Joshua Katz on Names, Pronouns, and the Law

uh hello everybody this is the program and constitutional government I'm Harvey Mansfield and our guest today is Joshua Katz a linguist and a classicist as he says a linguist by training and a classicist by profession got a he graduated from Yale got an M Phil at Oxford and a PhD at Harvard um he's presently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he focuses as again he says on higher education language and culture the classical tradition and the humanities in general um to describe him I will quote the headline article that a headline of an article he wrote In The Wall Street Journal Princeton fed me to the cancel cancel culture mob so that's his uh experience that was in May on May 24th uh 2022 so this this is what has happened to him he taught at Princeton from 1998 to 2022 um he's written dozens of articles saying um linguistic issues in in Homer Virgil catelis easier Horus and others he's written one called exercises in while and he knows many languages altogether one could say he's a master of the reckon diet and of non-obvious significance in notable human speech so the title of his talk is names pronouns pronouns and the law so Josh thank you very much you'll notice that Harvey just said so Josh and we're going to come to that in a moment so so uh so look I um it's it's great to be here I'm I'm thrilled to have been invited I'm amazed that you would show up for this because I'm amazed that I'm here I've given something like a dozen talks at Harvard over the years they've been in the Departments of linguistics and the classics and Celtic languages and literatures but the department of government I mean what am I doing here I don't know anything about government I don't know anything about constitutional government well but then I was thinking there actually are some reasons and I give them in one on this very long handout but I promise it's not as bad as it seems I give you some reasons in number one why I'm giving a talk on names pronouns and the law so first of all that Harvard dissertation that Harvey mentioned was in fact about pronouns now it was about pronouns in an entirely different sense from what people mean today when they talk about pronouns I've written a lot about pronouns before and these are highly technical discussions of Indo-European morphology the sort of stuff that even a few years ago even just a few years ago I could talk to non-specialists about and they would start laughing you wrote your dissertation on pronouns what an absurd thing that would be well nobody is laughing and anymore and so I thought well let's expand my knowledge of pronouns and let me talk to you about that the second personal interest that leads to this has to do with the second bullet point there you'll see I have the word Josh and then three little thingies before the word Joshua this is because despite my best efforts to get people to call me Joshua they invariably call me Josh more on that later on here is an example in point not set up and this makes me slightly cross and makes me therefore interested in names third in 2020 in addition to being attacked for all sorts of other things I was attacked for unintentionally misgendering someone which then got me interested in what that might mean and last but not least the law about which I know less than about both names and pronouns well you can't have had what happened to me happen in the past couple of years and not be interested in the law so here we go let me start with names so everybody knows this is number two on the handout everybody knows that names are not like normal nouns so if for example I want to talk about a daisy I can use the word daisy or if I want to talk about the word basket I can use the word basket and all of us have more or less the same understanding of what these nouns mean and if I decide to call a basket a daisy or a daisy a basket that's going to be a real problem because I'm going to do this inappropriately and you're going to say that this is a problem but but what about names so let's just take for example the name Peter if I use the name well hello Peter if I use the name Peter am I referring okay good we've got two of them great am I referring to you am I referring to you am I referring to the Apostle Simon Peter am I referring to Peter Paul rubins am I referring to Peter Thiel what is what is this mean am I referring to my one cousin Peter or my other cousin Peter and and more broadly than is there some notion you probably think not I probably think not of Peter Hood right the way there's some notion of daisyhood or or basket Hood well what do we know about names and meaning so there are plenty of cultures in the world in which names regularly have meaning this is now 2-2 on the handout ours is not such a culture although it's not totally uncommon for names to have quote meaning especially I should say female names so Faith or hope or the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin who is called Apple take for example daisy as in Daisy Buchanan as in The Great Gatsby so when you think about the character Daisy Buchanan it seems to me likely that fleetingly somewhere you imagine daisies I'm not I'm not going to insist on this but it would not be surprising if at some point in the course of reading this book you think oh Daisy Buchanan oh here's a flower now Daisy is married to Tom Buchanan that's short for Thomas and the name Thomas goes back to the Aramaic word for twin I am entirely confident that there is nobody in the world I include professors of Aramaic at Harvard who read The Great Gatsby and when they read about Tom Buchanan think about twins there's obviously a difference between Daisy and Tom in this sense and whether you think of a name like Peter as having to do with the rock like the first pope presumably depends at least to some extent on whether you are Catholic or high Catholic uh or not and of course we could go even deeper just to make a little comment that only linguists will really appreciate the word daisy a thousand years ago was not a word it was a collocation Deus Aya which meant something like the day's eye but once again when you think of either daisies or of Daisy Buchanan you don't think about that sort of thing so that's a little Prelude about names but now three on the handout let me discuss what I consider to be a nominal problem and I mean nominal here in two senses the one is nominal as in having to do with nouns and the other nominal as in maybe it's not actually all that important so first things first and this is going to get back to the whole Joshua Josh question I view it as a basic courtesy to try to get people's names right so let's take the vice president I am no fan of the vice president but the fact is that when people who have heard her first name hundreds and hundreds of times insist on putting the emphasis on the second syllable and saying Kamala uh I I find that really annoying it just seems to me fundamentally rude is it a microaggression is it a macro aggression is it an aggression well I guess that depends on what one thinks about microaggressions so for example I don't know I don't I don't think people should be censured for saying for example America is a Melting Pot and I don't really think people should be censured for saying Kamala but it does seem to me fundamentally rude and that's because and you'll see here in the fine print on the handout I have a few sentences here in parentheses with quotation marks there's a reason for this pay attention to these sentences there's my feeling about this is I have no trouble understanding why a person would wish for his or her personal name to be pronounced more or less correctly but I want to emphasize more or less so if for example you are and here is a another sentence an American called Harry and an Italian calls you Arie because Italian doesn't have the initial sound H it seems to me that if you object you're just being sort of ridiculous as I write here when a reasonable American named Harry here's an Italian call him Ari he will smile rather than object or take for example the German name Mikhail spelled exactly the same way Michael is in English if you're a German uh and you're called Mikhail and an American comes up to you and says hi Michael once again there's a reason for this it's not what I would call a particular aggression so probably you should just smile rather than object but Kamala Kamala that's a sort of different question it's not as though there's some interference that I know of of the Harry Ari Mikhail my cycle type and besides it's very similar to say the name Pamela and as far as I know speakers of English are not routinely going around saying Pamela or anything like that instead so there's every reason to think within English that people ought to say this correctly then there's the case of Josh I could go on about this forever needless to say I'm not going to although at some point I'm going to write a paper about why it is that Josh is different from Pam and Mike and all of those other shortenings it is a fact this really is a fact that over 90 percent of the time if I say to somebody hi I'm Joshua the response is nice to meet you Josh it happens almost every time this doesn't happen with pamelas and pams and Michaels and Mike's it's completely off the charts and there actually is a linguistic reason for it which I'm not going to get into now it's crazy I can I can talk to lawyers I can talk to doctors I can get official letters from the government