Even the protesters who keep vandalizing a museum plaque to scrub out female pronouns in reference to a yacht would struggle to explain what the exact offense committed here is.
The Scottish Maritime Museum has announced that it will replace all references to ships in its displays with gender neutral terms – ‘it’ instead of ‘she’ – after a display about a 19th-century steam yacht called Rifle was defaced twice in recent months.
But some of us don’t understand – despite not being all that old.
Julian Bray, former editor of esteemed maritime publication Lloyd’s List, gave it a try.
“I can see why ‘she’ would suit a magnificent cruise liner but to a rusting old hulk it could be rather offensive,” he told the Telegraph.
So, beautiful boats can be like women, but ugly ones cannot?
I think this misses the point. No one thinks a boat is a woman, or that a woman is a boat.
Also, if boats can’t be a ‘she’, what about other non-humans?
What about lions? Can they have gendered pronouns? Wolves? Ferrets?
To speakers of languages in which most nouns are masculine or feminine – Russian, French, German – this all becomes even more “problematic.” In Russian, ‘Russia’ is a ‘she’, as is ‘America’, but ‘China’ is a ‘he’. What is better? Which has the worse connotations? Should we re-gender all our nouns in a hierarchy of how potentially unflattering they are to women, or change every word to ‘it’?
How about we don’t do that.
And we don’t let literal-minded, offense-taking vandals dictate how we run our museums.