: in the UK, your title has no basis in law. If you're male-assigned, you're not legally obliged to call yourself "Mr [Surname]"; similarly, female-assigned people can adopt the title "Mrs" even if they're not married, or use "Miss" or "Ms" even if they are. Therefore, all these thousands of organisations who have mandatory title fields on their webforms are gaining essentially zero information by it. I strongly suspect that it's only requested (or rather, demanded) so that they can painlessly auto-fill the greeting "Dear [Title] [Surname] on their automated email replies. (This can lead to hilarity when an organisation tries to be inclusive but doesn't quite think about it hard enough, and sends out messages beginning "Dear Other [Surname]"...)

Mr, Miss, Mrs, Ms (etc.) are known as "courtesy titles"; that is, by saying "Dear Mrs Exampleface" instead of "Oi, Vera", correspondents (even automated ones) are supposed to be being courteous. But for many trans* people, it ends up being the other way round: we have to do the organisations the courtesy of selecting one of their woefully inadequate options. And while this is a minor annoyance on a webform, when individual correspondents know someone's trans*, the "courtesy" title can become a vicious, disgusting weapon for making their prejudices clear.

The gender-neutral title "Mx" (or "Misc") won't solve all of these problems. But the more widespread and well-known it becomes, the more it can help English-speaking society to become more inclusive. Simply including it on a webform will help gender-variant people, or cis people who are uncomfortable with being asked for unnecessary personal information, to feel more accepted. Meanwhile, those people who are blithely ignorant of gender issues are more likely to learn about them, and become more sensitive towards them, if they regularly encounter this strange new option on the drop-down menu and it piques their curiosity.

And, importantly, "Mx" doesn't have to be - shouldn't be - a title reserved only for non-binary-gendered people. It would actually be an incredibly useful resource at times when you're corresponding with a stranger and you're not sure whether ey's Mr or Ms. We've all had someone take a punt and address us as "Miss" when we're actually "Ms", or as "Mrs" when we're actually "Dr", and we smile, correct em and move on. If everyone who was unsure defaulted to "Mx" on first contact, it would work exactly the same way, but with a lower embarrassment/faff factor.

What's more, the receptionist at the medical institution who loudly calls out "Mr [Patient]?", when ey knows full well that the patient is, or might be, a trans woman, would no longer be able to innocently declare that ey "wasn't sure" or that the patient's first name "sounded like a man's name". Because in that case, ey bloody well could have, and should have, defaulted to Mx. Out of courtesy. And everyone in the waiting room, and at the institution, and who responds to formal complaints against receptionists, would know that.

But this will only happen if the gender-neutral, status-neutral, assumption-neutral title "Mx", or its variant "Misc", or both, becomes more widespread. And as a linguistics graduate, I can assure you that the way to make a new word widespread is to use it. Numerous organisations including the HMRC, the DWP and the UK Deed Poll Service have already started accepting it. The more examples we can give of it being used in official documents, like bank statements or council tax bills (I treasure mine proudly), the more leverage we have when trying to convince other organisations to include it in their databases.

I'm slowly beginning the long and irritating process of trying to get my title changed in all my records to Mx (and complaining when I can't). It's the teaspoon effect - it's a tiny action, and it's a drop in the ocean of the status quo, but every drop has ripples. If you're a binary-identified ally reading this, what are your teaspoon options? Well, since you're not legally obliged to use a title which reflects your gender, or your marital status, or anything else, you could always consider doing the same as me.

Think about it. Think hard, and fully explore the vague, irrational discomfort you feel when you imagine calling yourself Mx [Surname], and getting letters addressed to it, and and having it called out in doctors' wating rooms. Now reconsider whether I'm really being so petty.

Liminal space, language, and me

Posted by kaberett


Hello: my name's kaberett, and English is my second language.

Wait: that's misleading.

My name's kaberett, and English is my primary language.

To give you the full story needs a bit more than a one-sentence introduction in the style of twelve-step programmes. Let's try again: my name is kaberett, and I'm a third-generation immigrant. I was born and raised in the UK; I spoke only German until I was about two and a half; and for complicated and tedious reasons I wasn't allowed to speak any German at all between the ages of six and about eleven.

I don't sound Austrian when I speak English; I don't sound English when I speak German. My proverbs and my nursery rhymes and the stories of my childhood are all in German, up until you run abruptly up against Robin Hood and the Hobbit. But my grammar, and my abstract thought, and my pronouns? They're in English.

