Communities Make Lousy Political Mascots

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I was reading a left-leaning academic’s blog post about disliking pronoun rounds. They weren’t coming from an indignant “I’d rather go to jail than use they/them” perspective — instead, they thought it was a bit dehumanizing not to address someone else in the room by name. They felt that the best pronoun for everyone in a conference was “you.” Talk to people directly, they said. Don’t abstract them away as though they weren’t sitting next to you. They even got into Martin Buber’s idea of the “I-thou” relationship — engaging with an interdependent mutual partner — versus the instrumental, objectifying “I-it.”

I remember thinking, “It’s not that deep.” Why would pronoun rounds be some kind of grand social statement? Aren’t they functional — just a piece of interpersonal tech? With some people, you can infer their gender pronouns based on their appearance. But not everyone. The idea behind pronoun rounds is to save some hassle. If everyone just says what they want, nobody has to risk the embarrassment of guessing wrong. The notion that they’re about taking a stance against personal names didn’t square at all with my understanding.

But then I remembered back to college. Over and over, I was the only trans woman in the gender studies classroom — even when the course description specifically mentioned trans issues. How many of those discussions of…