Whose Freedom? Whose Speech? A Feminist Perspective on Language, Pronouns & Gender Identity Politics

Why language and pronouns matter for resistance to gender identity policy and law.

Image credit: A J Watt

Recently, a heated debate about pronoun usage and trans-identified people resurged on Twitter - but not in the way one might expect. Rather than a debate between trans activists and women critical of gender identity politics, it was an internal dispute among the latter.

It began when UK journalist Janice Turner published an article in the Times about Debbie Hayton and his new book. Hayton is a trans-identified male who has asserted that trans women are male, has worn a tee shirt making the statement, and does not care what pronouns are used for him. Throughout her article, Turner referred to Hayton as “she.”

Debbie Hayton: Image credit the Times of London

Turner’s tweet advertising her article generated 300+ replies, most of them about her use of female pronouns for him. A few were supportive, but the majority were critical. Over the years, Turner has published a number of articles on the conflict between the trans agenda and rights of women and girls, that navigate the issues with sympathy for sex-based rights and appeal to a mainstream audience. That she would now, in a situation where pronouns would not be contested, adhere to the trans mandate on pronouns, was viewed by some of her long-time readers as undermining the cause.

Irritated by the criticism, a week later Turner published a follow-up article, “I’ll Use Whatever Pronouns I Think Courteous.” She asserted that she would resist “compelled speech,” use whatever pronouns she chose, and that doing so was a matter of courtesy, bestowed on those she has personally met, who she deems respectful of women, and who have not committed sexual crimes.

I will use female pronouns for some trans women. My rules are personal. I will call no male who commits a sexual or violent offence “she”. But those who respect women, like Debbie Hayton, or those I meet in real life, I will respect. 

One might well ask, (and someone did), how she would know which males have not committed sexual crimes? I admit I read only about one-third of the more than three hundred tweets responding to her initial article, so I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether or not her critics were “compelling” speech, rather than voicing objection to the writer’s choice. Based on what I did read, I agree with Kara Dansky, civil rights lawyer and president of WDI USA, who later observed that people “yelling” at you on Twitter is not compelled speech.

Stella O’Malley, founder of GenSpect, who is connected to Hayton through his inclusion in her 2018 documentary, Trans Kids: It’s Time to Talk, joined the fray in several interviews.¹ O’Malley echoed Turner’s assertion of “free speech,” declared that the “movement” was not a “language-based movement,” and that she is focused only on the material harm to children of pediatric medical transitioning.

In her response to her critics, Turner noted that use of “she” for a trans-identified male was considered a “courtesy” until the “aggressive modern trans movement seized on pronouns” to advance their agenda.

We weren’t only compelled to call a male person “she” if they demanded it — and be punished for the heinous crime of misgendering if we didn’t — but in doing so we were acknowledging that this person had now become biologically female. 

Pronouns became a quasi-religious test. Those who refused to believe in this gender transubstantiation were heretics whose careers were torched.

Years of forced submission to gender identity mandates rendered women “battle-hardened” ideologues who, Turner suggests, have now become rigidly intransigent themselves:

No more politesse or pretence. Screw pronoun badges. Women seized the right to call a man a man. Now pronouns became a different line in the sand: to call a trans woman “she” was to be a liar, a science-denier, an enemy of women.

Turner then rejects what she sees as two extremes, claiming she will use pronouns based on her individual choice, without regard to either group.

Stonewall would say the choice should not be mine; gender-critical ultras will cry traitor. But I reject all compelled speech.

Turner’s “both sides” framing ignores the power dynamic between the two factions. Although women are no longer permanently banned from Twitter for using sex-based, rather than gender-based pronouns, and a few small openings for limited criticism of the gender identity project have recently emerged, overwhelmingly, gender identity mandates still reign supreme. Just this morning, I opened Twitter to see a detransitioned woman in distress because her employer had required her to undergo gender identity training, wherein she was taught how to “report someone for misgendering or saying they don’t believe in gender,” and directed to put pronouns on her name badge. Imagine forcing a detransitioned woman to adhere to an ideology she has rejected in order to earn a living. “I’m not in a financial situation to mess around,” she said.

Both Turner and O’Malley’s assertions of free speech, and reasoning for their choices, are individualistic. Turner will use gendered pronouns for trans people she has met and approved. O’Malley says she doesn’t “want to speak the way anybody else speaks because that’s how I come to better thoughts; when I can work things out.” In social situations, and for O’Malley, therapeutic situations, they will use the pronouns they wish.

Certainly in private interpersonal relationships, and when counseling persons in distress over gender, it will often be inappropriate and unhelpful to assert political speech. No one should be harassed for their choices. However, both women have public platforms which they use for talking about gender identity policy and law, and it is not out-of-bounds to criticize an author’s work.

In most social movements, activists have an expectation that prominent persons they believe are in some way affiliated will speak in ways that do not undermine the cause. Sociologist and anti-pornography activist Gail Dines, in a talk on advocating women’s issues in the media, describes a feminist ethic:

Whatever privilege we have that allows us a public voice, we use that voice on behalf of all women who do not have a voice… When you focus on that, ego goes out the door. Fear goes out the door. 

O’Malley has stated that she is not a feminist and perhaps Turner does not consider herself a feminist - although she has written many articles with a feminist bent. Nor is anyone required to speak always on behalf of others and never just for themselves. Neither have any formal obligation to the loosely defined and internally contentious “movement” resisting gender identity policy and law. Nevertheless, it was not unreasonable for women to hope that Turner would make the most of an opportunity to initiate re-normalization of sex-based pronouns on behalf of the larger community.