Josh Josh completely crazy I find this annoying is that illegal well we'll come back to that let me tell you a little more about my family my wife's name is Solvay s-o-l-v-e-i-g she is half of Norwegian Heritage the g at the end is silent if you are not a Scandinavian Heritage you are unlikely to say her name correctly and indeed a few years ago we went to her ancestral country of Norway where she was horrified to discover that her name there is in Solvay is which meant that she's pronouncing her name incorrectly from that point of view okay this is a rabbit hole we could go down this forever she doesn't really care though what people say but her mother one last sentence on the handout here her mother my mother-in-law is k-a-r-i pronounced Kari do not call her Carrie she really does care and last I just have to mention my mother whose name is Mehta her mother was also called Mehta her mother's mother was also called me to thank God we're at the end of that that problem and that I was not a girl and this is a perfectly fine name except that people mispronounce it they say meta they say meta they say Meda and as of last year when Facebook decided to change its name her name is absolutely everywhere and so I all I do every day is read things headlines like meta rolls out more parental controls which even at my age I find extremely alarming okay another let me let me let me be let me be serious here and talk about not a nominal problem but in number four on the handout a pro nominal problem so these sentences that I've uttered let me ring some changes on them four one number one listen closely or read closely when a reasonable American named Harry here's an Italian call her Arie she will smile rather than object or my mother-in-law is Kari pronounced Kari do not call him Carrie He does care you're unlikely I think to be able to process these um there is after all a reason that JK Rowling called Harry Harry and not say uh Hermione you're unlikely to be able to process okay oh you're of course right you how many signs have you heard of the name Josh it's um you know I it is there is a question here of uh of um of whether of whether uh if you're a public figure like that uh you should uh you should I could be whether could she sue me could she sue me as opposed to some minor figure for that okay I will never I will make that mistake again because people do make mistakes but it was unintentional and we will also come back to the question of intention so I'm I'm a bad boy but it was unintentional I was not meaning to offend her fair enough okay so look these sentences one and two are I think very very difficult to process but well first of all um maybe Harry has a penis but identifies as a woman okay this is not the sort of sentence that a few years ago I would have uttered but these days seems to be a perfectly real thing and then there's the second one about my mother-in-law I would say clearly clearly sentenced to there my mother-in-law is Kari do not call him Carrie He does care I I would say that clearly that one is unintelligible because after all I have introduced her as my wife's mother but then again Apple by which I mean the company not the daughter of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin last year put out the Emoji which you can barely perhaps see on the handout of the pregnant man so things have become a little bit more complicated let's ring some more changes for two number one when a reasonable American named Harry here's an Italian call them Ari they will smile rather than object number two my mother-in-law is Kari pronounced Kari do not call them Carrie they do care and number three I have no trouble understanding why a person would wish for their personal name to be pronounced more or less correctly now I am linguistically very conservative for my age for my generation um and I am not particularly fond of the thing at the bottom of the handout namely generic singular they but I know that I use it and indeed there are advantages to using it this is not the moment for me to go into the advantages and the disadvantages of it but that third sentence is not likely to strike most of you as bizarre and most of you I think will probably think it's pretty good after all the generic singular they has the advantages has advantages over the clunky his or her it avoids the sexism of imagining that some person you don't know is necessarily male or for that matter female and sometimes indeed it truly would I quote Brian Garner here be deranged not to use that they but this is very different from the they in those first two sentences sentences like my mother-in-law is Kari do not call them Carrie they do care those are they as gendered singulars with Harry and Corey specifically identified as gender non-binary or non-conforming and you may recall that in 2019 or if you're a linguist you won't have to recall you will know this that in 2019 Merriam-Webster Incorporated who run a major dictionary um called that they the word of the year and I don't need to tell all of you that in Elite circles it is increasingly recommended and in some cases even mandated that people use this for many Americans outside those Elite circles this is somewhere between ridiculous and dangerous so we have a real problem here so what I want to do now is go through a couple of questions things I want you to think about in the time ahead what are the practical moral linguistic and above all legal similarities and differences between names Latin nomina and pronouns Latin pronomina literally in place of of nomina what are the relationships if any between names and pronouns and what is the relationship between assigning names and assigning pronouns so let's talk about assigning names in number five um everybody agrees I think there's no dispute at all that children are in all but extremely unusual cases given their names assigned their names by their parents and furthermore that parents have considerable latitude in determining what those names are now different states have different automatic rules not to mention different countries but by and large the first and 14th amendments are taken to mean that parents have the right to do pretty much whatever they want there are some exceptions in some states many states you can't name your child an obscenity there are also practical matters so some states mandate that the length has to be under I'm now going to make up a number but 250 characters or something like that it appears to be the case although as far as I know nobody's tested it that in Kentucky you can do anything you want but in most states there are some regulations but they're they're very minor things well not entirely so in California for example you cannot use diacritical marks this means by the way that you cannot call your kid Jose with an accent in California that is extremely odd and I have to say not something that I approve of in California you have to use the standard 26 letters you cannot use Arabic numerals you cannot use pictographs you cannot name your kid a smiley face and this came to people's attention in 2020 when the son of Elon Musk and Grimes was born and was assigned the given name X AE ligature a hyphen 1 2 by his parents which hyphens it turns out are allowed in California but you can't have one too and you can't have an AE ligature and so uh Elon Musk and Grimes were forced to change the name of their child to x-a-e-a hyphen x i i um they moved of course to Texas the following year but even had the kid been born in Texas it wouldn't have mattered because Texas has the same rules as California in this particular instance okay now we're going to get to another child of Elon Musk in a second because let's talk about reassigning names five two people are permitted to change their last name when they get married I think everybody agrees with that and pretty much everybody will say that when you reach the age of majority or in some cases even earlier you may legally change your first and other given names different states have slightly different rules but fundamentally unless the reason to change your name is to engage in criminal activity like fraud you're allowed to do pretty much whatever you want so for example in 2004 Elon Musk had a child with his ex-wife Justine Wilson this child turned 18 earlier this year this child was originally called Xavier musk but has now successfully petitioned the court to be called Vivian Jenna Wilson there are countries in which this would not be allowed in Denmark for example you cannot use a conventionally female name for a male or conventionally male name for a female but I think it's fair to say that most Americans won't object to this you might think it's stupid you might not approve of it but you're unlikely I think to think that that should be illegal the real controversy is not the change of Xavier to Vivian so much as the other thing that that child well no longer child petitioned the court to do namely to change gender from male to female and this brings us then to six questions of assigning sex and assigning gender and the question of whether these can even be assigned so two big questions in six one first should people be allowed to change that is to say reassign their gender and you know to answer this we have to know what gender is you can see that that's going to be a problem and you're going to have to agree that gender is in fact changeable and then there's the other question what do we mean by assignment so 6-2 back to names just for a second we grant