I am neuro-divergent. I struggle with remembering minutia that aren’t, coincidentally, just luckily the minutia that I glimpse, once, and never forget. I state this not as an excuse but as a statement of fact and I am terrible at remembering people’s pronouns. I cannot even remember people’s names. When I see people I know, I can remember who they are, what we have done together, where we have been, what we have seen and even the tone of voice they might use to exclaim at an occurrence or upon some eventuality but – yet – I often cannot remember their names. Pronouns are like parts of their names.
And, so, I tend to address everyone with “they” / “them”.
In my limited experience, this only tends to annoy the anti-woke conservative types who renounce the very concept of pronouns and believe that one should only ever be addressed as “he” / “him” – assuming that a penis hangs between their thighs – or “she” / “her” otherwise. (A musing: How do they know? Also, what if it’s cold? Or they’re upside down? Quandaries within quandaries!)
BUT… I am open minded and I can believe that others, too, might be offended by my cop-out, including open-minded, non-mysoginist, non-bigots who do understand why people elect to be addressed under non-Victorian pronouns.
I have recently had reason to pause and wonder about this. I struggle with pronouns but I do try my best and so, I’m asking: for which reasons might someone object? Tell me, LGBTQ+ community.
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When in doubt, I always default to they/them. I also like to be called they/them.
They/them is a default for someone you don’t know until otherwise corrected.
And if some chud gets all hissy about their pronouns point out the irony of it.
I also default to they/them. That has been the default for way longer than this “debate” (i.e. stream of hate) has been popular. I’d love to see the people who use “he or she” instead of “they” in normal speech about people whose gender they don’t know. I don’t know anyone outside of old formal papers from the pre-internet era that use that kind of language.
I’m agender by the way, so not only are pronouns sometimes hard to remember because they don’t connect to the way I perceive a person, but i don’t even perceive my own gender except when forced to, so take my comments with that in mind.
Your comments might be more relevant to me than you know. I don’t know if I’m “agender” or something else. I know I very definitely do perceive that I have a gender, sometimes. Maybe an hour here and there, an evening, … but I can definitely identify with that “don’t even perceive my own gender” bit for the vast majority of my life, integrating over time.
And, as you can clearly tell, I haven’t perceived my own gender intensely enough to bother to find the right label for it so I mostly just let the world slap whatever labels they think makes them happy.
I guess that that annoys me, though, now that I come to think about it. I do know that I’m not what they label me. Most think I’m heterosexual male because that’s how I suppose I present in real life – how I dress and what you’d see on the “FKK” swimming lawn – and the rest label me “gay”-as-in-perjorative (I’m from a toxic-masculine culture, born in the 80’s, with a voice pitched too high and a body that’s not tall enough. What else would you expect?) I’m definitely neither of these. Or: nearly always neither of those and never only either of those.
Maybe this unacknowledged irritation is why I’m here, looking to find the right way to treat others even while I’ve long given up on being treated right by the wrong sort of others? (I am exceedingly lucky in that I can fly below the radar and live in a safe country so I literally can treat people who deny my existence as simply beneath my notice.)
I identify as agender now, I previously identified purely as a gay man for most of my life. In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious for me, I’ve always been fascinated by characters who stood outside the gender binary- robots, aliens, etc. I was very Christian growing up and I was fascinated by angels as genderless beings.
In my case, I just don’t like gendered language being applied to be in general. I don’t identify as having a gender. It’s always felt like work, being a man, like it’s never enough and everyone has all these opinions about, “what a man is” and I resented it so Intensely.
Because I didn’t want it. I wanted to be a weird outlier who didn’t have to grapple with expectations in regards to my appearance, interests and talents based on something arbitrary that I didn’t even opt into. I never felt validation from affirming my gender. It was just work I poured into a hole in the ground to please other people and make them more comfortable.
Now I’m pretty happy! I just don’t give a shit about how I come off gender-wise and I basically don’t care how people refer to me because I know I can act however I choose.
I’m not sure if this is helpful, but I felt like sharing? Maybe the irritation you’re feeling is because there are parts of the gender role you’re living out that you’re dissatisfied with. Gender role is constructed, so I highly recommend picking the parts you want and living that, if that follows?
Anyway, thanks for sharing! I love when people talk about gender! It’s nice to get to feel that way.
Yeah, I think of two sides to labels. One is how you perceive yourself and one is how you communicate who you are to others.
For the internal labels, these are only useful to some people, and can change as often as you want, or you can chose to not use them at all and just be you. You decide. What they are useful for in my experience is self-discovery and helping you to decide how you want to present to others. So use them, or not, try them on for a while and see how it goes, switch them up. Treat them like trying on clothes at home. You can wear which ever ones you want, in whatever combination you want or just go naked. It’s your house/brain.
External labels shouldn’t be assigned and if they are you should ignore them. Don’t let them affect who you are or how you behave or you just end up wearing masks. Now I say that with the caveat that masks are necessary in certain situations for safety or to preserve your job or whatever. But when you’re free to be you in public, ignore those assigned by others. Again, using the clothing metaphor, it’s like someone putting a hat on your head. It’s rude for a stranger to come up to you and do that. Now it may be that hat looks great on you and turns out you wear it the rest of your life. But someone shouldn’t put it on you, they should see that you might like it, hand it to you, and you decide to put it on or not. Same with labels. People can suggest a label, but should not try to assign one to you.
