Four Arguments for the Elimination of Professional Pronoun Declarations in Librarianship

With gender identity ideology increasingly facing challenges worldwide, it's time to rethink this ideologically-loaded and fraught messaging.

[Image: “Pronoun buttons” College Library (Flickr)]

Introduction

Historians and sociologists may, in the very near future, determine that there have been few parallels for the rapidity and breadth of the global collapse of the consensus surrounding gender identity ideology. For all its hold on institutions over the better part of the past decade—such that any opposition to it or even questioning was sure to elicit online mobbing, “cancellation”, job loss, or worse—gender identity ideology is almost everywhere in rapid retreat: The UK (following the release of the devastating Cass Review) has banned puberty blockers for those under 18, while in the U.S., newly re-elected President Donald Trump has repealed federal recognition of sexes beyond male and female thereby restoring Title IX sex-based protections from discrimination for women; ended federal financial or policy support for pediatric gender medical interventions; instructed the Department of Education to disallow schools to socially transition K-12 students; and barred males from competing in female sports. In Australia, a petition signed by more than 100 prominent public figures (including former Prime Minister Tony Abbott) demanded a national inquiry into pediatric gender medicine, warning of a “potential health disaster of generational significance”, while a number of European countries have similarly pulled back from the “affirmative model” of care, leaving Canada a notable outlier.

As Irreversible Damage author Abigail Shrier put it in The Free Press, the gender fever has finally broken.

There is one measure taken by the Trump Administration this past week that has particular significance for professionals such as librarians, and that was the directive issued on January 31^st for federal employees to remove pronouns from their email signatures by the end of that working day.

The debate over pronoun declarations in librarianship has come up fairly regularly over the past few years among my colleagues in Heterodox Academy Libraries and the Association of Library Professionals (ALP), specifically in terms of how one should deal with a situation where one is asked to make one’s “preferred pronouns” known in an email signature, meeting, training session, web meeting, or webpage, when one objects to the practice personally. I’ve wondered myself many times what I would say in a group setting if asked, but not being mandatory in my university, it’s never come up. However, I do believe that, beyond any personal objections, there are very salient professional and disciplinary considerations in librarianship that argue against the practice.

Please note that in what follows I’m not concerned here with how one chooses to refer to oneself or others in an interpersonal capacity; I’m only interested in our professional context as a public-facing service, although some of these arguments may also resonate with those in other professions as well. And I do recognize—particularly in our multicultural society and for companies that do business internationally—that some personal names when seen in print may not be intuitively associated with males or females, so that some prompts may be necessary to facilitate communication. I will address this point later.

I also realize there are considerations here both institutional and personal: that some libraries may have a policy mandating pronoun declarations, while library workers in institutions that have no such policy nonetheless include their pronouns in the bios and email, etc. voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill and “allyship”. In the former case, what follows might help inform policy; for the latter, it is intended in the spirit of helping to inform personal decision-making.

However, for my own part, I have never included, nor do I intend to include, personal pronouns in my email signature, web meeting ID or professional webpages. To explain why, I offer the following four arguments, which I hope readers may find compelling and useful:

1. Professional Pronoun Declarations Presume the Presence of Bigotry, which must be Disproved;

2. Gender Identity Ideology—as Represented by Professional Pronoun Declarations—is a Comprehensive Doctrine, the Institutionalization of which is Illiberal;

3. Gender Identity Ideology—as Represented by Professional Pronoun Declarations—is Philosophically Incompatible with Library Science; and

4. Professional Pronoun Declarations are Incompatible with Multidimensional Library Neutrality.

Let’s now consider each of these arguments in detail.

1. Professional Pronoun Declarations Presume the Presence of Bigotry, which must be Disproved

The act of declaring one’s preferred pronouns in the professional context of librarianship appears to presume the need to disprove bad faith, i.e., that the library worker bears no ill intent or bigotry toward a particular group of vulnerable people, rather than—as has always been the case—simply assuming that members of the public should take it for granted that everyone in our public-facing profession is approachable and friendly. This sort of reassurance has never been asked of us: I’ve worked in libraries since 1989 with people from all races, ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations and walks of life and it’s never occurred to me that I would need to reassure the public through documentation in email signatures or web profiles that I am a “safe” person with whom to work.