Because language, despite what O’Malley asserts, does matter. O’Malley contends that 

[A]nybody who fixates on language is generally operating from a coping mechanism… a defense mechanism to avoid often getting into further truths.

Further, focusing on language is “bowing into Judith Butler’s extraordinary conceptual ivory tower.”

Turner, on the other hand, noting Helen Joyce’s observation that “there isn’t a way in which a man can become a woman, except linguistically,” recognizes that “enforcement of pronouns” isn’t “a sideshow, but a key ideological tool.” Language, therefore, is a mechanism for coercing our compliance with the ideology; rebelling against that language is part of our resistance. 

O’Malley appears unable to see the link between the propagation of an ideology and its language with the material manifestation of a social problem. Dansky, in the same interview, points out the linkage, using the example of gender identity indoctrination in schools. But O’Malley insists that those who focus on language want to pretend that the phenomenon of children wishing to be the opposite sex did not exist before the contemporary transgender movement, and that they thereby “falsify” her experience. She didn’t know the language of transgender ideology as a child, yet still wished to be a boy. Although she briefly gives a nod to the notion of “social contagion,” social influences are not central to her analysis.

O’Malley’s position is perplexing because, although she recognizes an exponential growth in trans-identifying children, she waves away the importance of language and ideology, calling for us to focus primarily on the material harm of pediatric medical transition. Her discussion in the interview cited above seems to suggest she is arguing that gender identity is innate; yet her GenSpect website FAQ’s state:

 [M]any contemporary ideas about the transgender phenomenon derive from the theory of gender identity, a belief system which posits that every one of us has an invisible, unprovable and unfalsifiable gender identity. We simply don’t believe that the case for gender identity has been made.

What, then, is producing the phenomenon of the transgender child?

Born in the 1950s, raised in a blue collar, traditional Catholic family, I grew up knowing a number of young women, confronted with the gender norms of that era, who quietly wondered whether they ought to have been, or even wished they were, a boy. They surveyed the gendered path they were expected to walk and didn’t like what they saw. As they matured, they came to realize that they didn’t actually wish to be the opposite sex, but rather that they wished to have the opportunities, privileges, freedom from uncomfortable clothes, and so on, that boys enjoyed. Like O’Malley, many have expressed relief that gender identity ideology was not around in their day, else they might have made medical decisions they later regretted.

O’Malley has said that she is not a feminist; that feminism does not “actually bring in the human psyche in a way that satisfies me.” But feminists have made useful psychological analyses that are relevant to the contemporary gender identity landscape. One of the earliest was Karen Horney (1885-1952), the first woman trained in Freudian psychology. Freud theorized that females were jealous of males because they had penises and sought to remedy this lack by having male children. Horney argued that women did not desire actual penises, but rather that the penis was a symbol of the social status and privileges conferred on men that women desired. Like Horney, many second-wave feminists analyzed the sexist assumptions of psychological theory and the role of female oppression in the social production of “mental health” issues among women.

Language expresses the organizing ideas of a culture and shapes the way we think. This is why every social movement is attentive to the language used to frame their issues. Dansky uses what she calls “sex accurate” pronouns in legal documents she writes because:

I want the judges who are going to be reading that brief to understand what's going on here. If I'm talking about a man being housed in a women's prison I want it to be very clear; I want them to understand that we're talking about men in women's prisons. I want them to understand that we're talking about men in women's sports. I want them to understand that we're talking about men in women-only places of public accommodation… I worry that if I compromise on the use of pronouns that the judges will just be confused because they are not immersed in all of this stuff about sex and gender.

O’Malley calls Dansky’s approach

quite condescending… to think that normies or judges or whoever else won't understand if you start with this is a man… they were born as a male and now, by way, I'm going to go on and call them something else.

Dansky, however, is on solid ground here. The classic example is being told not to think of an elephant - and then being unable to get the image of an elephant out of one’s mind. Second-wave feminists understood this when they advocated for language changes such as using the term “firefighter” in lieu of “fireman” because the latter calls to mind the image of a male, and they wanted people to be able to envision women as firefighters. In a long legal document, even among judges who understand gender identity issues, it’s not unreasonable to think that using female pronouns could create confusion, even if one announces at the beginning that one is referring to males.

O’Malley claims that using female pronouns for a male is not a problem for her, as she “can hold two thoughts at one time,” though she does allow that other people’s brains might find it difficult.

The people who get incredibly exercised about pronouns might be of a brain, or a mindset, or a a way of thinking, that falls in with the sex of the person once the pronoun is used… I don’t get any brain ache if I think of a trans woman and I use “she/her” and I know he's a man.

But cognitive dissonance is a real thing for most people, and in the case of gendered pronouns, there are political implications. Max Robinson, author and detransitioned woman, observes:

During my time in transgender circles, I found that committing myself to using whatever pronouns someone asked for, even in my own mind, gradually eroded my understanding of who perpetrates misogyny and who benefits from it, as well as making it impossible to define ‘lesbian’ in a meaningful way. Juggling extremely counterintuitive systems of pronouns expended intellectual processing power I now instead use for my own thoughts.²

Language and pronouns are not trivial concerns, else why would so much energy be expended re-educating and policing us into trans-mandated usage at work, in schools, and on social media? Most women do not have the option to openly transgress the dogma without serious economic and social repercussions. Women who express frustration when those with the option choose not exercise it, are not the ones “compelling” anyone’s speech. The “compelling” is from the side that is enforcing a sexist ideology that has far-reaching political implications.

1. Should We Stop Using the Language of Gender? and Have the Gender Critical Feminists Gone Too Far?

2. Robinson, Max. Detransition: Beyond Before and After. 2021. Spinifex Shorts, AU.