My life is bilingual, liminal; my adulthood is, ignoring food, English. It is RP; it is university-educated; it is a disguise, but it does not ring hollow; it is only half the truth, but it is not a lie.

In English I am they; I am genderqueer; I am trans* and queer and I am assertively - aggressively - ungendered, or rather: I am gendered, and it is neuter.

I don't know how to occupy that space in German. I don't even know how to translate queer, with its reclamation and its political charge and its I'm-here-get-over-it, with its oddity and slyness and gentility.

Auf Deutsch I can be sie or er. I don't know how to occupy the space of they: of it, of es: I could, perhaps, refer to myself as mann - one - and force every descriptive noun, every adjective, into the neuter. Not der Lehrer, die Lehrerin: das Lehrer, the teacher, perhaps? But even there, I'm norming the masculine form of the noun.

I don't know how to navigate these waters.

But here is something I can say, can say loud and clear: I might not know how to occupy neutral space in my mother tongue, but at least it is honest about gendering within a binary. At least it is upfront.

No subliminal associations with teacher, doctor, engineer, nurse; no (s)he, no hero(ine): no. We will not relegate the feminine to a parenthetical adjunct to the masculine, an afterthought or grudging concession. Our noun classes are gendered, to be sure, but we have a choice in how to express that. Is the feminine marked? Yes: it is, with suffices to the masculine, but they are not parenthetical.

Schau mal, see here: die LehrerInnen; die Lehrer/innen. The teachers. Women need not be relegated to the position of cramped marginal notes: the feminine can occupy equal space, equal time, on the page. We need not soften her, nor encircle her in chains.

I don't know how to describe myself in German, but here's something I can ask you to do in English: if you must use language that asserts a binary of gender, please don't give the masculine primacy.

Instead, take a leaf out of a cousin's book: s/he, not (s)he. Hero/ine, instead of hero(ine).

If - when - we're pushed into the margins -- we don't have to stay there. We can take out our fountain pens, our marker pens, our spray-cans, our crayons, and we can say:

We are here. Get over it.

As a battle cry, it is perhaps true that librarians and book-herders miscellaneous are the only people likely to be taken faint with horror. But: we can fight this on our own terms, quietly, one by one and word by word.

Let's try it.

"I am Quvenzhané": Racism, Anglocentrism and Quvenzhané Wallis

Posted by Galatea

[TW: This post contains discussion of racism and misogyny]

[image description: A screenshot of the Twitter feed from ‘The Onion’, a satirical website. It was posted at 8.42pm on Feb 24, 2013 and reads “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?”. The word 'cunt' has been blacked out: this was added by the source from which I obtained the picture]

Yes, that Tweet was posted as a ‘joke’, and yes, The Onion has subsequently taken it down and apologised for it (and good for them for doing so).  However, I’d still like to unpack some of the discourse that has been going on around Quvenzhané Wallis, her name, and her position in Hollywood over the past few days.

Here is a list of names (assembled in about ten minutes on the Lashings mailing list) that the film-going, TV-watching and novel-reading public has had no problem at all in learning to pronounce and relate to in the past fifteen years:

Arwen Undómiel
Meriadoc Brandybuck
Leia Organa
Neytiri the Na’avi
Miles Vorkosigan
Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan
Raistlin Majere
Danearys Targaryen
Cersei Lannister
Garrus Vakarian
Bhelen Aeducan
Elphaba Thropp

Yes, these are all fictional characters, and yes some of them are from texts that do appeal more to that special geeky sub-section of the public that I hold dear. However, it sure seems to me that names which are difficult-to-pronounce for an English speaker don’t attract much in the way of screaming and whining if they come attached to Sparkly Elven Princess or Awesome Wizard or Space-Age Alien. However, when the name that presents an Anglophone speaker with some difficulty belongs to a young Black girl – even a ridiculously talented and adorable one – what we seem to end up with is comments like this (made, I remind you, by someone who was responsible for judging the Academy Awards):

"I also don’t vote for anyone whose name I can’t pronounce. Quvez---? Quzen---? Quyzenay? Her parents really put her in a hole by giving her that name -- Alphabet Wallis." 

In the words of Junot Díaz, one of Galatea’s literary lust-objects du jour, “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s 1/3 Elvish, but put two sentences in Spanish and they think we’re taking over”.

