Pronoun Discomfort: A Situational Analysis

“We suffer from the condition of being addressable.”

--Judith Butler, as quoted in Citizen, by Claudia Rankine

SITUATION: About two years go, I make two general announcements. 1) I am getting an elective surgery to remove my breasts. 2) I have decided I would like to be addressed with the pronoun “they.” These two announcements are part of a larger project, a project of being honest with the world about how I feel. For a long time I have known that when people say “she,” they are not describing the person who is me. I considered the alternatives. Gender is a two-party system, and I didn’t feel like the other platform fit me, either, though it was closer than the one I’d been born into. I picked “they” because I’d heard people were using it, mostly people a little younger than I. It seemed like the best compromise. I might say it felt right, but it is more accurate to say that it did not feel at all. “They” seemed a blank space, a cipher into which I could store myself. I make my announcement on Facebook.

SITUATION: “It seems impersonal,” my mother says, when I first make the request. But she adjusts, heroically. For a year she corrects herself every time she says “she.” She says it’s one of the hardest changes she’s had to make. I feel guilty, always guilty. Who am I to make my mother, who has been nothing but supportive—emotionally and, let’s face it, financially—contort her language?

Now she’s pretty good at it. But I wonder how she talks about me to her friends, to her mother, to people who don’t know me. In some ways this is not my problem, because I am not the one who speaks about myself. I don’t suffer the consequences, and yet I have brought them into being.

SITUATION: A literary magazine asks for a bio. Usually I can avoid the problem of pronouns by making the bio only one sentence, but this journal wants a longer one. I’d rather forget neutrality altogether, go back to “she,” blend into the page. But I’ve yoked myself to this albatross and there’s no going back. I write the bio with a bracketed explanation that the pronoun is there intentionally, in case they think it’s a mistake. The brackets are meant to signal that the text within them should not appear in the bio, but it ends up in the journal anyway when my copies come in the mail. I am embarrassed by this—at least they could have hidden my request! And I am embarrassed by the pronoun, which, when I read it again in the bio, looks wrong. Is there a difference between looking and feeling, because being a woman feels wrong, but this pronoun looks wrong, so what am I supposed to do?

SITUATION: Facebook, in addition to a range of 51 gender options, allows users to change their preferred pronoun to “they.” I’ve tried to do this before, messing with my profile’s code, but I’ve never gotten it to stick. I shouldn’t need one of the major structures of the techno world order to validate my gender, but I’m surprised by how good it feels. “Capitalism knows me too well,” I write on my Facebook wall, because there is nothing good that doesn’t also make me feel guilty.

SITUATION: A friend introduces me at a campus reading. For months I have been agonizing about this introduction; I know it will involve someone talking about me at some length in the third person, a situation I have grown to dread. (Fortunately, I am not a famous writer—I get introduced maybe once a year.) I remind my friend about the pronoun, and she is gracious. My friend is visually impaired, and regularly struggles to get her own accommodations met. She sees parallels between our situations, but I’m not sure if I do. Because I have chosen this, and she has not.

During her introduction...