Many British companies now permit the honorific Mx. Will American businesses follow suit?
This is a transcript of a Subtitle podcast episode.
Nina Porzucki: It’s Tuesday night at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and the house is packed for “Bar Whatever.”
Leo Hornak: A queer cabaret night in South London. On stage is Michael, the emcee. Pink dress, big heels even bigger wig.
Michael: Are there any Whatever virgins are in the house? Is anyone brand new to…?
Nina Porzucki: And we’re here to talk with the crowd about words.
Leo Hornak: One word actually: Mx.
Nina Porzucki: How many people do you know that use the honorific?
Bar Whatever attendee 1: My God, I don’t know, I can’t count. Me and my partner both use Mx.
Bar Whatever attendee 2: At least five or six people in my mind. But a couple of people in their own head, they feel that way. There’s so many people to count like, I don’t think it’s become more popular. I think it’s become more known.
Patrick Cox: If Mx isn’t that known to you — if you’re wondering how to spell it, how to pronounce it, what exactly it means — well, you’re not alone. From Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America, this is Subtitle: stories about languages and the people who speak them. I’m Patrick Cox. So this word Mx — spelled M-X — it’s more widely used in the UK than in the US. It’s one of several words in use right now — some will stick, some won’t — words that may just help us resolve a struggle of gender and sex and language that goes back centuries.
We have two people reporting this episode. Leo Hornak. And Nina Porzucki. Here’s Nina.
Nina Porzucki: Mx is an honorific, like Mr, Mrs and Ms. But it’s designed to be gender-neutral. And over in the UK, more and more people have started requesting Mx in their everyday lives — for example, their banks. So we’re doing a little experiment.
Leo Hornak: So my aim is basically to open a new bank account with the Nationwide, which is one of the big banks here in Britain.
Nina Porzucki: How hard is it to become Mx Leo Hornak, to your bank?
Leo Hornak: Would you like a checkbook? No, it’s not the 90s.
Nina Porzucki: Honorifics are sometimes called titles or prefixes. And while titles are definitely a thing in the United States, the UK is a bit obsessed with them.
Leo Hornak: Your details, your title: Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Dr.
Nina Porzucki: No Mx in the mix so far.
Leo Hornak: Wait. And then it goes a more, dot dot dot. I’m just gonna click on the “More” and, ah…This has opened up a new kind of tab, and it says: Able Seaman.
Nina laughs.
Leo Hornak: That’s not funny. Admiral. Admiral of the Fleet. Admiral Sir. AFC, Air Chief Marshal, Air Commodore, Air Marshal, Air Marshal Sir, Air Vice Marshal, Air Vice Marshall. That was twice. I don’t know why.
Nina Porzucki: What’s the difference between the Air Marshal and Air Marshal Sir?
Leo Hornak: I have no idea. I also don’t know why Air Vice Marshal and Air Vice Marshall — Oh, one is with one ‘L’ and one with two ‘L’s’. Wow, you wouldn’t want to make that mistake when you wrote to the Air Vice Marshal.
Nina Porzucki: Sir.
Nina Porzucki: Shai Jacobs hates titles. But…
Shai Jacobs: When forced to choose a title, I will use the title Mx, or M-X or whatever you want to call it. My pronouns are they, them, their.
Nina Porzucki: And they are a non-binary activist.
Shai Jacobs: What’s nice about Mx as a title is that it tells you nothing about a person. It doesn’t tell you their gender. It doesn’t tell you their marital status. It doesn’t tell you whether they’ve got any particular qualifications or not. In the widest possible sense, it is for everyone.
Leo Hornak: So how do you pronounce it? ‘Mooks’ or ‘Mix’ ?
Shai Jacobs: There is no standardized way. It’s one of those things where the world keeps changing and different people say things in different ways.
Nina Porzucki: You might hear us use ‘Mooks’ or ‘Mix’ interchangeably throughout the podcast.
Leo Hornak: It’s fair to say that Mx is having a moment here in the UK. Shai’s has been tracking its rise in Britain over the last few years. Several banks have adopted the prefix.
Shai Jacobs: I think about half the banks, the large utility companies
Nina Porzucki: Certain parts of the National Health Service. The Royal Mail now recognizes it. And in 2015 the British Parliament even voted to allow MPs to use the title
Leo Hornak: Though none of them has yet done so. MCs
Nina Porzucki: Mx even entered the Oxford English degree generic that same year 2015.
Leo Hornak: If Mx sounds a bit foreign to your ears, Shai admits this gender neutral language is relatively new. Shai only started using it themselves in 2010. But it makes a huge difference to people’s lives.