that parents May assign names but there's nothing about any newborn baby that demands that he or she be given the name Peter or Daisy sorry guys that's just the way it is we also grant that once baby is named Peter and Daisy can decide to call themselves Pete and days or to go by their middle names or for that matter ask they'll probably not demand that others call them say Jack and Jill and now I put a word a very important word on the handout in bold respectively so Peter can ask the seemingly seemingly not demand that people call him Jack and Daisy can ask but presumably not demand that people call her Jill but it seems to be the case we'll come back to this that if Peter wishes to become Jill and Daisy to become Jack then they may actually be able to demand this this is a rather interesting point more on that in a few minutes and furthermore I'm just repeating what's already been said once babies May at some point in their lives not only call themselves by a different name from the one that their parents assigned to them but actually legally change it so 6'3 what is sex what his gender and who has responsibility for assignment well this is being recorded to every single day is going to give different answers there are vituperative op-eds news stories videos political ads out there every single day with people giving entirely contradictory answers to these questions so it makes it essentially impossible and I think this is now legally interesting essentially impossible for anybody to deal with these questions in the current environment even-handedly because first of all the meetings are obviously labile and on top of that it's just impossible for one's own feelings and predilections not to enter into how one answers this question these questions and we're in such a mess I think in 2022 this is the bottom of page four that the old liberal Mantra sex is biological gender is social is now sometimes turned around so lior sapir who's going to be talking in the seminar I believe in a month and is writing phenomenal things on these subjects uh pointed out in a recent piece in City Journal that quote according to this new Progressive anthropology biological sex is a social construct while gender identity is real Universal and scientifically demonstrable these two views are entirely incompatible with each other uh so boy uh that's that's a real mess so what did I say I said one has to have one's own predilections into this there's nothing to be done so let me just say up front what my view is and we can of course argue about this if you want um number one despite uh rabid um arguments to the contrary sex is not changeable and thus cannot be assigned it just is and second there are two and only two Sexes male and female there is no Spectrum what about gender well to ask that question is to subscribe to some notion of dualism because if there's no difference between sex and gender then whatever you think sex is has to also be what gender is there's nothing more to say about this question but suppose that you are so so if for example you're anti-dualistic that is to say if you believe that one's body is an intrinsic and essential part of one's personhood rather than something extrinsic and incidental then denial of bodily Unity is a sign of mental illness so there's no point in even asking about gender because whatever it is is the same as sex but suppose for the sake of argument that there is a difference between sex and gender let's suppose for the sake of argument that there are biological males who legitimately believe emphasis on legitimately of course uh that they are in some sense female biological females who legitimately believe that they're in some sense male and individuals who legitimately believe that they're neither male nor female but are instead in some sense both or neither so two questions what do you mean by in some sense and of course suppose there's a conflict if there's a conflict between sex and gender which one wins does sex Trump gender or disgender Trump sex so let me make some comments about both of these first of all in some sense I'm in some sense male I'm in some sense female I'm in some sense neither or both the fact is that definitions vary these days from person to person and within a person from day to day in part because there's disagreement over whether gender means gender identity gender expression or some combination of the two in some as yet unagreed on proportion and here are two what I'll call monsters of gender ideology let's look at these Monsters the one is the genderbred person the genderbred person has existed in various versions over the years is now in version four zero it is unlikely that you've never seen the genderbred person especially if you have children there's also now the gender unicorn which is supposedly an improvement over the gender person the gender unicorn is a very elaborate purple creature which has mapped onto it gender identity gender expression physical attraction and emotional attraction oh and by the way also sex assigned at Birth these are all mapped onto this purple creature you can see that things are very very very complicated and well there's only so much one can say about representational baked goods and Mythic creatures let's actually turn to the real world 6-3 as you all know in 2020 the Supreme Court issued a decision on both stock versus Clayton County um I should leave to others deep thoughts about this but everybody knows that Justice scores such as view of transgenderism I'm going to leave aside for today his view in that case on sexual orientation but everybody knows that his view of transgenderism there was that sex the word in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and thus presumably the word sex in over 160 further Federal statutes which Justice Alito helpfully lists an appendix C of his dissent that the word sex there has to include gender but you know aside from what Alito called the pirate ship textualism and usurpation of legislative Authority exhibited by the majority there's the very real problem that without a plausible and stable understanding of gender which we clearly do not have I mean it may be plausible but it is emphatically not stable for this reason alone there are going to be lawsuits about this that go well beyond employment law and Bostock bathrooms sports teams pronouns dead names till Kingdom Come and these suits by the way are going to come from the left as well as from the right for one thing because Bostock only involves moves from male to female and female to male the words non-binary and gender queer go unmentioned in those 168 pages of opinion and descents and so people have already started talking about well what does that mean then there's that second question this is now six six that I mentioned before priority supposing that we grant that there is a difference between sex and gender and yet create laws that cover both at the same time what matters in a given situation you all know questions like should biological males compete in women's sports if they identify as that is to say assign themselves to be female should such biological males be housed in women's shelters and prisons what are society's obligations to those who refuse to call themselves either male or female or who call themselves male one day female the next day and then male again after that and critically to come to my question should biological females who identify as that is to say who assign themselves to be male be addressed with masculine pronouns should biological males who identify as females be addressed with feminine pronouns and should individuals who identify as neither or both be addressed as they or Zer or whatever pleases them at a given moment once again a question of rhetoric what does should mean is this a legal obligation is it legally required to address people according to their wishes or is this not a legal obligation but let's say a moral one if you're not a dualist then you're going to be strongly inclined to call Vivian Jenna remember Vivian Jenna whether or not you use that name or Xavier you're going to be strongly inclined to use the pronouns he him and his and that can get you into trouble but conversely if you have any dualist sympathies at all and I do have some dualist sympathies um then you're going to be torn are you are you do you want to be truthful or do you want to be what counts these days as civil and of course if you're torn then you can get into trouble too so both for the dualists and the uh and the um uh the the non-dualists there's a problem here so here in a sentence is what I think when it comes to the law and we're about to get to the law to conclude when it comes to the law I believe sex is what matters unless and until there is a generally accepted understanding of gender and unless there is reason to believe that this concept of gender is in fact more important than sex so the law as far as I can tell this is 7-1 and and this is something that really astounds me as far as I can tell there is no case law on misnaming people except in the context of trans rights so this brings us back to the stuff at the very beginning when I was talking about Josh and Kamala and so on the courts have as far as I know not ruled on whether it constitutes harassment repeatedly to call Kamala Kamala or Joshua Josh or Peter Simon or say any of us Chattanooga my feeling is that you know these again are nominal problems that is to say they probably don't matter very much and this seems to be the view of the