This is really interesting, and it’s the first time I’ve heard such an objection. Isn’t the point not so much disclosing private business, but rather being the one to determine how people refer to you, rather than being at the mercy of others perceptions? That seems a key distinction from your atheist example: religion does not come up in every neutral conversation about us, but because of the faults of our language, gender does.
One problem is that pronouns are inherently for third-person scenarios. When people use them, the subject isn’t typically present, so most misgendering happens where the person can’t hear it. So name tags inherently help not us but others in situations where we can’t observe their benefit. But people linguistically have to use some pronoun, even if your name tag is blank. It just won’t be you deciding which.
My industry uses them too, and I’ve grown used to them-I see it like how in the olden days people all used Mr., Mrs., and Miss.: they were also specifying, only it was given precedence to the name! And even marital status, for women. Our identity depended on that factor primarily. So now we’ve done away with that and put the person’s name first, and append it with the linguistic formality of gender, but in a way that reminds everyone that it’s purely a construct and that lots of options exist. In my workplace we have people who use they/them, but I don’t know if they’re trans or simply identify as non-binary. I’ve come to appreciate the singular use of they/them because it answers the language question without having to get more into it: there’s no avenue for inquiry about coworkers’ genitals. I like how they/them rather shuts it all down. I anticipate perhaps in the next phase we’ll be able to move toward all more gender-neutral, and eliminate the problem altogether. This is just one point of the path, and it’s an awkward phase, for sure.
Anyway. Thanks for writing this. I’m sure more people feel like you do and now I’ll be on the lookout.
I guess this is why i find the whole thing so irritating. If i'm talking about person X and i misgender them while in a conversation with A and B, who cares? It really doesn't matter what gender person X is. If X is part of the conversation, and it's very important to them, then it's trivial for them to interrupt and make a correction. (As i mentioned in a comment above, this could be seen as similar to the correction you might make if someone pronounced your name wrong.)
I do remember that for a brief period during my transition it seemed like pronouns were a very big deal, but that period for me ended pretty quickly, once i discovered that butch lesbians and other gender non-conforming people are misgendered all the time too and they just shrug it off. Not to mention working in multicultural teams where non-native speakers regularly use the wrong pronouns for all kinds of people and objects. It's really not something that i think is worth making a fuss about in the vast majority of situations.
The comparison to Mr, Ms, Miss and Mrs is a good one, because honorifics are awful too. That's actually a perfect example of why pronoun declarations are regressive! I remember in the 90s, honorifics were fairly standard at high school, although a few teachers just used their first name. By the 00s when i first got into the white collar workforce that decreased, and by the 10s i don't recall coming across anyone being referred to with an honorific. But now we're going back to this weird, formalized clarification of someone's gender before you even meet them... Or listing it in environments where it's entirely irrelevant (like Slack). It feels so backward.
Personally i also like they/them, but now that genders are "a thing" we get in trouble if we use that to refer to trans people or gay or drag-performing folks who consider a non-binary pronoun offensive and would prefer to be referred to by one (or either) of the binary pronouns! I feel like by having created such a fuss over these words in the first place, now we've just made everybody unhappy, except for some possibly imaginary minority of people who seem greatly attached to controlling how other people talk about them... It just feels so weird and uncomfortable to me.
Although, i do still do my best to always use the pronoun someone prefers, if they make it clear.
I always refer to my students as "they" then writing to my boss. I have so many students and no idea of names to faces, so when they write to me, I honestly have no idea if their Norwegian name is traditionally male or female. I'd have to guess, or google... and I don't have the fucking time for that. My boss will write back saying, "yes I've spoken to him" or "I'll contact her" and I'll look at the Norwegian name and think...yup... would have guessed wrong. EVERY TIME! It's not something I want to take a guess on, because if I cock up, it makes me look stupid, or deliberately a careless teacher. (And to be fair, some of the students writing to me I have never taught or met, so there is no way I will know what they look like, let alone their gender.)
