Sonya Bateson: Intentionally disregarding a person’s chosen name or gender identity is cruel and inhumane

Intentionally disregarding a person’s chosen name or gender identity is, in my opinion, cruel and inhumane, writes Sonya Bateson. Photo / 123RF

OPINION

The 90s were a wonderful time.

For me, the 90s meant spending hours sitting by the radio to record songs on a blank tape, rollerblading up and down the streets of the neighbourhood until the stars began to shine, and cutting photos of the Spice Girls out of magazines to make collages for my wall.

The “good old days” always seem so much simpler than today, don’t they?

Everyone worked so much harder in the good old days. Children were better behaved back then. Families stuck together. Dinner was served at 6 o’clock sharp every evening to a family gathered around the dinner table, arms tucked in, plates licked clean no matter how much you hated Brussels sprouts.

The good old days.

But, were they really?

Nostalgia is a funny thing. Dr Krystine Batcho, a professor of psychology and licensed psychologist, spoke about nostalgia on the Speaking of Psychology podcast produced by the American Psychological Association.

According to Batcho, remembering our past is a social function that helps us connect to others, particularly the people we grew up with – parents, grandparents, siblings and friends.

But Batcho says nostalgia also causes bitterness from remembering the best times of our life

“[It] comes from a sense that we know for sure that we can never really regain them, they’re gone forever. We absolutely cannot go back in time so it helps us to deal with the conflict of the bitter longing for what can never be again, together with the sweetness of having experienced it and being able to revisit it and relive it again and again.”

Batcho also says memories are not accurate. “One individual might be nostalgic for that time, but they’re not thinking about things like racism, discrimination, or even conflict. We pick and choose. The memory process is not only selective, but it also distorts to some extent. We do idealise things on occasion.”

It’s the lovely, rose-tinted parts of my childhood that are my foremost memories of the 90s. My weird, strange and negative experiences from those years remain buried until activated.

One such experience was activated this week when I read an article about a high school teacher who had his teaching registration cancelled for refusing to call a 14-year-old transitioning from female to male by his preferred name. The teacher later met the student on a morning tea break and told him gender transition went against his Christian beliefs.

This sparked a memory of sitting in a 90s classroom as a reliever teacher called out the roll. A kid in our class had an uncommon but not unknown name, with a spelling that was not instinctive to native English speakers. For this column, I’ll use the example of the Irish name Sinead.

The reliever butchered Sinead’s name as she read the roll. Sinead calmly put up her hand and explained that her name was pronounced “Shi-nayed”.

Well, the reliever did not like that one bit. She decided she’d call Sinead Sally instead.

The reliever was gone the next day, but that nickname stuck around a lot longer. Poor Sinead was mockingly called Sally for weeks until she eventually broke into tears in the classroom and the teacher put an end to the bullying.

Just the recollection of that is enough to evoke guilt.

Perhaps I feel it even more so because of my own identity troubles. I grew up using a different name than on my birth certificate. I don’t think I truly realised what my legal name was until I got old enough to start needing official documents. Suddenly there were bank accounts, driver’s licences, passports, and university applications all under a different name.

I felt almost like an imposter, like I was living a secret life or something. As an adult, I made the decision to legally change my name to the one I’d been using most of my life.

But more than a decade later I’ll get the occasional piece of mail under my birth name and I still get a brush of that imposter feeling.

We can look back on the past with our rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia, longing for a time when everything was simpler and everyone kept the identities they were born with.

But that’s the thing – identity change has always been a thing.

Last names changed upon marriage. Plenty of people were known by their middle names in everyday life. Some were known as Junior as a child and Fred as an adult. Celebrities and social climbers picked entirely new names to better reflect their desired status or career.

If our brains can remember that Miss Smith is now Mrs Jones, they can adjust to calling a person once known as Tim by their new name of Susan.

Intentionally disregarding a person’s chosen name or gender identity is cruel and inhumane.

Back in the good old days, kids were taught to treat others how they would like to be treated.

That’s one piece of nostalgia I wish all adults remembered right through life.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.