7:30am July 3, 2014

Trans and Non-Binary Pronouns and Identity are Not Jokes

I am a cis woman. Often a non-gender-performance-conforming cis woman, but a cis woman. My biological sex matches what society says I am, if not how society says I ought to behave.

I am not using cis to put myself down or stigmatise myself. I am not using cis because I think it’s cool. I am using cis because context is important and that is the context within which I live.

I say this so people know what my experience of gender is. This context is relevant. I am about to talk about issues that are outside of my personal experience but that exist within my personal life. Trans and non binary people are welcome to come in to correct or discuss, because I have not had the same experience with gender and sex as they have.

My spouse is AMAB AGENDER/GENDERFLUID

They use Zhe/Zhier/Zhey pronouns.

It is not a fad. It is not a joke. We are not using those terms because of some kind of silly affectation or because we think it’s cool.

Let’s break the fucker down then

AMAB/AFAB — a way to say ‘doctors assigned my gender because of my sex’ without having to say I HAVE X KIND OF GENITALIA.

Why? Because having to talk about what kind of fucking genetalia you have to perfect strangers all the time is fucked up. It’s an easy and understood way to say ‘society decided that, since I have a penis, I must be a ‘boy’ and I was raised as a ‘boy’ and told I had to identify with ‘boy things’ because of my sexual characteristics.

Zhe didn’t just wake up one morning and decide ‘whee AMAB sounds cool and edgy, I should use that.’ How do I know? I was there. It took several years of self exploration and coming to an understanding of how things has always been for them before they started using AMAB in mostly online conversations so that other Trans and GSM (gender and sexual minorities) people could have context for their particular experience of being gendervariant. Because of how these things effect us, being assigned a gender at birth is relevant to conversations and this is a less triggering, less upsetting, less blergh way to do so.

And the gender neutral pronouns? Guess what? I was actually the one who asked if Zhe wanted new pronouns, because calling Zher ‘HIM’ was starting to feel really odd to me when Zhe is not a HIM. OKAY?

Again, this is not some special snowflake esque ‘I wanna be all different and special’. It was because calling my spouse by traditionally male/masculine pronouns when half the time it feels like we’re lesbians and the rest of the time they don’t really have any gender at all and some of the time there’s a masculine thing going on but it’s pretty damn ephemeral — is fucking weird for me and us and we wanted other options.

So what did Zhe do? Zhe studied! Zhe spent tons of time looking at available pronouns and deciding which ones suited Zher. Zhe did not see the pronoun one day and decide that would be cool. These words we use to identify Zher have been developed over the last four years, after Zhier looking back at a lifetime of feeling agender.

Same with genderfluid and now agender. Zhe chose to use genderfluid because at the time we saw Zhier gender identity as fluidly going back and forth. These days the ‘no particular gender at all’ words work even better. Why? Partially because Zhe learned more and thought more and figured more out. Partly because growing up with a gender binary meant (for some reason) I kinda screwed up and thought of Zher as ‘sometimes male’ and ‘sometimes female’ with the attendant privilege/lack of privilege. I was wrong because Zhe was always this way. Always agender. Always not cisnormative. The words help me, as their partner, to think the right way, to adjust the way I need to as well. That is something I expect of myself. Zhe doesn’t ‘make’ me do this — I do this because I love my partner. Because I love my friends. Because I love my two other sometimes partners, one of whom is also non-binary and one of whom is a Trans Woman.

So when you make fun of people who use these words, you’re making fun of my beautiful, gorgeous, brave, amazing, agender spouse and it makes me really really really angry and protective.

After reading that, please remind yourself that my reaction is also to take the time to talk to you all instead of desk flipping and ragequitting. I care about what people know and understand. I’m pretty sure some of you might do things differently if you understood.

That said, from now on, if you post transphobic and trans exclusionary shit — including making fun of non-binary identities and new kinds of personal pronouns — I am unfollowing you. I’m tired of it and it’s harmful and it hurts the people I love.

deathraylasercrazy:

I am a cis woman. Often a non-gender-performance-conforming cis woman, but a cis woman. My biological sex matches what society says I am, if not how society says I ought to behave.

I am not using cis to put myself down or stigmatise myself. I am not using cis because I think it’s cool. I am using cis because context is important and that is the context within which I live.

I say this so people know what my experience of gender is. This context is relevant. I am about to talk about issues that are outside of my personal experience but that exist within my personal life. Trans and non binary people are welcome to come in to correct or discuss, because I have not had the same experience with gender and sex as they have.

My spouse is AMAB AGENDER/GENDERFLUID

They use Zhe/Zhier/Zhey pronouns.

It is not a fad. It is not a joke. We are not using those terms because of some kind of silly affectation or because we think it’s cool.

Let’s break the fucker down then

AMAB/AFAB — a way to say ‘doctors assigned my gender because of my sex’ without having to say I HAVE X KIND OF GENITALIA.

