It’s the High Holy Days, the time of year when Jewish people reflect on ourselves and our relationships with others, and do their best to rectify all our unfinished interpersonal business. That makes it the perfect time of year to put this into the universe. It’s also a triple-header weekend for figure skating fans, so I hope this makes for some thought-provoking reading during the ice resurface.
By now, most of my friends and family are aware that I’m nonbinary, and that my pronouns in English 1 are they/them/their. Some of you are doing a great and consistent job of using my pronouns. Others are struggling but making a good faith effort. If you’re in one of those categories, I appreciate your pronoun use with all my heart, and this lecture is not directed at you.
As for the rest of you: this is a reminder, and an exhortation, to use the pronouns I asked you to use. They are not my preferred pronouns; they’re my pronouns, just as Callisto and Eris are more than my preferred cats. It’s also important to note that I use “pronouns” as shorthand for a variety of gendered words that should and shouldn’t be used to describe me. You can refer to me as a person rather than as a woman, and note that I am neither a lady nor a gentleman. I’m my parents’ child, my brother’s sibling, and my niece’s tía.2 Instead of ma’am, you can call me friend – and really, you should do this for everyone, because most of the women I know find ma’am insulting. For formal occasions, you may refer to me as Dr. Rasher, because I spent eight years of prime adulthood on my Ph.D., and the smallest part of what I earned was a gender-neutral honorific.
I’m aware that it’s difficult to remember to use the right language for me sometimes. I might be the only out nonbinary person you know, and I’m not always proactive about correcting folks. I’m doing my part by getting bolder with the gentle reminders. If you are corrected, the appropriate response is to apologize briefly, move on, and get it right the next time. Please don’t beat yourself up about it, and please don’t use it as a launching point for an uncomfortable debate about gender politics and free speech.
If you’re cisgender,3 getting pronouns right might not seem like a big deal to you. It’s possible that someone has mistakenly called you sir or told you that you run like a girl, but misgendering is probably not a frequent occurrence for you. Trans and nonbinary people, however, are misgendered often, and it’s annoying and painful even when the intent was not malicious.
It’s kind of like people misspelling or mispronouncing my name. I’m Sarah with an H,4 not Sara, and it’s astounding how often people get this wrong. When a stranger does it, I can correct them or not, and there’s not much at stake unless they’re about to email something to sara@thefinersports.com.5 When it’s a friend or client I interact with more often, it becomes careless and kind of insulting: it’s right there in my email signature and all over social media. Even if you think my name looks prettier without the H, even if the phonetically vestigial silent letter disturbs your sense of orthographic propriety – my name is Sarah, with an H, and that is the only acceptable spelling when you refer to me. My pronouns are no different: I’ve told you what to call me, and you can show me respect by remembering that, regardless of your opinion.
But you have objections, surely! And you have the right to voice them! Perhaps you’ve been referring to me as she/her for a long time, and this is a difficult adjustment. But you’ve adjusted to all kinds of other changes in my identity. I’ve changed my legal mailing address nine times in my adult life, before buying my dream home last year and declaring that I am never moving again. For the most part, my friends and family have succeeded in mailing things to the right place, and in asking when they’re not sure which is the right address. My hair is probably a different color now than it was when you met me. If a stranger asked how to pick me out in a crowd, you’d tell them to look for the platinum blonde, even if I’m still a redhead in your mind’s eye. You’d never dream of telling me to move back to my old apartment in Connecticut so my address can match the one in your address book, or to revert to the mousy brown that I haven’t seen since I was 18 years old because it’s the hair color I was born with. Similarly, they/them are the correct pronouns for me now, regardless of which pronouns I might have said were correct in the past.
Even so, you might say, it’s hard to remember that I’m nonbinary and use gender-neutral pronouns, since I’m so feminine. I sometimes wear dresses (comfortable) and carry a purse (convenient), and I do not at all times put effort into making my breasts disappear. But when you focus on those elements of feminine presentation, you’re choosing to ignore the ways in which I’m masculine-presenting. I don’t shave my legs. My hair is short, and my stylist charges me for a men’s haircut. There’s a strong chance that I’m wearing men’s underwear under my dress.
More to the point, I’ve known since I was a small child that I am not female. When I was little, I used to articulate it, but teachers and family members trained me to value passing as a woman over describing my identity accurately. As an adult, I’ve gradually reclaimed and embraced my gender identity. It is safe to say that I have thought about my gender more than you have, and that I know myself better than you know me.6 Therefore, it’s presumptuous for you to say that you will continue to call me a woman because that’s how you see me. Your perceptions don’t hold veto power over my reality.
The other reasons for misgendering me are rooted in bigotry, and are the core of the reason why I’ve disabled comments on this post. Still, in the spirit of reaching out and presuming good intentions, I’ll address these arguments earnestly. If you’ve heard me explain to someone how we know that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him, or why Davis and White deserved their Olympic gold medal over Virtue and Moir in 2014, imagine the next few paragraphs being delivered in the same tone of voice.