In the past few days, we’ve also seen incidents of TV producers and commentators referring to Quvenzhané Wallis as ‘Little Q’ and ‘Miss Wallis’, presumably out of a desire to avoid having to say or type her real name (I don’t recall Haley Joel Osment being referred to as ‘Little H’ or ‘Mr Osment’ shortly after the release of The Sixth Sense, do you?).  My point here is that yes, ‘Quvenzhané’ is an unusual name, and one that doesn’t follow pronunciation rules that are familiar for a speaker of British English. I didn’t know how to say it when I first saw it written down either! But it is a real name, it is her name, and it literally takes all of ten seconds to learn how to say it properly (here’s a handy guide, which includes a video of the lady herself saying it for you!). If you’re a professional commentator on the entertainment industry, barring disability issues or temporary lack of access to communications devices, learning to say/spell the name of the person you’re speaking or writing about seems like a fairly basic minimum job requirement to me.

Interestingly, I suspect that the reactions of Anglophone people around Wallis’ name are to some extent backed up by research. A joint study produced last year by the University of Melbourne and NYU suggested something the researchers called the ‘name pronunciation effect’, meaning that people in the study were more likely to positively evaluate people with ‘easily pronounceable’ names in both a laboratory and a real-life context. You can read a short article about the study here and a copy of the report itself here. 

And despite the fact that a lot of people regard Quvenzhané Wallis with affection and joy, there have been a number of such negative evaluations. See the not-so-subtle hostility in the comments on this Jezebel post, for example (for those who don’t want to click through, the post features an image of Wallis ‘pumping her arms’ in her seat at the Award ceremony: apparently a gesture of pleasure and pride used by many cast and crew members on the film Beasts of the Southern Wild, the film for which Wallis was nominanted). At the time of writing, comments included:

“Am I the only one who saw this and was disgusted? I immediately decided I didn't want her to win because I don't want her to get any more full of herself than she seemed right there.”  

“Sorry this Quvenzhane kid annoys the fuck outta me. She's insufferable. Ever see her on a talk show? She is dangerously carried away with herself - way past the point of cute. You're never too young to learn humility.”

Which brings me back to the 'cunt' comment in the Onion. Yes, it was a joke -- a joke that revolved around the idea that so many people love Quvenzhané that you can now base humour on the idea of 'taking her down a peg or two': the basic premise of the comedy is still that a little girl -- a little Black girl -- has 'got above her station' and this makes it funny and shocking to throw misogynist slurs at her.  

Intersecting with the obvious racism here (a nine-year-old kid looks pleased and happy at the effing Oscars and she's 'full of herself' and needs to 'learn humility'? WTF?) I think that the jokes and complaints around Quvenzhané's name are particularly interesting. Here is where it veers off the theoretical and gets a little personal for me: in non-Lashings life, my family name is non-English and is difficult for many English speakers to pronounce. It's worth noting that for me, this comes with a large side-serve of white privilege (classic immigrant story: perfectly-ordinary-name in non-English-language became awkwardly-misspelled-uncommon-name when illiterate great-grandparents came into contact with English-speaking immigration officials). However, I’ve certainly felt that hostility, that slight frisson of ‘Ugh, awkward kid with awkward name’, even though my racial privilege shields me from most of the worst aspects of it. It was much worse when I was a kid and subject to the whims of roll-calling teachers, but is still around to some extent today. Anyone who’s ever had a microaggressive conversation that ran along the lines of

“What kind of name is that?”

 “How do you say that?”

“How do you spell that?”

 “Are you sure?”

“Where are you from?”

“No, where are you really from?”

might agree. When the 'name pronunciation effect' study first came out, I shared it with a number of friends on Facebook. Several people jumped in to say that I had it wrong -- there wasn't any kind of racial or cultural bias at work in the study: it's just that people don't like names which are 'unfamiliar'. By an amazing co-incidence, the contradictors were all people with English-based names living in majority-English-speaking countries. Reader, I LOL'ed. It's about more than 'unfamiliarity', I'm afraid. Yes, a ‘difficult’ name demands that the person who needs to use it work a little harder: ‘Quvenzhané’ requires more effort from an Anglophone teacher or secretary (or ‘Entertainment Tonight’ journalist) than ‘Sarah’ or ‘Jane’. That's called cognitive bias, it's a real thing, and cheers to fellow Lasher Bishop for reminding me of it. 

