Happy International Pronouns Day! This is your friendly reminder to respect people’s pronouns. It’s not our biggest issue as a community, this really shouldn’t be an issue in 2020, but it’s the one we face the most in our day to day lives.
Just to be clear, no matter how someone identifies, their pronouns are valid. One of the stonewall fighters – Stormé DeLarverie – used many pronouns throughout their life, despite identifying as a cis lesbian, and towards the end of their life is wildly believed to have used he/him.
The singular them was word of the year in 2015, 2019 and word of the decade for the 2010s, and has been recorded to have been used as early as the 1300s. Even Shakespeare used they/them in the singular form.
As for neo-pronouns, many that are more widely accepted often have their roots, or are, the pronouns used in other languages, and their user often speaks that language natively. Even in cases where they are ‘made up’, language has always evolved as people make it fit the needs they have. Shakespeare invented new words when the ones he had wouldn’t do, teenagers invented text and internet speak as we found full words used up too many characters and Tumblr posts needed ways to convey sarcasm. Now as we find new gaps in our language, we are finding new sound and letter combinations we can use to properly convey who we are to the world, the same as how we find new names.
Less conventional pronouns are not harming anyone, are widely accepted by the elders in the trans and queer community (many of whom lived through stonewall and section 28), and not using them is not the one thing stopping the cishets from accepting us – that’s just plain old trans and homophobia. I understand the need to gatekeep, protecting your community to keep it from being judged so people will accept you is something I went through, but this community will never be, for lack of a better word, normal, no matter how hard we try, and trying would only make us miserable. So I sit here, with my bright pink hair and almost 3 years of screaming about gender in the closet behind me, and tell you it is okay to make language work for you, no matter what that means, not matter how ‘weird’ it is, and if anyone tries to tell you differently, there’s a whole community behind you who will throw hands.
By Taylor Adams
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