It would make things so much easier for me if everyone just used they. I always would get wound up with formal letters. "Smith" has written to me, and now I am supposed to guess if they are male, or if female, married or a pseudo-virgin. If I cock up, they're bound to be pissed off! Thank god there's less of a labelling pressure nowadays, at least in emails.
Mind you, when people write to me and call me "Mrs" or ring me and ask for "Mrs" or worst of all announce me at conferences as "Mrs" it really gets on my tits. Can't I just be Smith? My gender is irrelevant to the subject of my presentation or my profound lack of interest in PPI, and my marital status (or lack of it) even more so.
I was big on "they" in China, because i had absolutely no idea what was a male or female name. In spoken Chinese it's even easier because he, she and it are all pronounced exactly the same (only the written characters are different, due to them being created for the specific purpose of translating western literature in the early 20th century).
I am very pleased that we no longer need to use honorifics in correspondence. I also have had these difficult moments where i knew the family name but not the gender of the person, back in the old days when we were supposed to write Dear Mr/Mrs So-and-so. Nowadays i am so glad that it's perfectly acceptable to start an email just with Hi Bob, or even leave out the name altogether and just go with Hi.
Being put in situations where i am forced to select an honorific for myself really gets my hackles up. (These days that's usually only a problem with airlines due to the ancient computer systems they use.)
I loved how the spoken version of Mandarin (and presumably Cantonese?.... but I don't really know, I only took Mandarin) he/him/his and she/her/hers sounded the same, but LOOKED different. That... was awesome.
I talked to a native Guangdong friend about this before, and they told me that in Cantonese there is just one gender neutral pronoun. I wonder if it's because Cantonese didn't go through the same process of "modernization" that written Chinese did after May 4th Movement?
In my workplace we have people who use they/them, but I don’t know if they’re trans or simply identify as non-binary.
Why would they be trans or non-binary? That's binary thinking at its best!
I'm a cis-female... and have never been mistaken for a male, but.. that's exactly why I generally never have to reveal my preferred pronoun. Yet...if I have to pick my pronoun, I'll take non-gendered! That's my real preference. I prefer to give people practice using it, plus, because my sex/gender is obvious I have a privilege to chose to stand in solidarity with those who feel they *must* out themselves (to people who may believe gender neutral pronoun preference is the same as trans or non-binary identities) for honesty's sake, and and because I really do hate gender norms/conformity as an *idea*.
I'd probably be he/him/his as a second favorite, just for the fun of it. Oh! The conversations I could have as an ultra-femme, big breasted HE with a female name, voice, and ID! But can I actually DO that at a job, while being taken seriously? Or am I suddenly, strange? Different? Unusual? Questionable? Or.. even offensive? To men! To women! To God! To society! To the LGBTQ population!
A good friend of mine considers themselves gender non-conforming. Born female, does drag queen work professionally.. as a female. They are generation Z and prefers they/them/theirs. They look female in their daily life... but her persona prefers "she" when they're in drag. They were called a "fag" and "misogynist" for doing drag by militant evangelist preachers who threatened to kill them... for being a born female.. who performs female drag and who has the audacity to call themselves.. 'them'.
We're kidding ourselves, no matter our professional industry or social group... if we say it does not come with repercussions to choose a pronoun that does not align with immediate gender impressions/assumptions or makes life "difficult" for people who trip around they/them/theirs.
LGBTQ+ people have a lot of pressure to *perform* (or declare) gender in ways the straight/cis community do not usually have to. Your assumption, although trying to be inclusive and welcoming, proves as much. I'm declaring a pronoun preference, not an LBTQA+ identity.
Unless.. of course, that is what the pronoun preference question IS? A covert LGBTQ+ question?
Is it??
I'd be totally into everyone goes by gender neutral pronouns and you have to specifically ASK to be called he or she and they'd have formally request gendered pronouns since they/them/theirs is so much EASIER and less messy for everybody! Ha!