Shai Jacobs: You suddenly got people going, “Oh my God! This explains how I’ve always felt.” As soon as awareness is raised, then people suddenly have words and have language to describe how they’ve always felt and never known what to do about that.
Nina Porzucki: Mx may seem like it’s on the road towards acceptance. Yet, the struggle to insert these two letters into the culture has been a bureaucratic and emotional nightmare. Two letters mean a lot of red tape.
Leo Hornak: Shai’s been through the bank thing many times.
Shai Jacobs: As is usually the case with things in the UK, it starts with a letter.
Leo Hornak: The other kind of letter, you know, the one with the stamp you put in the post.
Shai Jacobs: So you’ll have rung up your bank, and they will ask you for the title. And you will say to them, “It’s Mx.” And they will say, “What now?” And then you’ll say, “Mx.” And they will say, “Yeah, we don’t have that in the system.” And then you will say, “Well, that’s my title.” And they’ll say, “Yeah, well, we can’t do that.” And then you will say, “Okay, I’ll write you a letter.”
Leo Hornak: So basically, at this point, battle commences.
Shai Jacobs: …say very polite words, and then you’ll say some less polite words. And then they will either say, “Oh, that’s very interesting. And we will take that into consideration.” And they won’t, or they will actually do something about it.
Nina Porzucki: For a while, Shai got so frustrated with this routine, that they contemplated a more radical solution.
Shai Jacobs: So I signed up for the Church of Universal… whatever, and got a little certificate saying Hurray, you’re ordained! Well done! And thought, Okay, that’s good. I can use it forever. And now and it will be absolutely fine.
Nina Porzucki: But Reverend, though technically gender-neutral, wasn’t perfect.
Shai Jacobs: Then I went to the ordination of a friend of mine, who was genuinely being ordained as a minister in a proper church. And watching her go through that the amount of training that she had been through just made me go, No, this is not right. I cannot just appropriate someone’s title like that, that they’ve worked hard for. So yeah, you have to find a different solution.
Leo Hornak: You might expect the opposition to Mx to be from conservatives, and there’s plenty of that. But it also comes from a more surprising direction.
Julie Bindel: So how I feel about Mx is it’s a backward step.
Nina Porzucki: So this is Julie Bendel veteran journalist, lesbian and feminist activist.
Julie Bindel: Well, I’m 55 and I’ve been a feminist since 1979.
Leo Hornak: She’s not a fan of Mx.
Julie Bindel: What it’s doing is obscuring the fact that there are two sexes. And the feminist theory would have it, that the sex class of women are oppressed by the sex class of men. And for now, until we achieve feminist utopia, we need to know who is female and who is male, for the simple reason that we need to measure inequality and depression.
Leo Hornak: Julie’s stance on this issue and more generally on transgender politics has been pretty controversial. She has been called transphobic and a TERF, a trans exclusionary radical feminist. That’s not a compliment.
Nina Porzucki: Julie says that she is not against trans people and she supports their rights. But she is adamant that there is something anti-feminist about Mx.
Julie Bindel: It is a substitute for feminism. It is an absolute substitute for it. Young feminists who are lesbian, are under pressure to label themselves queer, not speak about female oppression, but to rather say, “Well, I’m just non-binary,” as a way to perhaps identify out of their own oppression — or if they’re born male, to identify their way out of the fact that they are oppressive.
Leo Hornak: It’s not just theoretical, Julie says.
Julie Bindel: I’ll give you an example. A man who identified as non-binary stood up in a conference on feminism recently, and he was there, very conventionally male: beard, typical male clothing. When the chair saw him stand up, several men had been speaking and this was a conference on feminism. The Chair said to him, “Could you please allow a woman to ask a question?” And he said, “I identify as non-binary. I have the right to speak.” Now it’s being misused in all kinds of ways. And this is not on.
Shai Jacobs: So I feel like that’s a little bit disingenuous.
Leo Hornak: Shai Jacobs again.
Shai Jacobs: I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be working towards a society in which gender boundaries are broken down to such an extent that anyone can, you know, express themselves in any way that they want. Nobody assumed what pronouns you use or what titles you might use to describe yourself, but we’re not there yet. We’re nowhere near being there and the bit that Julie Bindel especially will not get is that my body makes me so uncomfortable with my life that I have to do something about this otherwise I will quite simply die. I think that part of what people who don’t experience gender dysphoria don’t get is that this isn’t something that people — it’s not a lifestyle choice. It’s not something that people have woken up one morning and thought, “ Ah, you know what, I don’t need my breasts, screw it!” They know this on a very basic level and it causes such severe mental health problems and trauma. You know, the suicide rates are unreal.
