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.
Thanks! I'd come across some of this before, but I particularly liked the classroom take. Really good stuff there.
ReplyDelete--IP