EEOC the EEOC under harassment Petty slice annoyances and isolated incidents unless extremely serious will not rise to the level of illegality to be unlawful the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating hostile or offensive to reasonable people still it's not impossible to think that courts will soon decide that at least some mispronunciations are in fact harassment so in 2008 there was a case EEOC versus Blockbuster in which the former video giant was found to have engaged in racial discrimination against a Bangladeshi employee by among other things asking her to change her name because the customers could not pronounce it now what about trans rights so here is a quotation from the EEOC again this is in a different section and it's very similar to what we just saw but it's more ominously phrased quote although accident although accidental misuse of a transgender employee's preferred name and pronouns does not violate Title VII intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could constitute sorry could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment well a case lusardi versus the army in 2015 an EEOC case has set um banana peels on the ground for this sort of problem because in this case the Army was found liable for subjecting complainant who was a transgender woman to a hostile work environment based on sex by allowing a team leader intentionally and repeatedly to refer to her by nail male names and pronouns well after he was aware that complainants gender identity was female so again I keep having two sets of questions here in seven three are two sets of questions to think about one if someone of good faith is not a dualist or has doubts about dualism or even is a dual list but thinks it's sex that matters or if someone simply refuses to engage in compelled speech or if someone holds the sincerely held religious belief that male and female created he them can he or she really run a foul of civil rights law especially at a time when the panoply of so-called Neo pronouns is enormous and growing just a very few examples there on the handout when some people change their pronouns willy-nilly and when it's unclear what is even meant by gender never mind then transgender and the second question which I think has not really been asked can it really be the case that it is illegal to use a dispreferred name only when talking to and about transgender people I have to say I'm skeptical that this should be illegal for anyone but if intent matters and if intentionally doing this is illegal for some people then shouldn't it be illegal for everyone well 7-4 here are some live issues especially after Bostock as you all know I think Justice Alito in his descent worrying about the implications for freedom of speech wrote after today today's decision plaintiffs may claim that the failure to use their preferred pronoun violates one of the federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination there are endless examples I'll just give you three sets a a governmental one a quasi-governmental one in the sense of schools and fair Harvard so current laws exist across the country from New York City to California that you are liable if you engage in misnaming or make pronominal errors students in Virginia and the Fairfax County Public Schools have quote the right to be called by chosen names and pronouns and as you all in this room may be aware at Harvard current undergraduates are being given official notice in mandatory training that the use of quote wrong pronouns is a form of quote abuse so we've been talking about names and pronouns our names and pronouns the same in some sense or different well here's just a quick linguistic overview words in a given language typically belong to one of two classes open class words that is to say words categories of uh of words that routinely accept new words and closed class words ones that very rarely accept new words and there are differences among languages but nouns are always open class you can add new ones well pronouns are closed class personal names it's disputed some people think that they're open some people think they're closed and frankly the disputes are very very recondite so I'll say just for the moment this that if names and pronouns belong to the same class that would be closed then that might be a reason to treat them in the same way for extra linguistic like say legal purposes but if names and pronouns belong to different classes then at least from the perspective of a linguist there's at least one reason to believe that they uh not to believe that they have the same legal status different languages do different things different languages have different pronominal systems and even within a given system there's always change pronouns change in sound for example the word you goes back to proto-germanic is whiz and that's what I wrote that Harvard dissertation about a quarter of a century ago and you see people laugh because that's funny unlike stuff about say Zur which is no longer funny at all um but we don't really care about sound okay there's also meaning prescope and meaning over time but so do all words let's just take a case of you you in standard English has taken over the meaning of thou and thee which most of us don't use but what's really important is that closed class words including pronouns can be added and for that matter subtracted it's just not very common so for example there are successful Neo pronouns in dialect of English that nobody here objects to though some of us may think well that's a funny dialect we have dialects like y'all and yins and use guys which have taken over the plural function of you and in those dialects our friend you which had taken over the uh the meaning of thou now effectively means thou so pronouns can change and that's something that we should then want to talk about but it's recently become clear and I I think this is is quite sensible that legally pronouns and names May really be different so in 2021 in the sixth circuit there was Meriwether versus harttop Meriwether was a professor is a professor of philosophy at Shawnee State University and he sued his university for infringement of First Amendment rights when Shawnee State disciplined him for refusing to use the pronouns she her hers for a transgender student the case was concluded favorably with a settlement favorable to Meriwether this past April so here's what Meriwether himself wrote in 2020 about this so why not simply call students what they wish to be called I was willing to do so with this student and with any student who asks me to his chosen name though not his birth name is feminine and I was willing to call him this since using a person's proper name doesn't imply anything about what One Believes or what is true he goes on what I cannot do however is speak in such a way that implies that a man is a woman or a woman is a man in other words refer to a student he's thinking here about pronouns in such a way that I imply something that is not true and we have a very recent case in Utah Richard Bugg professor of theater at Southern Utah University who's suing for retaliation by his employer after he refused to use they then there for a non-binary student he offered instead to use the students given or preferred name but by his own admission two or three times he accidentally used female pronouns and that student then reported him to the administration and he is in trouble interestingly I don't think this is going to fly but interestingly this isn't the fine print on the bottom of page nine he didn't want to use plural pronouns because he believed they were grammatically incorrect is an interesting little legal question here of whether you can make a claim like that successfully now fire the started bye my friend Harvey the other Harvey over here right we have Peter Peter Harvey and Harvey well fire is on this case quote where professors can find reasonable alternatives to using a student's preferred pronouns such as using the student's preferred name instead as bug did their college must allow for that reasonable accommodation the use of preferred and non-binary gender pronouns is a matter of active public debate yes it is and people have different differing opinions on gender and gender expression indeed they do compelling speech to align with a particularized Viewpoint violates fundamental values of free speech and private conscience and now here's where it gets interesting I think describing an individual with pronouns that the individual finds offensive can be a part of a a part of a pattern of unlawful harassment or discrimination but professors should not be punished for accidentally using a student's incorrect pronouns nor would the law on discrimination and harassment require they be punished what counts as accidental what counts as a requirement and what does can be mean final comments it turns out that the fullest accounts on all of these things come from the progressive left indeed often from the very far left so if you want to know about the law you should read this very long and very detailed paper that appeared late last year in the California law review a paper called misgendering by John Tove McNamara this article is extremely useful but it makes clear up front what the author's views are and you have to be careful so for example McNamara writes indeed a look to employment discrimination case law provides a snapshot of how frequently nominal mispronunciation has been used to verbally harass minority employees and to