HOWEVER, I suspect that this interacts in some important ways with who we as a society deem worthy of ‘extra’ time and effort: we're much quicker to get over our cognitive bias about unfamiliar names when we think the person causing it is important or powerful. When I was little, adults didn't make much effort to say my name properly and were often rude and dismissive when they got it wrong: now that I'm an adult with a professional job, other people tend to be more careful about pronouncing it right and get embarrassed if they mess up. Funny, that. And thus back to Quvenzhané Wallis and an attitude that many powerful people seem to be projecting: who does this kid, this girl, think she is, ‘demanding’ (with her very presence) that we go to the trouble of learning how to say that tongue-twister? Can’t we just call her ‘Annie’ instead?

[GIF description: An interviewer is speaking to Quvenzhané Wallis. Interviewer: “Look who it is! It’s Annie!” (a reference to Wallis’ recent casing in the 2014 remake of Annie). Interviewer: “I’m calling you Annie now.” Camera zooms in on Wallis’s face, she looks shocked and annoyed. Wallis: “I am not Annie! I am Quvenzhané”.]

To my mind, this explains in part why there's been very little crying about having to learn how to say names like 'Jake Gyllenhaal', 'Gerard Depardieu' or 'Arnold Schwarzenegger', and why I've never seen a reporter bounce up to Ralph Fiennes on the red carpet and demand to be allowed to call him 'Ralf'. The 'name pronunciation effect' seems to entangle itself with other factors affecting the way in which we deem people in society to be worthy of our effort and respect, and age, gender and whiteness are all key in this. Having been someone who, by age and gender, was not deemed worthy of that respect at various times in my life (oh, but that "I am not Annie!" expression in the gif above is identical to that which frequently appeared on the face of the infant Galatea), I see what's going on here and I don't like it. I dislike even more the fact that it's still going on in 2013, and that we'll apparently spend more effort on learning to say the name of a fictional hobbit, alien or dragon-keeper than a real live nine-year-old girl. 

I don’t have a quick or easy solution here, but I think that it’s important to keep this in mind, and to remind everyone that this bias exists and perhaps needs to be consciously countered where necessary. In other words, do 'vote for people you can't pronounce' if they deserve your votes, and maybe be conscious of the need to do so! Another simple act of respect that you and I can begin with is to deliberately set out to educate ourselves about names that are not familiar to us, and to use them correctly whenever possible (assuming that we have the permission of the owner to do so).

[image description: Quvenzhané Wallis standing outdoors, wearing a red dress and smiling].

Who does this kid think she is? She thinks she is Quvenzhané, and she’s damn well right.  

The Curious Case of the Multiplicity of Watsons

Posted by Sebastienne





The internets have been roused, and they are very angry.

What can have caused this, you might think - has the US senate passed SOPA, legislation which could destroy the World Wide Web as we know it?

No - the unthinkable has happened.

Some TV execs in the US have decided that what the world needs now is another take on the Sherlock Holmes mythos... and they've cast an Asian-American woman in the role of Watson.

So obviously, the comments under every news article are full of the vilest kinds of misogyny and racism. It's even been summed up in Impact font: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jpmoore/a-note-to-cbs-on-casting-lucy-liu-as-watson-in-the

Ah, Doctor Watson. Sherlock Holmes' "one fixed point in a changing age". A solid and stoic counterpart, sometimes mistakenly represented as unintelligent, but always as devotedly faithful. As the narrator of most of Conan-Doyle's stories, he is the audience identification figure, the "everyman" who provides us with a window on Holmes' unique world.

Of Labels and the Notion of 'The Other

Posted by Jenni


One of the most common arguments I see regarding asexuality is “Why does everything need a word?”


Whilst there are many people who could identify with a label such as gay, queer, or similar, but choose not to, the fact remains that a lot of people who have non-heteronormative sexualities, and non-standard gender identities use labels. And so there must be a reason for it.

Can feminists be funny?

Posted by Sally Outen

OK, OK, here's one:
Q: What do you get if you cross, um, Silvio Berlusconi with... an accusation of sexism?
A: Silenced! Haha?

What? Not laughing? But... it's topical, nearly... and, and it's funny because it's true, right? Oh. Yeah. It's sad that it's true - that's the one. But at least it isn't as bad as all those how-many-women-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-lightbulb jokes - the ones that, while still being rather sad, also manage to be, well, not actually true. Not really. They're just playing on popular stereotypes and being generally misogynistic*.

