Why I Don’t Ask for People’s Pronouns or Announce Mine
By: Arielle Isaac Norman
Tags: Gender Identity, Nonbinary, Androgynous, Pronouns, Gender

I prefer not to be asked for my “preferred pronouns.” In a world as diverse as ours, not everyone’s preferences can be catered to all the time. This leaves us with the question: should we ask everyone, no one, or only those who look “different” for their pronouns?

It won’t be othering, they say, because we’ll ask everyone.

But they won’t. Not only will they never get everyone else to ask all of us for our pronouns, but the wokest among us will, in most situations, only ask the queers, the gender non-conformers, the people who look like they might “have” pronouns. To the extent that their mission works, that this catches on, it will only do so among some well-meaning leftists who will learn to hesitate when they see someone like me, and then ask, essentially, “Are you a them yet?”

No no, I have to constantly tell people now, I’m not a them. People used to just assume I’m a vegetarian. Friends I’ve known for years will still sometimes, while inviting me to a BBQ, falter and say, “Oh sorry! I know you don’t eat meat, but, uh, we’ll have potato chips…”

It’s true that I don’t eat much meat and that I do eat a lot of vegetables. I treat meat like I treat cocaine. I don’t buy it, but, if someone else prepares it for me and it’s good shit, I might have some, depending on what I have to accomplish the next day.

Mostly, I just listen to my body and what it wants. This doesn’t make me a vegetarian (much less sober), but I understand that if you see a shorthair lesbian order a veggie burger, your brain is likely to make the short leap.

But now, colleagues and strangers alike not only assume vegetarianism but also default to the pronoun “they” for me. Having forgotten to ask, a host announcing me at a comedy show will often refer to me as “she” and then “correct” himself, sometimes clumsily apologizing to the audience and to me as I take the stage. Or she’ll confidently announce of me that “They are so funny; you’re going to love them!” Either way, the audience now thinks I’m a Them (sometimes after realizing a duo act or improv troupe isn’t about to take the stage). And as a comedian, and yes especially one who visibly doesn’t align with standard gender expectations, my first goal is to get people to see that I am one of Us.

Well-intentioned people who’re trying to follow the rules, now righteously assume I am Other and trip over themselves to apologize if they accidentally include me in the woman category simply because their brain recognizes that I’m an egg-maker. I have short hair, a strong jawline, and don’t wear dresses or makeup. This doesn’t make me a Them. Maybe it’s just that women can seem like a whole different gender when we’re not trying to attract men.

My gender expression is androgyny. The most affirming thing for me is when I cause people to wonder.

“What is that?” — My girlfriend’s father, upon seeing this picture of me, unwittingly gendering me correctly.

We can all clock people’s congenital genitals accurately the vast majority of the time. But I get mis-sexed fairly regularly, whether because people are only seeing me in their peripheral vision, as I’m walking past them toward a stall while they’re doing their makeup, or they’re already greeting me as I walk into their store before their brain has had time to take the whole picture in. Sometimes, particularly with men who are middle-aged or older, they claim to really not be sure even after extended interactions. I love this. I love confusing people. I joke that, if I’m using the same restroom as you, and you don’t give me at least a double take, that’s misgendering me.

Thus, I am much more affirmed, personally, when someone asks me about my genitals. I can get dysphoric when people aren’t a little confused.

When I was coming of age into a more feminist consciousness (i.e. in college), we learned to roll our eyes at people whose first question to a pregnant woman* or to someone holding a baby was, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

Even now, all forward-thinking people mock “gender reveal parties” as the ignorant hootenannies of Team Red. Not only would it be more accurate to call these gatherings “gamete reveals,” but also we find it to be backwards that parents and other interested parties think sex is the most important thing to discuss about a new life (although at least people are finding both sexes to be cause for celebrations these days, in several countries anyway).

And yet it seems the same people who find this behavior atrocious want to have a gender reveal party every time they meet someone new or read an email.

Right-thinking people see it as obnoxious how some parents go out of their way to make female infants look different from what we perceive as the male-looking default by putting pink (in this era) dresses on their doughy little bodies, purple bows on their bald heads, or by piercing their ears**.

Meanwhile, now, at a mixer or in a new class or job orientation, one often finds oneself passing around markers and name badges that include a section for “preferred pronouns” to be circled or written in. Or worse yet, everyone is instructed to go around in a circle answering 2–3 questions about themselves: perhaps name, pronouns and one fun fact!

To my mind, it would be better to ask for a person’s name and where they born or our preferred creative outlet or they we were in high school and then let some people’s fun fact be their pronouns, if they feel so inclined to share. The always-ask-for-pronouns idea means we are now supposedly morally obligated to, upon meeting each new person, so as not to single anyone out, ask, “Are you a boy or a girl or an other?”

