Here’s something that happened to me last month: I got asked my preferred gender pronoun.
For those who aren’t familiar, this is a thing that tends to happen a lot at queer-positive conferences and gatherings these days. When you go around the room at the beginning of a session, you’ll say your name, something about yourself, maybe answer an ice-breaker question, and state your preferred gender pronoun. It can be he/him, she/her, they/their, or one of the newer alternatives like ze or hir. Or you can just say you’d prefer to be referred to by your name.
I first encountered this tradition in 2011, I think. Maybe 2010. Most likely it was at a United States Student Association conference. The idea behind it is that respecting people’s gender identity is important, and volunteering your identity can be awkward, and misgendering someone is hurtful. So rather than guessing, or asking individual people to speak up if their preferences are non-standard or non-obvious, you just go around the room.
So I’ve been asked my preferred gender pronoun before. But this was different. This was at a party. In a one-on-one conversation.
It was the middle of the evening, and I’d been chatting with someone — a college student — for ten or fifteen minutes, over by the snacks. And at some point, as an aside, like asking me what borough I lived in, they asked what my preferred gender pronoun was.
I’m six foot three. I have short hair. That night I was wearing jeans and a button-down, and I don’t think I’d shaved. The question wasn’t about my self-presentation, is what I’m saying. It wasn’t specifically about me at all. It was about a new way of interacting, a new way of thinking that is on its way to becoming ubiquitous among young people — and far quicker than I could ever have imagined.
Every few months, doing the kind of work I do, I encounter another artifact of this sort of change. It can be a little discombobulating. But when I told this story to a friend a few days ago, and he rolled his eyes, I surprised myself a little with the vehemence of my response.
Because it was actually a great question that I was asked that night. It was an exciting question. I’m a “he.” I’ve always thought of myself as a he, and I expect I always will. I’m a man, I’m a guy, I’m a dad, I’m a son, I’m a brother.
But in that moment, I got to choose. I was asked to choose, asked to pick whether for the duration of that conversation I wanted to be approached as a he or as something else. And I knew that whatever answer I gave, it would be honored, respected, taken seriously. And that recognition, far more than any of the rote rounds of he/she/they/ze responses I’ve seen given at the start of workshops, opened something up in me. It wasn’t a door — at least not a door I was tempted to walk through — but it was a window.
And I liked the view.
12 comments
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January 10, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Glenn Hume
I Reckon that We will a Lot by experiencing being another Gender for a while to get what it feels like to be another Gender! It gives Us a Lot of Empathy and Understanding of Other Genders!
January 10, 2013 at 1:01 pm
Glenn Hume
I left Out Learn! Learn a Lot not a Lot!
January 10, 2013 at 2:12 pm
Valarie (@walelia2)
<3
January 10, 2013 at 4:17 pm
Gemma Seymour-Amper
Asking what borough you live in is a far more loaded question! :D
That said, I’d have preferred it if, in referring to more recently-coined pronouns, you’d have refrained from saying “newly invented substitutes”. This phrasing may have the effect of creating an inherent bias in favor of more commonly accepted pronouns, which flies directly in the face of the purpose of not only asking others their preferred pronouns, but also the process of language creation as a vital and necessary cultural dynamic, as well as pronouns of more recent coinage, themselves.
January 10, 2013 at 9:43 pm
Thursday Night Links « Gerry Canavan
[…] * What’s your preferred gender pronoun? […]
January 11, 2013 at 10:59 am
Angus Johnston
That’s an interesting point, Gemma, and I think you’re right. Your phrasing — “more recently-coined pronouns” — is better than mine. Thanks.
January 12, 2013 at 7:50 pm
Anonymous
[…] […]
January 13, 2013 at 12:56 pm
Randall Ellison
Excellent insights! I guess it’s time to dust off the gender-neutral pronoun system that I devised in high school. I put it on the back burner for 20-some years, because I knew that it wasn’t socially relevant (well it was, but at the time, sexism was too far ingrained in our culture to expect a promising outcome from such a radical proposal). I have much greater hope for it now that people are openly talking about gender liberation and transgender rights, in a wider context than feminism.
January 20, 2013 at 10:14 am
Weekend Reading « Backslash Scott Thoughts
[…] “What’s Your Preferred Gender Pronoun?“ […]
April 10, 2013 at 9:24 pm
On Gender in Language | Backslash Scott Thoughts
[…] a year and a half, and read this wonderful piece by Angust Johnston about the time he was asked his preferred gender pronoun at a […]
July 17, 2013 at 4:52 pm
Kevin T. Keith
I lived through the long evolution of “Ms.” – so obviously right, and so infuriatingly dismissed and mocked until finally, almost silently, it became the default, after decades of slow infiltration. It’s exciting to see the awareness of gender options growing so rapidly in comparison (though still as yet confined to progressive circles, while the right wing remains utterly baffled and hostile in the face of the concept of “white Hispanic”).
May 20, 2015 at 3:13 pm
9 months later, and 10 years on | washing dishes: a mulatto's blog
[…] yourself by saying four things: Your name. The place you live. Your class identity. Your “PGP” (preferred gender pronoun). I’ve been more schooled in and on gender and sexuality from the colleagues, friends, comrades, […]