Gender neutral language - Inclusiveness, the biological family, and the state

Tomasz Kaye
Jul 28, 2017 · 2 min read
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cosmonautirussi/440553845

The dutch rail provider changed policy recently.

In automated announcements NS will no longer address it’s clients as ‘ladies and gentlemen’ but as ‘dear travellers’. The railway company wants everyone to feel welcome in stations and trains, including “LGBTQIA” people.

In social media exchanges following the announcement, I’ve seen two apparently opposed sentiments, something like:

  1. The change helps more people feel welcome. Helping more people feel welcome is a good thing.
  2. The change advances a trend headed in a dangerous direction. That’s a bad thing.

They might both be true.

The first seems simple enough. If a simple change in language can help a set of people feel more welcome somewhere, why not change it?

There’s one complication with it — while some will feel more welcome, others will feel less so — for instance those who affirm statement two. Maybe the net effect on welcomeness is more relevant than how much more welcome one group feels. In estimating the net effect on feelings of welcomeness, the sizes of the two groups are important. The upshot is that the likely net effect on feelings of welcomeness is quite ambiguous.

The second statement likely needs more explanation. Here’s a anarchist-traditionalist idea that I’m not committed to, but that might be true.

There is a trend currently underway that undermines the power of the biological family unit in society. The robustness and power of this unit, society wide, is dependent to some extent on the rate at which people adopt a set of traditional gender roles.

Interventions that help to normalise non-traditional gender roles (such as the promotion of gender neutral language) reduce the rate at which traditional gender roles are expressed. That weakens the power of the family to some degree.

This process needn’t be a conceived of as the product of a deliberate conspiracy to be a legitimate source of concern.

Diminishing the power of the family allows the state to arrogate power to itself more easily since one important competing object of loyalty has been weakened.

Tomasz Kaye

Written by

Anti-political propaganda animations. Market anarchist. Netherlands.

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