Nina Porzucki: Feminist campaigner, Julie Bindel has also won no fans at Bar Whatever — remember, that non-binary cabaret night in London.
Leo Hornak: Several years ago, Julie was asked to speak at an event held at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the same venue as Bar Whatever.
Protest speaker: there is and there will be a peaceful — I’m saying this — is gonna be a peaceful demonstration
Nina Porzucki: Bar Whatever regulars were so offended by her inclusion. They staged a protest
Julie Bindel: Well, there was a huge baying crowd outside, screaming and shouting.
Nina Porzucki: Inside the club, the scene was equally tense.
Julie Bindel: The screaming and shouting and cursing and threats were so rabid — it was so hostile and horrible — that the the organizer to intervene, throw people out. Somebody was actually carried out screaming threats at me.
Leo Hornak: On another night, they had a cabaret act where a person on stage had their underwear pulled down and was spanked. The person was wearing a Julie Bindel mask.
Julie Bindel: Bullying, horrible, nasty, vicious piece of performance that was just set up to ridicule, and to send a message that, you know, I’m subhuman and therefore can be treated that way.
Leo Hornak: One of the ironies of Julie’s problem with Mx is that back in the 80s, Julie herself was involved with another campaign to get a new honorific accepted. Not Mx but Ms. M-S.
Julie Bindel: We were campaigning against use of the prefix Miss M-I-S-S. And we wanted it replaced with Ms, M-S. Because we saw that that was equal to the Mr.
Nina Porzucki: It’s hard to conceive of now but not that long ago Ms was the controversial prefix, sounding as foreign as Mx might sound today.
Julie Bindel: It was one of the achievements of feminism. It may sound small compared to, you know, the campaign to end female genital mutilation, for example. But you know, it all counts towards the ultimate goal of equality.
Leo Hornak: There was a lot of pushback
Julie Bindel: What was the campaign like it was quite hostile from those that were against reclassifying women as having equal status to men, at least on official forms are in speech.
Nina Porzucki: And like today, the front line was about getting banks and corporations to change their ways.
Julie Bindel: I remember just feeling so uncomfortable when every time I made a call — because in those days, of course, you got to speak to a real person — when I was asked if I was Miss, or Mrs. Because as a lesbian, it was particularly uncomfortable because in those days, of course, you were scrutinized as to your marital status. And what that meant was whether you were married to a man or not.
Leo Hornak: In those days, of course, lesbians legally couldn’t marry in the UK.
Julie Bindel: You were instantly discriminated against. If A) you said that you were Miss, because people thought, “Oh, they’re not married. Oh, that’s a shame, maybe one day.” And B) if you said, “I object to that question. I’m a lesbian. I’m not going to marry.”
Patrick Cox: Just a quick interruption here to tell you about the Subtitle newsletter. Did you know that we’ll pop something into your inbox, if you sign up, every two or three weeks? It’s a quick and fun read. There are language-themed stories that are in the news. You’ll see what’s coming up in future podcasts, you’ll hear about other podcasts that we’re listening to and we think you’ll like. And there’s some goofy lingo stuff as well. You can sign up here.
Leo Hornak: Ms actually has much, much early origins according to language expert. Mr. Ben Zimmer.
Nina Porzucki: Stay with us for this detour. So back in 1901, a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, drew attention to a problem. Quote, “There is a void in the English language which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill. Everyone has been put in an embarrassing position by ignorance of the status of some women. To call a maidenMrs is only a shade worse than to insult a matron with the inferior title, Miss.
Leo Hornak: I hate it when I insult a matron with an inferior title.
Nina Porzucki: So do many people, Leo. So for the next 60 years, Ms — M-S — would pop up every now and then as the polite solution to this problem.
Leo Hornak: But it never really gained much traction.
Nina Porzucki: Then in 1961, Sheila Michaels, a 22-year-old American civil rights activist, went to her mailbox one day to get her mail, saw a letter addressed to her roommate, a Ms. Mary Hamilton.
Leo Hornak: It was her sort of lightbulb moment.
Sheila Michaels: I was looking for something that didn’t identify me. And I saw this Ms. And I thought that could be a title.
Nina Porzucki: This is Sheila on a public access TV show talking about Ms. Unfortunately, she passed away last year. Throughout the late 60s and early 1970s Sheila became obsessed with promoting the honorific finally one day her message broke through.