I was responding to the part of amw’s post where * said that trans people don’t use pronoun designations. My point is that in the usage of pronoun designations that I have observed, nobody knows who’s trans, and that’s fine, and the conversation gets eliminated. Which I think is as we would all wish.
And your point about using pronouns counter to your gender presentation is spot on: and to my point, how would someone guess that you prefer that, unless you express your preference?
I certainly didn't mean to jump all upons... but it certainly seemed like choosing the neutral pronouns was being **perceived** as identifying as trans or non-binary (you just don't know which)... and its a mystery package.
I'd only choose they/them/their if backed in a corner and given a choice between being referred to as male/female/other... I pick other, mostly because of my beliefs about gender in general, rather than feelings or definition of *my* gender. It's the same reason when forced to answer questions about my race I answer "human". I hate the *question* so I prefer to answer with vague non-commitment and this also happens to align me with gender-non conformists which is fine by me... but again, I will clearly state there are serious professional drawbacks to doing so, whether or not it is recognized within certain organizations.
It would be pretty amazing if that was the trend for everyone to go gender-neutral with feminine/masculine pronouns becoming the troublesome social linguistic outliers in English!
I certainly didn't mean to imply that all trans people don't use pronouns, or even that i don't use pronouns. My point (which i think is the same as gemini's) is there is a sort of Streisand effect happening. If you never need to declare (or talk about) pronouns, it's much easier to ignore them. If someone uses the "wrong" one then oh well, the moment passed and life goes on. But by forcing people to explicitly declare (or encouraging a conversation when they choose not to explicitly declare), now it's triggered this emotional labor around deciding what pronoun to use.
Here's part of my thought process that i go through whenever i'm stuck in this situation.
I'm a trans woman and my passport says "F", so i "should" choose "she". That's what the vast majority of people call me by default since that's what they perceive me to be. But if i write "she" now i'm making a political statement, because i'm saying trans women "should" be "she", which i know is something some people (rightly or wrongly) disagree with. Am i appropriating a cis woman's pronouns? And anyway, i find the whole idea of gender offensive in the first place, so shouldn't i choose "they"? I believe all people should be "they" and society needs to break free of this old-fashioned view of gender, which is fundamentally oppressive, and a cause of much suffering. But if i choose "they" because i think gender is stupid, am i appropriating the identity of an explicitly non-binary identified person? Or am i making a political statement that trans women aren't actually women? Or am i saying that women don't get to express their gender in a non-conforming way and still be women? Isn't any woman who chooses "they" making it harder for "she" women to be gender non-conforming, since it reinforces this binary idea that women always have to behave a certain way?
And on and on, all of this fucking anxiety and stress over a fucking pronoun! Before the days we constantly had to pick, or see others pick, we could just leave these thoughts and conversations for the philosophy roundtables (or LiveJournal), but now they've been pulled into the public space, the workplace! I guess that's the point of the activists who advocate for this - "if i'm constantly anxious and stressed about gender then everyone else should be too" - but... I dunno it just feels like a really aggressive form of activism to me, and one that is liable to make people resentful and perhaps even less understanding of whoever's plight it's supposed to be raising awareness for.
One problem is that pronouns are inherently for third-person scenarios. When people use them, the subject isn’t typically present, so most misgendering happens where the person can’t hear it. So name tags inherently help not us but others in situations where we can’t observe their benefit. But people linguistically have to use some pronoun, even if your name tag is blank. It just won’t be you deciding which.