Problem with social labels is that it’s not acceptable to go naked in many social situations. So you have to pick the ones you want or risk being forced to wear them. And in some situations, you will be forced to wear one without your consent. You just have to decide if it’s worth being in that situation or if you should leave. And the other issue is that changing labels confuses people, just like significantly changing your clothing style might if you go from wife-beater and jeans to goth cat girl. So it’s best to pick some base ones and then add on or make small adjustments as you go. There are lots of generalized labels like non-binary or gender-fluid that sound like might be a good starting point for you. Then you can add more specific ones later once you have internally tried them on for a bit or tried them on in safe spaces like with good friends who are open to it. Like starting out with a black tshirt and pants, then adding on a skirt or sweater later, you can add on something like demiboy which is a subset of non-binary and eventually get to more specific labels as you find them useful.
And also, something I always emphasize to people is that gender and sexuality are not directly related and sometimes even romantic interests and sexuality are not necessarily directly related. There may be a correlation for the majority, but it’s not a direct relationship. So choose your sexuality, romantic, and gender labels separately at least the internal ones. Just realize that because language is weird, the most common romantic and sexuality labels are only meaningful when combined with a gender label (e.g. straight, gay, hetero/homosexual, etc), so it’s good to find that first, but not necessary. There are more gender neutral sexuality labels, especially in the ace spectrum, or ones that explicitly specify the target gender rather than specifying the relationship the target gender has to your gender, like gynosexual.
And remember, we all change over time. Be flexible with yourself and don’t worry about what you felt like in the distant past, only today. Gender, sexuality, etc., are much more complex psychologically than simply a single chromosome like many bigots pretend. It’s mostly up to hormones and the way different parts of your body react to those hormones which can change over time from age, environment, diet, etc., not just your genes. Genes just set a starting point, and sometimes those get overridden before birth even. That’s why people with an X chromosome can be born with a vagina and all the other combinations.
Hope that is useful. It’s a deep interest of mine because my own journey has been complex. So I enjoy info-dumping about it. Lol
Doing your best is the best you can do. As long as you’re respectful and nice, no one is going to get mad over that if you fumble. It’s how you act if corrected that really matters. If they do get mad, just apologize and move on.
This is a broad generalization but I feel like some of these people that get so angry over it, likely get angry over being corrected about anything.
I’ll throw in one perspective, one of my pet peeves as a trans woman is when people use they/them to refer to me after I’ve told them my pronouns. A lot of people will do it to try to be inclusive, and I appreciate the sentiment, but my pronouns are not and never have been they/them. I’ve been fighting for over a decade to get people to use she/her.
Of course, this only applies when it’s targeted and not to the more general use of singular they/them. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing more than a pet peeve
I’m sure that dead-naming is far worse but would I be wrong to think that this lies in the same vein as dead-naming?
This is fascinating to me. I’ve never changed my name so I cannot have been dead-named but I do know how I feel when my family treats me in a way that denies the facets of my identity that I have accepted in my more recent adulthood – concretely: my neuro-diversity, because they don’t know that I don’t think of myself as binary.
Of course, these are not the same thing but people understand differences by bridging gaps based on common ground and all of this discussion builds common ground, in my mind. That’s why I’m asking.
Not the origonal commenter, but “analogous to deadnaming” is certainly how it can feel sometimes.
Obviously there’s innocent mistakes/forgetfulness, but when someone had no problem calling a (passing) trans person by the correct binary pronoun but suddenly “can’t remember” or reverts to “they/them” once they learn you’re trans - there’s clearly something else going on there. It’s additionally upsetting because the slight is subtle enough, and the excuse believable enough, that you can’t easily explain why it’s a problem to people who don’t already understand it.
In the english language, they/them are pronouns used when you don’t know a person’s gender. So in that sense you’re using them perfectly right.
However, relatively recently people started to adopt they/them as their own pronouns and some people might not identify with these pronouns and therefore might be displeased if they/them are used for them. But I struggle in a similar way as you (AuDHD here) and have not met a single person who was still angry after I explained my struggles (showing effort might be key for some though).
However, most people who rant about they/them (or pronouns in general, weirdly enough) are part of the anti-woke crowd (and grifters from those bubbles).
This essay seems relevant to help more fully frame the question.
But in fact, gender is maintained by constant effort from everyone in society. Imagine what a truly genderless society would look like: no he/she pronouns. No seeing a stranger and thinking of them as male or female. No such thing as being gay or straight. People of all body types wearing pants or skirts as they please. The vision I’m describing isn’t a fantasy based on some fundamental change to how the world works. It would happen if tomorrow morning we all got out of bed and decided to stop paying any attention to gender.
[…]
[There are people who…] do care about gender. They have an internal sense that they need to look, dress, and act a certain way that conforms to their society’s idea of their gender. If they aren’t recognised as their gender, it makes them uncomfortable. These are the people who made our language have he and she pronouns. They’re the people who feel satisfied and fulfilled when they get addressed as “sir” or “madam”. They are where gender comes from.
