askyermom

Look, I’m ready to say that pronouns are lazy little jerks. They are so short and dense. She and he and them and all their pals just throw their weight around, pushing concepts in front of them like a child with a wheelbarrow. Maybe they are useful, but just as likely they are tipping over a load of stuff we didn’t ask for.

I was raised by English teachers, so I can’t help but have reverence for language that likely it did not earn. In school, when we reached the stage of diagramming sentences in the study of grammar, I felt a surge of love. To be able to show the structures that had been whittled into my consciousness before I understood them felt like a precious gift. I can still explain objects versus subjects if you like, but for the moment, the point is that grammar rules exist and grammar is meant to help us be clear.

I was horrified to learn that in other languages, objects have genders. In French, a window is feminine, but a cat is masculine. Freedom and luck are feminine but a book is masculine. So if anyone wants to complain about gender pronouns in English, I would be quick to point out that at least we don’t have gendered articles to keep track of. Although we do have prepositions to end our sentences with.

So how are we supposed to politely handle the minefield of pronouns now, in this modern world? It is rude to disregard them and I am not going to accept anyone’s insistence that getting pronouns correct doesn’t matter.

Remember in, say, your late 20s when someone called you ma’am or sir for the first time? When someone called you by the wrong name after you had a long, heartfelt conversation? Or maybe someone failed to recognize you after you had saved their pets from a house fire. Any of these is likely comparable to having someone mistakenly call you a he when you’re a she or vice versa and so forth. It’s an unpleasant jolt.

Why would anyone deliberately taunt someone with the wrong name or pronoun? It’s not fun for the misnamed person, and it’s a really weird sort of humorless joke. Some people are proud of their taunts, which is just showing off and amplifying how unkind they are. Most people don’t want to be unkind or to look that stupid.

Most of us want to get it right and are mostly bothered by the likelihood of making mistakes when we forget or are just getting acquainted with a new person.

I meet new people constantly and learning names gets a lot easier with practice. I find my greatest struggles are with the large quantity of similar names in my orbit. I need to keep my memory tidy to improve recall and make room for new names.

Regularly, I will have a nice chat with someone and then a few days later I will feel my mental fingers flipping through the files in my mind, struggling to find the correct name. I might be able to tell you they have two chihuahuas and live by a creek, but I cannot tell you if they are named Sheila or Simone. In my filing system, Shelia and Simone are dangerously near one another, but it’s no help at all.

I don’t avoid using their name. Instead, when we talk again I get right to it, “I want to call you Dorothy, but I know that’s not your name.” No one has ever been irritated by this, at least as far as I can tell. My new friend, Not-Dorothy, will generally smile and say “Simone,” or she might say, “Sheila.” Either way the problem is solved and so far this exercise is all I ever need to update my mental file.

Depending on where you spend your time, you may get acquainted with people who are evidently queer and wonder if you should ask for pronouns. I have met women who pretended to be transgender women for their own mysterious reasons. There may be layers upon layers of identity going on.

I am always reluctant to ask for pronouns–it just feels like it’s none of my business.

If you find yourself wondering, you can ask, but that creates it’s own problems if they don’t expect it. People don’t always have a good idea of how they present themselves–if they did, we’d never see anyone with persistently tragic haircuts.

I prefer to state my pronouns as an invitation to them to do the same. If they don’t, I can they them indefinitely.

This ain’t France.

Love,
yermom

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