My industry uses them too, and I’ve grown used to them-I see it like how in the olden days people all used Mr., Mrs., and Miss.: they were also specifying, only it was given precedence to the name! And even marital status, for women. Our identity depended on that factor primarily. So now we’ve done away with that and put the person’s name first, and append it with the linguistic formality of gender, but in a way that reminds everyone that it’s purely a construct and that lots of options exist. In my workplace we have people who use they/them, but I don’t know if they’re trans or simply identify as non-binary. I’ve come to appreciate the singular use of they/them because it answers the language question without having to get more into it: there’s no avenue for inquiry about coworkers’ genitals. I like how they/them rather shuts it all down. I anticipate perhaps in the next phase we’ll be able to move toward all more gender-neutral, and eliminate the problem altogether. This is just one point of the path, and it’s an awkward phase, for sure.
Anyway. Thanks for writing this. I’m sure more people feel like you do and now I’ll be on the lookout.
Reply
I do remember that for a brief period during my transition it seemed like pronouns were a very big deal, but that period for me ended pretty quickly, once i discovered that butch lesbians and other gender non-conforming people are misgendered all the time too and they just shrug it off. Not to mention working in multicultural teams where non-native speakers regularly use the wrong pronouns for all kinds of people and objects. It's really not something that i think is worth making a fuss about in the vast majority of situations.
The comparison to Mr, Ms, Miss and Mrs is a good one, because honorifics are awful too. That's actually a perfect example of why pronoun declarations are regressive! I remember in the 90s, honorifics were fairly standard at high school, although a few teachers just used their first name. By the 00s when i first got into the white collar workforce that decreased, and by the 10s i don't recall coming across anyone being referred to with an honorific. But now we're going back to this weird, formalized clarification of someone's gender before you even meet them... Or listing it in environments where it's entirely irrelevant (like Slack). It feels so backward.
Personally i also like they/them, but now that genders are "a thing" we get in trouble if we use that to refer to trans people or gay or drag-performing folks who consider a non-binary pronoun offensive and would prefer to be referred to by one (or either) of the binary pronouns! I feel like by having created such a fuss over these words in the first place, now we've just made everybody unhappy, except for some possibly imaginary minority of people who seem greatly attached to controlling how other people talk about them... It just feels so weird and uncomfortable to me.
Although, i do still do my best to always use the pronoun someone prefers, if they make it clear.
Reply
It's not something I want to take a guess on, because if I cock up, it makes me look stupid, or deliberately a careless teacher. (And to be fair, some of the students writing to me I have never taught or met, so there is no way I will know what they look like, let alone their gender.)
It would make things so much easier for me if everyone just used they. I always would get wound up with formal letters. "Smith" has written to me, and now I am supposed to guess if they are male, or if female, married or a pseudo-virgin. If I cock up, they're bound to be pissed off! Thank god there's less of a labelling pressure nowadays, at least in emails.
Mind you, when people write to me and call me "Mrs" or ring me and ask for "Mrs" or worst of all announce me at conferences as "Mrs" it really gets on my tits. Can't I just be Smith? My gender is irrelevant to the subject of my presentation or my profound lack of interest in PPI, and my marital status (or lack of it) even more so.
Reply
I am very pleased that we no longer need to use honorifics in correspondence. I also have had these difficult moments where i knew the family name but not the gender of the person, back in the old days when we were supposed to write Dear Mr/Mrs So-and-so. Nowadays i am so glad that it's perfectly acceptable to start an email just with Hi Bob, or even leave out the name altogether and just go with Hi.
Being put in situations where i am forced to select an honorific for myself really gets my hackles up. (These days that's usually only a problem with airlines due to the ancient computer systems they use.)
Reply
Reply
Reply
Why would they be trans or non-binary?
That's binary thinking at its best!
I'm a cis-female... and have never been mistaken for a male,
but.. that's exactly why I generally never have to reveal my preferred pronoun.
Yet...if I have to pick my pronoun, I'll take non-gendered! That's my real preference. I prefer to give people practice using it, plus, because my sex/gender is obvious I have a privilege to chose to stand in solidarity with those who feel they *must* out themselves (to people who may believe gender neutral pronoun preference is the same as trans or non-binary identities) for honesty's sake, and and because I really do hate gender norms/conformity as an *idea*.