Sheila Michaels: I was on a radio show with a group called the feminists. We were on the show and there was a lull in the conversation. And I brought up my hobby horse, you know, Ms. I to get people to listen, no one would listen. Really, I would think that this would be an idea that would appeal to women. It took Gloria Steinem, a friend of hers heard it and when they were trying to think of the title for this magazine.
Nina Porzucki: Yep, Ms. Magazine, which launched in 1972, was a breakthrough to the mainstream for this honorific Merriam Webster put it in the dictionary a year later.
Leo Hornak: Still, it wasn’t accepted by all it took more than a decade for the New York Times to add it to its style manual.
Nina Porzucki: So that’s how it might go for Mx. An idea that grows from a few activists to a wider range of activist to a radio show to a magazine title to mainstream acceptance.
Leo Hornak: Or a podcast.
Leo Hornak: Hon Viscount, Honorable Dame, Honorable Earl, Honorable Lord, Honorable Mrs, Honorable sir, HRH Prince, which is His Royal Highness the Prince, His Royal Highness Princess, His Royal Highness the Duke Inspector Junior.
Nina Porzucki: Meanwhile, Leo is still searching for Mx from the Nationwide Bank’s list of accepted titles.
Leo Hornak: And by the way, we’ve been doing this for 20 minutes and we’re only up to M. Managing Director, Marchioness, Marquis…
Nina Porzucki: And on.
Leo Hornak: Marquisse — female version I guess — Marshal of the RAF, Master…
Nina Porzucki: And on.
Leo Hornak: Most honorable Marquis, Mother Superior — good to get that in there — Mother...
Nina Porzucki: And on.
Leo Hornak: Ops Sergeant, Pastor.
Nina Porzucki: We went through the M’s.
Leo Hornak: Wait a minute, we finished the M’s?
Nina Porzucki: There’s no Mx.
Leo Hornak: There’s no Mx. There’s no M-X.
Nina Porzucki: Oh my gosh. You need to write a letter
Leo Hornak: It’s not just a modern argument. This debate in one way or another goes back a long time.
Nina Porzucki: A very long time. Cue the music.
Harpsichord music.
Leo Hornak: You promised me no harpsichord music, Nina.
Nina Porzucki: Fine.
Nina cuts the music.
Nina Porzucki: But it goes back to everybody’s favorite gender-bending genius and perhaps lover of harpsichords William Shakespeare.
Andy Kesson: The literature of his period is always playing with gender crossing one form of gender crossing over into another
Leo Hornak: Andy Kesson is a scholar of Renaissance Literature at the University of Roehampton. He’s our go-to guy when it comes to the history of theater.
Nina Porzucki: Instead of social media campaigns or non-binary cabarets, the social commentators and critics of the 16th and 17th century would circulate pamphlets, according to Andy.
Leo Hornak: There’s something so unsexy about the word pamphlets.
Nina Porzucki: So true.
Andy Kesson: Two of the most famous ones around 1620 are called Hic Mulier and Haec Vir. These are both Latin names. Hic is the male pronoun and Mulia means woman. So “He Woman.” Haec Vir. Haec is the female pronoun, she, and we’re means man so “She Man” if you will.
Leo Hornak: He woman and she man. Talk about gender-fluid language.
Nina Porzucki: Yeah, except the authors were fretting about people not sticking to their proper gender roles.
Andy Kesson: Particularly around the playhouses.
Leo Hornak: Shakespeare’s plays were originally performed entirely by men. The idea was to avoid the provocative exciting sight of women on stage. But that created a problem. Sometimes the boys in skirts were even more exciting than the girls.
Andy Kesson: And there’s lots of anxiety and pamphlets that this is encouraging queer desire that both men and women are watching gorgeous people, but not being clear about their gender.
Nina Porzucki: And there was another risk back then. If you broke gender rules on stage, the fear was that it might become permanent. In other words, that even if you were born male, your gender could change by merely acting the opposite sex.
Leo Hornak: Trans by accident.
Andy Kesson: If you dress yourself in the clothes of the opposite gender, whoops! You may well have gender transition whilst you’re onstage and not be able to transit back. Gender fluidity and moving between the binaries is very much in the air.
Leo Hornak: And it’s very much on the page too.
Nina Porzucki: Andy wanted to show us an example from Shakespeare himself.
Leo Hornak: Do people often come to see the Shakespeare documents.
Nina Porzucki: There’s only a handful of first edition copies still surviving of Shakespeare sonnets, and it takes a special appointment to see one.
