Making Fashion Illegal

I was regularly but only intermittently misgendered as a child. My brothers and sisters likewise. There is a simple reason for this. Our mother was a Finn.

The whole gender and pronouns mania that has engulfed the world over the last ten years or so is the result of the fact that the Finnish language does not differentiate between ‘he’ and ‘she’. Finnish is an old language, older than most European languages, and has an older type of gender system, similar to that of the native American languages. In this system, rather than having three genders – masculine, feminine and inanimate – there are only two: animate and inanimate. So my mother, despite having spoken English at home for decades, could never quite get the hang of ‘he’ and ‘she’, in just the same way that most English speakers can never quite get the hang of gendered nouns in French or Spanish.

It didn’t mean anything. She knew which of us were boys and which were girls. Pronouns are entirely meaningless. The clue is in the name: pro-nouns. They stand for nouns. They are just placeholders.

The connection with the gender madness is not that complicated, but it does involve another country, namely Finland’s neighbour, Sweden. Swedish is not related to Finnish and has a different gender system. It is one with a peculiar technical problem when it comes to its pronouns.

Swedish has similar pronouns to English: han, hon, det are he, she, it. But the problem is that Swedish nouns have lost their genders. This is a long process, but it has become more like English in that nouns for things that have no sex have joined together into what is known in Swedish as ‘common gender’. So it is sometimes not clear which pronoun to use, and - as in English - there is a natural tendency to use a masculine pronoun.

In the mid-1960s there had been a discussion among Swedish linguists about adding a new gender-neutral pronoun, as in some cases ‘det’ (it) would not be appropriate – as in English. ‘It’ is not acceptable for a person claiming some invented gender, for example, as ‘it’ is dehumanizing. The suggestion died away, but many people knew vaguely that there was some such idea in the air. Then in 1994 the idea was revived by another linguist, Hans Karlgren, and Karlgren was an expert on Finnish. So he made a more immediate suggestion: why not adopt the Finnish gender-neutral 3^rd person singular pronoun hän to cover the difficulty?

Finnish and Swedish pronunciation being different, this was simplified to hen. However, the situation had changed. Sweden was now awash with feminism, and so this time round it was feminists rather than language professors who seized on the idea. Yes! A tool to smash the patriarchy!

Many feminists have an embarrassing problem with male children. Germaine Greer, for example, a well-known and likeable feminist, had a son, but consistently referred to him as ‘my child’ rather than ‘my son’. Admitting to adding to the ranks of the enemy was clearly a bit distasteful. In Sweden, however, it was primary education that faced this issue. Most primary school teachers were women, and therefore (in the Sweden of the 1990s) dedicated feminists. Erasing the differences between boys and girls was an obvious aim, sex being a social construct etc. etc. so here was a valuable weapon.

Thirty years later it clearly hasn’t worked. Schoolteachers, journalists, academics and so on immediately started to adopt the new pronoun, but you can’t just decide to change the way people speak. An example that occurred to me is this. Imagine a Christian cult of some kind that encouraged people to go about in groups of three to emulate the Trinity. In this cult, a new pronoun is introduced: throu. This is ‘you’, but only used with groups of three people. It would be easy enough to introduce it within the cult, and depending on the respectability of the cult, some people outside might use it as well occasionally. But the chances of it catching on in general use would be zero.

This is exactly the situation with ‘hen’ in Swedish. It’s easy to learn, those committed to erasing sex differences still use it, everybody knows about it, but it is not part of natural language, is not used by the general population, who rightly see it as feminist jargon, and it looks as if it will eventually die out when the wind changes.

But now that it had acquired the status of a feminist weapon, the absurd pronoun activism was internationalized. It is now the curse of teachers throughout the English-speaking world, where in addition to learning the names of the members of each new class, you are supposed to learn their pronouns as well, an exercise in pointlessness worthy of Jonathan Swift. It didn’t make any difference to me that my mother would sometimes refer to me as ‘she’, and it won’t make any difference to any student or teacher if they are accidentally or even deliberately misgendered by pronoun.

But now there is a fresh force to contend with, more powerful even than feminism: fashion.

Trump’s new Executive Orders include, bizarrely, a position on gender. There are only two sexes, apparently. They cannot be changed. Well, everybody knows that already of course, but pronouns clearly can be changed, and it is fashionable to do so. The fashionable, indeed, are already up in arms about this.

In Singapore, the 1960s fashion for long hair on men was made subject to a government ban, with long-haired men being picked up by the police, fined, and either told to get their hair cut or hauled off to have it cut for them. Did it work? It worked for a while. The Bee Gees and Led Zeppelin cancelled gigs in Singapore in the 1970s. But it eventually failed and was abandoned.

Mini-skirts, tattoos, piercings… Every large-scale new fashion attracts conservative opposition. In Japan, tattoos for women are not fashionable, because they make you look like a gangster’s moll. But even that is a fashion. The need to be fashionable - to obey the dictates of fashion - trumps everything else in a world that runs on competitive consumerism, and will presumably also trump Trump.

With about 25% of American high school kids identifying as LGBTQ, this is a fashion juggernaut. Trying to legislate against it is like suggesting that women shouldn’t wear trousers. It is true that the kids are encouraged in their fashion choices by staff – especially school administrators – who reward them with approval for announcing some new pronoun choices or whatever it is, but like all youth fashion, it is essentially bottom-up rather than top-down. The feminists who started all this have found themselves re-branded as TERFs in career suicide unless they are prepared to bow down to teenage fashionistas who have learnt to smell blood in the water and are ready for mass assaults on unbelievers. If the grown-ups turn against them due to new government guidelines (which may happen in some Trump Country areas), does anyone seriously believe that this is going to discourage them?