Will Sweden abolish the concept of gender?

Quite exciting, not least in view of our recent discussions on gender. I’m glad there is a country on earth that is conducting this experiment. I’d like to know what Peg Tittle thinks.

But if gender is abolished, it might mean the eventual end of war as well, and we wont be able to kill and maim people in third world countries anymore.

@Intomorrow
Do not worry, women are perfectly willing and able to wage war, and even approve mass infanticide of their little enemies (http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1084). So, equality triumphs in this department.

This Swedish idea is the typical desperate, useless move of a centralized political administrations with little or no contact with social reality. If people needed an extra pronoun, language would mutate spontaneously, and linguistic agents would start innovating their vocabulary by themselves. For example, if gender dimorphism decreased dramatically in a certain community, or if enough hermaphroditic individuals appeared - surely language would mutate accordingly. Yes, political authorities can change language by decree (but not on the lung run, of course) - but they just cannot change reality.

Besides - “480-day parental leaves — of which 60 days are reserved for dads.” Sounds not very equal to me. Unless we let dads stay home for at least 240 days. This is a typical symptom of how these policies are constantly struggling with preexisting, and often unchangeable, real structures. Anomalies like this can be found everywhere.

My question is - is it functional and ethical to force changes on some linguistic structure, a structure that everybody uses, only to please a gender confused minority? My answer is : no, it is neither functional, nor ethical.

One might use the metaphor of a building to refute my thesis. It is definitely ethical to change the structure of a building, to make it accessible to a small minority of handicapped people on wheelchair. Yes, this is not an economically efficient allocation of resources. It is not functional. However, the ethical side overrides other possible evaluations. 

But with gender is different. By changing language, we are not removing social, biological barriers for transsexuals, hermaphrodites, homosexuals. We are just pleasing a small minority of intellectually unsatisfied activists, with some kind of self-rejection syndrome, who want to express their Wille zur Macht on everyone else.

“But with gender is different. By changing language, we are not removing social, biological barriers for transsexuals, hermaphrodites, homosexuals. We are just pleasing a small minority of intellectually unsatisfied activists, with some kind of self-rejection syndrome, who want to express their Wille zur Macht on everyone else.”

André, do you actually have any evidence for this or are you just ranting? More importantly, do you have any evidence that the Swedish initiative is likely to do actual harm? If so that would certainly dampen my enthusiasm for it. Otherwise you just give the impression (to me, at any rate) of being prejudiced against political administrations and intellectual elites, which I find rather annoying. Surely you can do better than that.

@Peter
“André, do you actually have any evidence for this or are you just ranting?”

The burden of proof falls on the agent promoting the innovation. This is a universal principle, widely applied in courts all over our planet. Those who want to introduce a new pronoun should demonstrate its usefulness, not those who are skeptical about it. And of course these innovators cannot prove anything. And for one very important, yet simple, reason. Nobody has a complete theory of the human behavior - I repeat, nobody. Clark Hull once baldly stated that his understanding of the human behavior was so complete that, one day, behaviorist psychologists will be able to tell precisely how long a certain subject till take to pick up the phone. He failed. We cannot predict accurately - I repeat, we cannot predict accurately - how each human organism will react to a certain stimulus, especially to a certain linguistic stimulus. So, artificial changes in a linguistic structure do not entail predictable results. In other words, Swedish linguistic innovators cannot possibly demonstrate the usefulness of their decisions. Why should I be the one providing (impossible) evidences?

“More importantly, do you have any evidence that the Swedish initiative is likely to do actual harm? “
No I do not. nobody can prove such a thing. Of course, first we should define the kind of “harm” we are talking about. But, I want to be more forthcoming. I lay my cards on the table. I endorse completely Hayek’s epistemological conclusions - in particular his ideas about artificial, monocephalous, interventions on spontaneous, complex, natural mechanisms. He dealt with these issues in great detail, so I recommend you to take a look to his work. You can review his demonstrations and his arguments - so I do not have to repeat them here. He concludes that such interventions cannot but cause harm, because they disturb a precarious, emergent structure - a structure created by a myriad of individual interactions, a structure that essentially defies complete comprehension. In other words, such interventions cannot possibly deliver the goals that promoted them - not only they lack justification, they will surely deliver unexpected, dysfunctional results. This is the theoretical basis of my rejection of Swedish linguistic policies.