Leo Hornak: When the library room and displayed in front of us on these specially designed book supports is this tiny book with the word Shakespeare’s sonnets row bound by red brown leather book…
Nina Porzucki: We’ve come to Oxford University’s Bodleian Library for being carefully supervised by library staff.
Leo Hornak: We’re not allowed to touch the book, or even photograph the hands for the man who does.
Leo Hornak: …handwritten, it says, 1609 in someone’s in ink, stamp. Oh, that’s the Bodleian Library. So that’s probably a bit more recent.
Nina Porzucki: Oh that’s your stamp. You stamped the book?! That seems sacrosanct!
Nina Porzucki: Andy says there’s one love poem above all that plays into this gap between female and male in the Bard’s work, Sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted.
Andy Kesson: And so it sort of stands in this bisexual place in the collection as a whole.
Nina Porzucki: It comes in the middle of the book of sonnets, after a sequence of love poems, apparently written to a beautiful man.
Leo Hornak: But before a sequence of poems apparently written to a beautiful woman.
Nina Porzucki: And although Sonnet 20 is a love poem, it professes love to neither a man nor woman, but a person who is devastatingly beautiful.
Andy Kesson: And who keeps slipping between the cracks of gender binaries, so he or she is the master-mistress of my passion. He or she keeps being pinned down by the poet in terms of gender, but keeps slipping away and not staying put.
Nina Porzucki: We asked the archivist with his gloved hands, to turn to sonnet 20. And Andy starts reading.
Andy Kesson: So I guess as we hear this poem is worth thinking about, who is being described who is being spoken to here.
(Andy reads) “A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;”
Leo Hornak: And as Andy reads, he also gives us a close reading of the gender games being played in this poem.
Andy Kesson: And right from the start, we’re told that this person has a woman’s face, which has been painted by “nature’s own hand.” Nature has created this person and given them a woman’s face. And then they’re called the “master-mistress of my passion,” and immediately we’re not quite sure where we are.
Leo Hornak: Stop there. Did you catch the honorifics?
Nina Porzucki: “ Hast thou the master mistress of my passion.”
Leo Hornak: Neither male nor female, but both master-mistress, the Mx of the 17th century.
Nina Porzucki: The poem continues on, flouting what is female what is male.
Leo Hornak: Here’s the entire poem.
The poem is read simultaneously by a man and a woman.
“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.”
Voice on phone: Now please say or key in your customer number or account.
Leo Hornak: Help, please. Speak to an agent.
Voice on phone: Sorry, we’re having trouble finding your account. Let’s get someone to help you.
Leo Hornak: Yes, please.
Nina Porzucki: We contacted Nationwide by the way. Mx wasn’t an option at the time, but they did give us a statement. Quote: “At the time our current systems were built, which is over 20 years ago, our large list of titles including professional and military titles was drawn up. At that time, Mx and other gender-neutral titles were not titles we were aware of, nor asked for. There has been a lot of fantastic and well-needed progression in the world of equality, diversity and inclusion in the UK over the past 20 years, that Nationwide continually strives to embrace in our practices and policies.” Still no Mx.
Patrick Cox: Since we ran a version of this story about five years ago, the Nationwide has added Mx to its drop down menu. It’s nice to know that a corporate statement is sometimes more than just a piece of fluffy PR. They actually meant what they said.
The battles over trans rights versus women’s rights have, if anything intensified in recent years, especially in the UK. Like, if the intensity level back then was, I don’t know, nine and a half out of 10, now it’s 11, take-no-prisoners level. Julie Bindel — who you heard from — she remains very much at the forefront of pretty much every single argument online. As is, I’m sure you know, JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame. Rowling’s participation has amplified the argument — actually globalized it. So much so that even if you’re just a casual consumer of social media, you might look at this standoff and think that every single person on earth has taken sides. Despite all of this really unforgiving rhetoric, once in every while you do see other people sticking their heads above the parapet. People who refused to see this cultural war as an either/or. People who are just trying to seek ways to champion both women’s rights and trans rights.
Thanks today to the Sister Superior Leo Hornak. And the Very Reverend Canon Nina Porzucki, who originally reported this piece and sent me updates. Deputy Chief Constable Alison Shao manages Subtitle’s newsletter and social media.
Subtitle is a member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective. We’re a group of independent podcasters who tell stories about stuff we value but don’t fully understand: things like belief, future technology and the nighttime. The Lonely Palette is a podcast about visual art. In each episode, host Tamar Avishai looks afresh at work of art. She records others as they respond to it, and tells us how it came into being. A recent episode considers that icon of feminist pop art, Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled: Your body is a battleground.” The perfect thing to listen to after this Subtitle episode!
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