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Walking out of the cinema after seeing ‘He’s Just Not That Into You’, I nod in agreement to my friend’s comments of "that was soooo good", "what a feel good film", but I have a sneaking suspicion I may be lying.
I love political correctness. I really do. I feel safe in the knowledge that racist, sexist or homophobic remarks will not (technically) be tolerated. We are living in a still progressing society. The issue of the pay gap between men and women is still being recognised and protested against, and, despite occasional opposition, gay people can legally secure their rights as a couple. We are, however, far from living in an equal rights Utopia.
The most worrying aspect of modern opinion is that suddenly the term ‘political correctness’ is being used as a shield for astounding bigotry. The defence by people who spout bigoted vile is simply to say that ‘political correctness has gone too far’. The most empowered people in society (i.e. white heterosexual men) can demand that their rights are protected, by labelling the defence of other’s as ‘a step too far’. The comment sections on the Daily Mail website are, obviously, frequently home to such absurdity, with one P.C.-phobe even suggesting that “Political correctness should be made illegal as much as the fraud of racial superiority.” I hope I am not alone in detecting the irony...
In our own University of York, we are seeing it for ourselves. The huge backlash against Peter Warner-Medley’s request for the word ‘sex’ on data response forms to be changed to ‘gender’ seems to stem exactly from this. The most frequent opposition I have heard has been based wholly around the idea that it is just unnecessary. This is the result of people making a big deal about nothing, and it is ‘political correctness gone mad’.
I cannot stand it when lecturers or students use the terms ‘man’ or ‘mankind’, when they could easily substitute this for ‘people’ or ‘humankind’. It is an unnecessary clinging-on to an age gone by when the only people recognised for their contribution to society were male. We are not in that time anymore: move on.
I want to reclaim the word ‘politically correct’, and reuse it as a symbol of the intolerance of bigotry and people hating
Likewise, if we are living in a time (and we are) when some people do not feel comfortable putting their birth sex on a form, unless the answers are needed to research biological differences between men and women, it is simply not a big issue. Men can still let everyone know they are male if they want; women can still let everyone know they are female if they want. Most questionnaires now do feature ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘sex’. More importantly, Facebook does.
Also, if a form asks for a person’s ethnicity, there is always an option of ‘other’, and generally, ‘prefer not to specify’. This is particularly common with questions of age and sexuality. If so, why the surge of resentment towards this particular UGM motion? Possibly, and worryingly, because of a complete fear of change. If the term were in use in the 1800s, I’m sure that some would have applied it to the 1882 Married Woman’s Property Act. Maybe even in 1967, when homosexual sex was finally decriminalised in Britain.
Why, then, should we accept its pejorative usage today? In ten or twenty years time, I feel positive that more people will support the rights of the trans community in labelling, or refusing to label, their own gender. Refusal to accept this now is only reflective of the previous opposition to changes in culture that most today see as right. Nobody else is hurt if a person chooses to not declare a specific gender. Repulsion of such re-wording simply stems from some people refusing to allow others a more comfortable life because of a complete aversion to change and diversity. I want to reclaim the word ‘politically correct’, and reuse it as a symbol of the intolerance of bigotry and people hating. I will quite happily be the first person on here to say that I, Hannah Cann, am politically correct and proud.
"the intolerance of bigotry and people hating"
I find this contradiction quite amusing. Wikipedia says "A bigot is a person who is intolerant of opinions, lifestyles, or identities differing from his or her own" and other sources agree.
Having admitted intolerance, this begs the question of whether you are intolerant of yourself.
I completely agree with the article, but I just thought I'd pick up on something that I get irritated with on the other side:
"I cannot stand it when lecturers or students use the terms ‘man’ or ‘mankind’, when they could easily substitute this for ‘people’ or ‘humankind’. It is an unnecessary clinging-on to an age gone by when the only people recognised for their contribution to society were male. We are not in that time anymore: move on."
Man means "human" and came from an Old English word - the word that we understand to be "adult male" was originally 'wer' or 'were'. It's nothing to do with recognising men as being dominant, just as history doesn't mean "his story" out of a patriarchal dominance but out of the Greek word 'historia' which means "a knowledge through narrative"... I get annoyed that people think it's some sort of big conspiracy when it frankly isn't.
It could be argued that the word now has an underlying dominance but I don't think it is; I would happily use the word 'chairman' to describe a woman and apparently my usage of the word 'actress' is outdated as they are now female actors. I don't see the point in picking on these points when there are much bigger fish to fry!
