Not even Hollywood liberals and the Guardian have caught up with gender-identity changes
By R.L.G.
“ZOOLANDER 2” will be out in February, bringing Derek Zoolander and Hansel (played by Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson respectively) back to the screen as a pair of airheaded male models. Besides the potentially unwise attempt to revive the quirky fun of the first movie, which came out in 2001, the filmmakers have fallen on the wrong side of a fast-moving social change, with its own vocabulary that some young people are perfectly up to speed with, but which many older folks (Mr Stiller is 49) have yet to master.
The western world has seen a lightning fast revolution in, first, the acceptance of gay people, and more recently, the visibility of transgender people. The latter group has a new pinup in Caitlyn Jenner, who won a gold medal as Bruce Jenner in the decathlon at the 1976 Olympics. Those comfortable with trans people know to call Caitlyn “Caitlyn” and “she”, reserving “Bruce” and “he” to discussions of the past. The embrace of Caitlyn has been astonishingly rapid, with only a few daring to say a cross word. (Germaine Greer, a feminist whose heyday was in the 1970s, was a rare vote of dissent in saying that “Just because you lop off your penis…doesn’t make you a woman.” Activists have protested against speeches she had planned to give, which she in turn cancelled.)
The Zoolander creators have angered a different constituency. In the trailer, Hansel and Derek meet a new model (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) named All: shaved eyebrows, ironed-straight long hair, a white fur coat and blank expression. “Are you, like, a male model or a female model?” Asks Derek. “All is all,” says All. Hansel rephrases: “Do you have a hot dog or a bun?” All gives a high-pitched giggle.
By hiring a cis actor to play a non-binary individual in a clearly negative way, they [sic] film endorses harmful and dangerous perceptions of the queer community at large.
Tell Paramount Pictures, Ben Stiller, and Benedict Cumberbatch that mocking transgender/androgyne/gender fluid individuals is not okay—sign this petition to pledge to boycott the film!
Some people will never have heard a few of the words in this protest. Transgender people are born to one gender but feel that they belong in the other: “he” becomes a “she”. But a smaller minority of people feel they belong in neither sex fully; they constitute the movement to erase the “binary” gender distinction. Many “cis” people, though, will not have heard of the non-binary movement, nor even the words “cis” and “non-binary”.
“Cis” is simple etymologically: from Latin, it is the opposite of “trans-” and means “on this side” of something. But it is hardly known in English: classicists know that Rome referred to “transalpine Gaul” and “cisalpine Gaul”, but “cisalpine” and “cismontane” (“on this side of the mountain”) are the only two “cis-“ entries in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Google Books data (though it is messy and to be treated with some caution) shows how much more common “trans” (red, in the chart below) is than “cis”, and despite the millions of books Google has scanned, the collection includes not a single instance of the word that “cis” is short for in today’s parlance, namely “cisgender” or “cisgendered”.
So cis people can be forgiven for a bit of cluelessness in their “cis privilege”. Though this phrase turns up some 34,000 Google results, most people have no idea they are cis, having never heard the word or felt the need for it. Those like Mr Stiller and Mr Wilson—who as Hollywood A-listers can safely be presumed to have the standard liberal politics and no desire to insult a misunderstood minority—are probably up to speed with “trans” but have not, in their safe cis place—got the “non-binary” thing down. Even the Guardian was confused, calling All "transgender" in the first article over the flap, and "gender-fluid" in the second.
Non-binary individuals obviously deserve the same respect all people do, but the binary sex system dividing male and female seems to many people as formidable as the Alps: hard enough to cross, but harder still to lived perched on top of. The binary sex system runs deep not just in human but in nearly all animal biology. This is reflected in language: English is highly unusual in European languages in having no gender system. Nearly every other languages classes nearly all ordinary nouns as masculine or feminine, though some, like German and Russian, also have neuter—but non-binary people don’t think they have “no” gender and understandably do not want to be called “it”, so neuter won’t do either.
Artificial pronouns to avoid the male-female distinction, including “v” and many other entries, will almost certainly never catch on. But fortunately, English does have a pronoun that some non-binary people have taken on: “they”. It has been used for centuries by great English writers in phrases like “everyone has their own opinion.” Facebook now allows people to choose it (“It’s X’s birthday: wish them a happy birthday!) Though the Zoolander protestors above first refer to All as "he" in the petition, presumably because of Mr Cumberbatch's real-world identity, they go with "they" on second mention. It has the virtue of being deeply familiar. Those who would like to radically disrupt the binary gender system might prefer an eye-catching alternative like “v”. Those who want non-binary individuals to be treated like anyone else might consider the virtues of this ancient and venerable English word.
