pronouns discourse can’t resolve personal issues, and it can’t politically liberate us either
many of my loved ones regularly misgender me. they’ve known me for years and can’t get their mouths around my new pronouns. they are intimately involved in my life and offer me forms of love and support that directly contrast this misgendering. this tension is a common dilemma for trans people, and it’s often overlooked during conversations about pronouns.
enough has already been said about pronouns being an essential and non-negotiable part of respecting trans people. this important conversation often dogmatically frames misgendering as an always intolerable thing. but this only deepens my dilemma, to the point of erasing any possibilities outside of it. breaking from this fixation with pronouns allows us to think more pragmatically, more holistically about transness, and whether the people around us truly value it.
why did i feel uncomfortable, even when they used all the right language?
my friend sam has known me for 13 years. for the vast majority of this i was a straight cis boy without a care for gender, let alone pronouns. i’m trans now. sam is dyslexic and often gets his words jumbled up, regularly misgendering me. we’re housemates, so this is something i deal with on a day-to-day basis. correcting him has become second nature, but still adds to my daily stresses. i love sam dearly, and our friendship brings me deep joy. how is this possible when he can’t even get my pronouns right?
a very different context is the one of my employment. i work for various organisations focusing on masculinity, where i’m always the only trans person in the room. despite this my pronouns are almost universally respected. one company in particular was flawless – i worked there for a year and don’t remember being misgendered once. they normalised parts of me otherwise considered controversial, something i never expected from a workplace. but still i felt marginalised, like they didn’t really understand my transness. why did i feel uncomfortable when they used all the right language?
pronouns are powerful and tricksy symbols. they make gender explicitly clear, calling it into sharp focus and marking us with a precise label. this clarity inspires confidence, as if pronouns offer a transparent window into someone’s perceptions, revealing how they truly think of us. but language is a hazy thing. pronouns are like other grammatical tools in that they form the backdrop for more complex expression. this backdrop isn’t neutral, nor does it communicate a genuinely held belief. pronouns are a habit formed and reinforced through repetition, a habit most of us don’t notice, and which we have limited responsibility in changing.
my colleagues knew me for a year, during all of which i was trans. our interactions were guided by the administrative structures of our workplace: structures that made pronouns explicit in email signatures and video calls. these helped my colleagues get into the habit of referring to me correctly. when they used my correct pronouns, it was just as much thanks to the structures that promoted this, as their willingness and ability to co-operate with those structures.
pronouns are like other grammatical tools in that they form the backdrop for more complex expression. this backdrop isn’t neutral, nor does it communicate a genuinely held belief.
institutionalising language like this is a popular way for business to integrate transness. it enables acts of recognition that make me feel safe at work, assuring me that i’m respected and valued by a business that has my best interests at heart. employees’ pronouns are collected, stored in databases, and applied; their use is demonstrable and can be tracked, measured against a business’ inclusivity policies. in other words, pronouns slot into existing business practices with great ease and without much cost. they allow a business to integrate trans people without challenging its foundations.
my workplace was typical of the masculinities field in its focus on cis heterosexual men. their research was very straight, very binary, and completely ignored transmasculine people. as i’ve written elsewhere, this erasure strips trans people of the men’s movement’s support, and prevents cis men building new bonds of solidarity. when i pointed this out to my employer, i was met with silence, confusion, and resistance.
on the face of it, my employers welcomed me into a workplace that was set up for my safety and comfort. at the same time, they perpetrated an erasure that directly undermined me and my siblings. i was part of an integration that didn’t change the transphobic base of the organisation and its work. this is a common experience for minorities that find themselves co-opted by capitalist drives for more liberal and representative structures. in my case, it was specifically enabled by the discourse around pronouns. discourse which reduces transness to a game of words and symbols.
sam isn’t very good at that game. he slings pronouns like potshots from the halfway line, rarely getting mine right. but dogmatically fixating on this erases the deeper complexities of our friendship. over 13 years of knowing each other, the more i’ve leant into my queerness, the closer we’ve become. where other childhood friends have vanished, we support each other as two visibly queer people in an otherwise very square world. he’s a visual artist, and our collaborations consistently inspire me to write in ways i never have before. this year we published my first ever collection of writings on transness, a project which has massively fuelled my comfort and confidence in my gender. all of this, while regularly misgendering me.
pronouns slot into existing business practices with great ease and without much cost. they allow a business to integrate trans people without challenging its foundations.
the discourse on pronouns would have me believe that sam is a bad friend and my employer was supporting me as best they could. it allowed my employer to present a veneer of trans integration that concealed the erasure they perpetrated, whilst making my friend seem like a dick. pronouns discourse insists on measuring our relationship by an absolute standard of their value: whether they respect my pronouns. this distorts our perception of these relationships. on a wider level, it distorts our understanding of transness by reducing the places, peoples, and ways in which it’s possible.
transness is bigger than the pronouns we use to describe it. as hannah baer has pointed out in her book trans girl suicide museum, the very possibility of misgendering implies ‘a totally stable, mapped, and controllable gender’ that can be neatly articulated. many of us don’t live in this kind of gender. pronouns discourse seems to think i’ll be ‘safer if someone can say exactly what i am,’ and that its my responsibility to declare myself to them. the popular backlash to trans visibility gives me no reason to trust this is true.
transness is bigger than the pronouns we use to describe it.
there are vital ways of fighting for trans liberation outside of language games, by acting on the material realities of trans life. by providing free binders, genderswap acts against the medical and financial poverty of trans people. the outside project is an lgbtq+ community shelter, centre, and refuge, that directly supports against the precarious housing conditions of many trans people. and the trans fam justice campaign is fighting for trans parents to be recognised on their children’s birth certificates.
these are all concrete aspects of trans life that aren’t reflected in pronoun discourse. fixating on language serves to erase them as examples of the sexism which we face. sexism that requires deep structural change rather than the symbolic engagement of pronoun sharing. this is all the more true given that many trans people are outside the reach of business’ pronouns policies, caught as we are in precarious working situations. when we ask ourselves, “am i safe here? am i healthy? happy?”, pronouns discourse asks us to find an answer in two or three letter words – ignoring the concrete actions of those surrounding us.