"Most questionnaires now do feature ‘gender’ as opposed to ‘sex’. More importantly, Facebook does" - rofl! XD
comment deleted by the author "The huge backlash against Peter Warner-Medley’s request for the word ‘sex’ on data response forms to be changed to ‘gender’ seems to stem exactly from this"
This motion was hadly even opposed. The motion that provoked huge backlash was the one about gender-neutral toilets. This entire post is a comment about nothing. You are using arguments against nothing, and you're being proven wrong by the very fact that hardly anyone disagreed with the motion that you are talking about. I'm not going to restart a debate, but if you are to throw accussations around at least know what you're on about.
http://www.tell-york.com
I enjoyed this article. I agree with a lot of it; but not with other bits. But it made me sit and think about the subject matter, which is always a good effect for a blog to have on people, in my personal opinion anyway. So overall, I consider this a very good piece, with some good points: thankyou for your opinions!
Guardian style guide has this to say about political correctness: a term to be avoided on the grounds that it is, in Polly Toynbee's words, "an empty rightwing smear designed only to elevate its user"
Sounds about right, which is surprising given the source used.
#4 - did you not read Nouse?!?!? Many comments were along the line of 'people should get over it'.
I quote -And seriously, changing the word ’sex’ to ‘gender’?! Political correctness or whatever you’d call this is getting way out of hand! (By 'This is Ridiculous).
Political Correctness got way out of hand long before this. It’s basically a minority group making the majority of us conform to their sad ideas that would be laughed at in the real world. (Dan Taylor)
As I’ve said, if a person feels so offended when asked for their sex on a form, changing the form won’t improve anything: that person will still obviously have identity issues, and that person should receive help. (A.Catsambus)
I think people who feel ‘victimised’ and ‘privacy raped’ because they have to fill out the sex on a particular form is ludicrous and am seriously of the opinion that most are just attention-seekers who received a bit of a hard time at school and have this urge to stick 2 fingers up to the ‘big bully of society’. Harsh? No. Just completely and utterly true. (Dan Taylor. Again. )
This is a sample!
#4. What are you on. Loads of people disagreed with changing 'sex' to gender. Even if they didn't vote.
The main point of clash was the motion about gender-neutral toilets. The rest of the motions were hardly discussed. I can imagine that they would not have been discussed at all had it not been for the GNT controversy.
Yet another opinion-piece descending into name-calling. As if the Nouse comments were not enough. This debate is really tiresome and really really depressing..
I can't see name calling - I can see a couple of people (anonymous, unsurprisingly) that suggest there wasn't any controversy over data capture and I can see #8's post that highlights a few examples of people that a) opposed the data capture motion and b) used political correctness as an example. The names were just there to provide the location for the quote for those who wanted to look it up, presumably.
And it's quite key to this argument, really, because the first two quotes directly cite political correctness as being the problem, which is directly related to the argument. Granted, most definitely, that GNTs were the most attacked of the UGMs but that wasn't a 'political correctness' issue but rather one of failing to understand trans issues or not caring about trans issues (i.e. irrelevant to this article)
Jason - I don't really understand your post about Old English derivatives, and doubt your sources. I have my Old English dictionary in my hands and 'wer' refers exclusively to men: 'male being, man, husband, hero' and occasionally 'troop or band'. Perhaps it is more likely that the modern English 'mankind' derives from the Old English 'man' or 'mancynn', words which both had universal meanings. However, one must remember that a universal meaning for the Anglo Saxons did refer to a male dominated culture, hence the other meanings of 'man' refer solely to men (man, brave man, hero). This was a society that valued male-male bonds above all others; the bond between a lord and his retainers was sacrosanct and prized above male-female bonds. Essentially, Anglo Saxon England was a warrior culture. The connotations of a highly male-dominated society are invoked in the modern usage of 'mankind', hence some people's annoyance at its peristant usage over other, more neutral, words.
I don't speak Old English so my knowledge of the etymology of words comes straight from the Oxford English Dictionary - according to them, man meant 'mankind' and wer was the word they used to mean 'man' - if that's wrong, I apologise!
