In my college days, around the turn of the century, I volunteered to help move in the new freshmen at our dorm. There was a special kind of pleasure in meeting the newbies, especially in being part of their first experience of college and in introducing them to the unique culture of Heemstra Hall. To step out of the role of freshman myself and step up instead to the role of mentor in this context was satisfying on a number of levels.
I recall one new freshman in particular. The name on the sheet said Nathan. Introducing him to his new abode, I asked if he went by Nate. He said, “Yeah, but call me Nate-dawg.”
This was, at the time, what one would consider a cool nickname. A fly one, even. I can’t be sure, but I vaguely recall him even bothering to spell it for me.
Naturally, I resisted this immediately. And I never did honor his request. On one level, it seemed silly, as I had just met Nate, and calling him Nate-dawg would seem artificial and forced, even dishonest. On another level, it may have reminded me of being called Ben-dog a decade earlier, when this was meant as an insult—the impetus for me to stop going by Benji as a kid.
More than this, it was a rite of passage in Heemstra Hall that each new resident would have to find his place in the community as he integrated into dorm life and became known for what was distinctive about him. This was a transitional time in life, and while he might have been Nate-dawg in high school, he would be—should be—someone else in Heemstra.
In other words, Nate would have to earn his nickname if he wanted one. Some earned monikers like Dano, Crotch, Rizzo, or Ding (Nate’s roommate), but not all got nicknames. Many, like me, would be most commonly referred to by their last names. This is jarring at first, but then empowering, as it instills a sense of maturity and an independent identity in the public sphere. This is a common coming of age ritual in young men’s culture, as in the locker room, or in the military. But whatever you ended up being called, it was the community that made the naming happen. It came about not by some decision someone made—especially not Nate himself—but organically through the natural process of social integration into dorm life. In fact, your new name was a sign that you had settled in and found your place. You had earned your spot in Heemstra.
I am reminded of Nate whenever I see a certain poster on a bulletin board in my office building. In large letters is a quote attributed to notable feminist and CIA asset Gloria Steinem: “We all have the power to name ourselves.” This is emblematic of a new liberal orthodoxy with respect to names: each person gets to choose what everyone else calls him. Or her. Or, I am told, them.
Looking through the lens of politics and power, this makes intuitive sense. If I can’t determine my own name, then people might call me something I don’t want them to call me. From a liberal individualist perspective, it seems that some right of mine must have been violated. I have not consented to being called that name. We have a simple term for this offense: it’s name-calling, and it’s generally out of bounds in civil society.
Interestingly, name-calling refers only to such insults, and not to the plain act of calling someone by name. There is a chasm of difference between calling someone by name, and calling them names.
One could make a case that name-calling is a more serious issue than in the past, due to the impersonal nature and increasing frequency of online interactions, and the arguable decline of civility this has entailed. But the loss of manners has been a common complaint for centuries. What is novel here is the contemporary insistence that everyone has a right not to be called a name they do not want to be called. And this is stacked on top of the idea that one automatically belongs to a particular group simply by—another novelty—‘identifying as’ a member of said group.
The friction here comes up most frequently in the battle over pronouns—those inconveniently gender-specific abbreviated names we can hardly help but use, no matter how valiantly some of us try. The sudden emergence in the last fifteen years of the transgender movement, under the well-worn (worn out, perhaps) framework of civil rights for a marginalized minority, has brought up questions and issues that were heretofore completely undiscussed by all but a tiny fringe of niche academics and social outcasts. We had never had to think about what pronoun to use for someone before—like a good nicknaming, it just happened organically, naturally. Fifteen years ago, I’d bet most people couldn’t even identify what exactly a pronoun was. Now, not only do we know, we have to watch our tongues vigilantly, or we might misgender someone—another piece of newspeak.
People are nice. They don’t want to offend others, nor even be perceived as being rude. They also want to avoid confrontation, especially in person. Last year an old college friend of mine and I got to talking about transgender issues, and he thought it a simple matter of common human decency to refer to people by their requested pronouns, in all cases. As someone who has found this issue vexing myself, this struck me, as I’ve always known him to be—at least compared to me—a fairly conservative evangelical Christian. If this was his approach to pronouns, there must have been a seismic shift in conventional opinion on all of this.
Yet another term was added to the lexicon in recent years: deadnaming. Seen as even worse than misgendering, this is when someone uses a person’s old name despite a gender transition. For instance, refusing to use the new name, Brenda, and stubbornly sticking with Brendan instead. Notice that it is not called oldnaming, but deadnaming: as though Brendan has died, and Brenda has taken his place.
The most striking thing about deadnaming and pronoun pickiness is how it used to rewrite the past. If I were to say that Bradley Manning leaked the Iraq War Logs to Wikileaks, I would be correct. But I would also be corrected, by an eager enforcer who would hurry to inform me that, actually, I just deadnamed and misgendered Chelsea Manning. But Manning did not transition until 2010, after his military service and his heroic act of whistleblowing.
