Coercing in, coercing out: Metadiscourse on the pitfalls of ‘inclusive language’ for intersex people’s self-determination

Abstract

<p>This paper takes as its focus metadiscourse about inclusivity in the <em>Darlington Statement</em> of consensus, a document compiled in 2017 and endorsed by Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand intersex community organisations and independent advocates. Intersex people are those born with physical or biological sex characteristics (such as sexual anatomy, reproductive organs, hormonal patterns and/or chromosomal patterns) that fall outside of normative expectations of what biological sex entails. The statement is a response to previous ‘consensus’ statements that had emerged from biomedicine in the Global North, which had attempted to maintain control of language used to talk about intersex bodies. The Darlington Statement includes metadiscourse on inclusive language and inclusivity more generally. Analysis of this text gives rise to several insights about what intersex activists can teach us about shifting meanings of ‘inclusive’ in relation to intersex experience with language (and beyond it). Terms like ‘Disorders of Sex Development’, framed as inherently ‘inclusive’ in the biomedical consensus statements, are positioned in the Darlington Statement as pathologizing and amounting to structural violence, so claims to greater inclusivity than the term ‘intersex’ are seen as spurious. To be ‘inclusive’ is not always to be fair or just, and it can involve disregarding people’s rights to self-determination. Another insight that emerges is the complexity of coercion in efforts at inclusivity. ‘Prescriptivism’ is often a target of inclusive language efforts because of opposition to its insistence on binary language, and yet in the Darlington Statement there are seen to be many parties guilty of prescriptivism. In the text, guilty parties include those who prescribe non-binary terminology and proscribe binary terminology to the exclusion of intersex people and their families should they use ‘impermissible’ language. This undue focus on classifying intersex people, coercing them to align to specific language ideologies, is identified as another form of structural violence that fails to allow for self-determination. The solution to inclusivity is found to be achievable not by stricture but rather flexibility, which is found less in QUILTBAG style lists and boycotts of terminology than in broad, gentle definitions and even in the de-emphasis of discourse in specific contexts. The paper concludes with some reflections on what these stances on language say about these activist organisations, and more importantly, about who we are including in what…and how they are being included.</p>