this claim there is a lengthy footnote that gives six cases and it calls these cases exempli gratia implying that there are more but what McNamara does not even hint at is that in not one of these six cases was the ruling in favor of the plaintiff so back to my comment that there is in fact no clear case law on this sort of thing and then there's Dennis Baron who's a very distinguished linguist there's his book what's your pronoun Beyond he and she which came out in 2020. Baron 2 is a man of the left there's a great deal to recommend in this book but the pages called pushing back against pronoun Choice are contentious and well I'm legally unsophisticated so I can't really complain but they seem to be legally unsophisticated too for example he writes official support for non-binary pronouns is no different from Rules against the use of racial ethnic or religious slurs swearing or harassment that's a very contentious statement and I don't know how many people here and elsewhere would agree with that and he ends that section with I think this very interesting sentence using such words in the workplace may not be illegal and it is not unconstitutional but it may be in poor taste and it can still get you fired so why have I given this talk I've given this talk because as far as I can tell people on the center and to the right have not yet commented sufficiently on the status of names and the law and the status of pronouns and the law so here's a taste and let's discuss Catherine and then Harvey okay are there languages do you know of any language you don't have male female pronouns I know that there's yes so actually I I realized I I put in a little Clause there but I actually realized this morning as I was coming over here that I didn't have an obvious point on the handout talking about how other languages uh work um the short answer is yes there are all kinds of systems of pronouns out there and and that actually is a very important point I'm glad you mentioned that and I'm annoyed at myself for not having put a section of that on the handout um so the fact that English behaves in a certain way even right now never mind across time does not mean that God made English and that's the way everything has to be there are unquestionably other systems out there and there are systems out there that people who want to emphasize trans rights I think perfectly understandably uh talk about because there are other systems that do these things very differently from the way English does so then the question is how much should we care about that it's a little bit like how much should we care about say foreign law right people are going to have different views on this but yes I should have had a section on this it would be hard to be hard to comment coherently and succinctly right now but it's a very important point to understand that English is not the be-all and end-all there are other systems out there and of course other systems are going to make the people who use those systems and potentially even other people have different points of view English has Shakespeare English does have Shakespeare who by the way used they as a singular you're right and it does is there any language that doesn't have pronouns uh no there is no language that doesn't have pronouns sure did you just say s right now so I wish I could I wish I could do that I should be prepared for that question um and I'm not um um well it's actually it's hard to look up I mean of course you can look it up in the OED and it will it will it will tell you it will tell you uh various things but what's very very hard to get from this is is just how different people's conceptions of that word are so it's one thing and I should have already answered to this and I apologize for not having it it's one thing to uh to figure out when first gender as something distinct from sex was used and then popularized I'm sure it was popularized well after it was first used but I don't remember when it was first used and I should um but that's only part one of the question part two is having having decided that there is something called gender which is different from sex then what is that gender and you can believe anything you can have any views you like on whether what I've just said is really good or really horrible but you cannot deny that people have entirely different points of view right now on what actually gender is and what it constitutes and what the important aspects of it are just a follow-up question on my on what whether there's a language without pronouns yeah what makes it necessary to have pronouns would you say uh such that everybody does it couldn't you just repeat Peter you could you could of course do that um repetition is of course a very interesting thing in languages there are forms of repetition that we that we really like and there are forms of repetition that we really don't like you can repeat things and your editor will say oh come on stop using the same word over and over again or you can repeat things and it's a wonderful stylistic feature it was the best of times it was the worst of times it was the age of wisdom it was the age of foolishness right so is that is that a good thing or a bad thing um I I I don't I don't have a I don't have some deep answer to why it is that uh that people don't like saying Harvey Harvey Harvey Harvey Harvey but they don't yeah maybe if it were poetic maybe if every single time one mentioned Harvey it had the cadences of Dickens then it would be okay but that would be hard to pull off okay I'm very quick follow-up to the captain's question have you heard that the distinction between sex and gender I've read this but I have no idea whether this is true actually originated within the scientists when they became more popular because sex is the same as having have having sexual act yes yes so it is and so what I don't now know is the chronology here but it is it is certainly true that that uh people that one reason that people started using gender was in order not to have the laughter of using sex because sex meant well sex that's right what I don't know now is is the chronology but that that is part of the story is absolutely clear conservatives and religious people I I I I think they're I think that is probably partly true yes does anyone speak of having gender I I wouldn't I uh yes but I think this is a different question um I uh not in my circles all right but perhaps in others you're right did you have a question yes all right I'm a lawyer this is Harvey silver practical indeed and my question is I'm I have a lot of disciplinary cases in universities representing students and even faculty members and uh my question is when did it become the business of the dean of students what one student called another isn't that in a free Society the typical kind of thing will work out for themselves but I was I was in person's class of 64. indeed and I was the there were very few Jews even few of them would he was from Brooklyn I was in a very small category and it was not unusual we can hear that we can hear that uh and it was not unusual for somebody the main Dixon line and it wasn't unusual for somebody to call me a the idea of my going to the dean of students to complain about this was completely foreign would say did he punch you in the nose when it punches you in the nose come back to me otherwise you work it out with it you know um and and that's that's how I got through four years and sure what's that would be called the hostile environment indeed um and how do you consider it a hostile environment I was getting a good education I was on a full scholarship and what did I care about what some cracker called me from George yeah how does that how did that okay when did when you're of course asking me a question that you can answer better yourself even I can as to how when it happened that that one of these you know tin pot Napoleon D the suddenly decided to became the language police sure well I guess the way I would start to answer the question is this I started at Princeton in 1998 1998 is a considerable distance from 1964. but in 1998 and 1999 and 2000 I think I knew every single member of the Princeton Administration that is to say there weren't dozens and dozens and dozens of tin pot deanlets running around there simply weren't so if you had a problem you knew exactly which person to go to not because that person was the vice president for San Pellegrino and this other person was the vice president for potato chips but because there were a very few jobs and they were and and the things that these people did was distributed according to principles that every normal person could understand so the idea that you would go to one of the high-ranking officials because being a Dean meant something in those days to complain about something that at that point virtually everybody would have called a triviality words were not yet violence silence was not yet violence violence was violence that was a different question people wouldn't do that it just it just didn't happen even then so of course many things happened between 1964 and 1998 but in my experience this sort of thing is really a a a much more recent phenomenon nobody would have done this no no sensible person would have done this or received the sorts of responses that you would get today when I started at Princeton there's a you know there's a chicken egg problem I'm running as a petition candidate for the Harvard Board of overseas out of free speech platform and due process but I'm also