The deeper (and more divisive) problem is that, the corollary of so declaring that “I am a safe employee” is to imply (in so many words) that any colleague who does not make such a declaration may not be safe. While we often hear the expression “virtue signalling” referred to derisively, in the case of a public-facing service the peer pressure to, in fact, signal one’s virtue to the library’s clientele in order to prevent others from prejudging us becomes very compelling. Abandoning this practice as a norm would return us to a base assumption of professional goodwill.

2. Gender Identity Ideology—as Represented by Professional Pronoun Declarations—is a Comprehensive Doctrine, the Institutionalization of which is Illiberal

To publicly declare one’s pronouns—even if that declaration is consistent with one’s biology—is to declare adherence to an ideology that holds that one can choose one’s gender, regardless of one’s biological sex. It valorizes one’s experience (or phenomenology) over one’s embodiment (or ontology). In other words, pronoun declarations are oriented towards a worldview of metaphysical idealism rather than realism. This is not to deny the validity of that subjective sense of self to those who experience it, but there are very real downstream socio-political effects if such idealism is taken to its logical conclusion, and those espousing the ideology seek to compel the recognition of those ideals on the part of the rest of society and its institutions. Such compulsion—regarding what philosopher John Rawls referred to as a comprehensive doctrine—would be outside the parameters of what a politically liberal society could be expected to accommodate or tolerate; there would be instead (quite understandably) resistance from those who do not believe in that particular ideology, which would result in social conflict. As philosopher Eric Voegelin observed in his 1970 essay “The Eclipse of Reality”, an ideological conflict with reality results in a conflict within reality.

People should be free to hold their own metaphysical beliefs and live their lives according to their experiences of them—that’s precisely what Rawls articulated in his work on comprehensive doctrines and political liberalism. However, I believe it is essential that democratic societies have at their core a synthesis of realism (a shared acknowledgement of what exists), pragmatism (a shared agreement regarding what works) and political liberalism, in terms of a shared willingness to co-exist under a system of governance that respects and tolerates differences and facilitates debate, in order to allow people to live according to their personally-held beliefs while not seeking to impose them on others.

The opposite condition—no agreed-upon ontologies, practices or system of shared governance—leaves society open to the rise of any kind of totalizing ideology that one party may seek to impose on the whole. Venture too far from this above formula and the socio-political space for pluralism vanishes, and with it the tolerance of reasonable people; what remains is a vacuum into which may rise a host of intolerant and unreasonable people, of whatever ideological bent or political persuasion.

While appending one’s preferred pronouns may seem like a minor (and kind) act, its idealistic worldview—when carried to its logical conclusion—is in conflict with librarianship’s democratic commitments to serve a pluralist public interest.

3. Gender Identity Ideology—as Represented by Professional Pronoun Declarations—is Philosophically Incompatible with Library Science

English language pronouns have always only been intended to indicate sex, or else the plurality or indeterminacy of persons; they have never been intended to take into account how people feel about themselves or to describe their experience of self. From the perspective of library science—concerned as it is with the classification and indexing of knowledge into categories, of recognizing and making accessible to others a world of ontologies—this is, fundamentally, a category error. Category errors aren’t something that librarians ought to be engaging in every time we send an email.

The central focus of library science on establishing descriptions that may be intersubjectively-understood and communicated is also gravely undermined by gender ideology’s insistence that one of the most basic aspects of human existence—our sexed bodies—cannot be described in an intersubjective, empirical fashion. Ask any gender activist to define what a woman is, and the answer will invariably be the circular logic of “anyone who feels like a woman.” This must be regarded as intolerable in library science, which relies on the existence of stable categories around which bodies of knowledge may be structured. Countless Library of Congress Subject Headings and Subheadings depend upon—and are intended to communicate—a stable definition of woman. On this point I must disagree with Emily Drabinski, and her 2013 call to “queer the catalog,” when she wrote

queer theoretical perspectives on classification and cataloging challenge the idea that a stable, universal, objective knowledge organization system could even exist; there is no such thing if categories and names are always contingent and in motion (104).

