Using requested names and pronouns

[entanglingbriars]

I've been of the opinion for a long time that the proper name for a person or group is what they ask you to call them and that by extension the proper pronouns for a person are the ones they ask you to use. However, in the past several months I've had a new experience; of fundamentally not wanting to use a requested name, of feeling that the request to do so is an unreasonable imposition. It's been an unpleasant experience. I stopped identifying as nonbinary in part because there were people who deliberately misgendered me and considered using the/them pronouns an unreasonable imposition. I considered that response rude and disingenuous. And yet, here I am.

In November 2018 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requested that it no longer be referred to as the "Mormon Church," "Mormonism," or "LDS"; that its members be called "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," not "Mormons." If we must abridge the name of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints they suggest "the Church," ""Church of Jesus Christ," or the "restored Church of Jesus Christ" as alternatives. The key, for President Nelson, is that the name Jesus Christ be centered when referring to the Church (I'm not sure, given that, why "the Church" is acceptable but "LDS" is not, but that's not really my business).

I feel this is an unreasonable imposition for several reasons, but ultimately my reasons shouldn't matter. If I wish to maintain integrity I need to refer to the restored Church of Jesus Christ by the name they've asked me to use. The fact that I don't believe the restored Church of Jesus Christ is actually a restoration of anything, that I consider using "Church of Jesus Christ" to be unnecessarily vague, that I think "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" is impractically long... none of these should matter. I should respect the name the restored Church of Jesus Christ has requested I use.

Either that, or I stop thinking that misgendering and deadnaming trans people is wrong. Because I can't maintain moral integrity while believing it's okay to request a specific name in one case and ridiculous in another.

Comments

[alexseanchai]

I'm not convinced that's true.

Someone says "the Church", I need to check context for which church, and my first assumption will always be the Catholic Church.

Approximately every third Protestant sect is the Church of Jesus Christ of some description or other. (The number is an ass pull but it really is a lot of them.)

The group under discussion...does not own either phrase. They can ask to be called whatever they want, but surely they know that if there are two Sarahs in one room, no one can say "Sarah?" and expect only the one they want to address to turn. They need to specify which Sarah. And if they specify "diva Sarah" or whatever and the said Sarah doesn't like that... demanding to be the Sarah will not help her. Trying to be "pottery Sarah"? Will probably go better.

That's not to do with respecting or not respecting self-chosen names. My name (which is not that my parents gave me) is Alex, so is that of one of my housemates, and we both use "they" pronouns. When the third resident yells for one of the two of us, they still need to distinguish which one.

I don't know the history of the labels "Mormon" or "LDS". But if the people so described don't like those and want people to stop using them? They should come up with an alternative that people aren't going to confuse with the Catholics or any of a thousand single-worship-location Protestant sects.

[entanglingbriars]

The thing is, they did come up with an alternative. "The restored Church of Jesus Christ." To my knowledge, no other group calls itself "restored," so it's unambiguous even if it's an unfamiliar term.

The history of the labels "Mormon" and "LDS" is that (at least in the last several decades) until President Nelson both were enthusiastically embraced by the restored Church of Jesus Christ. Their website was lds.org (now it's churchofjesuschrist.org) and they spent millions on a campaign where people made Youtube videos and other content titled something like "I am a Mormon."

The change in policy is the result of a claimed divine revelation received by President Nelson that the restored Church of Jesus Christ must place Jesus' name at the center of his church's name. Apparently it's been his particular pet peeve since at least the 90s.

[alexseanchai]

So they should be angling to get people to call them "the Restored Church", I'd think. Or the RCJC. (I think, absent this post, I'd have to google who was meant, but I'd certainly know it isn't the Catholics.) But that doesn't sound like what they're doing.

[osteophage]

Oh wow. This is... pretty absurd. Do they think they're the only Christians who get to call themselves the Church? ...or that it's bad to have any more specific designation for them than that?