“Otherwise you just give the impression (to me, at any rate) of being prejudiced against political administrations and intellectual elites, which I find rather annoying.”
And you give the impression of being prejudiced in favor of any unjustified political intervention on our everyday dimension (which, however, I do not find particularly annoying). I lay again my cards on the table - this time, my moral cards. I take violence and coercion very seriously. I do not like them one bit, and I know very well how every human who ever suffered their administration did not like such experiences. However, I also know that they are a necessary components of a functional society. Violence and coercion cannot be entirely removed. So I strongly believe that their presence should be limited to the functional minimum in any human group. I do not care how high and noble is the goal behind bio-political interventions (I take this term from Foucault, I recommend you also to review his analysis on “bio-politics” - it is extremely insightful). If they are not justified with very, very urgent and cogent motivations - I reject them entirely. The toll that violence takes is too high. We cannot allow its expansion - because, yes, it has the natural tendency to expand, little by little, for a number of anthropological reasons.

The political manipulation of natural languages, in the form of an innocent new pronoun, or of punishments for linguistic transgressions (see hate speech laws) increase the level of violence in a given society. It cannot be avoided. Those who promote the change must enforce it somehow on the population. An obligation without a sanction - is just a laughable suggestion. And we are talking about everyday human routine here - about how we use words, how we relate to one another. I cannot tolerate any political structure with this kind of pervasive power.

So, concluding, it is really misleading to interpret my words as populist rants against egg-heads and freaky bureaucrats. So I repeat my question - is it FUNCTIONAL and ETHICAL to force changes on some linguistic structure, a structure that everybody uses, only to please a certain minority? I remind that this minority cannot not made of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals. All the homosexuals I know want to be “discriminated”, etymologically speaking. And I have reasons to believe this is not merely an anecdotal accident. They want to be seen as women - or, in case of lesbians, men. They do have a gender, a sexual identity inside of them struggling to emerge. Surely they would not want to be seen as sexless social units. So, who are we really helping with such policies? Cui prodest?

@André

Seriously? Gay men want to be seen as women, and gay women want to be seen as men? Certainly not the ones I know!

I don’t promise to read Hayek, since I fear I would find it an annoying waste of time. My initial reaction to your summary of his conclusions is that the alleged separation between “artificial” interventions and his “precarious, emergent structure” is false. On the contrary, the emergent structure that we call civilisation includes within it administrations and their “artificial” interventions, and they play an essential role. So his thesis is based on false premises.

Of course it is possible that my view might change if I familiarised myself more thoroughly with his work, but currently I believe this is too unlikely for it to be worth bothering (not least since I have other priorities in any case). And one reason why I think it is unlikely is that Hayek’s ideas have been quite well tested in practice, and my assessment of their effectiveness is as we have discussed previously (with regard to liberalism generally): they have played an important role, but are less effective in their pure form than when nuanced and refined by social democratic ideas.

In the mean time, many non-English speaking linguistic groups regulate their language. This is not violence or coercion (for heaven’s sake), it is a form of standardisation. Some prefer to do it via government, others via the Oxford English Dictionary. Obviously, of a politically decreed language becomes too far removed from common usage it becomes useless or divisive (which is why, for example, the socialists decided to change the official Modern Greek language from Katharevousa to the more popular Dimotiki in the 1980s). But equally well some kind of standardisation is essential, and when it’s done by governments it has the added advantage that it allows for experimentation for agree political ends…as part of the precarious, emergent structure that we call civilisation.

André, it’s not that I have a problem with ideology, but we need to take ALl of them -including liberalism - with a pinch of salt, particularly when they are making falsifiable claims. And when they are not, we should accept that they are ultimately nothing more than aesthetic preferences, like my own preferred utilitarianism.

