I'm not working this afternoon, so I'm going to muse out loud for a bit about something I've been confused about for a while.
Feel free to mute me for 24 hours or so if this gets too spammy. 🙂
Question: when we use gendered pronouns for someone, what is it that we're doing?
There's one really obvious theory, I think: our language forces us to do two things at once; first, we make a non-gendered claim about a particular contextually-defined person; second, we make the implied claim that this person is of a particular gender. [On this account, most "gender-neutral" pronouns are understood as non-gendered pronouns, which make no such claim.]
I can think of several things to like about this theory, but it seems obviously incorrect upon closer analysis.
So one thing I like about the theory is that it explains something that actually isn't obvious - why many trans people (myself included) feel their pronoun choice to be forced.
"I don't have a preferred pronoun," I might say. "I have a gender. There is one commonly accepted way to refer to non-binary people in English, and so that's what you should use."
This gets at something important, but it can't be the whole truth.
For one thing, if this view is true, then demanding that people in shared, politically-sanitized spaces like corporate offices use others' requested pronouns is tantamount to demanding that they revise and reject any transphobic views they might hold, or else be expected to lie about those views to others.
Maybe you do think it's okay to demand transphobes revise their views, but I don't think this is what we're doing when we establish policies of respecting others' pronouns.
For another thing, the view basically amounts to the idea that the language we use exists downstream of identity, and is dictated by it. But this ignores the fact that language itself is an important component of identity for some people.
Meaning that if someone doesn't use my preferred pronouns, they're probably (?) indirectly misgendering me, which is bad, but they're also directly disrespecting something that's an important part of my identity.
(I don't feel this way, but I think many do?)
Did A *misgender* B?
There's one sense in which the answer is trivially yes, because we sometimes use "misgender" as simply a synonym for saying the wrong pronouns. But let's push past that, because what's in question here is precisely what makes the pronouns the wrong ones in the first place.
On what I called the obvious theory, there's at least an answer to that question, since there's a "right" (scare quotes) pronoun to use for each person. But that theory definitely seems wrong.
On what you might call identitarian views, pronoun preferences are a component of individual identity that are entirely severable from gender identity.
But this view seems to take the other extreme, in that saying the wrong pronouns *can't* be misgendering. After all, if I mistakenly use she/her pronouns for you when your preference is he/they, my failure is not accidentally gendering you incorrectly, it's failing to remember what you prefer me to use - a completely different thing.
Neither view can answer the following question:
If someone uses he/him pronouns for me, I get mad at them. If they use she/her pronouns for me, I'm not even annoyed about it. Why?
(For those might not know me, I'm non-binary and use they/them pronouns as my exclusive preference, not they/she. You might also find some recent pictures of me on my profile useful in evaluating the statement above.)
There seems to be something to the idea that sometimes when we use pronouns, we are assigning someone a sex/gender, sometimes we are referring to their gender, and sometimes we're just respecting a known preference. In other words, that our uses of gendered pronouns are multifarious.
Example of assigning a gender: "wow look at the hat on that guy over there" - calling him a "guy" helps our interlocutor narrow their visual field to the person we're talking about.
This sort of socially cognized "gender" comes apart from gender identity.
Maybe this is more obvious than it sounds at first. After all, a lot of what people are trying to do (I think!) in transition is shift how other people instinctively gender them.
To go back to the question of accidentally using the wrong pronouns, the reason this sucks so much is that it indicates that you still code as [assigned sex] to that person. At least when a transphobe does it you can assume they're being mean.
Okay let's try to take this in a coherent direction.
If I'm standing on the sidewalk, and someone and their friend are walking on the other side of the street, and out of my hearing one refers to "that woman over there", what does that mean? Should I be upset about it?
Have I been misgendered? That probably depends on how you're using "gender". If you mean, how I identify when asked, then yes. If you mean, how I read to people who don't know me and can't ask me, probably no??
So for pronouns, the priority seems to be
stated preference > known gender identity > socially cognized gender
I think some people might entirely decline to gender anyone whose gender identity / preference they don't explicitly know, but that would (at minimum) be a form of activism, and my interest here is in a more descriptive question about human behavior and social norms.
But maybe we have to get over the idea that when we use gendered pronouns in each of these three ways, we're doing the same thing in each case. Maybe we're doing three different things?
I'm not really satisfied with this view. (If this somehow hasn't become clear to anyone reading this, I didn't start this thread with an answer I wanted to work my way towards.)
The first two tiers (stated preference, gender identity) double as political aims. The general view, I think, is "it benefits trans people to be able to volunteer a gender identity that does not accord with socially cognized gender." "It benefits trans people to be able to state preferred pronouns that do not accord with their gender identity."
I'm in favor of both, but they add some complexity to our use of pronouns. And there are risks to playing the representational politics game as well...
Sorry, delayed because of making dinner.
By that I mean, there's a danger of making these things synonymous with "transgender" (at least in the minds of cis people). Because of course they aren't - when someone uses he/him pronouns for me, it sucks because they're probably reading me as male, not because I've identified as non-binary and they are forgetting / rejecting that identification. At least, it sucks a lot more if they're doing the former than the latter.
One of the reasons it's weird if gendered pronouns are used multifariously is that it means that whether someone is misgendering you depends on (a) the context, and (b) their intent.
So e.g. my family referring to me with "he" is misgendering me. The staff at a restaurant saying "good evening ladies" to my partner and I are not.
... I don't know, I might be willing to bite that bullet? At least it has some explanatory power with respect to my feelings?
Maybe there's a real bifurcation among trans people here?
"Are you identity-first or identity-last?"
This is all sort of hypothetical and experimental, to be clear. I'm not sure if it's true that I AM socially produced as a female subject, as a trans femme. Particularly as one that's clockable to everyone I meet. What role does transphobia play in all this? If someone calls me a man, and I resist that identification / recognition, what does that do to me? What implications does it have for my experience as a subject?
Yeah I'm reading theory again, what of it? 💅
Alayna Mead
Liliane Fontenot