Why? Because having to talk about what kind of fucking genetalia you have to perfect strangers all the time is fucked up. It’s an easy and understood way to say ‘society decided that, since I have a penis, I must be a ‘boy’ and I was raised as a ‘boy’ and told I had to identify with ‘boy things’ because of my sexual characteristics.

Zhe didn’t just wake up one morning and decide ‘whee AMAB sounds cool and edgy, I should use that.’ How do I know? I was there. It took several years of self exploration and coming to an understanding of how things has always been for them before they started using AMAB in mostly online conversations so that other Trans and GSM (gender and sexual minorities) people could have context for their particular experience of being gendervariant. Because of how these things effect us, being assigned a gender at birth is relevant to conversations and this is a less triggering, less upsetting, less blergh way to do so.

And the gender neutral pronouns? Guess what? I was actually the one who asked if Zhe wanted new pronouns, because calling Zher ‘HIM’ was starting to feel really odd to me when Zhe is not a HIM. OKAY?

Again, this is not some special snowflake esque ‘I wanna be all different and special’. It was because calling my spouse by traditionally male/masculine pronouns when half the time it feels like we’re lesbians and the rest of the time they don’t really have any gender at all and some of the time there’s a masculine thing going on but it’s pretty damn ephemeral — is fucking weird for me and us and we wanted other options.

So what did Zhe do? Zhe studied! Zhe spent tons of time looking at available pronouns and deciding which ones suited Zher. Zhe did not see the pronoun one day and decide that would be cool. These words we use to identify Zher have been developed over the last four years, after Zhier looking back at a lifetime of feeling agender.

Same with genderfluid and now agender. Zhe chose to use genderfluid because at the time we saw Zhier gender identity as fluidly going back and forth. These days the ‘no particular gender at all’ words work even better. Why? Partially because Zhe learned more and thought more and figured more out. Partly because growing up with a gender binary meant (for some reason) I kinda screwed up and thought of Zher as ‘sometimes male’ and ‘sometimes female’ with the attendant privilege/lack of privilege. I was wrong because Zhe was always this way. Always agender. Always not cisnormative. The words help me, as their partner, to think the right way, to adjust the way I need to as well. That is something I expect of myself. Zhe doesn’t ‘make’ me do this — I do this because I love my partner. Because I love my friends. Because I love my two other sometimes partners, one of whom is also non-binary and one of whom is a Trans Woman.

So when you make fun of people who use these words, you’re making fun of my beautiful, gorgeous, brave, amazing, agender spouse and it makes me really really really angry and protective.

After reading that, please remind yourself that my reaction is also to take the time to talk to you all instead of desk flipping and ragequitting. I care about what people know and understand. I’m pretty sure some of you might do things differently if you understood.

That said, from now on, if you post transphobic and trans exclusionary shit — including making fun of non-binary identities and new kinds of personal pronouns — I am unfollowing you. I’m tired of it and it’s harmful and it hurts the people I love.

Thank you so much for writing this.

I’m genderless, which some people would call nongendered or agender. I like the word genderless because it flows better, it feels less cobbled-together out of parts than nongendered or agender. I came up with nongendered on my own (like so many before me) when I could find no other word to describe my gender experience.

Due to a language disability, I have a hard time with the AFAB/AMAB terminology, so I tend to say ‘raised female’ these days. When I was in the trans community originally, the term was 'biologically female’ or 'bio female’. I understand why that has fallen out of favor, but I wish it was still okay for some of us to say it, especially those of us with language disabilities who find changing our language much more difficult than the average person does. Also because it would be nice to have words for biological sex alone, that didn’t convey anything about gender. Anyway, I was raised female, and that’s the best way I can find to put it these days that doesn’t clash with my language disabilities.

I can’t say how grateful I am for the existence of all the extra pronouns that are out there.

When I was growing up, I played on a MUD called Lost Souls. Your character could be “male”, “female”, “hermaphrodite”, or “neuter”, depending on which fantasy race you chose, among other things. And it was there that I learned about nonstandard pronouns. I tried to always play as the category that gave the pronouns 'sie’ and 'hir’, but I never gave much thought to why, despite the fact that I’d been questioning my gender in various ways until I was seven years old.

It’s only in the last few months that I’ve gathered up the courage to ask people to use my preferred pronouns where possible. I say where possible because I belong to communities where a lot of people have the same kind of language disabilities I do. These language disabilities can make it hard to remember neologisms, as well as hard to remember to use new names and pronouns for people who have changed them. If I hadn’t been exposed to nonstandard pronouns in my formative years, I would have just as much trouble with them as my best friend (whose brain works almost exactly like mine) does, I’m sure. (She is upset sometimes that she was not so exposed to them, because she would like to have a wider range of pronouns at her disposal.)

Anyway… for years when people asked my pronouns I’d say “call me anything, I don’t mind”. And in a way, I didn’t.

But.

Recently someone asked my pronouns.

And I said fuck it, I’ll say how I really feel.

