Ladies and Gentlemen... here's my take on TfL's new policy

I’m all for moving forward into the 21st century, now that we’re in it, but I’m not sure that banning phrases just because they’re quaint and formal and only encompass two genders is a sign of progress towards equality. I mean, I don’t know about you, but until I heard this news I thought of the gender divide as being broadly between men and women, and I wasn’t aware of a massive campaign against “Ladies and Gentlemen” with demonstrations of intersex people marching along Whitehall waving banners proclaiming their offence at being stereotyped, and demanding the introduction of gender-neutral language.

In fact there had apparently been months of campaigning by LGBTQ+ activists. And now here we are, with Transport for London agreeing to re-record its pre-recorded announcements and train its staff to... well, phrase it out, and Sadiq Khan, our Mayor, backing them to the hilt. And I’m sure we’ll get used to it, just as we got used to everything that people once thought was inconceivable, from allowing women to vote, to banning smoking in public places, and letting homosexuals marry each other. But it still seems a bit odd to me, even though I have no problem with anybody defining themselves in any way they want.

When two young people called ‘Fox’ and ‘Owl’ went on breakfast television to tell viewers they did not subscribe to society’s hierarchical labelling of human beings as ‘men’ and ‘women’ I was fine with that, and when Piers Morgan mocked them by asking whether he could define himself as an elephant I thought he looked like the ridiculous one, although, if truth be told, I didn’t believe their real names were Fox and Owl, and I had a fairly good idea which one of them was biologically male and which one female. But, you know, each to their own.

Lots of people, not all of them in Tunbridge Wells, and a great number of them almost certainly among the government’s new coalition partners in Northern Ireland, probably think this move by TfL is a scandal, and that it’s an example of political correctness gone mad, and that it’s the thin end of some sort of imaginary wedge that will almost certainly lead to the decline of western civilisation, if not Armageddon and the End of Times (if they’re not the same thing). But really the only people who need to be concerned about this decision are the people who might be upset by it. And even though they are a very tiny minority of a tiny minority of people, they’ve a right to their views.

I do wonder, though, if banning archaic language is the best way to increase trans awareness, which is a laudable aim, whereas banning things generally isn’t. It’s what fascists do, and it’s becoming worryingly prevalent, from no-platforming in universities to legislating against religious headgear. We’ve usually got along just fine by consensus, without banning things and threatening people with prison if they don’t agree with us. If you don’t do that you end up trying to rewrite history, and that never goes well.

So if we carry on down this road, are we going to have to change all our old materials to redact any mention of ladies and gentlemen? Will we have to instruct Jason Pierce of the rock band Spiritualized to retitle his landmark album ‘Ladies And Gentlemen... We Are Floating In Space’ to ‘Good Morning Everyone...And Welcome To Lord’s Where England Play Australia In The First Ashes Test’? Or should we use ‘Parental Advisory’ stickers and publish Trigger Warnings in case anyone is traumatised by unexpected references to binary gender stereotypes? And if we start, where will we stop

What will we do about books that contain the N-word? They include literary classics like ‘Huckleberry Finn’ (more than 200 times) and ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. Surely we learn by reading and discussing how things were in different times, rather than by trying to erase the past – another favoured tactic of fascists. There’s a rather marvellous episode of the sitcom ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ in which Larry David overhears a racist using the N-word and is so appalled that he tells his friends what he heard. Each time he repeats it, a black person is walking by and he’s forced to try to explain that he’s not the racist. In a further layer of irony, I once described that scene to an American friend, who stared at me with her mouth open when I’d finished. “I can’t believe you used that word,” she said. “I’m quoting the line from the TV show,” I replied. “I know,” she said, “but in America you wouldn’t be able to do that.”

But if we start censoring literature it won’t be long before we’re burning books. And we know the kind of people who do that. We’d also lose a great deal of literature. We would have to do away with Steinbeck, Faulkner and Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Robert Louis Stevenson; so too Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and James Baldwin, if you’re looking for balance. And that’s without counting a childhood book I remember called ‘Little Black Sambo’ that appears not to have damaged me for life despite its title.

If only the same could be said for Anne Marie Morris, the Conservative MP who referred to a “n***** in the woodpile” during a debate about Brexit last week. It’s a sign of progress that we would all agree she was wrong there, and she has since had the whip suspended. But what worries me most is not just that she said it, but that she clearly thought there was nothing wrong in saying it, and that the rest of the people present (including Tory MPs Bill Cash and John Redwood) didn’t raise any objection to her saying it.

I can only assume that at some time in the past, Ms Morris inhabited a world where such language was acceptable, and presumably normal, which is terrifying because it’s not like she’s 100 years old. She needs to know that those days are long gone, thankfully. Perhaps in 10 or 20 years from now we will have the same feeling when an MP addresses a meeting with the words “Ladies and Gentlemen...” but I rather hope not.