A Terrible Tragedy, and a Persistent Pronoun Problem

At dinner every night during the first few weeks of this school year, my kids would talk about the new teacher: she said this, she wore that. “You know that person is a man, right?” I would ask them. Over the summer, the principal had hired a mask-wearing male math teacher who went by she/they.

Their response: duh. They knew she/they was male. They used the pronouns she/they requested because it was polite to do so. Our conversations were always the same. I’d try to explain why I didn’t think it was polite to ask or demand that other people lie or pretend or participate in someone else’s self-conception that departed from reality, and they’d say: it’s not a big deal. We’re used to this.

Pronouns, to them, weren’t attached to sex. It did not cause them cognitive dissonance to use them this way. Pronouns were more like a nickname. They could kind of see my point of view but also: not really.

I tested their version of reality out myself recently when talking to a mother of a non-binary teen. Soon after we started chatting, I said, gently, “Do you mind if I ask the natal sex of your child?” She told me, and then after that it was easy for me to use they in the conversation without feeling that cognitive dissonance myself. Using those pronouns allowed the conversation to move forward, and it went better than any conversation I’ve had with an affirming parent in the last nine years.

Those are different situations. I still don’t believe it is right to ask children to call a man she/they, but there’s very little I can do about it—other than suing the state of New York for its gender identity protections that violate free speech. (I’m not going to do it, but if you do, let me know.) But in conversation, having some wiggle room can be really helpful.

Where it gets much, much more serious is in anything official, from medical forms to reporting.

When I wrote about Admiral Rachel Levine’s role in pressuring WPATH to remove age limits for pediatric gender medicine, I used she/her. Why? Here’s the big secret: out of habit. I had only known of that human being as Rachel, not Richard, and it didn’t occur to me to use he/him pronouns even though of course I knew Levine is male