We are learning to center gender in people’s minds, making it constantly salient, to the tune of ending all our emails with a reminder of our own identity, though to many of us it not only feels like an uncomfortable mixture of virtue-signaling and loyalty oath-making, but also, where does that leave those who are still working through our gender identities and don’t want to publicly commit right now to being a he or a she or a they or a xie or a turtle emoji***?

“I’m cisgender, I identify with the sex assigned to me at birth. But I also include pronouns in my email signature for one simple reason: It normalises discussions about gender. Which, as a queer man, I can assure you is a conversation that benefits everyone,” writes Jamie Wareham in his December 30th, 2019 Forbes article “Should You Put Pronouns In Email Signatures And Social Media Bios?”

“With only seconds,” he continues, “to make the impression in your email to get a response — or a follow on your socials — showing your pronouns could be the difference between the click that you need.”

Ah, so it can only help business. You might get an extra follow or gig if you’re seen as being part of the tribe. To my mind, focusing on gender has become all too common in our society, one of many hyper-polarizing subjects, which, as a queer dude chick person, I can assure you doesn’t always benefit everyone. Further, no one queer person has the ability to speak for all of us, as if any view could be representative of everyone under an umbrella of 12+ letters (LGGBTQQIAAPP and sometimes more). As is true of conservatives, liberals, men, women, people of various ethnicities or nationalities, members of religions, the nonreligious, and people of various shapes, sizes, ages and abilities, we are not a monolith. Whether you’re speaking about us or for us as if we are, you’re trafficking in stereotypes.

I do not purport to speak for “the queer community.” Many people are thrilled to be able to announce their pronouns to the world via bios, signatures and name badges, and they’re hoping you ask. Often the people who want to be asked are the ones who don’t look as pronouny. Since they pass as cis-normative, having special pronouns is helpful to them. Thus, ironically, we tend not to ask the people who wish we would.

Ideally, the hosts of my comedy shows would use no pronouns for me. I tried that out for a while each time a host asked before a show for my pronouns. I quickly abandoned that as it seemed destined to result in a 95% failure rate, the host either defaulting to “they/them” or saying “she” and then apologizing, repeatedly, sometimes with fear in his eyes as he handed me the mic. Thus, when I’m addressing multiple people, such as at shows, my pronouns are she/her/hers, and I’ll fill the audience in on the fuzzy details of my gender, or I won’t, depending on what I feel like talking to them about or don’t.

And I’m not alone. Many trans people prefer not to be asked for their pronouns. If you’d been taking exogenous hormones and perhaps hormone blockers for years and potentially paid ten of thousands of dollars for surgeries, you’d probably feel a lot more affirmed by people assuming your newer pronouns than by asking about them. If the gender someone’s going for isn’t obvious, I think it’s okay to make a guess and let them correct you if they want to, you know, like an adult. Some of us are much more interested in knowing how you see us than in telling you how we wish you saw us.

I realize that my love of androgyny might leave you to think “they” would be an ideal pronoun for me. But I’m holding out on that one, partially because of my grammatical conservatism. It is challenging to effectively recount or follow a recounting of an experience involving multiple of my many trans and non-binary friends and acquaintances, especially the stories involving sex. I live in Austin, where I record a podcast about sexuality, gender, kinks and fetishes — Gender Fluids — with a poly and omnivorously sexual trans chick. The stories can become difficult to follow. “Wait, so did they, Alex, suck their, the couples’, dicks? Or did they, the couple, suck their, Falcon’s, dick?… They, Kayden, sucked their own dick?! How flexible is- Oh a detachable dick.” Some stories necessitate that we stick solely to proper names.

But it’s not really the hilarious confusion that steers me away from theying myself. We live in such a divided, polarized culture, and I live in the in between. I talk to audiences all over the political spectrum, some homogeneously conservative or thoroughly liberal, some quite mixed. I relate to everyone. I don’t identify as much of any one thing, but I identify with almost everything. I want people to see themselves in me in return. This seems to be the most successful way to effect an evolution of hearts and minds. So my pronouns are a secret, or they haven’t been invented yet, or they don’t — and maybe can’t — exist in English. My pronouns are whatever yours are.

The only pronouns I actively reject are “they/them” because, as much as I’d like to preserve ambiguity around my sex and gender, it’s more important to me to preserve ambiguity around my politics. It’s part of my attempt to follow the advice of Ruth Bader Ginsburg: “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

I don’t want people to be told I’m one of Them, I want people to realize I’m one of them.

*At the time, circa 2005, we didn’t have pregnant men or pregnant non-binary folx yet.

**Just once I’d like to see a baby boy with pierced ears, or even just one pierced ear. (Also, if piercing an infant’s ears is a parent’s right, and circumcising a male child is too, then is it legally permissible to give one’s baby boy a Prince Albert?)

***See Gender Wiki’s entry on Emojiself Pronouns.