“Sticks and stones” we used to sing, “may break my bones/ But names will never harm me.” It was not true then, and it is not true now.
Names are how we identify ourselves and how we are identified by others, and these are matters of great consequence. They are not just words and sounds – they are also speak of perception, prejudice and power.
Like most rights, the right to one’s own name is most potently expressed when we are deprived of it: slaves, inmates and poor migrants have always known why they must be given new names or no names at all. So it is not mere political correctness for transgender people to be sensitive to how their names are recognised (especially when they have changed them to reflect their true genders) and what pronouns are used to refer to them.
The problem, though, is that neither deliberate misnaming nor the desire to choose what one is called are exclusive to transgender people. We can’t talk about them as if they were.
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In January 1990, my wife went into the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, in labour, happy, expecting a fast delivery. She was brought to the prepping room and was met by a young midwife who went through her file and did the routine prep work.
The pleasure of keeping people in their place should never be underestimated
As she was about to be moved directly to the delivery room the midwife said: “We will get your husband from the waiting room, what is his name?”
When my wife answered, the midwife was furious: my surname is different to my wife’s. She tore up the wrist ID bracelet, berating my wife for not using her “married name”, crossed out her actual name on the file she had brought to all her hospital and GP visits throughout the pregnancy and wrote “O’Toole” on the file.
My wife told her that this was not her name. The extremely tetchy response was that she had given the nurse a lot of extra work as she would have to “rewrite all of her admin”. Then she went off in a huff to call me to the delivery room.
It was clear to me that she was cross, but there were more immediate things to worry about and I never asked why.
Two weeks later, my wife spoke to the hospital matron, who was a lovely woman. It was mostly a very pleasant conversation about the terrific midwives who had actually delivered our son and the excellent care mother and child had received.
But my wife became upset when she talked about being stripped of her name, seeing it crossed off her file and being assigned a new name that she had never used.
The matron told her that it was hospital policy: what would happen if her mother-in-law visited the hospital and asked for her using my name? She answered: “My mother-in-law has manners and would always use the name people chose to call themselves.”
The real reason
The point of this story is that it is utterly unremarkable. Hundreds of thousands of women have had similar experiences. And not just from hospitals, but from banks, businesses and service-providers. There was always some administrative reason but the real reason was simple: power. The pleasure of keeping people in their place should never be underestimated.
I’ve always tried to remember this when writing about any group of people.
The very loaded phrase "political correctness" is really just a mocking term for good manners. The Sign of the Times survey in the Irish Times last week asked people whether "society is too politically correct" and 69 per cent agreed.
Would they have agreed if the question was whether good manners have gone too far? Good manners includes doing people the courtesy of calling them by their chosen names.
I grew up in a profoundly bad-mannered society of “bastards”, “queers”, “Chinks”, “Jewmen”, “cripples”, “spas”, “Proddies” and a few dozen more daily epithets. Why would anyone want that back? The courtesy of calling people by their own chosen names, individual and collective, is essential both to civil society and to basic human decency.
In recent weeks, I've been thinking about all of this in relation to John Boyne and the attacks on him for writing in The Irish Times that he does not want to be called a "cis man". And also in relation to a sentence in a critique of him by Aoife Martin of Transgender Equality Network Ireland: "Whether Boyne likes it or not, he is a cis man and he has cis privilege."
I am, in these terms, a cis man with cis privilege, and I therefore have to ask myself if I am troubled by this only because of inherent prejudice. But I have thought about this a lot, and given it some time, and I’m still troubled by it.
As it happens, I don’t agree with John Boyne, or not entirely. I have no problem being called a cis man with one crucial qualification: that it is relevant to the context.
The term “cis” is useful and entirely valid when the context is one in which it is necessary and appropriate to distinguish people by one very specific criterion: whether or not they still have the gender that was assigned to them at birth. If that’s the conversation we’re having, then of course we need a language in which to identify our own experiences.
But the problem lies with the demand that this self-identification bleeds out into every other context “whether you like it or not”.
To use an obvious analogy, I greatly dislike being called a “white” man. Race is just as much a cultural construct as gender is, and I have no desire to be trapped within its pernicious fictions.
But in some contexts I am “white” whether I like it or not. If the discussion is about race, then that’s the experience from which I am speaking. Yet if I go around proclaiming myself white the rest of the time, you might reasonably conclude that I am not woke and self-aware but in fact an obsessive racist.
Might you not reasonably draw a similar conclusion if I constantly proclaim that I am cis?
Privilege and compassion
The second problem I have is with “cis privilege” and the idea that those who have it must (whether they like it or not) use it as a form of self-identification. It raises a lot of questions.
Is there a hierarchy of privilege in which being cis is at the top, a benefit so egregious that it puts all kinds of advantage and disadvantage in the shade? Who gets to decide this?
Should a woman in Saudi Arabia who is not transgender be required to identify herself as a cis woman in order to acknowledge her good luck in having the second-class gender that was assigned to her at birth in a brutally misogynistic society? Does a Rohinga child have to feel privileged if he or she is comfortable being called a boy or a girl?
Any compassionate human being can understand that transgender people can suffer deeply, and that this suffering is greatly amplified by stigma, ignorance and discrimination. It is of course a kind of privilege not to have to face that suffering.
But privilege has many dimensions: the privilege of being male, of belonging to the dominant ethnicity, of being heterosexual, of being able-bodied, of not suffering mental illness, of being born in a stable country, of getting a good education.
The only names that should be compulsory for all of us are those of fellow human being and equal citizen
And always, everywhere, the biggest privilege is money and the biggest disadvantage is poverty. Poverty is the great dark seam that runs through all of these questions: it is easier to discriminate against people on all grounds when they are poor, and discrimination in turn engenders poverty.
If we really must, as it were, privilege one form of privilege over all the others, the overwhelmingly obvious candidate is, I’m afraid, not being cis. It is being wealthy.
But what’s the point of this competitive victimhood anyway? We are surely capable of balancing in our minds two things at the same time. One is to recognise that different groups of people have different experiences of discrimination, some of them, as with transgender people, highly specific.
The other is to recognise that most people have been discriminated against in some way at some point in their lives. What we need is to use this common experience as a way in to the more specific experiences.
So, yes, most cis women might not fully understand what it is like to be transgender but they do know what it is like to have people and institutions impose unwanted names and identities on them. Instead of descending into a contest about who is most abused, we need to remember that decent societies emerge when people are able to empathise with suffering that may not be exactly what they have known themselves but that they can imagine because, in some form, they have a sense of what it is like.
So there are times when we do all need to be reminded of the many ways in which we are privileged – and also times when we need to be reminded that privilege can be fragile and transitory, that in a discriminatory society none of us can be sure that we will not be next in line for victimhood.
The only names that should be compulsory for all of us are those of fellow human being and equal citizen. The rest should be a matter of free choice and respectful acceptance.