I have to presume you had some kind of traumatic experience in the past in connection with classic liberalism. Maybe at school you repeatedly faced an unpleasant bully dressed in a t-shirt with Adam Smith’s face on. I cannot understand otherwise how can you be so firmly dismissing it as a “waste of time”. Anyway, I was only giving you a suggestion for an interesting reading. Not demanding you to take a bath into a sacred text. You have other priorities? Good for you.

But - let us leave for a moment liberalism aside.

Can you just list me the possible benefits of adding a neutral pronoun to identify people?

It would also interesting to read from homosexual, or transsexual readers of ieet whether or not they would like be identified as genderless.

While I’m all for freeing people from the constraints of unnecessary social categories, I’m just as excited about the grammatical implications. I can’t tell you how many times I cursed the English language for its lack of a gender non-specific singular 3rd person pronoun. “He/she” is terrible, so I feel compelled to spend time thinking up a work-around. It makes no sense to have such a gaping hole in our language.

I prefer your comments on the other thread, André. As far as this one is concerned, I suggest you re-read my previous comments and ask yourself where I said that liberalism is a waste of time. As you said on the other thread these discussions are important, so let’s try to conduct them in a respectful and intelligent way.

With regard to your question I refer you to the long discussion we had in response to Peg Tittle’s Mr and Ms thread. I have no intention of repeating the same arguments here.

But since you want a list, here is a list of some of the personal drivers of my distaste for naïve (especially economic) liberalism (no bullies with Adam Smith T-shirts, sorry): coming of age in the UK during the Thatcher years, a decade and a half of policy-making at the European Commission, and the damage the current austerity obsession (which is closely linked to the neoliberal backlash against Keynesian economics that has dominated policy over the last few decades) is wreaking on people’s lives, not least the jobless youth.

“Maybe at school you repeatedly faced an unpleasant bully dressed in a t-shirt with Adam Smith’s face on. I cannot understand otherwise how can you be so firmly dismissing it as a ‘waste of time’ “

On the contrary, Hayek’s sort is excessively clear: reduce everything to the free market and we would in fact be more prosperous; yet you know how the majority of men are too rebellious to be cogs in a machine. Also (re Sakharov and the Soviet Union) the free market is impotent against alienation and criminality, so for instance since corruption is top down and violence is bottom up (e.g. Fascism and Communism derived from the bottom) the free market may be the only way to go; economically it sure is the only way—but ethically it doesn’t ‘solve’ our major problems and may exacerbate them. Are problems ever solved, or do people merely die off? what Keynes said in discussing ultimate problems in economics comes to mind: “well, eventually we all die”. Or at least that is how it has been up till now.
IMO all our ‘systems’ are dissipative structures if they can even be deemed structures in the first place.

@Michael Bone
You and me both. André might prefer to dismiss this as the concern of an intellectual activist minority, but it’s a pervasive problem, and it has practical implications, not least with regard to discrimination. If such pronouns existed in the English language I would happily use it for myself, interchangeably with the masculine ones, according to whether I felt my male gender was germane to the discussion/document or not. André seems to be quaintly traditional on these matters.

@Intomorrow
“IMO all our ‘systems’ are dissipative structures if they can even be deemed structures in the first place.”

Indeed, and the reason they sustain themselves is that they succeed in exporting enough entropy to maintain (and even increase) their internal structure. Not because bureaucrats keep their noses out of decision-making. Like I say, liberalism has played an essential and in many ways positive role in history, but André‘s devotion to it is problematically religious.

@Andre: Your insistence that the proponents of this legislation demonstrate conclusively that this legislation would be beneficial (which, by your own definition/admission, would require a complete understanding of human nature and hence impossible) is an absurd distortion of commonly accepted standards of evidence. We have substantial literature demonstrating how preconceptions of what the “proper” roles for certain genders affect how we treat people (the very fact that I have to explicitly bring this into the discussion is a testament to the intricate mental gymnastics you are apparently engaged in, in order to deny the obvious). The severity of this tendency can run the gamut from using different baby-talk styles for babies in differently colored clothes, to mutilating the genitalia of intersexed infants/children in order to force a clearer place in the gender dichotomy. For someone who (I presume) subscribes to the notion of individual liberty, you sure are defending a pretty liberty-limiting institution.

