What to Say When You are Asked for your Pronouns

For those of us who understand that sex is a biological term that applies to possums, wolves, elephants and humans, what should we say when asked for our "pronouns"? Colin Wright says we should refuse to answer the question. I think a bare refusal is a bit rude. People asking for pronouns often don't mean any harm, even though they are implicitly asking you to buy into an ideology that conflicts with biology, often without awareness that they are doing this. I agree with Wright that a request for pronouns constitutes stereotyping.

What would I do next time I'm asked? I might respond by saying something like: “Sign me up as a human being who doesn't believe in stereotyping." If that triggers an awkward silence, perhaps I would follow up: "But by all means, I'm not telling anyone else how to respond . . ."

Wright's article appears in the Wall Street Journal. The title is "When Asked ‘What Are Your Pronouns,’ Don’t AnswerA seemingly innocuous question masks a demand for conformity with a regressive set of ideas." Here's an excerpt:

Gender activists believe that being 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. Planned Parenthood explicitly states that gender identity is “how you feel inside,” defines “gender” as a “a social and legal status, a set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts,” and asserts that “it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.” . . .

So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female. While women’s-rights movements fought for decades to decouple womanhood from rigid stereotypes and social roles, modern gender ideology has melded them back together. . . .

Let me offer an analogy. [Imagine a] request from the American Federation of Astrologers encouraging everyone to begin conversations with, “Hi, I’m a Sagittarius. What’s your sign?” To respond with your own star sign would be to operate within and signal your tacit agreement with the belief system of astrology.

Here is a free pdf of Colin Wright's article.

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Richard Dawkins: Race is on a Spectrum, Sex is “Pretty Damn Binary.”

Richard Dawkins answers the "dangerous" question he asked in April 2021, the question that caused him to be disowned by the American Humanist Association. The title to his article at Areo: "Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary."

Were race not a spectrum, Rachel Dolezal’s critics should have spotted that she wasn’t “really” black, simply by taking one look at her. It’s precisely because black Americans are a spectrum that it wasn’t obvious. With negligible exceptions, on the other hand, you can unwaveringly identify a person’s sex at a glance, especially if they remove their clothes. Sex is pretty damn binary.

If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. It’s marginally more ridiculous than the Church’s Aristotelian casuistry in identifying the “substance” of blood with wine and body with bread, while the “accidentals” safely remain an alcoholic beverage and a wafer. Not at all ridiculous, however, was James Morris’s choice to identify as a woman and his gruelling and costly transition to Jan Morris. Her explanation, in Conundrum, of how she always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body is eloquent and moving. It rings agonizingly true and earns our deep sympathy. We rightly address her with feminine pronouns, and treat her as a woman in social interactions. We should do the same with others in her situation, honest and decent people who have wrestled all their lives with the distressing condition known as gender dysphoria.

Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.

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Consciousness as the Tip of the Cognitive Iceberg

Perhaps you will enjoy this passage, but perhaps you will find it disturbing. Here is one of my favorite passages on the fact that we are not ultimately (in any meaningful way) the conscious authors of what we do. The passage is from Johnson/Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh:

Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

    • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.

    • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes

    • Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language

    • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate the context

    • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole

    • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion

    • Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed

    • Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them

    • Filling in gaps in the discourse

    • Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor’s body language

    • Anticipating where the conversation is going

    • Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather; they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control.

The above passage should severely reduce our confidence in introspection as a tool for what is going inside of us, as part of "cognition." And, in fact, the work of Johnson and Lakoff requires us to expand the geography of "cognition" to include far more than the brain.  It needs to include the entire human body:

As is the practice in cognitive science, we will use the term cognitive in the richest possible sense to describe any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason. Because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, we will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensory-motor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason, Since cognitive operations are largely unconscious, the term cognitive unconscious accurately describes all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language.

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Gad Saad’s Homage to the Late Harvard Biologist EO Wilson

I've followed the works of E.O. Wilson for many years, starting with his book, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), which I read as a teenager. His recent death is both a great loss and an opportunity to remember his substantial contributions to evolutionary biology.

Gad Saad offers this excellent homage to E.O. Wilson's work. One thing that stood out to me is Saad's coinage of the term "human reticence effect." Here is Saad's explanation of this critically important term (and phenomenon):

The human reticence effect: It's perfectly okay to apply evolutionary principles to explain one million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine species, but if you apply to study one species called humans, well then, you are Himmler and you're a nazi. And so E.O. Wilson, in daring to apply incredibly rigorous and profound evolutionary principles to explain incredible animal behavior, including some very puzzling animal behavior, once he used that framework to apply it to human behavior, then he was a persona non grata which, of course, is exactly what you see 45 years later with evolutionary psychologists. If you apply a principle to study the evolution of mating behavior of the salamander then bruh, you're a great scientist. If you apply the exact same mechanism the same methodology, the same epistemology, to study the evolution of human mating in humans, well then, come on bro that's just faux science. It's "nazi science" it's "pseudoscience." I have written about why people have these emotional and cognitive obstacles to accept the application of evolutionary principles to the study of human behavior in much of my scientific work.

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The “Race” Endgame

Sam Harris appeared on stage with Scott Galloway to discuss many topics, including "race." I am using these scare quotes because I do not recognize "race" to be a reality-based category, but only an extremely toxic temptation for both well-meaning people and power-seekers. I'm convinced that from Day One, recognition of "race" was always a bad idea and it continues to be a bad idea that needlessly tears people apart, often causing physical violence and sometimes causing death. The concept of race has the scientific validity and reliability of astrology--both concepts are gross miscategorizations, attempts to silo complex human beings (and all human beings are complex) on the basis of immutable irrelevant characteristics. The less credence we grant this concept, the better, in my view. Here's what Sam Harris had to say about his view of the best endgame for the concept of "race."

The goal has to be to get to a society where we care less and less about the superficial differences between people. It seems to me patently obvious that there can't be a matter of caring more and more about these differences. [There are] people who were actually living in a post-racial society in the sense that they weren't they did not care about the color of anyone's skin or anyone's sexual preference or gender identity. There were many people living truly ethical lives having broken out of this this truly toxic past with respect to those forms of bigotry. They're getting pushed back. They're being told by this corner of the culture “No no no! It's too soon to say that. It’s always going to be too soon to say that you're post-racial or blind with respect to these differences among people. These differences have to be ramified. They have to be acknowledged. You as a white person have no standing with which to say anything about race.” That's madness. It's absolute madness.

The goal for us ethically and intellectually has to be to arrive at a time where we don't care about these things no more than we care about hair color. Just imagine if we were coming from a time where people had been discriminated against based on hair color. That would be totally perverse.

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