Tribal speech codes breed linguistic compliance
Last weekend brought surprising news: an unprecedented spike in the number of
West Ham fans identifying as trans. According to the 2021 Census, the London
borough of Newham has the highest proportion of trans people in England and
Wales, coming in at a staggering 1.5%. Meanwhile, the “trans-friendly” city of Brighton and Hove languishes in the
rankings at a lowly 20th, a bit like the UK at Eurovision.
Marvellous as it is to imagine the Cockney heartlands full of Paris Is Burning re-enactments,
a more plausible explanation is that many of those Newhamites answering “yes”
to the trans question didn’t understand what they were saying. Newham, after
all, has relatively high numbers of immigrants and non-English
speakers; and as an investigation by academic Michael Biggs has revealed,
the strongest predictor of trans identification within a local authority is the
proportion of people whose main language is not English. Once this was pointed
out, the Office for National Statistics acknowledged it
was “possible” that respondents misinterpreted the question, and confirmed it
would investigate the findings.
On reflection, such confusion was easily predictable — and not just for
non-native speakers. The Census asked: “Is the gender you identify with the
same as your sex registered at birth?” Even assuming you successfully parsed
its off-putting syntax, a number of serious ambiguities remain.
Is a “gender” a grammatical category, a synonym for maleness or
femaleness, a set of sociocultural meanings, or a psychological identity?
According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, it could be any of these. So,
whether or not you “identify with” a gender (or, even more clumsily, have a
“gender you identify with”) will partly depend on what you think “gender” is.
It also partly depends upon what you think “to identify with” means, since this
is hardly an everyday term. And then there’s the awkward fact that, if you are
an immigrant without a birth certificate, you may not take yourself to
have a “sex registered at birth” at all.
One might ask why the statisticians at the ONS got this so wrong, given
that one of their main jobs is to design survey questions that don’t invite
false positives. By the ONS’s own admission, the trans question was trialled by means of
“community testing at LGBT History Month events”, which is a bit like gauging atheists’
understanding of the Catholic Mass by means of community testing at the
Vatican. Why didn’t those in charge anticipate that a question couched in
obscure genderese might stump noninitiates, even if it would please their Stonewall overlords?
The most obvious hypothesis would be that the ONS was cajoled,
guilt-tripped, befuddled and emotionally blackmailed into linguistic
compliance, like many a fellow national institution before it. Maybe so, but a
wider explanation is also available: that those who designed the question
didn’t even realise it was couched in obscure genderese. They
took their own standards of linguistic apprehension to be universal and
binding.
This is a tendency that extends well beyond transactivism. Word choices
can have many functions apart from direct communication, and an obvious one is
to convey the status of the speaker or author. Now that many of us spend our
days sitting around scrolling emails and timelines, reading snippets and
writing things with our thumbs, word choices are one of the main opportunities
to socially signal. Slang, jargon, abbreviations and buzzwords are all ways to
imply that you’re in a particular crowd.
Belonging also requires knowing what words not to use. As social
animals, we can’t help but practise what linguistics expert Deborah Cameron
calls “verbal hygiene”: trying to purify language of socially
problematic word choices. If you’re a well-off Tory, you’ll want to avoid terms
such as “toilet”, “lounge” and “settee”. If you’re a well-off Lefty, you’ll
want to avoid phrases such as “ladies and gentlemen”, “cancel culture” and “lab
leak”. The Right dislikes grammatical solecisms, especially when committed by
Angela Rayner; the Left is much more concerned with moral solecisms. Either
way, though, it’s at least partly a way of indicating who’s in and who’s out.
Many of us practise verbal hygiene simply in order to have an easier
life. Some enjoy throwing the rulebook at others as a means of social control.
Still more hubristic individuals — usually with PhDs — try to rewrite the rules
altogether, inventing new lexical standards out of the blue and then
associating any deviance from them with a suspect character. In certain
circles, serious disagreement about meaning is cast as linguistic violence, and
semantic power grabs are attributed to everyone but oneself. They want
to “create
divides” ,“police” categories and “colonise” minds and vocabularies. We are
simply building a better world from our book-lined offices, one enforced
redefinition at a time.
Whatever their provenance, knowing the speech codes for your own social
group is consistent with relaxing them for others. It is possible and indeed
desirable to understand that not every deviation from a group norm is a
deliberate rule break; that sometimes people just aren’t familiar with the
rules in the first place. Children and pensioners should get leeway for most
forms of expression; either it’s too early for them or too late. Sometimes a
white person will say “some of my best friends are black” simply because some
of her best friends are black. She isn’t automatically to know
that some count it as a racist dog whistle. And sometimes a man will enthuse
innocently about feminist causes on behalf of his “wife and daughters” without
realising his supposedly terrible anti-feminist error. He just means it.
Familiarity with your own group’s linguistic rules is also consistent
with recognising that observance is a poor general guide to much else about a
person. Manipulative types will mould their language in ways that invite
confidence and disguise true motives. History is littered with gullible
upper-class people, lured into handing over their assets to con artists who can
accurately state the difference between “less” and “fewer”. The gunman who
killed five people in Louisville last week was reported as having listed his pronouns on
LinkedIn.
Trouble also arises when you’re an unreflective type who only ever
encounters people in your own tribe, and who takes your intuitions about verbal
hygiene to determine everyone else’s impurity. In institutions dominated by
those of a certain age, income bracket, political sensibility or educational
background, this is a real risk. Exacerbating this risk is the widespread
reduction in meeting others face-to-face at work and in socialising outside of
the office, both of which remove valuable opportunities to get to know human
nature in the wild. If life is a series of highly straitened, professionalised
encounters with people like yourself — if, say, you never meet a working-class
person who you aren’t paying for something — it’s no wonder that failures of
imagination occur about what others might be saying or hearing, by way of the
very same words.
At worst, this myopia can lead to serious miscarriages of justice,
especially when the semantically short-sighted have influence on the judicial
system. This week also brought news of
Christopher Mitchell, a welder from Caister-on-Sea convicted of aggravated
“hate crimes” for making statements critical of a Drag Queen Story Hour event
at a local library. For writing in a Facebook post that the drag queen in
question was “grooming children” and that the parents of attendees “clearly
have serious issues and should have their devices checked”, Mitchell received a
12-month community order including 20 rehabilitation days, 150 hours’ unpaid work,
and a fine of £1,500. To anyone not already mired in rainbow-sanctioned
speech codes — according to which the word “grooming” must never be applied to
brave and stunning LGBT+ folk — this looks like a serious overreaction to the
exercise of free speech.
But if fear of harming others doesn’t lead to more circumspection in
interpreting others by one’s own lights, then perhaps the fear of harming
personal reputations will. Mindlessly following unacknowledged tribal speech
codes can result in extremely lazy thinking. Those responsible for the Census
debacle at the ONS now look ridiculous; as does the BBC reporter who interviewed Elon Musk on Wednesday, so sure of
received wisdom that Twitter is awash with hate speech that he hadn’t bothered
to memorise any examples before confronting Musk about it. In a similar vein,
the FBI were also made to look daft this week, when FOIs revealed they rather
histrionically had classified common internet slang such as “redpilled”
or “based” as indicative of “violent extremism” linked to the incel movement.
But when it comes to second-hand embarrassment, perhaps nothing tops
Stonewall CEO and self-described “data geek” Nancy Kelley, cheerfully tweeting on Census publication day about how happy she
was that her manor in Newham was so full of trans people. As Kelley’s fellow
Newhamites might put it, it’s amazing what confirmation bias can make you Adam
and Eve.
How
the trans census fooled Britain - UnHerd
