Is "Louise" an insult?

[sorenr]

A very strange courtcase now seems to have found it's conclusion in the Eastern Regional Court in Copenhagen.

In Summer 2006 a man called out "what's up, Louise" to a male police officer in Christiania, the free town in Copenhagen. The police officer filed a report, and in the Copenhagen City Court the man was fined DKK 600,- (approximately &euro

Comments

[essbee80]

oops sorry I clicked before I read the second part so i'll comment. No it is not insulting. Its no more insulting than calling me Gillian (my sister's name) or Louise (my sister and mum's middle name) or Hugh (my dad's name). Ok i'd really rather people dont call me hugh but in scotland its not unusual to be called Jimmie or Hen or Love. Its just an expression. It is also freedom of speech - something I may not like in many cases (ie extreme phobic cases of gender / race / religion etc) however I will say it is one of our most basic and most important human rights - freedom of expression

[pagerbear]

I don't really know the cultural ramifications, but considering all the things policemen and women in the US are called, it does sound like an overreaction to arrest the jerk and take him to court.

(But then, my own country has seen people arrested for wearing anti-war T-shirts to shopping malls.)

[biascut]

Ooh, interesting.

I'd go along with pagerbear that a distinction needs to be made between an insult and a crime, but obviously conceptions of free expressions vary massively between different national jurisdictions. Because British law is what I'm most familiar with, I would tend to say that insults become a matter for the law when they constitute harassment or constitute a threat of violence. So I can see that calling someone by a name usually associated with the gender they don't identify with might be an act of homophobic or transphobic harassment or violence. But a threat of violence or the repeated and deliberate hostile use of the term would have to be established for it to be a legal matter, for me.

[poliphilo]

But in this case it seems likely that the guy meant it as an insult- as just the sort of thing likely to rile a macho police officer.

I'm glad the judge dismissed the case. That fucking pig really needed to chill out, man.

[kishenehn]

*grin*

[clydde]

I hate to answer yes, however: the intent of the insult is what is at question here. Insults can be delivered in a language that one doesn't even understand, and one would still know they were being insulted, with non verbal communication cues. In this case, the perceived intent was the emasculization of the insulted officer. Any word choice that would have this effect should be considered an insult - i.e. the fact that word chosen was a woman’s name is secondary to the perceived intent. Legally, the perceived intent is more significant that the speaker’s intent - and that’s where the ambiguity of the whole situation lies.

Socially, should it be insulting? No. Who cares? My gender is not defined by my name but by my personality and choices that I make. I don’t believe in binary gender classification anyway, but that’s a whole other discussion.