one of the things on my platform is going to be to fire 95 percent of the administrators I'm using it if you did they're useless right if you don't know they're much that they're much much much worse than than useless they're pernicious right useless is one thing useless is just a waste of money these people are actually causing harm yeah but if you get rid of them they would have to get rid of some of these codes in order because there wouldn't be people to enforce them well yes but of course now we get to the law some of the reason and there's this administrative bloat is because it's it's federally mandated right so there are certain people you probably can't easily get rid of because of idiotic federal laws there are others who exist only inside a given Universe like the Princeton orange bubble but there are other people who exist now in a way that they didn't exist a quarter century ago because the rules have changed the rules from on high Susan please I mean with all due respect you may have a very thick skin that you made out of mind being called kite they could understand a black student if all the white students in the class every time he came and said hey there's my or if I is the only woman student in the class had you know got tackles here comes the hole there comes the hope I mean there are certain standards of Civility at the University among numbers is that we don't make our fellow students and colleagues needlessly you know uncomfortable yeah so and Title IX presumably was a scientist I'm not defending well Title IX of course was designed for something else and is now but yes with reasonable standard disability that Free Speech doesn't mean you can just scream of course of course and um if so that would be one point the second point is that um gender I mean the way we use gender now is not the only way that I mean the original I mean at least you know when you study languages you know you talk about the gender yeah does you mean that just decision sure so in some sense maybe long ago in England uh people thought that ships were theming yes there was a kind of poetic identification of certain kinds of objects which have nothing to do with sexual reproduction it's true with the feminine sphere and that's fine right um that's so that would be one thing that it's a way it's an old story that pronouns can have gender associations that have nothing directly to do with biological sex right the second thing was you yourself refer to the fact that you know that we used to use the thou would be and now we don't but there was probably a a transitional period where to use the wrong pronoun with an act of disrespect if you called an employee you know if you two-way an employee yes that's an act can be an act of disrespect yes and under those conditions it is a kind of rudeness and so it's simply not a grammatical point because when you use which pronoun can can also be unblocked so I'm I want to suggest that the current problem is really about kind of ideology of that that sort of makes a certain kind of sexual fluidity a hugely big deal and getting it right will if you don't get destroyed as lives and so on and that's certainly an arguable point I happen to disagree that I think it's way overblown but isn't that the real issue the attention turn using the wrong pronouns into the equivalent of using two and you should be saying rules yes right so in fact I I you'll be glad to know that I agree more or less and probably much more than less with every single thing you you just said so let me let me let me start the middle one was a little different from the other two that's about ships and so on you're you're of course right and that's not just an old thing if you if you uh break a champagne bottle against a ship today and Christen it I mean this is not something that people in my Amelia do but I gather you use uh you use feminine and pronouns and For Better or For Worse some people think For Worse maybe so lots of guys call their cars her ships and cars you know are both sort of round and spherical and well okay but of course it's not about about sexual reproduction as you say so yes we we could certainly talk more about that but you're correct that at least on the margins of English today there are some um um uses of gendered pronouns that don't have to do with sexual reproduction and are a little bit odd in The Wider perspective but are still very much in the language absolutely okay the other the other two points um are I think really great and we just we just have to Hash these things out so first of all I'm interested in now what you're going to say about this if I call you is there a difference between my calling you sorry to do this a ho once and my deciding that every single time I see you I'm gonna say yo ho or something like that right I mean where is where is the line here I am I am all for civility and I just don't know I mean I'm not a lawyer I don't know where one is supposed to draw that line and how one is supposed to draw the line between a uh accidental uh versus non-accidental I mean in the case of ho it's hard to imagine it being non-acidental but one can imagine other cases where it might be and then the difference between doing it once because one is drunk or one is angry or who knows or one is trying to be funny and the other person doesn't record it as funny where's the line between that and doing it very very often where's the line here between um illegality and incivility to put it like that and that's I think for everybody to discuss last but not least the transitional Point yes I'm really really glad you mentioned this it is absolutely the case that the way language Works always is in this sense gradual it's not that people wake up one day and you know the day before you said X and now nobody does the way it works is that more and more people start doing something pronouncing a word in a given way using a word with an expanded sense adding a word to the vocabulary subtracting a word that's the way it goes and so sure there has to be that intermediate period how does one make laws again I'm not a lawyer how does one make laws about language to deal with this sort of thing I don't know I'm glad I'm not a lawyer I don't know how to do it what I do believe is that as far as gender is concerned at the moment it's not that we're in a a transition where everybody can see what's going to happen that's what worries me it's not that I I believe firmly that the word gender is going to make it and that at some point uh there's going to be a reasonably robust understanding of gender whether I or you or somebody else likes it or not that one can more or less create laws on but where it absolutely not at that period right now as far as this thing is concerned but yes it's it's because we're in transition but this is a particularly messy transition sorry that was a long-winded answered all this but I actually agree with everything you said thank you I can put some clarity on I'm sure you can you're a lawyer the law takes you a employee called a boss um a kite that would probably be a not an offense but if the employer called the employee a kite that would be and that that's because the law takes into account our relationships and there are certain things an employer can't say to an employee whereas an employee can say may say to an employer so that explains a lot of this the the law I think it doesn't explain though what happens if one student calls on other students a hoe or a kind correct well you know my solution would be if you'd have called something repeatedly that you know like ignore it and say to the person until you address me the way I want to be addressed I'm not going to answer your question right so I'm I'm this I'm this I'm this wishy-washy kind of guy by Nature who agrees with that and agrees with you uh that that that this is seriously uncivil ultimately ultimately I suppose I love being on camera for this ultimately I I incline in your direction because I don't actually like making things that are tricky like this illegal but it's not that I don't understand the impulse I absolutely do this is my usual wishy-washy uh sort of way Harvey um how many people are in this category not the ones who are supporting this categorization but the percentage of population of the U.S population that are in this long list of lgbtq right do you happen to know that I I don't but what I can say is that the percentage is uh astronomically higher on Twitter than it is in the real world uh but but that I mean I know I didn't say that to be funny I mean this is this is a question which in which social media is is is is running a a majority minority on social media is wreaking havoc on the rest of the population most of which you know couldn't care less about any of this uh some some comments have always been said with regard to the gender assignment of inanimate object to my knowledge they're all female ships planes tanks and in the planet it's Mother Earth it's never father Earth or parent or so you know what no it's often father son no I mean male female yeah I've never heard that okay oh you get one um it strikes me that this is an outgrowth of what has emerged in society here over the last few decades and that's what might be called victimology ascendancy of victimization as a credential for for what you want to accomplish and we see it now rampant in in groups in fact all all groups now are preferred except for white males even they're absolutely white heterosexual males now we've seen this being