Just Shut Up and Say Their Pronouns
By: Kristen Pizzo
Tags: Identity, LGBTQ, Gender, Genderqueer, Nonbinary

Just Shut Up and Say Their Pronouns

Artwork by @hattedhedgehog on Instagram. Their work is available on T-shirts on Redbubble.

The #IAmNonBinary took over Twitter on Friday. The beautiful campaign showed that non-binary people come in all forms and that there isn’t a wrong or right way to be non-binary.

Lately, the non-binary identity has received a lot of attention. ‘They’ became officially recognized as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun by dictionaries in 2019 (but it actually has always been one).

It was also labeled the “word of the decade.”

However, there still seems to be a learning curve for its use. Or perhaps, in some cases, it is a flat-out refusal to learn and do better.

Some people continuously challenge it instead of just accepting it and moving on with their lives. Others, like young children, catch on to the practice fairly quickly.

In elementary school, my grammar lessons always taught me that you refer to persons of unknown identities as they, never the clunky phrase, “he or she.” Perhaps my teachers’ reasoning back then was not about inclusivity, but the practice still stuck and has made the singular pronoun a non-issue for me as an adult.

Not everyone had the same grammar curriculum or remembers it. There is a lot of pushback against the use of they/them. One of the main complaints I hear about it is:

“I keep thinking you are talking about multiple people!”

Well, here’s a solution to that: Use those context clues like it’s third-grade reading time and it will be obvious that “they” is referring to only one person in the scenario.

Here are some examples:

“Their favorite color is turquoise.”

“They were wearing a blazer.”

These statements are clearly about one person, but if you’re still confused, try these:

“They asked me to marry them.”

“I had sex with them last night.”

(No shade towards polyamorous people, of course, but most people only sleep with one partner, so this example works for the majority).

This tweet by author Amanda Jetté Knox also helped put the issue into perspective:

If you are going to grumble about how hard it is to adjust, think about it as analogous to any of these situations:

When your friend gets married and goes by a new last name

When the year ends and you have to write a new year on everything you sign

When your Pokemon evolves and has a new name

If these are too abstract for you, remember that the bottom line is that none of this is about you.

When you make a big deal about how difficult it is to adjust to using new pronouns or names, you are telling the nonbinary person in question that their existence is an inconvenience.

Stop thinking about how “awkward” the singular pronoun ‘they’ feels on your tongue and think about them for two seconds.

Think about how much it stings for them to hear the wrong pronouns coming out of your mouth. How maybe their chosen name and their pronouns are the first things that ever made them feel like everything made sense for once. Like a new pair of jeans that fit just right. Like a song that describes their emotions in ways they never could.

Of course you don’t entirely understand what being non-binary feels like. No one is asking you to.

All they are asking is for you to take the information they gave you about themselves and use it. That’s it. It is literally the least you could do for them.

I am a queer cisgender woman and I cannot say I will ever know exactly what it feels like to exist in the middle space of the gender binary Venn diagram, but I can put aside that lack of personal experience and any confusion I may have, and simply call people by their names and their proper pronouns, and you can too.

This isn’t a “look at me, I am better than you” post. I fuck up pronouns and names too. I don’t always get it right.

The first time I met a person who used they/them/theirs was five years ago, and I am sad to say that the attitudes around the pronouns haven’t changed as fast as the Internet sometimes makes it seem.

This was written out of my frustration with people who have a hernia every time they are asked to use they/them. It costs nothing (okay, maybe at first it costs slightly more brainpower) and is a simple matter of respect.

If you use a “freedom of speech” argument to explain why you won’t adjust your language accordingly, then every nonbinary person you misgender has a right to refer to you with derogatory names.

But they won’t. Because they are almost always going to be the bigger person. And it’s time you thought about putting your pettiness aside and doing the same.

*Note: Not all nonbinary people use they/them pronouns.