she/he/they? scattered thoughts
I understand the importance of respecting a person’s choice of pronoun. Yes, it can be hard to remember, especially when a change has been requested, and in some cases, guessing correctly is difficult to the point of being fraught. However, noticeable effort toward getting it right, and begging pardon when mistakes are made, have kept me off naughty-lists while my memory rewrites itself. (I have incredibly poor name recognition — to which pronoun assignment seems to be tied, at least in my brain — and have spent a good chunk of my adult life calling everyone “lady” or “mister” because their name doesn’t come when called.)
Really, using a specified pronoun shouldn’t be a problematic request. It is not considered unreasonable for a person to ask that a certain form of their name be used (Kristin rather than Kris, for example), and I would bet that no manner maven would suggest that you continue to call someone by a name or term after they’ve asked you to stop. Furthermore, languages with gendered nouns require that people match the article and pronoun to the noun’s gender, and in these cases, the noun and its gender are simply learned as a single unit: der Junge (the boy — he), die Frau (the woman — she), das Mädchen (the girl — it)… Ok. That was meant as a tongue-in-cheek example, but still, it is not so difficult that German/French/Spanish/etc. children cannot remember the genders of tens of thousands of nouns…
Yet, for those of us less used to acquiring words in tandem with their gendered articles and pronouns, and who grew up with the understanding (wrong though we now know it to be) that a person’s pronoun can be easily guessed via visual cues, gendered pronouns can cause confusion. I would love it if English personal pronouns were not gendered, similar to the pronoun of our common nouns: “it”. At the same time, I can see where, for those with severe gender dysphoria, being correctly gendered linguistically can be tremendously meaningful and validating.
A slight tangent: Did gender have to be the pronoun delineator? Is pronoun-based dysphoria only a problem because we have gendered pronouns to begin with? What if pronouns were based on age, or height, or whether you happen to be a cat or dog person? I ask this in a semi-facetious way: of course, we have to work with, or work to change, what we currently have, but it is interesting to think what might have been. There have been attempts throughout my lifetime, and before, to get English speakers to adopt genderless personal pronouns, but I doubt it will happen in what remains of that same lifetime.
My personal issue with this necessary movement to respect people’s pronouns sounds silly, but isn’t — not to me. If I had been a teen now, with all the support my daughter had growing up, from her family, her doctor, and the LGBTQ+ community, I would probably have identified as a genderqueer pansexual, rather than simply being a closeted bi kid with a predominantly androgynous expression of self. We didn’t even talk about this stuff when I was growing up: time and place prevented it, and I doubt we had the vocabulary. Now, more than half a century into my life, I do not have the energy to change much, to avail myself of the options open to me. I am lucky to have a supportive family (chosen and otherwise) who simply takes me as I am. I have embraced my multitudes. The most I’d like at this point is to 1) contribute to the forward movement of identity recognition and respect, and 2) to have a bit of freedom of expression for myself.
I have been asking friends who are far more involved in things trans if they have any suggestions for how I might add my pronoun preferences without sounding offhand, explaining that what I want is to be able to put, after my name, something like (whatever) or (surprise me) or (whatever you think I am). I know these are not acceptable, no matter how earnestly I may mean them, because they can be misconstrued as dismissive. Still, I get warm fuzzies when someone calls me “he”, am quite happy with “she”, and feel completely at home as a “they”.
I have been looking for answers for months now, but until a Zoom meeting this afternoon, I was stymied. That meeting has given me the one possible solution I have seen so far: a coworker had (he/she/they/them) after his name on the screen! This, I thought, I could do. I’ll have to change it a little: (she/he/they) will be my choice. “She” first because it feels right, and because I am a contrarian who will always quietly subvert the status quo; and only the subjective because listing subjective/objective/possessive for all three genders would be obnoxious, but doing a partial, mixed list would be confusing, and would annoy my inner grammar marm.
I know it isn’t anyone’s job to instruct me on social propriety, but the last thing I want to do is step on another person’s heart while trying to free my own. I would love to hear other people’s opinions on using (she/he/they), or about any other options I haven’t yet discovered. Thank you!