played on and on and that's what you get I think on the college path is I've been victimized he called me a name I didn't like I want action there's a communitarian sense lab and I say this as a Libertarian who usually believes in just individual rights but as a society we have necessity draw lines in the gray so for example we say that you can vote in 18. I suppose some 17 year old could bring a lawsuit saying I'm perfectly capable I must mature and I have a I know a 19 year old here who you really shouldn't have in the ballot button but we make the arbitrary distinction because we have to draw a line somewhere and then let those who can't get on with it if a five-year-old child wanders into traffic industry and will go and physically grab the child and bring her back you try that with a 25 year old female and you've got yourself some problems there are lies you try with the 25 year old male you also going to have problems by the way yes so there are lies that we draw and I suspect that what's happened here is we haven't been willing to draw a line in the gray frankly I guess I agree with Harvey and I don't know why the government's getting into this ask for this question of somebody always referring to someone as a hoe okay a situation like that I suppose you go to the dean and say x here is is harassing me and you would make a judgment on the case but it doesn't have to be codified it could have to be the first time somebody says something and you immediately to a dean of diversity who now is going to expel somebody or other to show that he's worth his job and I wonder if we can get to that point where we just in effect are willing to say okay they're a handful of you who have all sorts of problems with gender uh we'll sympathize with you because we all have personal problems of some kind or other but the community is making the assessment that if you want to walk around without clothes what's an individual state but you can't do it we presented the community has a different value and we can assign a community value here to gender or sex Duality if you want to call it that and for those of you who have trouble with that who are sorry but you're simply going to have to make accommodation to society as old and as I say let those who can get on with it we're reminded of closing I think William F Buckley said at the time when uh when New York was going to allow everybody to be admitted to come college she said let's give everybody a PhD at Birth and let those who can't get on with it I think you need something of that type right here right well there's much I could say I'll comment only on one point that you made where I I mildly disagree and that's the matter of of precedent so I as I think I'm making clear do not like uh the imposition from on high of laws about speech and about contentious speech in particular but you seem to say well if somebody says ho to you too many times then okay there isn't some federal mandate that you can't do that but you go to the dean and the dean will look at it in context and not codify whatever the punishment or non-punishment is and that worries me because of of precedent it's one thing to to say that you shouldn't have a law from on high about this but if you have a local call it law if you have a local ruling then it seems to me very bad news if then the next week somebody else comes in and there's no record whatsoever of what happened that just seems to me wrong so there's a difference here between law and local custom but I do think that local custom has to be recorded in some way as well because it would be grossly unfair to punish X for saying ho ho ho ho ho that comes out wrong but you know what I mean and then the next week uh person y other than that yes I mean victimology sure one could we could talk for hours about this I was thinking when you go to the dean the dean would call the guy and say knock it off and that that would be well it wasn't talking about expelling the students right that's what used to happen right yeah right yeah the phrase knock it off is is excellent I I strongly encourage uh more knock at autism but that's not going to happen very easily this is not quite the tool you're next go ahead that's all right um this is not quite a question but talking about the power of some of Summer people um my wife who's turning 70 on her birth certificate says baby girl because the nurse didn't like the name that my mother-in-law came unbelievable my wife's name is Carrie k-e-r-r-y and the nurse said that's a boy's name I mean so you know it seems a little crazy the other crazy thing is I worked at Boston University and there was an employee whose name first name is Dean now just imagine what that does sure in Academia uh absolutely I mean it's not it's not it's not as good as cardinal sin of the Philippines but it's uh it it's it's it's pretty good yes um um yeah well I mean birth certificates are have become very interesting because because right but but now now there are many moves to amend birth certificates that's actually intellectually a very uh a very a very interesting thing now your wife's case might be a really good case of of doing this since presumably she doesn't go by the name baby girl right um right although although one can uh one can one can imagine all sorts of stories to follow from that but but in general I I do I do think it's quite interesting that that legal documents like this that there are moves now to be able regularly to amend them by personal choice yes and thanks for your circumstantial and explicit lecture and first of all I want to have the answer for Provisions those questions that was the difference between the pronouns and the uh no no I guess like the appearance of the pronouns do help us to see more things in one sentence so we could you know use one simple sentence to contains more meaning so I think the appearance of pronouns do help us to enhance the ability to abstract so I think it might be a symbol of human being become more reasonable uh become more rational no that's the answer I want to see to provide the Love Field I I would say yeah actually that's quite interesting I would I would add to that that you're quite right that pronouns can give you information that was not there to begin with there are languages in which that kind of information is going to be substantially greater than what you get in English but I mean let's take a name like uh well let's take Kerry which I guess can be both male and female so if you if you say well you know Carrie went to the store uh Carey you looked at the time Kerry went home again and then you compare that with Carrie went to the store he or she then you actually are given a piece of information that you didn't have there in the first place so that's a that's a nice observation yeah uh I'm a student who study philosophy so when I uh first attached your title of the lecture I I won't I have a salt light uh you know way people have so many different ideas and opinions about our gender but yeah it do uh you know increase the different ways of of kind of self-expression not just limited male and female but I have a question like does this you know abundance or the realities of self-expression give us more I mean in the old times when we see female it might Implement your soft or weak or you know some very gentle features and when we see of the male it implies you are stronger with much of many muscles but today yeah we do have you know if one person is biological uh female but she says I am super gender and male so at this point when we see female the first things is that we should pay attention to that we can see that a shade weak so at this point it seems like female and male such kind of words reduce their meaning their meaning become more limited so I mean my question is that so this kind of so-called abundance of self-expression bring us uh bring us what I mean more uh yeah we do have the Liberty to express ourselves but it seems this kind of abundance of self-expression is quite thin and quite limited just you know some features as related features together and to describe one person so I just uh questions this kind of abundance of self-expression I do think it helps some people to uh you know to to to say what kind of person he or she is but in my opinion I think this kind of multi self-expression might be a question of your self-awareness because you you can't use the traditional male or female to uh to to to Define what kind of person you you are but you use them as a limited feature to Define your body are you as successfully use these ability features to Define you so I think it might be a crisis of yourself awareness yeah I feel as I should punch punt this question to Professor Mansfield who has never been called Professor women's field because after all Professor Mansfield knows more than anybody else here about the distinction I'm being serious here between masculine on the one hand and manly on the other or or or or or feminine and and womanly uh I'm gonna give that one to you [Laughter] um as you spoke I was thinking of another point which is the way in which Chinese when they come to our country take a a proper name that we can pronounce so this is yeah and she calls herself Veronica so far indeed I mean that it's actually this is a very good point because this uh this seems to be very widely culturally accepted in a way that perhaps with the Blockbuster the Bangladeshi Blockbuster employee it was not it's actually a very good point I hadn't thought about about that and