Welcome to The Interpreter newsletter, by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, who write a column by the same name. (Right now Max is on book leave, though, so Amanda is flying solo.) |
On our minds: The Crown, house party nightmares and the debate over transgender rights. |
It’s a Balmoral Test World |
 | | On “The Crown,” Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson) and her husband, Denis (Stephen Boxer), dress to impress for dinner with the royal family, and totally miss the mark.Netflix |
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When Elliot Page, the actor best known for roles in the movies “Juno” and “Inception,” came out as transgender this week, I kept thinking about “The Balmoral Test,” the second episode of the new season of “The Crown” on Netflix. |
In “The Crown,” the test in question refers to whether guests are able to follow the rules of etiquette and gamely participate in the outdoor hunting and indoor games of the queen’s summer vacation estate. |
I cringed my way through the episode because it was so clear that the entire thing was a trap. Pass the test, as Diana did, and you might find yourself stuck in an unending series of similar ones for the rest of your life. But fail the test, as Margaret Thatcher and her husband did, and the royals would bully and humiliate you. The Thatchers are not particularly sympathetic characters, but it was hard to watch the royals mock them to their faces for dressing too early for dinner, not bringing sufficient quantities of aristocratic tweeds for hiking, sitting in the wrong chair and otherwise failing to properly conform to a set of rules they didn’t know. |
Though superficially about etiquette, really this is about power. That the rules are inscrutable and silly is kind of the point, because that makes clear that doing things the Windsors’ way is a signal of conformity with their way of life and acceptance of their right to set the rules. (Who the hell cares whether to change for dinner before or after the pre-dinner cocktail hour? Or, for that matter, whether to change for dinner at all?) |
Which brings me back to Elliot Page. Transgender rights have become a battlefield of choice for people outraged over so-called “political correctness” — their term for the blowback they encounter when they speak of a person or group in a way those people find disrespectful. |
I confess that I find this complaint a bit baffling. To me, it seems joyful and exciting for a person to recognize and live as their true self, including by expressing the gender they identify with instead of the one they were assigned at birth. Using accurate pronouns has never felt like a burdensome request. |
But the closest I’ve come to understanding what’s really going on, I think, is to realize that many of the people who are angry about being asked to respect transgender people’s pronouns, names and identities feel like they are being subjected to a Balmoral Test — and are often also trying, perhaps unconsciously, to administer one. |
In a refrain that will be familiar to anyone who reads this newsletter regularly, this comes down to hierarchy. As the excruciating scenes in “The Crown” make clear, etiquette can often be a way to assert and test status. When the rules of etiquette change to give protection or respect to a new group, as has happened in recent years with the broader recognition and acceptance of trans people, it can feel like an assertion of new power by the beneficiaries of the change, over those who are asked to follow the new rules. |
To those who feel invested in the gender hierarchy as it stands, being asked to comply with the new rule can feel threatening, not just to their position but to the system of gender norms itself. They go from feeling like Diana, familiar with the situation and able to do everything right, to feeling like the Thatchers, criticized and humiliated for not complying with rules set by people they don’t think should get to do so. |
But of course the status quo is not actually neutral and neither is preserving it. Although a hard-won change might feel like it has been imposed from the top down, the truth is that groups who are now slightly less marginalized than before, as is the case for trans people, are still at a major power disadvantage. |
The more accurate reading of the situation is that the people complaining about “political correctness” are the Windsors in this scenario. They’re being asked to change the rules they’ve always followed, which seemed neutral to them but exclusionary to others, and to take notice of the feelings and comfort of people who in the past just always played along. |
Acknowledging that is uncomfortable. But the stakes aren’t equal on each side. Discomfort and shame are unpleasant, loss of status can be frightening. But trans people encounter discrimination and abuse, even murder, because of who they are. “The truth is, despite feeling profoundly happy right now,” Page wrote in his statement about coming out, “I am also scared.” |
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