This goes further than a demand to call someone a gender that does not match his or her sex. It demands instead a rewriting of the past. To talk about the time when Chelsea Manning leaked the Iraq War Logs amounts to historical revisionism, since at the time the individual who did that deed went by the name Bradley.
This demand of others to misrepresent the truth is no surprise, of course, to those who are already pronoun-hesitant, as those are the people who see such requests as a demand to deceive in the first place. It would be like me pretending that I was Ben, and not Benji, in the first grade. Even if Gloria Steinem were right, and I did have the power to name myself, do I have the power to reach back into the past to change my childhood name too? Surely there is some point at which we must defer to reality rather than to the demands of those who would rather deny it.
Deferring to reality, as opposed to desire, is not as easy as it used to be. Escaping from reality is the new normal, and here we see a particular mental and cultural tectonic shift that underlies the idea of gender transition. Children and young people today seem to take for granted that you are what you identify as, largely because of their extensive experience in the online world. On social media, and in innumerable videogame worlds, the individual user is practically a disembodied mind who gets to customize not just their avatar’s gender, but their height, build, race, hair color, facial features, skill set, and more. And these things can usually be changed again anytime at the whim of the player. Online, reality bends easily to the user’s desire, and your mind gets to pick exactly the body it wants. The internet is making gnostics of us all. In any case, if you are accustomed to choosing all of these things for your own online persona, then of course being able to choose one’s name and identity feels natural and normal. What’s more, to resist this idea at all is to be an intrusive busybody who won’t let others be who they want to be.
The issue of naming is of more immediate political consequence than many realize. For one, whatever your opinion on pronouns and deadnaming, it is now a critical front in the fight to preserve the freedom of speech. Which is more important: the namer’s freedom of conscience or the namee’s demand to be free from perceived name-calling? Is it worse to allow name-calling, or to compel people to say things they don’t believe are true? Despite the recent American election, freedom of speech globally has been rapidly losing ground. As we watch European governments arresting a growing number of thought criminals, from pro-Palestine journalists to anti-immigration tweeters, names too are now a live free speech issue in Germany and other countries.
As I mentioned above, I was subject to some name-calling as a kid, when I went by Benji. Because of the famous cute little dog with the same name, I was derisively called Ben-dog by my schoolmates (unlike in the case of Nate-dawg, this was well before that formula was cool). I started to realize that Benji was a child’s name, like Joey or Timmy. By some accident, some of these names age just fine into adulthood, like Jimmy or Andy. But Benji was not one of those names—adult Benji’s are few and far between. At my mom’s helpful suggestion, I started asking people to call me Ben, and although it sounded boring at first, I grew into it. It was a key transition for me as I came of age, and it changed how I thought of myself. I felt more adult, more mature.
This experience gives me some empathy for people who want to transition to a new identity and to be called a different name. But I think it also stands in contrast both with Nate’s request and with the idea of an individual making a decision to transition. As I “transitioned” from Benji to Ben, I remained Benjamin throughout: the name my parents gave me. The key difference is givenness.
While we mostly refer to them as “first” and “last” names, more properly speaking these are your given name and your family name. Neither is up to you. A family name is, of course, inherited, or married into. And a given name is, naturally, given to you. A gift. Parents get the incredible privilege of naming another human being, because they are the ones responsible for bringing that new person into the world and raising him or her.
And what a joyful privilege that is! I recall naming my first son with my wife sixteen years ago. We both loved the name, which she found in a church hymnal. She had wanted to spell it Neale, after the hymnodist, and I wanted to spell it after the style of Rush’s drummer Neil Peart (peace be upon him). We compromised, and were both very happy with our gift to Neal. (Now that I think about it, it should be no surprise what a knack for music Neal has!) I was also excited to give him Vincent, after my great-grandfather, as his middle name.
The modern world has become quite uncomfortable with given things. Given things are things you don’t get to choose, things you don’t freely consent to. And individual choice and consent seem to be all that remains of modern ethics. The idea of transitioning as an individual to a new identity and a new name is a radically individualist idea that ignores the social foundations of naming and the relational significance of names themselves. It’s helpful here to remember also that life itself is a gift—a given thing. None of us chose or consented to be here, and that doesn’t make life an injustice. In the same way, no one consented to be born into a particular sex, or race, or body type, and that doesn’t make any of these things an injustice, but simply—like life itself—a given thing. Yes, some gifts are more appreciated than others, but a gift is always an occasion for gratitude.
Nate’s request to be called Nate-dawg rubbed me the wrong way in part because he was trying to graft his old high school identity onto his new college community. He was trying to skip past the communal naming process, trying to assert his own personal control over a natural practice of giving by others. Nicknames, like all names, are special because they are given. Even if your nickname is well earned, you don’t get to claim it for yourself. It is given you by the community, by those who preceded you and who welcome you into this new place. Interpreted the right way, maybe Gloria Steinem was right after all. We all have the power to name ourselves—collectively, not individually. But I don’t think she meant it that way.
Image Via: Flickr
