Last Saturday, I attended the booth-and-stage-show part of Boston's Pride festival (I didn't get there in time for the parade, but whatever
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I also feel out of place in most 'GLBT' things. Part of this is that I'm not generally presenting other than male and while I'm bi I tend to like girls more, so I feel a bit of an impostor. It's also true, though, that trans people are behind the GL acceptance wave (you probably hear about this sort of things from the blogs you read); most of the people there probably don't bother or have any need to think about trans issues.
I personally prefer appropriate pronouns for how I am presenting; this basically never happens (apart from WoW characters, even though I play with people I actually know and other people's characters usually get the real person's pronouns).
I feel similarly, as a bi-tending-to-like-men; also, I've never been very active politically, so that's probably part of why I feel out of place at rallies/etc. The issues are important to me, but I've never really been one to take to the streets.
I hope my recommendations are generally read to include "appropriate pronouns for how one is presenting" -- I certainly meant them to include that case.
Shouldn't the "bathroom symbols in pink for the M and blue for the F" have been a kind of major tip-off?!
On a different note, I literally LOLed at you're reference to the "dreamy" essay you wrote senior year of high school and was asked by PKG to explain why. My answer (roughly parphrased) was, "Naomi wrote a post about her experiences in Pride. At the end she mentioned an inciden that happened in high school. I remember when he wrote that essay, it was hilarious." I'm unsure if I should have used the last pronoun the way that I did. Does your preference for female or Spivak pronouns extend to people talking about things that happened prior to when you made the request that people use gender neutral pronouns, or should I have said, "I remember when she wrote that essay"?
Shouldn't the "bathroom symbols in pink for the M and blue for the F" have been a kind of major tip-off?!
Yep. They didn't, though. I'm not as much surprised by this as just plain annoyed.
On the other note, using Spivak pronouns for highschool-me feels least wrong to me. Certainly by the end of high school I wasn't male-identified, though I wasn't exactly female-identified either then. If there's ever a situation that I am (deliberately) passing as cis-female and this comes up, though, the correct thing to do is to use female pronouns.
Note: you will pretty much never offend by using someone's current preferred pronoun for them in the past, even if they preferred (or were quietly, sadly accepting) different pronouns back then.
As for the note, thanks, I kind of figured as much. In this case I didn't think about the pronouns being time-frame-specific, that just kind of came out unthinkingly. After saying it that way I thought it might be something to make an effort to avoid in the future but wasn't sure, hence asking.
Good list. I might also add that in some situations it's ok to ask a person what pronouns they prefer. That can settle the question for both parties with a minimum of awkwardness / pain.
I thought about it, but I am not sure that's a "beginner" thing to ask cis folks to do, to figure out when it's appropriate to ask about pronouns. Certainly not when you first meet someone; at least have a conversation about something else first.
That said, "what pronouns do you prefer?" is the most polite way I can think of to do a gender check, if for some reason you must do a gender check.
Although, asking somebody about their pronoun preference can sometimes be perceived as an insult when they feel that their presentation should make it obvious. However, if it's potentially rude to make a gender check, is it more polite to just not use gendered pronouns for anybody who hasn't explicitly told you their preference? How about people who really want gendered pronouns to be used for them?
The right thing to do never seems very clear to me. If only language didn't constantly shove these issues into your face...
I think this really drives home to me the point that we all have such a deeply ingrained sense of immediate, pre-conscious identification with gender, no matter how sensitive or "with it" we think we are. I can see how you come to wanting to remove that node on that mental identification flow chart people go through when they size someone up.
I would think that of all places, Pride would be the one where folks would get it right when on automatic.
Thank you for presenting such clear direction to relative mundanes like me! I think it is a generally a good thing to look and listen more closely to individuals and resist the urge to pigeon-hole bases on incomplete data. We should all do more of this.
I'm so sorry. That seems like it should have been ridiculously obvious that you shouldn't have been gendered male, and it's even worse that it happened in a space like Pride.
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I personally prefer appropriate pronouns for how I am presenting; this basically never happens (apart from WoW characters, even though I play with people I actually know and other people's characters usually get the real person's pronouns).
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On a different note, I literally LOLed at you're reference to the "dreamy" essay you wrote senior year of high school and was asked by PKG to explain why. My answer (roughly parphrased) was, "Naomi wrote a post about her experiences in Pride. At the end she mentioned an inciden that happened in high school. I remember when he wrote that essay, it was hilarious." I'm unsure if I should have used the last pronoun the way that I did. Does your preference for female or Spivak pronouns extend to people talking about things that happened prior to when you made the request that people use gender neutral pronouns, or should I have said, "I remember when she wrote that essay"?
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Yep. They didn't, though. I'm not as much surprised by this as just plain annoyed.
On the other note, using Spivak pronouns for highschool-me feels least wrong to me. Certainly by the end of high school I wasn't male-identified, though I wasn't exactly female-identified either then. If there's ever a situation that I am (deliberately) passing as cis-female and this comes up, though, the correct thing to do is to use female pronouns.
Note: you will pretty much never offend by using someone's current preferred pronoun for them in the past, even if they preferred (or were quietly, sadly accepting) different pronouns back then.
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As for the note, thanks, I kind of figured as much. In this case I didn't think about the pronouns being time-frame-specific, that just kind of came out unthinkingly. After saying it that way I thought it might be something to make an effort to avoid in the future but wasn't sure, hence asking.
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You're assuming that people actually would notice that the colors were backward. People see what they want to see.
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That said, "what pronouns do you prefer?" is the most polite way I can think of to do a gender check, if for some reason you must do a gender check.
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The right thing to do never seems very clear to me. If only language didn't constantly shove these issues into your face...
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I would think that of all places, Pride would be the one where folks would get it right when on automatic.
Thank you for presenting such clear direction to relative mundanes like me! I think it is a generally a good thing to look and listen more closely to individuals and resist the urge to pigeon-hole bases on incomplete data. We should all do more of this.
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