So I explained that sie/hir (pronounced 'see’ and hear’), and ze/zer/zem or xe/xyr/xem (both pronounced identically, zee / zurr / zemm) are my preferred pronouns. And especially sie/hir – that is my favorite. And it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It felt like, even if nobody else were to use these pronouns. Even if I were the only one to ever use these pronouns. It still feels so much more like me, so much more like being comfortable in my own skin.

So I will never make fun of anyone for finding a pronoun that works for them. I never understood the power of the right pronoun, until I experienced it for myself. And it happened in two ways.

One was years before I adopted my own pronouns. As in, this happened over ten years ago. I was in a supermarket with a friend who was autistic and a trans man. And he saw the cashier sort of ignoring everything I did and said. And I’m nonverbal, so I couldn’t correct her on the fly. And my friend said something like “Ze's trying to get zer wallet out! Be patient with zem!”

And I remember glowing all over, not because he stood up to me, but because he used pronouns that finally, almost, fit, and he’d done so spontaneously. I was so happy. And I continue to be happy every time someone calls me sie or hir.

Just for reference, sie and hir are used like this:

Sie rides a bike. (Sie is pronounced like see.)

Sie rides hir bike. (Hir is pronounced like hear. )

That bike is hirs. (Hirs is pronounced like hears.)

Sie rides hir bike all by hirself. (Hirself is pronounced like hear-self.)

Other people may have different ways of pronouncing these words. And different ways of combining the pronouns. (I’ve heard ze/hir before.) But these are my particular pronouns, and this is how I pronounce them.

I had no idea how strongly I felt about pronouns until I experienced them myself. The weight lifted from my shoulders. The feeling of being able to breathe… it felt exactly like when my oxygen dips really low, and the paramedics put an oxygen mask on my face, and I can breathe again. It’s like when you’re super-dehydrated and they find a vein and start pumping fluids into your body in huge quantities and it feels better than the best oral drink of water you’ve ever had. Umm… these are all medical metaphors, but they’re all the extremes of when you need something badly and you didn’t realize how good it would feel to have it until you got it.

For me, I’m perfectly willing to have people use different pronouns if the ones I prefer are too difficult for them. I understand why that wouldn’t be good enough for some people. But with firsthand experience of being unable to change my language, I would not tell someone they were a bad person if they were unable to change theirs. (And will not, in fact, put up with anyone telling my friends they’re “misgendering” me if they’re using the wrong pronouns. My friends know what my gender is(n’t), they just can’t all handle neologisms very well. And most of the unusual pronouns are either neologisms or words that were so obscure for so long that they might as well be neologisms for all that my friends’ language skills can parse them.)

But anyway. Even if nobody but me were using my pronouns, that would be such an enormous weight off my shoulders that it would be worth it. OTOH I have a friend who is just as genderless as I am, who mostly uses her birth pronouns out of convenience and out of the fact that her brain doesn’t deal well with any of the gender-neutral options. Plus she doesn’t even attach enough gender to pronouns to make it worth her while to change from 'she’ to something else on the basis of gender. So everyone’s mileage with pronouns is going to vary.

But from my experience, when the right pronouns can be found, they work. And to make fun of someone for doing what it takes to be comfortable in their own skin, is despicable. You have no idea what it’s like to feel wrong on so many levels and then to suddenly feel right in just one area for once in your life. Just from a simple change of language. It’s one thing if you can’t follow or use someone’s pronouns, there are plenty of disabilities that affect that. But if you can and you just won’t, or worse, if you make fun of us for it and act like we’re just trying to be special… you have no idea how long I waited to tell anyone I even had preferred pronouns, despite being asked many times, because I did not want to stand out. That’s hardly the act of someone who’s doing this to be special. Plus if I wanted to be special it wouldn’t be over genderlessness. There are much more painless ways to be special.

But count me in as another one who won’t put up with people making fun of nonbinary pronouns, nonbinary people, and agender / genderless / nongendered / neutrois people. Because first and foremost we are people. Deciding to hate us because we are the people we are, says far more about the haters than it does about us. And that goes whether the haters in question are cis or trans – because I see a lot of trans people out there who seem to have it in for nonbinary or genderless trans people, to the point where I’ve sometimes had better luck explaining my identity to cis people than to trans people. Which is a sorry state of affairs, given my long history in the trans community and my sense, back then, that this community would have my back. But these days parts of the trans community have devolved into pissing contests about who’s more trans than who else, whose identity should count, and whose identity should get laughed at.

And that’s not okay, not when this is the community that young trans people are turning to for guidance. Young trans people who will often either get chased out of the community, or learn to conform to its norms (including potentially its bullying of certain kinds of trans people) while hiding their true selves. There have always been problems in the trans community, but I do remember a time when the whole point of the community was discovering and expressing your real gender, whatever that gender (or lack thereof) might be. There was bullshit back then too, but it was different bullshit.

So whether the bullying comes from cis or trans people, I’m not putting up with it. I’m genderless and proud of it, using sie/hir pronouns and proud of it, and if you don’t like that, just deal with it, don’t make it my problem.