Alex Byrne
they/them/theirs pronouns
Pierce County Library System
@HeofHIShirts
for
Washington Library Association Conference
5 October 2020
#wla2020
What Gender Is and Isn't
The pronouns a person uses is intimately linked to their gender identity (the gender that a person says is theirs.) Gender identity, rather than being a binary of two points (man or woman), or even a line with two end points (man and woman), is much more of a multidimensional coordinate system with different axes that describe aspects of someone's gender identity, which can include "male"/"female" but can also include "Jareth, King of the Goblins (and Genders)"/"No thanks, I had a gender earlier."
Gender identity is a complex thing, and it doesn't always follow anything that a person displays on the outside. Identity does not always follow gender expression, as not everyone who claims a certain gender identity wants to look a particular way (and for some gender identities, there really isn't a way of conveying it easily) You can't tell what gender identity a person has by looking at their body, and that includes if you're privileged enough to look at their genital configuration.
Gender identity is also not a fixed property of a person. People can and do change their gender identities, sometimes after a long period of contemplation and thought, and sometimes because they woke up with a particular gender identity that day. And not everyone is necessarily at one of the endpoints of gender scale on any given day. It's normal for a person's gender identity to only be leaning in one direction or another, or squarely in the middle, or to discard that axis entirely as relevant to their gender identity. What constitutes a gender identity is different to everyone.
What Pronouns Are and Aren't
Pronouns are pieces of language that allow you to refer to a person or a group of people without using their names, because sometimes you want to be able to talk about all of your co-workers or family members without having to list them individually.
Pronouns are also a useful way for someone to signal where in Gender Identity n-space they are, because, as we noted above, external characteristics are insufficient to know what someone's gender identity is.
Pronouns are vitally important to people who want to respect and refer to someone according to their correct gender identity. To do otherwise is, at best, an unintentional social faux pas that can be corrected, and at worst, a deliberate act of aggression and violence against another person by insisting that your incorrect perception of them is more important than their stated identity.
Pronouns are still being used as a proxy to fight other social battles around recognizing a person's gender identity or allowing them to live under their correct gender identity, instead of insisting that whatever genital configuration they were born with is their gender identity and cannot be changed, no matter what physical, hormonal, or mental changes a person undergoes to get closer to their correct gender identity and to be able to express themselves in the way they know is true. Actors who want to exploit the reluctance of political and religious conservatives to accept a new way of thinking about identity will often try to paint pronoun usage as something that only "special snowflakes" or people who are more interested in signaling to others how virtuous they are, as opposed to the "normal," usually trans-hostile, majority.
Pronoun Examples
Most people have been using pronouns as soon as they learned about them, so using correct pronouns is less of having to learn how to do an entirely new thing, and more expanding the possibilities of what is a pronoun for a person.
Pronouns like he/him/his, she/her/hers, and they/them/theirs are fairly well-established in most languages to refer to a singular man, a singular woman, and a person or persons of unknown gender identity. The extensions to this already-established framework are often referred to as neopronouns (which means "new pronouns"), and can include combinations like ze/zem/zes (pronounce the zed as one would in zebra), sie/hir/hirs, xie/hir/hirs, or fae/faer/faers (that's Fae, as in the Fair Folk). There's also e/em/eirs (the Spivak pronouns) that predate the common use of many neopronouns, but are also in the same vein.
If you encounter a pronoun that you're not sure how to pronounce or to use correctly, most people will explain to you the correct pronunciation if you ask them. Most pronoun groups are in the order of subject/object/possessive adjective, so you might have to break out the sentence diagrams the first few times that you try to use the neopronouns correctly, but with time and practice, it does get easier.
One final note on pronouns and gender identity: Some people have a gender identity, but they don't wnat you to use pronouns to refer to themselves. This is a valid configuration for pronouns, so hopefully you get lots of practice refering to a person by their name and using it appropriately.
While it would be nice if everyone aaccepted the correct use of pronouns (and that a person's pronouns are what they say they are), there's usually a few hurdles and objections that need to be overcome before someone is fully on board with the idea.
Common Objection: Grammatical Genders
Other languages, usually Romance languages (derived primarily from Latin - Romance in this case refers to Rome, not love) have a concept called a grammatical gender, which can be one of the most annoying things about trying to learn a Romance language if English is your first language. All things in Romance languages with grammatical genders have a gender. Forks are masculine, spoons are feminine, that sort of thing. In a language where everything is gendered, and there are only two genders, so the objection goes, it's not linguistically possible to refer to someone without gendering them. (And, somehow, that means that people who are non-binary or agender can't exist, because there's no linguistic capacity to acknowledge them.)
Good news, English speakers: English is not a Romance language, and it does not contain grammatical genders. So, English is perfectly capable of referring to agender, non-binary, or any other gender identity through the use of pronouns without causing a language crisis.
Even in Romance languages, there are efforts underway to make those languages more gender-neutral and gender-inclusive in the way they refer to others. French, for example, has people suggesting the use of "iel" (a combination of "il", the masculine pronoun, and "elle", the feminine pronoun) as a pronoun to use when referring to someone who is non-binary, and the mayor of Montréal (at the time of the Tweet) demonstrated an inclusive dot construction, "citoyen.nes", which includs "citoyens" (the masculine plural used to also refer to any group of more than one gender) and "citoyennes", (the feminine plural that refers to groups composed solely of women) together, the dot linking them together so that it sounds like the mayor said both words together, inclusively. Even in places that have only had two genders, there's work afoot to try and overcome those limitations and present a more accurate representation of the world.