In the first place, I think this is a bit of a straw man argument: no librarian imagines that any single library classification system is considered to be “universal”, when (for example) Library of Congress Classification and Dewey Decimal Classification both remain popular for academic and public libraries respectively. And of course, there are some instances in fields of study when names and categories do undergo changes or adjustments, usually through processes of evidence-based deliberation within the discipline. But rejecting the notion of any stable categories whatsoever reduces the integrity of knowledge production and makes knowledge sharing highly problematic. Ironically, this rejection has certainly been especially harmful to Drabinski’s own focus on gay and lesbian liberation, with same-sex attracted people now being accused of being “sexual racists” and “genital fetishists” for insisting on the validity and integrity of their sexual orientation, rather than accepting trans-identifying members of the opposite sex as partners. If a class of people cannot be defined, neither can the human rights to which they are entitled.

4. Professional Pronoun Declarations are Incompatible with Multidimensional Library Neutrality

Finally, at its core, gender identity ideology has proven to be a political project, which has sought to implement changes to institutions at virtually every level of society. This means that in our professional context advancing its goals places the library worker in conflict with any notion of library neutrality—in many cases probably intentionally. Just as I would not include any statement of religious or political belief in my email signature or bio—or wear overtly political symbols at a public service desk—so too then does such a declaration become inappropriate.

On this Substack I have written numerous times about the four dimensions of library neutrality—that it comprises neutrality in terms of values, stakeholders, processes and goals (I’m especially pleased that this definition has been formally adopted by the Association of Library Professionals in their Bylaws). Given the intense and ongoing conflict between gender activists and gender-critical advocates for women’s rights and for gay rights, declaring personal pronouns in a public-facing professional capacity is to appear to take a side in this heated debate, which would violate a commitment to multidimensional library neutrality:

• Value neutrality: pronoun declarations are a public indication of adherence to a totalizing ideology, and therefore serve to advance and promote that ideology to members of the public, who may not share it;

• Stakeholder neutrality: pronoun declarations are a statement of “siding” with gender activists, and against those with gender critical/sex realist views;

• Process neutrality: from the perspective of the library user, pronoun declarations on the part of staff members create an ambiguous environment in regards to the institution’s position on matters related to the gender controversy;

• Goal neutrality: Should a library patron be seeking assistance with researching matters pertaining to gender from a realist perspective, they will be justified in wondering if the librarian will be biased against their research objectives

By contrast, simply indicating one’s name without pronouns is compatible with this model of library neutrality by taking no side on the issue either way.

Conclusion

Public pronoun declarations by library workers may have been undertaken with the best of intentions. Yet, the debate over gender ideology is now so fraught, the harms it has unleashed so pronounced—in terms of the impacts on women’s rights, gay rights, and the irreversible medicalization (and often sterilization) of gender-confused young people, to say nothing of the global crackdown on free speech justified in its name—that the practice of pronoun declarations cannot be divorced from this controversy. Again, nothing discussed above should preclude anyone from expressing or using preferred pronouns in an interpersonal, private context, which is entirely a matter of free expression. However, to declare one’s pronouns in a professional context in our public-facing profession may be readily interpreted by our users as a political act—the decision to take a side in this debate—which is incompatible with the precepts of multidimensional library neutrality.

At the same time, as I indicated in the introduction, it must be conceded that there are examples of names that may be used by both sexes (Robin, Pat, etc.) as well as names from many different global cultures which, in a multicultural context, may not be familiar enough for others not from that culture to understand in a print context to which sex the name refers. An option in such cases might be to simply append (as I recently saw in a Zoom meeting) a form of address before or after one’s name (e.g., Mr., Mrs., Ms.).

And for those who wish to create a safe environment for vulnerable library users, I would argue that the model of multidimensional library neutrality provides ample scope for such assurance in its articulation of stakeholder neutrality, which is to say the ethical commitment to ensure that every library user, of whatever background, characteristic, or identity is afforded equal right to dedicated, open-minded attention by the library worker., without fear of judgment or prejudice.

Now that’s something I would be willing to put in my email signature.

(Inspiration for my title is owed to Jerry Mander and his 1978 book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, one of my all-time favourite books).

Sources

Drabinski, E. (2013). Queering the catalog: Queer theory and the politics of correction. The Library Quarterly, 83(2), 94-111.

Rawls, J. (1993). Political liberalism. Columbia University Press.

Voegelin, E. (1970). The eclipse of reality. In Phenomenology and Social Reality: Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz (pp. 185-194). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

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