If somebody – particularly a child – announces that they henceforth wish to be ascribed the pronouns “they and them” instead of “she and her” or “he and him”, are we obliged to comply? Or do we retain the right to ignore their wishes, and keep on calling them by the name, and referring to them by the gender, that they have always had?
It’s a vexed question, that, and it may cost Enoch Burke, of the Mayo Fighting Burkes, his job.
The Burkes, to their credit, have always had a characteristic that’s vanishingly rare in the Irish psyche: A willingness – in fact an eagerness – to stand up for their personal principles at almost any cost, even when those principles are deeply unpopular. Most of us, after all, would take the coward’s way out when confronted with a young person announcing to us that they wished to be referred to by a new name and pronouns. We would comply.
Not because, in many cases, we did not think the demands absurd. But because we know, and have been well trained to know, that there are some fights worth having, and some fights where the cost of fighting just dramatically outweighs the benefit of victory. It costs me nothing, for example, to write a piece generally bemoaning the rise of they/themming in Irish schools. It will cost Enoch Burke his job, I fear, for standing up to it directly. There are degrees of courage. Or foolhardiness, depending on your perspective.
Where the Burkes are different from you and I, or at least from most of us, is in their religious convictions. Earthly punishments have no meaning for them because they would rather be damned on earth than in heaven. That level of true belief is rare enough, even amongst the most devoutly religious. In its own way, it is to be admired.
But it also goes to a fundamental question of conscience: Why should Enoch Burke have to refer to a person, even a child, in a way that he feels is fundamentally dishonest? It goes I think to the very heart of why the transgender issue provokes such strong emotion on both sides.
We are told, often, that Ireland is a tolerant country, and that tolerance is a good and noble thing to which we should always aspire. The issue is that transgender people, and their voluble allies, demand of us much more than just tolerance: They demand participation.
You do not just tolerate a transgender person when you refer to them by their “new pronouns”, after all. You are not simply tolerating and accepting their existence – you are being made an active participant in their “transition”. This is understandable, in its own way: A person who has spent a lifetime wishing to be of the opposite gender will not, I suspect, truly feel that they have achieved their dream until they are publicly recognised as being of that opposite gender. When the question of how they are seen becomes so central in their lives, a member of the public declining to recognise them for who they are becomes – in the language of the moment – a form of “violence”, because it is a direct attack on their identity.
But it also demands of us dishonesty. That is the truth. There’s a reason that groups like the National Women’s Council regularly send tweets like this, after all, and it’s because repeating a mantra over and over and over again is the best and only way to train the brain to accept something that it does not wish to accept:
Trans women are women.
Trans rights are human rights. https://t.co/JX0Y0iOkpe— Womenscouncilireland (@NWCI) August 10, 2022
“Trans women are women”. Repeat it often enough, and you will eventually come to believe it. Maybe you do, genuinely, 100% believe it – but you’ve had to train yourself to do so. You certainly did not think that women had penises when you were eight years old. But by his late forties, after all, even Winston Smith loved Big Brother.
And the truth is that this lying is something that most of us – to varying degrees – are happy enough to do. In my own case, for example, I’d happily write here that it’s a lie, but addressing a teenager by “they/them” if that’s what they demand is something I’d probably do. For an easier life on the one hand, and because I’d feel a little bit like I was telling an eight year old that the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, on the other hand. Or that Fido the Dog didn’t really go away to visit his brother in America, or whatever. It’s in that class of dishonesty, as I see it. But perhaps that’s just my excuse, and the real reason is the first. An easier life.
We don’t naturally like conflict, after all. Most of us, anyway.
But does Enoch Burke like conflict? He’s likely, I suspect, to lose his job. If they can’t get him for refusing to address the student as they wish him to address the student, they’ll likely get him for making a big scene about it and so on and so forth. Certainly, I fear, every effort will be made to ensure that he loses his job, pour encourager les autres. The school, we’re told, has engaged the services of Mason Hayes and Curran, suggesting that it is either much wealthier than the average school, or very determined.
There is no reason to think that Burke is enjoying this experience. It is simply the cost of speaking his mind and refusing to participate in someone else’s transition.
And the fact that there is a cost should put to an end to the lie that this is a “tolerant” country. We do not demand tolerance. We demand participation, and compliance, with no exceptions. And woe to those, like the infernal Burkes from Mayo, who just won’t comply.
Update: A reader writes
Hey John, I always enjoy your writing on gript. I rarely agree with it but I enjoy having my own views robustly challenged. In your bit on Enoch I feel you did yourself a dis service in minimising his actions in the aftermath of his suspension. He (allegedly -ed) gate crashed an event he wasn’t invited to and was borderline abusive to those present in pursuit of his views. Maybe this isn’t related to your argument but I feel like it should have been mentioned.
Response, JMG: It is certainly true that Mr. Burke’s alleged behaviour – making, it is claimed, a big scene about this in front of parents and students and staff, and allegedly confronting the school Principal, is unsavoury in the extreme. I did not include it because I did not feel it was the most relevant part of the story and wanted to focus instead on the question of whether Mr Burke’s grievance with the school which prompted this alleged behaviour was justified. But readers are not wrong, I think, to consider this an important element of the story.