For the record, I don't think balking at that wild of a change is necessarily incompatible with using trans people's names right. Why would they be equivalent? One's an issue of referring to individual people, and one's an entire litigious and religious organization. I wouldn't hold those to the same standard.

And, besides... even hypothetically, if a person asked to be known strictly as, I don't know, "Your Majesty," or some kind of ethnic slur or something -- as *their name* -- then that'd be another case where it'd be fair to say "no, hold on a second. I'm gonna have to ask you to pick something else." I don't think that has to be considered an anti-trans stance to take.

[entanglingbriars]

That's more or less my take. The problem is that I'm having trouble articulating why exactly I think this name change is an unreasonable imposition in a way that wouldn't also be able to be used by someone else to deadname or misgender trans people. Like, I'm pretty comfortable saying "I'm not going to say 'The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' every time I mention your church" but "the restored Church of Jesus Christ" is only two syllables longer than "the Assemblies of God" and I don't regard the Catholic Church as actually being universal (that's what "catholic" means) but I have no problem using either name.

[osteophage]

Yeah, I see what you're saying.

One of the differences, to me, is essentially the difference between standards for real people and standards for corporations. Saying something like "you need to make your name something more specific; this move comes off like you're trying to dodge your reputation by making yourself less identifying" isn't really... an argument that makes as much sense for talking about individual real people, since nobody expects there not to be more than one John Smith in the world, but having official organizations with extremely vague names too similar to the names that others already lay claim to *is* suspicious.

On the matter of syllables, I think it's also worthwhile to have a way to... noun-ify it for individual people, like how members of the Lutheran church are Lutherans, etc. What are they now? Restorers? Restorationists? "Members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ"?

[entanglingbriars]

They are members of the restored Church of Jesus Christ. Their temples are temples of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, not Mormon temples.

The whole thing is self-evidently ridiculous, I agree, it's just hard for me to articulate why.

[notreallystars]

I think it's partly a category issue. When I changed my name I chose a word that clearly belongs in the category of 'name'. If instead I had changed my name to something like 'tall person with brown hair' people would have refused to use it, partly because it's long and partly because it doesn't function as a name. To me, 'Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' doesn't really function as a name. It functions as a descriptor, which isn't quite the same.

For me there's also the issue of meaning. Most churches could describe themselves as churches of Jesus Christ. 'The Church' tends to refer to the Catholic church or to the official religion of a country (I'm British and thinking of the Church of England, which is quite often just referred to as 'the Church').

I'm also not convinced that treating people one way means that you must treat organisations in the same way. If a person I know consistently deadnames and misgenders me I'll probably complain about it but I won't take legal action against them. If an organisation did that they would be in contravention of the Equality Act and I absolutely would.

Corporations aren't people, and neither are churches

[random_thought_depository]

I think there are important differences between something a person wants and something a big, powerful, impersonal institution wants. This seems kind of like legal corporate personhood to me: big, powerful, impersonal institutions should not be treated as people because they are not people.

An institution does not have consciousness, independent will and desires, and feelings. It cannot be hurt in the way a person can. Individual Mormons might be hurt by perceived disrespect of their religion, but I think it's reasonable to approach that issue on a more case-by-case basis.

Big, powerful institutions should be held to different standards than regular people for the same reason that kings should be held to different standards than regular people. Behavior that is inoffensive in a regular person may be extremely destructive in an entity with great power.

Nationalists, religious people, etc. have a bad habit of demanding that their totemic symbols be treated with constant fawning, cringing, submissive deference. This is more like the behavior of extreme narcissists than trans/nonbinary people; it's a fundamentally different and much more dangerous pattern of thought, feeling, and behavior.

I think this might be a case where the desire for a simple, elegant, consistent morality is seducing you into ignoring a lot of actually relevant considerations (maybe because you can't articulate them, and this sort of approach to morality privileges social knowledge that can be articulated, and is structurally biased against social knowledge to which the Polanyi Paradox applies).