I of course think this is fantastic news!  I am convinced language DOES affect our behavior, our attitudes.  I believe that if we were still using ‘policeman’ etc, women wouldn’t be as accepted in such positions as they are (which is, admittedly, still not as accepted as men, but I think it would be worse if we were still calling them policemen rather than police officers). 

I want to move to Sweden.

@Peter
“As you said on the other thread these discussions are important, so let’s try to conduct them in a respectful and intelligent way.”

Now, I honestly do not think I have been disrespectful. If I offended you with joke about Adam Smith, obviously I am sorry. It was meant to be a lighter diversion. Maybe, yes, I have not been intelligent enough - but I cannot really do much about my cognitive abilities.
On the other hand, I have to say that I frankly found your responses to my interventions quite outside the “ethics of discourse”. I am sure you understand that one might soon lose any wish to articulate his views in certain circumstances. When the interlocutor suggests immediately that I am just ranting, that my words trigger annoying impressions, and, then, that following my literary suggestion would result in an annoying wast of time - well, I tend to be become less comprehensive and forthcoming. That said - I insist that I believe I never crossed the line of respectfulness. Do not take this as a reproach or worse. But, since I like debating with you, I wanted to give a motivation for my anomalous tone.

@Intomorrow
“On the contrary, Hayek’s sort is excessively clear: reduce everything to the free market and we would in fact be more prosperous;”

I was not referring to Hayek’s economical suggestions. As I stated quite clearly, I mainly endorse his epistemological research. I made that joke only to react to Peter’s wish to reduce me to some kind of political acolyte of liberalism - while, here, I quite openly associated my ethical analysis to Michel Foucault’s reflections on biopolitics. Yes, that French, communist pederast. So much for a quaint defender Smith’s dogmas. Anyway, irrelevant personal notes aside, I am not sure really all political, economical structures are equally dissipative. There are differences. And if I can avoid to live in a place where the wrong sound from my mouth might cost me imprisonment and torture - see Turkey and Kurdistan - well, I am definitely happier. I honestly do not think Sweden will ever arrive to that. However, is bad enough to puzzle those poor Swedes who will have to fill forms containing unexpected linguistic mutations.

@SHaGGGz
Sorry but I just do not know what to reply to your comment. I think we are on two different wavelengths. If you refer to my arguments as “intricate mental gymnastics”, probably there is no use in better explaining myself. Especially after you bafflingly assumed that my theoretical position entails gender specific clothes and genital mutilation. You think that political interventions should not questioned? You think that those you attained to legislative power do not have to bother justifying their choices before skeptics? Well, good luck. Only, prey that your interests and those of the legislators coincide.

“Foucault… that French, communist pederast”

If you leave out the pederasty, whither is the reward for being a French Communist?
Sorry, I didn’t know, or pay attention, to Hayek’s having done epistemological research- it’s akin to hearing about Sartre writing plays or something as a hobby: it isn’t the first thing coming to mind when his name is mentioned.

... um, communist, not Communist; after the election in France yesterday, we’d better be careful.

@André

It wasn’t the joke about Adam Smith that offended me, it was the fact that you seemed to have completely ignored and/or misinterpreted my previous comment. I do understand that my response to your initial comment on this thread was somewhat provocative, but - since I also like debating with you - let me similarly clarify my motivation for this “anomalous tone”. I did find your comment annoying, in part because I found it a disappointingly churlish reaction to what I still think is a very promising initiative. And I do find your commitment to liberalism excessive. These debates can become boring if we don’t occasionally get on each other’s nerves, especially if we are tending to stick doggedly to relatively static positions. Of course we are all guilty of that, to some extent, but it’s important also to be prepared to question some of our most deeply-held beliefs, is it not?