Common Objections: The Singular They
Some of the biggest uproar in English-speaking countries is the use of the singular "they". "They" as a pronoun is most commonly used to refer to a group of people, regardless of their gender identities. Since "they" does not express a gender in usage, people who are not men or women have adopted "they" as a possible pronoun to use to refer to themselves. (Like the person presenting this to you does.) Certain self-styled grammar experts and style guide writers proclaim that using "they" in such a way is impossible, and that "they" is always and forever a plural pronoun, no exceptions.
This is silly. (And several other possible adjectives that can get used when not speaking in public.) The use of "they" as a singular is at least as old as Shakespeare, noted conservative with regard to language and the creation of neologisms.
Furthermore, English as a language already has a situation where one pronoun has come to refer to both a singular and a plural. After English lost the T-V distinction between the informal second person (thee/thou/thine) and the formal second person (ye/you/yours), the pronoun "you" now refers to both singular and plural second person address. How do you tell the difference? Well, at least some of the dialects of English have adopted a different second person plural pronoun, like "y'all" (or the phrase "all y'all", where "y'all" has taken the spot "thee" held as the informal second person pronoun,) "yinz," and "youse."
As you can see, the English language continues to evolve with usage, and since "you" already occupies the same sort of space a person would use a singular "they" for, it seems logical that singular "they" should work equally as well as "you" already is.
The singular they has also been selected twice as a Word of the Year, (2015 - American Dialect Society, and 2019 - Merriam-Webster) even if that suggests more about how much talking there's been around the use of a singular they, and as the word of the decade of the 2010s by the American Dialect Society. Several style guides, including the Associated Press style guide endorse the use of the singular they, especially in relation to they being used as someone's personal pronoun, so even formal writing seems okay with the use of the singular they.
Common Objection: Gender Binarism
Some people are unsatisfied at the changes in language, and the ability of people to more accurately describe themselves along Gender Identity n-space, and refuse to acknowledge anything more than two genders, each of which is tied to a specific genital configuration, without exception or nuance.
Gender is not genitals. The existence of intersex people proves this. The existence of people who have sucessfuly transitioned, both socially and medically, to their correct gender identity, proves this. It should be abundantly clear at this point that someone's genital configuration has no bearing at all on what their correct gender identity is, but the belief still persists. (Often because there's lucre or power to be gained by the unscrupulous who want to promote ideas that transgender or gender-nonconforming people are somehow morally wrong for not acting and presenting themselves in accordance with what was assigned to them, or want to paint transgender and gender-nonconforming people as threats or menaces to cisgender people, usually women or children, so as to give the people they want to lead a clear Other to fixate on and direct their hate toward.)
Acting on the belief that there are only two genders, fixed and immutable, and tied solely to genital configuration is going to lead to many acts of misgendering and aggression against others, and in many workplaces, gender identity is a protected class that will provoke disciplinary actions if discrimination or hostility can be proven to be based on someone's gender identity or expression.
So, if you are interested in getting more familiar and comfortable with using people's pronouns, we recommend this short exercise that you can start practicing now.
Pronoun Practice Party
The Pronoun Practice Party method is best done in groups, but you can also do it solo, and explain what you're doing to others, so that they can also start their own Pronoun Practice Party.
- First, when introducing yourself to others, use your pronouns in addition to your name.
- "Hi, my name is Ω, and I use ze/zir pronouns" is a perfectly cromulent way of doing it. Do this even if you don't use neopronouns, because the point is to normalize the idea that people can share their pronouns without terrible consequences happening to them.
- Once you're comfortable introducing yourself with your pronouns, start putting your pronouns on your business cards, e-mail signatures, name badges, and other places where people are likely to interact with you. Again, do this even if you don't use neopronouns, because the goal here is to normalize the behavior and make it something that "people" do, not something "those people" do.
- The other part of the Pronoun Practice Party is asking other people what their pronouns are, and getting comfortable doing so if the other person doesn't have something where they are sharing their pronouns for you.
- "What pronouns should I use for you?" is a good way of constructing the question, as "What are your pronouns?" might get back "I don't know." or other similar answers if the person you're asking hasn't made a decision yet about what pronouns they want to use, or if they don't tell people their correct pronouns until they have passed a trust check, or they're not out in their work life. By asking what pronouns you should use, the other person doesn't have to justify themselves to you in any way, but instead can answer your question with whatever the correct answer is at the time you ask.
- Regardless of what answer you get when you ask what someone's pronouns are, regardless of whether that's the same answer they gave you the last time you asked, when you get the answer to what pronouns to use, use the correct pronouns for someone in the appropriate situation when you are referring to that person. Respect any conditions that someone has put on the use of their pronouns. They probably have good reasons to not want to be out at work, or with their family, or in other situations where they might suffer harm from use of their correct pronouns. (The slide here says "all situations," which would be the ideal. If you phrased the question correctly, you should be able to use what answer you got back in all situations, even if it means that in some situations, you use a different set of pronouns than you would use more generally.
- You are going to mess up. This is inevitable, and for most situations, embarrassment will be the strongest consequence of messing it up. When you mess up, acknowledge the mistake, correct yourself by using the proper pronouns, and then continue on. There's a phenomenon where people who profess to be allies make a bigger deal of their mistake, demanding that the people they've just slighted comfort them and reassure them that it's okay to make mistakes, which both saps energy from the people who should be apologized to and centers the discussion away from the important part of using someone's pronouns correctly. Apologize, correct yourself, continue on.
That's the secret to it, which doesn't seem like a whole lot at all. The benefits of correctly using someone's pronouns correctly and normalizing the use of corrrect pronouns are significant. Someone leaving you a nice note about how nice it was for you to use their correct pronouns the first time and without prompting is the base level of nice things that can happen, and it only gets better from there.
It's time to practice!