I'm not going to spend my day tracking down the right or wrong answer; what I posted was simply my understanding from having studied Old English a little. But 'wer' does not mean mankind in perhaps the most widely used Anglo Saxon dictionary, nor does it refer to anyone but a man, a role only assumed by a man, or a troop of men. Whether I'm right or you're right about the word is irrelevant really - my point still stands that words that refer to men and also have a universal meaning in Old English are loaded with connotations of a male-dominated society; connotations which are invoked when the word is used in a modern sense and, evidently, offend some people. These words could be replaced easily with more neutral words.
Incidentally, this stand-up by Stewart Lee on political correctness is pretty funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K21e7po1Sro&feature=related
Firstly, my name is Aris Catsambas, not Catsambus. Now, what is the problem with what I said? Why is it presented as negative? Elliot Smith states in Nouse: "it’s wanting a little privacy, wanting not to be reminded about the body that we hate,"
Clearly, if you hate your body, you do need help. I never meant it in a derogatory way. It is a simple fact: if you hate your body, you have a problem. The solution is not to run away from your issues, rather than try to solve them. Once again: I am not saying that being trans is a problem. I am saying that hating yourself is.
In addition, political correctness is not a shield for bigots. Instead, it is used by all sorts of persons to promote unnecessary agendas, and take offence at the slightest of issues (are you really offended when I say mankind rather than humankind?)
A.
There's no need to exaggerate disliking something to being 'offended'. As a female I resent women not being included in the word 'mankind'. I don't feel 'offended'. One doesn't have to be 'offended' to want change to make others more comfortable at no cost to anyone else.
Also, disliking your body because you see yourself as fat is VERY different to not wanting to label yourself as a particular sex. If a person feels like a man, but looks like a woman, or is half-way through a sex change, I think it's understandable to not want to put a 'male' or 'female' on a form. Some people feel that their 'sex' is not that easily defined.
There are areas that have so much more understanding that those including women and, now, transexuals. If there were a word that openly described white people but implicitly implied black people too, people would not use it! That is a good side to being politically correct. If something is potentially offensive to women, it is political correctness gone too far.
Aris, I don't think it's for you to judge the experiences of trans people, or to suggest that a troubled relationship between body and identity is reducible to a mental health issue in every case. Even if you had some personal experience with trans issues, which for some reason I doubt, the trans community is made up of unique individuals who have different experiences and issues that should be respected, instead of others making generalisations and assumptions about their lives.
To some extent, I think the troubled relationship between body and identity that many trans people experience is caused precisely by the societal practices that the motion sought to challenge. Our society clings to a system of binaries wherein people are persuaded that one's sex and one's gender are inextricable, and that one's sex should be supported by attendant gendered stereotypes. This happens from birth, where the baby girl is dressed in pink and the boy is dressed in blue, and pervades our society in instances such as the labelling of toilets. Society tries to suggest that gender and sex can be arranged into neat little categories but, in reality, this division does not so easily exist. There are tomboys, 'butch' women, effeminate men, cross-dressers, transgender and transsexual people as well as many people who simply are not 'typical' man or 'typical' woman. We easily recognise that these differences exist - we probably know someone who matches the above descriptions - yet society, on the whole, is more resistant to trying to change the world to accommodate these differences. What does it take to remove labels off of toilets? Not a lot. So why the problem? We can't cling to the sex/gender binary system forever, it's been outdated for a long time and doens't accurately reflect 'real life' in contrast to Dan Taylor's opinion quoted in one of the posts above.
If anyone feels that the labelling of a toilet couldn't possibly have such an impact on a person's identity, then I urge them to read the introduction to Judith Halberstam's book called Female Masculinity - her delineation of 'the bathroom problem', as it's widely known, is incredibly insightful and shows that the toilet is often a site for the policing of gender differences.
"pervades our society in instances such as the labelling of toilets."
Do you honestly not realise that there are practical reasons for which this is the case? Seriously now?
I am not in way opposing the GNT motion, my only point here is that your argument is absolutely insane.
I can understand why a trangender person may feel uncomfortable by this awkward situation, and that's why some extra provisions need to be put into place. This is why I agree with this very sensible motion, which isn't really asking for much.
But it is purely and simply stupid to suggest that all toilets should be gender neutral, or to claim that it all boils down to an evil society brainwashing us into small behavioural boxes.
Take a moment to consider this simple truth; men pie without needing to sit. If you can't understand the implications of this undeniable fact, then I urge you to start using men's toilets from now on. After a few attempts, let us know if you still think that unlabelling ALL toilets is such a fabulous idea.
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