Sunday papers: Pronouns

So, inspired by Resonance, here's some alternative Easter Sunday papers. On Friday I was misgendered and publicly wrong-pronoun'd, in what was described as a queer space, and so I've been thinking about pronoun etiquette. I make just a many assumptions as everyone else and 'he' and 'she' people all the time based on their appearance, so I'm interested in working out what to do to make things better. Here's some readings on that topic.

• Getting Pronouns Right - Why Pronouns are Important - a pretty good explanation of why they're important
• The Pronoun Question - why asking the question about pronouns is important
• Some briefer guidelines: from Sylvia Rivera Law Project and IAmTrangendered.com (the latter seems to have some problematic stuff)
• Making Classrooms Welcoming for Trans Students

A lot of this is centred around trans people, but it's not just trans people this is for. This is for everyone, because you actually just can't tell what gender or pronoun people prefer from looking at them. You might think you can. And if you assume, you might get it right 90-99% of the time. Liberation isn't about 99% of people though, it's about everyone.

If we want to be inclusive, we need to work out new social etiquette and practice it. So, homework for this week: start a conversation with someone about pronouns. What should we do differently? Where do we start? Hand in your answers in the comments below.

Why I love

Via Richard Jeffrey Newman comes this really moving post called "Why I love my straight boyfriend":

So what exactly does a contemporary relationship between a gay man and a straight man look like? I don’t know. This is a love affair and it looks like this. Every day we email and text back and forth about who we’re sleeping with, how we’re sleeping with them, and if we should continue to do so (in his case it’s just one girl in Paris who he’s in love with). We email poems to one another (this is less gay than it sounds since we’re both poets, which is more gay than it sounds), we have event nights, non-event nights, and date nights where we get together for really expensive drinks we can’t afford and remix Chrissie Hynde with Camus and (oh my god) our feelings.

[...]

I kind of knew things were serious with D when he sent me a love poem he wrote for me some months ago. I think it may have originally been a kind of, I wrote this for you what do you think of it thing, but I wasn’t about to give him any edits. Please. Send that shit to The New Yorker stat. I can’t remember a time when a man wrote a poem for me and called it a Love poem, capital L. And it better be capitalized twice because I like those kind of typos. Give it all or don’t give it at all. I hope all the gay men I’ve slept with are reading this.

It's just beautiful, and powerful. Lots of politics, lots of love. Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing.

This is something we don't talk about enough -- love between men. Well, love between anybody that doesn't fit a "there's a mommy and a daddy and then they love each other very much" kind of pattern. But perhaps especially love between men, and the heteronormative requirement that men shut down so much of their psychoemotional lives seems such a terrible price to pay.

--IP

Decisions, decisions

In the last few weeks, the press has been abuzz with talk of this consensus decision-making that all the kool kids in lefty activist communities use. Although it's a little unpopular in many lefty activist communities to admit, I personally have mixed feelings about consensus decision-making.

The participatory consensus model (PCM) is a system for groups to make decisions. The idea is that everyone should work to find a mutually acceptable solution to a given problem, not settle on something which is acceptable to majority. The reasoning for this is that a majoritarian view can alienate minorities, and a group decisions should be one that the whole group can feel part of and ownership of (so "alienate" here means not only "exclude", but also the Marxist sense of "alienation"). A consensus is reached when everyone in the group agrees on a decision.

The PCM makes some basic assumptions about participants, and the decision-making context. It assumes people are willing to accommodate to each other's points of view, that everyone actively wants to find a solution that works for everyone and resolve any problems that might be standing in the way of that. It assumes that everyone has an equal right to participate, and that everyone is committed to learning from each other. In a lot of ways, it's very much like the consciousness-raising model -- consciousness-raising for decision-making. Typically, PCM discussions are facilitated, to make sure that everyone gets a chance to speak and speaking turns are allocated fairly. However, PCM is generally used in non-hierarchical settings.

On a more fundamental level: PCM assumes everyone has an equal ability to participate, and there is a very real sense in which PCM is relies on the idea that "decisions are made by those who turn up". PCM is not a representative democracy.