I'd probably be he/him/his as a second favorite, just for the fun of it. Oh! The conversations I could have as an ultra-femme, big breasted HE with a female name, voice, and ID! But can I actually DO that at a job, while being taken seriously? Or am I suddenly, strange? Different? Unusual? Questionable? Or.. even offensive? To men! To women! To God! To society! To the LGBTQ population!
A good friend of mine considers themselves gender non-conforming. Born female, does drag queen work professionally.. as a female. They are generation Z and prefers they/them/theirs. They look female in their daily life... but her persona prefers "she" when they're in drag. They were called a "fag" and "misogynist" for doing drag by militant evangelist preachers who threatened to kill them... for being a born female.. who performs female drag and who has the audacity to call themselves.. 'them'.
We're kidding ourselves, no matter our professional industry or social group... if we say it does not come with repercussions to choose a pronoun that does not align with immediate gender impressions/assumptions or makes life "difficult" for people who trip around they/them/theirs.
LGBTQ+ people have a lot of pressure to *perform* (or declare) gender in ways the straight/cis community do not usually have to. Your assumption, although trying to be inclusive and welcoming, proves as much. I'm declaring a pronoun preference, not an LBTQA+ identity.
Unless.. of course, that is what the pronoun preference question IS? A covert LGBTQ+ question?
Is it??
I'd be totally into everyone goes by gender neutral pronouns and you have to specifically ASK to be called he or she and they'd have formally request gendered pronouns since they/them/theirs is so much EASIER and less messy for everybody! Ha!
Reply
And your point about using pronouns counter to your gender presentation is spot on: and to my point, how would someone guess that you prefer that, unless you express your preference?
Reply
I'd only choose they/them/their if backed in a corner and given a choice between being referred to as male/female/other... I pick other, mostly because of my beliefs about gender in general, rather than feelings or definition of *my* gender.
It's the same reason when forced to answer questions about my race I answer "human".
I hate the *question* so I prefer to answer with vague non-commitment and this also happens to align me with gender-non conformists which is fine by me... but again, I will clearly state there are serious professional drawbacks to doing so, whether or not it is recognized within certain organizations.
It would be pretty amazing if that was the trend for everyone to go gender-neutral with feminine/masculine pronouns becoming the troublesome social linguistic outliers in English!
Reply
Here's part of my thought process that i go through whenever i'm stuck in this situation.
I'm a trans woman and my passport says "F", so i "should" choose "she". That's what the vast majority of people call me by default since that's what they perceive me to be. But if i write "she" now i'm making a political statement, because i'm saying trans women "should" be "she", which i know is something some people (rightly or wrongly) disagree with. Am i appropriating a cis woman's pronouns? And anyway, i find the whole idea of gender offensive in the first place, so shouldn't i choose "they"? I believe all people should be "they" and society needs to break free of this old-fashioned view of gender, which is fundamentally oppressive, and a cause of much suffering. But if i choose "they" because i think gender is stupid, am i appropriating the identity of an explicitly non-binary identified person? Or am i making a political statement that trans women aren't actually women? Or am i saying that women don't get to express their gender in a non-conforming way and still be women? Isn't any woman who chooses "they" making it harder for "she" women to be gender non-conforming, since it reinforces this binary idea that women always have to behave a certain way?
And on and on, all of this fucking anxiety and stress over a fucking pronoun! Before the days we constantly had to pick, or see others pick, we could just leave these thoughts and conversations for the philosophy roundtables (or LiveJournal), but now they've been pulled into the public space, the workplace! I guess that's the point of the activists who advocate for this - "if i'm constantly anxious and stressed about gender then everyone else should be too" - but... I dunno it just feels like a really aggressive form of activism to me, and one that is liable to make people resentful and perhaps even less understanding of whoever's plight it's supposed to be raising awareness for.
Reply
Leave a comment