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 Peg's
Polemic
Every
month, philosopher Peg Tittle casts off the calm, measured and qualified
style of her profession to deliver her opinionated and impassioned
column, exclusively for the TPM philosophy café...
Number
10. An
Apartheid of Sex
I'm
in this world, okay, and the people identify each other by sex.
All the time. No kidding. It's like 'Female Person McVie' and 'Male
Person Steinberg' or 'Person-with-Uterus McVie' and 'Person-with-Penis
Steinberg', I don't know the exact translation. But sex-identity
is a mandatory prefix. They distinguish males from females. Before
they do anything else.
It
bothers me. It irritates me. It pisses me off. I mean, what's so
goddamned special about my sex that it has to be part of my name?
Surely my values, my interests, my abilities, my character - these
aspects define my self more than my sex does.
And
anyway shouldn't I be the one to decide what parts of my
self are important enough to be part of my name? Maybe I want to
be identified by my ovaries, but maybe I want to be identified by
my occupation. Hell, maybe I want to identified by my blood type.
The
thing is, they consider it polite. Polite! To draw such relentless
attention to details of my anatomy! In fact, they think that to
call someone just by their name, without the penis/uterus prefix,
is rude. So it's really hard to say anything. And it's even harder
to do anything. I mean, I tried just saying "Dave" one time and
everybody turned and stared at me. No kidding. I tried to hold my
ground, but I heard myself say "Sorry, I mean, 'Penis Person Steinberg'."
And everybody smiled with relief.
I
even tried variations once. I thought if I loosened up the custom
a bit, it'd be easier to get rid of it altogether. Sort of like
food that's dried onto dishes you haven't washed in a week.
Anyway,
next time I put on my best smile and said "Dickhead Steinberg".
Everybody turned and stared. Worse than last time. Again, I found
myself saying "Sorry, I meant 'Penis Person, Male Person, Steinberg'."
Surely
this can't be good, this obsessive marking of sex, this insistent
separating of human beings into male and female. Talk about paving
the superhighway to sex discrimination. I wanted to shout "Look,
it's not like it has to be this way!" Why not just call people
by their names, 'Dave' or 'Mary'. Too familiar for the formality-prone.
Then use their surname, 'Steinberg' or 'McVie'. Too rude for the
etiquette-addicted. How about an all-purpose sex-neutral prefix
like 'Doctor' but without the professional implications; how about
just 'Person' - 'Person Steinberg' and 'Person McVie'. As for the
pronoun problem, they already have a sex-neutral pronoun: 'it'.
But, stupidly, it's reserved for animals. Go figure. In their world,
animals are accorded the respect of a sex-free identity,
but people aren't.
(Thanks
to Martine Rothblatt - The Apartheid of Sex, NY: Crown Publishers,
1995 - for the title.)
Peg's
Polemic will next be updated at the beginning of mid-September 2001
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