My partner came out as non-binary this week and so I am incensed afresh by people who refuse to use their loved ones’ new pronouns.
There are lots of ways to refuse to do this. There’s the outright refusal of people who deny singular they/them pronouns are a thing in English (false), or who deny that anything or anyone outside the gender binary should exist (also false). But there is also the more subtle refusal of people who “have a hard time” with pronoun changes, and who use the supposed difficulty of the task as an excuse to continually misgender people they claim to care about.
Regardless of your reasons for getting someone’s pronouns or other gender descriptors wrong, it is still a hurtful and inconsiderate thing to do. So I’m writing this as a cis person to give you the advice I wish someone had given me, when I met my first trans friend and had to whip my mealy mouth into submission and drill “ze/hir” pronouns into my lexicon:
PRACTICE. Really. Practice using your loved one’s new pronouns. It’s very simple.
There is a tendency for some people to whine, “Practicing won’t make it easier, because it’s just GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT and so it’ll always be hard for me!” First of all, it’s not actually a grammar problem at all; the singular “they” has been in use for centuries, and you probably use it yourself on a regular basis, in sentences like “Someone forgot their umbrella here” or “When my Uber driver gets here, I’ll meet them outside.” But secondly, yes, practicing WILL help – because our brains are adaptable (and if they’re not, we should train them to be) and going down the same neural pathway several times makes that pathway easier to find again. That’s why practice works in other areas, like foreign languages and math, and the same principle applies here too.
Practice out loud in your car. “I love them. They’re cute and nice. They make me smile.” Practice when you talk about them to other people. “I’m seeing them on Friday. I saw them last night.” Practice when you write about them in your journal or think about them in your own head. “I had a good time with them last week. I hope they did too.”
When people have trouble adapting to the pronoun change of someone they know, often it’s because they’re not practicing using the new pronoun – they’re reverting to the old one, everywhere except in front of the person whose pronoun it is. This comes from a fundamentally transphobic belief that the person’s new gender isn’t real – that it’s a fiction which only needs to be acknowledged in front of the person who invented and maintains said fiction. This isn’t true, it isn’t fair, and it isn’t kind. A frequent anti-bullying admonishment is “If you wouldn’t say it to their face, don’t say it at all,” and that’s true for pronouns too. Shift the way you speak about them, and not just when they’re around.
There are far too many cis people who whine that changing someone’s pronouns, in your words and in your head, is “HARRRRRD!” They have no idea that it’s much harder to go through life being misgendered. They have no sense of how hard it is to see your friends and family disrespect your identity time and time again, then plead ignorance so they won’t be held accountable for their thoughtlessness. I don’t know what these things are like either, because I’m cis, but being cis is truly no excuse to center your own minor grammatical inconvenience over someone else’s visceral lived pain. If you’d rather stick stubbornly to your old language patterns than make someone in your life feel loved, accepted, and respected, then frankly you might be a lost cause. Empathy is hard to teach.
It’s not enough to humor someone when they tell you about their new identity; if you’re any friend at all, you have to adapt that identity into your view of them. That can be hard work, mentally and emotionally, sometimes over a long period of time. You will fuck up, especially if you’re barely trying. But each fuck-up is an opportunity to apologize, recognize how much pain you’re causing, and endeavor to never cause that type of pain again. Get the words right. Put the work in. This stuff fucking matters, and I hope you’re not too self-absorbed to see why.