Refusing to address someone by their preferred pronouns may not be unlawful, but it is rude

Is it, as the South East Technological University (SETU) claims, “unlawful” to refuse to address someone by their preferred name or use their chosen pronouns? It isn’t and it shouldn’t be. But it is bad manners – and deliberate discourtesy is not a trivial matter.

I don’t understand why anyone has a problem calling people by the names they prefer. I’ve been doing it almost all my life.

It started when I was four. I entered the junior infants’ class in the Marist convent school in Crumlin. I discovered that I had to call nuns Sister even though they were not my sisters. I learned that the head nun had to be addressed as Mother, even though I had a mother and it wasn’t her.

When I went to primary school, I had to call the Christian Brothers Brother, even though they were very much not my brothers. When I served Mass, I called the priests Father though I was and am pretty sure that none of them was my Da.

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When I was a kid, I accepted these rituals of nomenclature out of a sense of religious duty. But I didn’t stop using these names when I fell off the devotional wagon. I will always call a priest Father and a nun Sister and a lay brother Brother.

Why? Because it’s good manners. And it costs nothing. Objectively, it may feel absurd to address a younger celibate man as though I were his son. But if that’s what he wants, if it is important to his sense of who he is, I’m not going to be rude about it.

There’s a fancy phrase for the relationship between words and realities: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. It means, simply, that names have no real connection to the thing (or person) they refer to. They are conventions, social agreements that vary with time and place.

This ought to be very obvious – how else could a hat also be un chapeau, ein Hut, un capello, un sombrero and a thousand other names? Yet there is a stubborn desire to believe that it is not so, to want a name to have some innate connection to what is being named. It is magical thinking, but of a kind that can become deeply unpleasant.

Most women know this all too well. I remember my wife booking a holiday under her own name (which is not mine), paying for it with her own credit card and still getting a receipt addressed to Mrs Fintan O’Toole. I remember the ill-concealed irritation of a nurse in a Dublin maternity hospital when they found that my wife, who was about to give birth, was married to me but not called O’Toole. She was messing up the paperwork. Could she not just use her “real” married name?

Nor is it all that long ago that women had to fight for their right to be called Ms instead of Miss or Mrs. Until 1986, for example, the supposedly liberal New York Times stubbornly refused to use the term and insisted that its reporters had to ask women who were being mentioned in the paper whether they were married or unmarried so that their “proper” prefix could be attached to all mentions of them – whether they liked it or not. (Needless to say, there was no such question for men.)

Irish speakers – especially but by no means exclusively in Northern Ireland – often encountered the same pigheadedness. It is not for nothing that official bodies in Northern Ireland have adopted an explicit policy that “a person may use whatever form of their name they choose. This right should never be questioned.” In this case, the issue at stake was not gender identity but the right to be known by the Irish version of one’s name.

There’s nothing really new, therefore, in the idea that some people want to change the way they are addressed, and some other people think it’s okay to ignore or even defy those wishes. Withholding someone’s chosen name has long been a way of asserting power over them: it’s why all the Irish were Micks, Paddies or Bridgets. It’s why slaves were given their masters’ names.

Just because something is not unlawful does not mean that it is acceptable. Especially in an educational environment, a teacher who is consistently bad-mannered towards particular students is a problem. Deliberately miscalling names is as rude as calling names

Yet not everything that is boorish is or can be unlawful. For example, SETU’s website tells me that its Catholic chaplain is called “Fr David Keating”, which is presumably the form of address he prefers.

Should it be against the law for a student to call him, say, Mr Keating? Of course not: you can’t legislate against being a churlish pain in the behind.

[ Names and identity: Nomenclature as tool of slavery and invasion ]

[ That’s not my name: Why getting the pronunciation right matters ]

But this also works the other way round: just because something is not unlawful does not mean that it is acceptable. Especially in an educational environment, a teacher who is consistently bad-mannered towards particular students is a problem. Deliberately miscalling names is as rude as calling names.

There’s an obvious imbalance of power between teachers and their students. That places a particular onus on the teacher not to abuse that power and on the school or university to make sure that the student is treated with respect.

So Colette Colfer, the lecturer at SETU who has objected to the university’s gender inclusion policy, is right to question the university’s implication that “staff and students at higher education institutions [are] required, by law, to use a person’s preferred pronouns”. But I think she’s wrong to go further and claim that requiring staff to use a person’s preferred mode of address “could result in discrimination against those who do not subscribe to gender identity theory”.

It really couldn’t. If I call the SETU chaplain Father because that’s what common courtesy requires, I am not subscribing to the teachings and beliefs of the Catholic church. If I call one of my students “they” or use the name they ask me to use, I’m not subscribing to a theory. I’m just trying not to be an a**hole.

Let’s remember that we’re all transitioning here. Decency by any other name smells just as sweet.