Officialdom’s frenetic replacement of words like son and wife with words like ‘carer’ and ‘partner’ diminishes our identities.by Frank Furedi
I have always
been fascinated by the language we use to express our view of everyday life.
But it wasn’t until the death of my mother three years ago that I realised how
words could be used to diminish our identity and pressure us to adopt new
values.
As soon as I heard that my mother had a
stroke, I went to see her at our local hospital in Kent, England. On arrival, I
introduced myself to the nurse with the words, ‘I’m Frank Furedi, I’m Clara’s
son’. The woman looked up at me and said, ‘You mean you’re her carer’. ‘No, her
son’, I responded. But she was insistent: ‘No, you are her carer.’
Later, one hospital administrator
explained to me that they used the word carer because it included all;
apparently not every patient has a close relative to look after them.
In Australia, the Department of Health and
Ageing defines everyone who provides help to an ill or frail person as a carer.
On its website it notes that ‘many carers
don’t consider themselves to be carers - they see themselves as just family
members’. Outwardly, this is a simple and uncontroversial statement of fact.
But when you examine it closer, it offers a chilling reminder of who defines
your identity. You may think you are family but, according to this
administrative formula, you are ‘carers’.
The word carer may be inclusive, but if a
special connection between mother and son is transformed into a bureaucratic
typology, then something very important has been lost. The relationship between
patients and their family, friends and paid help all involve care, but they
convey fundamentally different meanings to the people concerned.
This
linguistic engineering, this tendency to redefine human relations through a
vocabulary that corrodes their special, unique and intimate qualities, is often
promoted as a way of making all of us feel included. The first time I felt
ambushed by linguistic policing was in the 1990s, when I read a report on how
to deal with child abuse in a religious setting. The author, Helen Armstrong,
argued that the church should respond by changing its traditional language.
Why? Because ‘religious language often depends on a positive view of the value
and trust placed in fathers, parents and family’ and it therefore may offend
victims of abuse. The report warned against the use of a language that
‘represents God as father or as protector’ and said we should rethink ‘the
range of “family” language used in religious thinking’.
The implication of Armstrong’s arguments
was that the positive valuation of the family discriminated against victims of
abuse, and therefore a new language should be made mandatory. If the
celebration of the family is seen as troubling to those who have had negative
experiences with their parents, then what intimate relationship can be unashamedly avowed these days?
Certainly not that of husband and wife. As the Flinders University’s guide to
using inclusive language explains: ‘Language that reinforces the assumption
that all personal relationships are exclusively heterosexual denies the lived
realities of same-sex couples.’ Accordingly, it advises using the term partner
instead of wife or husband.
Like carer, the term partner has the
advantage of homogenising every relationship, eroding their distinctions and
instead making them all conform to an inoffensive generic formula. Insisting
that I was my mum’s son was proof of my emotional illiteracy, apparently. But
to refuse to be called partner and actually to embrace discriminatory
appellation such as ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ - that is a marker of gross
insensitivity, we are told. Better that you call your wife a spouse. And it is
now official. Those applying for a visa to migrate to Australia are told by
www.australia-migration.com that ‘if you are married, then you apply for the
spouse visa’. It helpfully informs applicants that spouse is ‘the Australian
husband or wife’.
Thankfully, you can still acknowledge that
you are married. What is at issue is who you are married to. Numerous advocates
of same-sex marriage argue that the association of marriage between a husband
and wife is an expression of discriminatory prejudice. So a few years ago a
submission by the Melbourne-based Human Rights Resource Centre to the inquiry
into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009 insisted that references to wife
and husband should be removed from section 45(2) of the act. The submission
also took exception to the ‘gendered’ term ‘man and woman’ used in marriage and
opted for the term ‘union of two people’.
In Canada, where same-sex marriage was
legalised in 2005, terms like husband and wife have already been removed from
much official documentation. A similar approach is proposed for Britain in the
Lib-Con government’s consultation on same-sex marriage, which implies, in Brendan O’Neill’s
words,
that ‘bureaucrats have the right to define our relationships, and by extension
to govern them’.
Meanwhile in Sweden, campaigners are
urging the authorities to introduce ‘gender-neutral’
language.
They want to do away with any linguistic expression of difference between the
sexes (such as the use of apparently discriminatory words like ‘he’ and ‘she’
or ‘boy’ and ‘girl’) in favour of having everyone speak in a fully PC, new and
neutral fashion.
Whatever you think of a world in which
sons are called carers, lovers are described as partners, husbands and wives
are reinvented as spouses or just ‘two people’, and no one says ‘boy’ or
‘girl’, you should at least acknowledge that it is a very different place to
one where people cultivate their own identities and traditions to determine who
they really are.
It is important to understand that these
new administratively sanctioned terms are not simply different words that
express the same old identities or relationships. No, when a son is transformed
into a carer, then the defining features of his relationship to his mother
become obscured, maybe even lost. When religious organisations are told to use
a language that treats the family as no big deal, then they cease to serve as
institutions that can give spiritual meaning to their members. When marriage is
reinterpreted as merely the union of two people, or a partnership of spouses,
then the identity of a husband and wife is steadily eroded and loses its
deep-rooted symbolic significance. Linguistic engineering impacts in a very
real and very negative way on how we conceive of ourselves and how we think
about our most intimate bonds.
The words we use really, really matter. They
shape our view of ourselves and of our fellow citizens. In an open, tolerant
society, people should possess the freedom to choose how they define themselves
and others.
Unfortunately, today there are powerful
cultural forces that believe they have the moral authority to decide what words
the rest of us can use to describe ourselves, our loved ones and our
relationships. Language is a far too important an area of human life to leave
to the administrators and experts. We need the courage of our convictions to
use the words that best express what we are about.
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