@Andre: No, the baby swaddling and genital mutilation served as examples of the range of such lengths our society has gone/does go to to conform to the static gender dichotomy. And no, I never said political interventions should not be questioned, but merely pointed out that your standard of evidence for these measures to be acceptable, impossible to meet by your own very admission, are an absurd distortion of what typically pass for standards of evidence.

@Peter
“Of course we are all guilty of that, to some extent, but it’s important also to be prepared to question some of our most deeply-held beliefs, is it not?”
I am a natural born skeptic, so - I have no difficulties in questioning anything, including classic, or contemporary liberalism. As I stated above, in my paragraph about keeping the level of violence as low as possible, I have a strong preference for certain moral principles behind classic liberalism. That said, I really do not care for the economical framework inside which those principles can be found. Contemporary European austerity, for example, gives me the shivers as well. Not because I am a Keynesian, or because I believe that public administrations should just keep spending, no matter their already gargantuan deficits. I oppose this austerity because you just cannot enforce such policies on the population, without - at the same time - intervening drastically against ALL cartels, monopolies, and sector-specific special grants. This is the recipe for a disaster, or better said - for a recipe for a transfer of wealth from the general population to the banking sector and its creditors. But this is off-topic. I apologize everyone for the digression.

About comparing speech laws and dictionaries or standard grammar text - I remind you that nobody can force anyone to speak according to linguistic standards. No punishment involved. Dictionaries describe - not prescribe. So, languages change, evolve, mutate - and dictionaries too. What yesterday was an illiterate mistake, today is the praxis. You put a political intervention in this process - and you linguistic structures will freeze according the local balance of powers. This happened many times. And it is never for the best. 
I address your attention to the Italian language - an entirely artificial language, created, at first, to support the unified monarchic bureaucracy that resulted from Savoia’s expansionism, and then to straighten national unity after WWI and WWII. Now, because of its artificial nature, it did not work too much so far. I can honestly tell you that, in Italy, almost nobody speaks Italian (at least, in its authentic, correct form). It sounds like an exaggeration, but many Italians can confirm my surprising claim. Large regions of my country host people who can only speak the local dialect (which is typically far from the national standard), and in other - more rural - areas, you can find many individuals who do not even understand the national language. One implication for this surrealist scenario is that, somehow, many intellectual professions in Italy exist mainly to mediate between the incomprehensible language of local administrations and regular citizens. This means that an artificial language imposes huge costs on the population, it hampers prosperity, innovation - and forces everyone to submit to linguistic authorities.

In Sweden, the artificial bit is one, single pronoun - but the principle behind the intervention is the same. Political control of language. What kind of society is this change promoting? A society where people are productive/consuming units, devoid of sexual characterization. A society where - you should appear genderless, in a number of contexts. To me, this is very preoccupying. You should now that political control of sexual expressions is one of the most fundamental strategies of hierarchical, static, social structures. I still wonder - cui prodest?

Besides, I really think experiments should be confined to labs, and inanimate objects. No matter how interesting.

@André
About your Italian example, the real question is whether Italy would be better off, or worse off, without its “artificial” language. Do you seriously think it would be worse off? I don’t.

“Besides, I really think experiments should be confined to labs, and inanimate objects. No matter how interesting.”

Heisenberg would have disagreed: merely observing in a lab today changes the world outside eventually. As for the topic, it doesn’t bother me if men were to become effeminate by word or deed; however if the hidden fear is “men without chests” (Chesterton was the author’s appropriate name), if the fear is men wont be lumberjacks, steelmill workers, construction guys, etc., what does it say about postindustrialism? that it is still heavy on the industrialism, light on the post?           

Besides, real-world experimentation is an essential part of policy development. André should also bear in mind that this is a decision taken by an administration accountable to a democratically-elected government. If the Swedes don’t like it they have ways to protest, and of they don’t mind, who are we to complain? We should reserve our ire for Merkel and the IMF lecturing Greece as if it is some kind of miscreant. Their hypocrisy is truly nauseating.