Or... oh... maybe I'm just one of those humourless feminists.

Five Fat Facts

Posted by Sebastienne




I thought it was time to unpack some of the assumptions behind our RENT filk, "Fat". (Lyrics)

1. "Fat" is a neutral descriptive term. It describes the way that a person's body carries adipose tissue, and says precisely nothing about their moral character, their health, their lifestyle, or their attractiveness. It is not offensive to call me fat - but it is offensive to assume that using the term to describe me is in some way insulting. And as for "but you're not fat - you're gorgeous!" - care to elaborate on what your problem is with my being both of these things?

Now - of course - as with any self-identification, there are going to be people who disagree with me here. Fat is a descriptive term with a nasty history - like "queer" or "dyke" - and there are going to be people who won't want to apply it to themselves under any circumstances; we have to respect that.

Watch Your Language

Posted by Sally Outen

I'm going to dedicate this post to various ideas that will probably be very familiar to many of you reading it. This isn't especially exciting or radical material, but I hope you won't mind too much... and, OK, I promise to try better next time. The thing is, I'm finding myself having to go over the same old ground lately, in current debates over 'political correctness' and problematic terminology, and because I'd like to have all my arguments ready in one place. So here, in a similar spirit to Derailing for Dummies, is a quick summary of responses I've received recently after calling people out on the use of slurs directed at people from marginalised groups. I'll provide a quick rant about deconstruction of each of these responses in turn.

I'm not a feminist, but..

Posted by Sebastienne


It seems like "feminist" is a dirty word these days.

"As feminists in the twenty-first century, we spend a lot of time trying to reassure people about how we’re not the scary kind of evil, militant, hairy-legged feminsts you read about in the Daily Mail." (Vagina Dentata, Galatea Gorgon)

And I know it's important to let people self-define - they are best placed to know their own gender, race, or sexuality, after all. So if fewer and fewer people are comfortable calling themselves feminists..

Surely I should conclude that feminism is on its way out, as a term? Just as many Black women, sick of mainstream feminism's focus on Whiteness, embraced the term womanist, today girls and young women who believe in gender equality are rejecting "feminism" as too extreme to describe their concerns. They're turning to terms like "egalitarianist" or "equalist", or not even using terms - on a case-by-case basis they'll engage with an unequal world: "I'm not a feminist, but I find that sexist".

It feels as if it would be against my code of self-definitional ethics to tell these women that they are feminists, however they self-define - I wouldn't say it to a womanist, so how can I say it to these women? - but there's a difference, a core difference which means I think this is a special case: the cultural construction of feminism.

The popular media are taking feminism away from us. Media constructions like "Harriet Har-Woman" suggest that a conspiracy of second-wave radical-feminists are trying to privilege women over men. It's so easy, in a world which privileges maleness in almost every arena, to construe the redressing of the balance as unfair - to describe quotas or special funding, imperfect tools but the best we have yet found to address the problem, as "positive discrimination". As if, because we cannot create a gender-equal world overnight, it is not worth striving for; as if the tools we have to hand which occasionally give the appearance of disadvantaging men are somehow worse than the endemic oppression experienced by women.

The worst lie of all, the one the underlies all the above, is the idea that feminism's work is finished. That women and men are equal under law, therefore anyone still self-defining as a feminist or attempting further legislative change must be a female supremacist. This completely ignores the vital hearts-and-minds work yet to be done, not to mention facts like these:

• We've had equal pay legislation since 1970, but women in the UK earn 83p to men's £1


• 72% of the effect of the government's cuts is going to fall on women


• Do I even need to mention the cultural construction of girlhood?

I don't want to go around forcing this label on the young women who have rejected it. But what I do want to do, so desperately, is show them how they have been duped. How - even if the word feminism has had its day - we do not live in an equal society.

I'm not that keen on the word feminism myself - it has, perhaps, been too much tainted by its intertwining with the aims of white, middle-class, cisgendered women - and it's certainly not up to me to define the terminology of the future. But, given the ease with which a lack of language can lead to oppression - think of the discourse surrounding women's lack of appropriate terminology for their own sexual organs and experiences - I'm nonetheless concerned that "feminism" is being taken away from us. Without a named movement to give us solidarity, we're just individuals fighting a seemingly impossible burden of oppression.

If only "anti-oppression kyriarchy theorist" were catchier.. I've always wanted a term that centred intersectionality before any particular oppression. Maybe I'm just a Lasher?