There is no "X" in History

Geraint Hughes

There has of late been a movement within the more progressive circles of America—universities, magazines, LGBT groups, etc.—to change words perceived as “gendered” to reflect greater inclusivity. Whether changing woman/women to womxn, Latino/Latina to Latinx, or Filipino/Filipina to Filipinx, proponents argue that these changes highlight and include transgender, non-binary, and racial minorities often discriminated against and promote intersectionality. As the undocumented advocacy group Uplift put it: “The "x" is meant to be an inclusive and progressive term that stands for the many different identities, struggles, and intersectionalities. Additionally, it is meant to shed light on the social injustices womxn have and currently face.” The key distinction is taking words that are perceived to be masculine and that fit white, masculine narratives and modifying them—removing the man from woman, for example, or the masculine “-o” ending from Romance derived words. The argument is a form of linguistic relativism—as language shapes our perception, so would changing our language to be more inclusive change our perception—also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the linguists who postulated it. This addition of x can be found in a myriad of places, particularly at a place like UC Berkeley: the official website of the Gender Equity Resource Center (a key part of the campus’s Division of Equity and Inclusion) to The Daily Californian student newspaper which frequently showcases the alternative spellings in its opinion section (though not in its news section). The movement to change these words is part of the broader burgeoning of the LGBT, intersectional and fourth-wave feminism movements themselves as they continue to expand in our digital and polarized age.

A recent notable attempt to include the use of these “x words” was a bill in the California Legislature to establish mandatory ethnic studies classes in public schools (which was postponed after a huge outcry). Despite all this activity, I find there is little danger (despite the fevered dreams of some right-wing pundits) of these becoming mainstream terms outside of ethnic studies departments and LGBT groups. The proposed legislation would have taught the terms in the context of their use by the ethnic studies field but would not have started renaming high school, much less university level, history classes “hxstory”—I am highly unlikely to be majoring in “hxstory” anytime this decade or the next.

I do want to examine this one particular “x word” in this article—the term “hxstory” mentioned above. I will leave the potential minefields of the other terms for another day. Let me be perfectly clear: I hate it when I see “hxstory”. I am a fourth year history and classics double major, and I will be damned before I embrace this term. It should not be used by a university, a newspaper, a transgender woman of color, a non-binary person, or a straight white cisgender male. Why do I hate this term? It reflects a lack of understanding about the etymology of the word history, exposing the lack of education and the English-dominated worldview of those who use it; it reflects a lack of understanding of the nature of history and its beauty and use as a discipline of thought. I would again like to reiterate I see this as a very minor issue within the broader context of modern progressivism, but, with the recent (failed) bill bringing the term into a broader public consciousness, it feels like an appropriate time to write.

The word history itself comes from the Greek word historia (στορία), which is a feminine noun meaning inquiry or examination. The femininity of history can be seen in the Romance languages: in French it is l’histoire, again a feminine word and completely unrelated to the French masculine “il” or “lui”; in Spanish it is also a feminine historia, divorced utterly from “el” or the masculine suffix -o. So, not only is history already a feminine word, but to equate the his- prefix with masculinity is to display a bad grasp of linguistics and, moreover, it embraces the English, white, male-oriented worldview that studying ethnic studies is meant to get rid of. History gained its modern meaning from its use by the Greek writer Herodotus as the title of his work, the Histories: “This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos...” reads the opening, written in the 5th c. BCE. History is personified as Clio, one of the nine muses in Greek mythology, the proclaimer and recorder of famous deeds—not just those of men, but women as well, as Herodotus writes of cunning, brave, and powerful women from Tomyris of the Massagetae to Artemisia of Caria.

It is not enough to argue that someone is merely technically incorrect over a piece of grammar. That is how you win internet arguments, not hearts and minds. Thus, moving from etymology to philosophy, history is a general inquiry into the past of humanity—not just white men, but all of humanity, regardless of gender or orientation. It can be broken down into various subfields concerned with specific themes (such as legal or gender history), periods of time and location (Early Modern Britain), or the navel-gazing that is historiography. But what is necessary and important is that history contains multitudes, it contradicts itself, its truths overlap and overflow. It has to contain room to evolve new perspectives and for those perspectives to be clashed around and chewed over for any scrap of knowledge, of understanding of the human condition. History is not to be held up as inflexible, unable to contain a new point of view somehow denied before. I study history not to gain an understanding of one minute facet of existence and then hold that up as superior to all others, but that so, by studying one facet intensely, I can understand the patterns behind humanity and our interactions, the complicated recursive fractals of our existence. What little (if any) objective truth I can discern from history is a truth about us—all of us. The use of “hxstory” is an assault against what I believe, that says history is a flawed and corrupted vessel for the human past, controlled by a handful of men who denied agency and voice to most. This is false. History is the story of all of humanity, and, if you cannot find female voices, gay voices, non-binary voices, and voices of color, within the past you are not trying hard enough. Read the poems of Sappho, the Alexiad of Anna Komnene; look at the paintings of Amrita Sher-Gil and Artemisia Gentileschi (whose portrait of Clio begins this essay); listen to the trobairitz. And then place them and their works in their historical contexts: that is history.

I believe objective truth exists and can be found, I believe in Free Will, that we have a choice. This might make me an outlier—we live in an age of divide and subjectivity, of truthiness and fake news. In such times the term “hxstory” might seem apt, a way of promoting one interpretation amid the clamor of so many others. But I urge everyone who thinks of using it to resist the temptation. Not only is it etymologically unsound, it goes against the fundamental tenets of why we study history: to understand all of humanity, not to set one part aside from all the others.