@Intomorrow
Good points about the remarkable frequency of French communists - and Hesienberg. My fear however is not about the breakdown of traditional, sexual stereotypes. Actually, I cannot wait till wearing a skirt will become socially acceptable also for us, western men, I am sick tired of pants. My fear is about how these cultural changes will take place, and how political power today hijacks them only according to the interest of few individuals.

@Peter
You are very right about democratic procedures, I agree - of course. Swedes are perfectly able to revert this linguistic innovation - if they will not want to. But I was only expressing my personal evaluation on the subject. I did not say that - now Swedes are doomed to be linguistically manipulated by the evil elites.
And about Italy and artificial languages - I am not even sure that Italy should exist, as one, single nation, in the first place. Probably, we would all be much better off on this peninsula if three of four central administrations existed - instead of the single one we have now. They are speaking for decades about the creation of a federal republic - but, I guess, still too many are suckling from the Capitoline Wolf.

Re Italy, please God not another EU Member State that is thinking of fissioning. That would be a big distraction. What we need is a Europe of solidarity, whose administrations - at European, national, and sub-national levels - actually serve the genuine aspirations of the people they are supposed to represent. Currently the glass is half full: we’ve come a long way since feudalism and war, but we can do much, much better. I might write an article along these lines shortly.

Please do write the piece, Pete; though the fissioning may have a purpose: to keep the Russians from meddling and the Germans from dominating—they are the Big Two.

“My fear is about how these cultural changes will take place, and how political power today hijacks them only according to the interest of few individuals.”

Andre’, I worry about the above too- but from paranoia. It appears worrying about that which you can do something about is concern; worrying about that which you can have a minuscule or nonexistent impact on is paranoia (I know, I do it all the time). BTW, Giulio is correct on the negatives of bureaucracy yet to evolve past bureaucracy involves such a lengthy timeframe it is unimaginable. It is comparable—and related to—to evolving beyond war, beyond religion, beyond crime.
The difference between Giulio and I is though we grew up in the same era, he can more readily adapt to changing circumstances: the recurrent mistake I make is attempting to discern patterns where none exist. Do you ever do the same, Andre’?

@Peter
I cannot wait to read your piece on the evolution of European institutions - and centralization too, I suppose. I am already curious. 
Anyway, I am not the personification of Italy. So, if I say that Italy should fission, it does not mean that Italy itself wants this outcome. Yes, there are several movements that demand local independence, secession, and so on - but they have still little influence.

I do not see anyway a mutual incompatibility between the multiplication of sovereign territories and the participation to the European Union.

“I do not see anyway a mutual incompatibility between the multiplication of sovereign territories and the participation to the European Union”

Encouraging.

@Intomorrow

Probably I am really hopeless - but some part of me still hope that I can tell delusions from insights. I would not want to revert the historical evolution of modern bureaucracies. Public administrations do many things. Same are definitely useful. Some useless. And some offices are plain criminal - operating under the protection of oppressive legislations. Alone I can do little about it. But, as Milgram demonstrated, with a little encouragement and a good example, people can rediscover their natural moral resistances, buried deep under layers of conformism, obedience, and respect. I will provide the encouragement - and a few ideas. I hope this save me from being qualified as paranoid. But maybe I am wrong.

“the recurrent mistake I make is attempting to discern patterns where none exist. Do you ever do the same, Andre’?”
I often make the mistake of creating a pattern merely from the informative content of what people say. So, yes, I basically do the same thing. Maybe I am borderline Asperger, who knows? I tend to forget that, often, people say things not to vehicle informations, but to express their desires - or to even impose their biological presence on this planet. So I study language, metaphors, and conceptual strategies - in the vain hope to transcend the immediate mask of our linguistic games. This is also why I immediately jump when I see people bending language to their agenda. Language is already opaque and hypocritical by nature, it is a perfect camouflage - and is very pervasive. A dangerous tool - especially in hands of the local Brahmin caste.