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What Listing Pronouns Doesn’t Tell Trans People
I knew a transfeminine person who preferred to go by “they/them.” But whenever it was time for a pronoun round, that’s not what they would say. Instead, they always asked for “she/her.” When I was curious about that, they told me that asking for “she” meant getting “they” in practice — but asking for “they” would only get them “he.”
I’d like to be more optimistic than that, to assume sincere intentions of those who go to the trouble of asking for people’s pronouns. But I do admit that since leaving the activist community, I don’t miss having to do pronoun rounds all the time. In principle, they establish a norm of respecting trans and cis people’s identities equally. But I’ve always found that things tend to go more smoothly the less the cis people around me think about transness, no matter how conscientiously-intersectional they are. Visibility doesn’t always lead to acceptance, even in settings that have officially committed to the latter.
Lately, though, I’ve started seeing non-activists list pronouns in their Zoom bios (mostly people I already know to be liberal cis women — my cousin the college professor, an acquaintance who works in education on the West Coast, etc). I appreciate the message they’re trying to send, but I’m not about to offer mine without prompting. Pronoun rounds seem to be successfully making the leap — instead of…