I would be very interested I'm now not answering your comment at all for which I apologize but I'd be very interested actually to know what you think about this what when Michael double system of naming which is so incredibly common as Harvey just said uh in the United States and perhaps elsewhere in particular with people from China there's your name and then there's what you call yourself or allow me to call you here um I mean there is there's a there's a there's a a cultural allowance of this that we don't have in the same way I think it's fair to say with any other culture I mean there are isolated cases but I think it's fair to say that there is specifically a sino-american culture of doing this for Better or For Worse yes okay yeah I mean it's a uh from Individual perspective if you go if you're you know growing a one of the Metropolis uh you'll have English class in your first grade and then your first grade English teacher will assign you an English name uh more or less more or less random wow or sometimes if your parents know English I mean my generation is really really rare maybe your parents have given your English name is more or less unrelated to your Chinese name although I do have a friend in first grade it was a surname which means Stone and his English name is Peter hahaha generally is he Catholic yes ah okay it might still become Pope you know rooting for him but uh that was not what I meant but all right yeah um but a societally this is very kind of a professional usage as well I think a lot of companies have this convention of referring to colleagues by English names everyone speaks Chinese uh many times these people themselves don't really speak English but we'll call each other but you know Mark Vivian Daisy or whatever as a kind of I'm not sure why exactly but I think has to do with the kind of attitude uh you know sort of we have global company and we are we want to have a 21st century mindset we want to sort of you know be in step with the times so has that kind of associational music that's my take on that right fascinating yeah honor oh all right so uh what about language changes and um and um you said president I understood that language changes tend to be slow and yet I wonder are there two kinds of language change maybe I'm sort of stupid seems like it's fast and slow and it probably largely correlates with top down versus bottom up which is to say with coerced or free you know in July uh 1917 Russians were all calling it right Mr and this is the question thereof right yes are you a leader they're all calling each other you know you had to do that right it was the recent changes obviously had this covers to top down quick quality yes right okay good so I I didn't I didn't mean to say that language change is either fast or slow um simply that it is never instantaneous there are certain languages that at certain times have in certain ways changed very quickly and certain languages at certain times that have changed incredibly slowly uh the Irish language changed massively in the course of a couple hundred years in the first half of the first Millennium A.D the Icelandic language has changed very minimally over the past uh a thousand uh not very minimally but comparatively very minimally um one of the issues here has to do with what one might call imposition of vocabulary as opposed to uh more I hate to use this word but systemic or a systematic changes so the processes by which a new word or new designation comrade that sort of thing gets introduced is quite different from the sort of thing whereby uh sounds well let's say then in which sounds change which then tends to run language change much more broadly so yes you absolutely can very quickly get a word imposed often from a top-down perspective or have some word removed again often from a top-down perspective because that has unsavory connotations but even then of course it isn't instantaneous right what what does it mean it's instantaneous for one person to do it but it has to spread like waves throughout society and it takes some time but sure you can introduce a word like comrade or um or remove a word um like Master uh much more quickly than you can do certain things that are not just single items of vocabulary or items within some very specific sphere but affect the language as a whole I think it's uh you know one last no one last question oh Paul okay um what gender is God well uh I I mean I'm I'm an even worse Theologian than I am a philosopher at the at the top of page one of your handout uh you will see because I'm at Harvard that I made reference to the so-called pronoun Envy controversy at Harvard in 1971 uh Harvey Cox at the Divinity School had some of his students this was of the time decide not to call God he and this actually for a while made national news um what exactly do you want me to say about that or or or or other things I mean I know he says meaning God is oh I see yes ruthlessly ah this is like so this is the you don't use pronouns because you just say yeah never hear that he is great he's always yeah this is great well so I it it will be known to many of you in this room that there that there are uh now a number of of ways of dealing with this one is just to say God over and over and over again uh some uh stick to he some have she some have they and some go back and forth which is actually what I thought you meant I I have heard well in one way or another I have heard all of these in my life um the one that I find actually the most disorienting is the one in which it moves back and forth so that one sentence is he in the next sentence is she and the next sentence conceivably is they I find that very disorienting but other people apparently find this comforting if you're asking me theologically well I don't want to get into into my theological thoughts about this um um but it it is intra I mean it it is true that one of the the areas in which people get particularly exercised about this matter that does not have to do with their own person is in fact the matter of God and so I'm glad you you brought that up but have a have a look at the at the Harvey Cox uh pronoun Envy controversy 71. there's growing support in the blue collar area for Donald Trump issues like this we're pronouns in general that's correct but that's why a few years ago if I said I was interested in pronouns people thought it's funny and now they don't think it's it's it's it's funny at all um but honestly this is a re I mean in my view here this is a really really crazy thing for us to be worrying putting near the top of our list of things to worry about and in a way maybe I shouldn't even be talking about this because I'm promoting uh this this insanity but the fact is that people are worried about this rather than say the economy that's nuts wasn't it Gloria Steiner who was doing a demonstration that said so that women demonstrating uh pray to God she'll help us I I it sounds plausible I don't know that but it sounds plausible one quick comment on that um so my [Music] I'm a guy he just absolutely dismisses Christianity because it's a demonstrative to be provable that God is incorpore real and has no attributes and The Trinity and the he just doesn't even deal with it yet I mean so obviously outrageously foolish so he would say that question he obviously has not a body and hence not a penis or no gender or sex but that's my mind that's not Jupiter either what he probably didn't approve of Jupiter same thing it's the same thing um so I have a question um I have a friend a good friend who said well I'm going to say that if they want that but I might say they has left the room instead of they have would that be a nonification of a pronoun would that be a total you know misuse of the language or would that actually introduce yeah well that's a that's that's an interesting question and I I don't have a I don't have an easy answer to that but when I made the comment bottom of page nine um remember Professor bug at Southern Utah University um who felt that plural pronouns were grammatically incorrect um I'm I'm more sympathetic and I I'd have to think I'd have to think carefully about just how I would justify this but I'm willing to say now as a Gambit that I am more sympathetic to that point of view when it's a they was rather than it's they were I don't know how far I mean somebody could get at me now and and force me to justify that further but uh but but to me to me they was though actually potentially very useful is a step too far I mean I'm not happy about the day to begin with but I I can live with that in various ways for civility they was would be very very very hard for me to do and I actually think would be would be very hard for most people to pull off consistently I mean people who are skeptical of this or even people who aren't skeptical but are just just trying already find this difficult that would be creating a second level of difficulty which would in some sense help grammatically but I think would so mess things up in a way so I'm not enthusiastic about that but I think it's a very I think it's a very interesting thing to think about well it's uh two or a little little past two and um you took a vacation from the recondite and and entered the realm of where everyone has an opinion indeed and we thank you very much for you did a wonderfully well thank you for having me [Applause]

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Id: zPTuEntHJZI

Length: 96min 13sec (5773 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023