Some people persist in defining gender by chromosomes or reproductive organs. Unless you’ve examined my uterus or sequenced my DNA recently, it’s best not to make inferences about either of those. The only person who has performed a medical assessment of my reproductive system recently is my primary care physician, and she uses my pronouns correctly and consistently. When I came out to her as nonbinary, we had a thoughtful conversation about what that means for my medical care, and she adjusts her approaches and terminology in a respectful way. You should take my word for it that my body is a nonbinary body, but if the authority of a medical professional helps to confirm it, here you go.
And then there’s the grammar argument. A nonbinary person with advanced degrees in early modern English literature and proficiency in three languages is literally the last person anyone should come at with the contention that the singular they is somehow destroying English. Before you attempt this, know that I come armed with 700 years of receipts for the usage of the singular they in English, and that your punishment for even bringing it up will be a 15-minute bonus lecture about how cool it is that the commonly cited reference to the singular they in Chaucer comes from the prologue to the Pardoner’s Tale of the Canterbury Tales.7 Those eight years of grad school conferred more upon me than the right to call myself Dr. Rasher.
It’s possible that after all of this, you’re still resisting. You recognize that you’re annoying me and hurting my feelings by refusing to use my pronouns, and you might even concede that you’re wrong about grammar. Still, getting my pronouns right is hard work, and it’s more effort than you want to expend.
Finally, we’re being honest here. Your honesty is painful, but I respect it. We all put our own needs ahead of others’ sometimes. But I also now feel less close to you, and I trust you less. I’ve asked you to do something that will ease my anxiety and increase my comfort with you, and you’ve refused to earnestly try. That gives me a clear indication of where I stand with you. Thank you for the clarity. You’ll forgive me for avoiding your company in the future, to avoid poking at the sore spot where the two of us meet.
“But I didn’t realize it was that bad!” you might be saying. “Is it really such a big deal that you don’t want to be friends anymore?”
But it is that bad. You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you how much it upset me, or I didn’t repeat it enough times for it to sink in. I didn’t do that because it is exhausting to spend my entire life confronting people on their interactions with me. I needed to find a way to tell you that would resonate, and I am writing this in the hopes that it will be forceful enough to do the trick, or permanent enough that I can text you the link every time I’m misgendered and hurt, or witty enough that you’ll catch yourself slipping and go, “Oh, right, Sarah with an H, pronouns with a TH.”
If all the effort I have put into this explanation hasn’t been enough to sway you – the couple of days it took to write and edit, and the years of turning these ideas over in my head – I can accept that, as I’ve said. You can walk away with your convenience and your strongly held beliefs, and I can walk away with my wide, supportive circle of friends and family who understand that this fairly small adjustment in their speech benefits my well-being enormously. It breaks my heart that you don’t want to be part of that circle. I hope you’ll rethink your resistance and change your mind. My door is open.
Next on The Finer Sports: did I mention there are three significant international figure skating competitions this weekend?
- I also have pronouns in Spanish and Japanese. If you wish to communicate with me in either of those languages, inquire within. Japanese requires very little effort on your part; Spanish is so much more complicated than English that I’ll admire you for trying.
- In Spanish, tía is a gendered word, meaning aunt. My family and I chose it as a way to set me apart from my niece’s many other aunties, and as a reminder that I’m a designated Spanish speaker with her, at least in theory. It became a gender-neutral alternative for me (and probably for me alone) because it’s neither aunt nor uncle, and because our Midwestern accents reduce the final vowel down to a genderless “uh.”
- A cisgender person is someone whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. If you’re not transgender or nonbinary, you’re probably cisgender. It’s neither a slur nor a compliment, just a useful word for describing a kind of person.
- I’ve considered changing my name to something less traditionally feminine. I pored through baby name websites, I talked to other trans and NB people about their name change processes, and I went through hours of philosophical dithering. I came to the conclusion that I don’t wish to change my name. For one thing, my name is a brand, in association with my small business as well as on social media. More importantly, I’m attached to it and can’t find another one that I like better. To paraphrase David Bowie and/or Eddie Izzard, it’s not a woman’s name, it’s my name.
- Actually, this will still reach my inbox, because the misspellings are frequent enough that I’ve planned ahead. I have no idea where misspelled attempts to reach my Gmail go, though.
- A handful of people do know me as well as I know myself, or better. I am grateful to have these people in my life. Every single one of them either gets my pronouns right, or is making an effort. Two of them were amazingly helpful in getting this ready for publication. One of them embroidered me a sampler with my pronouns on it.
- If this bonus lecture interests you, inquire within. I’d much rather talk about Chaucer than go over this pronoun business again.