A Guide To Sex, Gender, and Pronouns
Why use he/him, they/them, te/ter?
I started writing this as a simple short note and it became something that I really wanted to tell people without distraction. I hope it’s helpful and shareable. So, apart from asking for marathon sponsorship to save the Earth at the bottom it’s just the “Guide” — dan
As you may have noticed, it is a confusing time for straight people like me. Norms around sex and gender are changing again, as they did in the ’60s “sexual revolution” and as they did more recently toward gays and lesbians. And the language is changing with that shift. I’m no longer just a straight man — I’m a straight cisgender man.
In important, loud and highly visible ways, English-speaking society is engaged with how it treats people with different genders and different sexualities.
But it’s worth just explaining what that means.
The terms “sex,” “sexuality” and “gender” are often confused. “Sex” is a person’s physical state with respect to primary and secondary sexual characteristics: usually male or female, sometimes (around 1% of the time) intersex. “Sexuality” describes to whom a person is sexually or romantically attracted, so straight, gay, bisexual and so on. And “Gender” refers to the “norms, behaviours and associated roles” that are associated with what it is to be a man or woman — or other — in society.
Though they often feel like bedrocks, social norms are ever-changing. In our culture, women wear skirts; in swathes of contemporary Asia and Arabia as well as in 17th century Scotland, skirts were for men. In our culture, women wear makeup and have long hair; in 18th century France, those were things men did. But to traditionalists, these contingent norms are often seen as sacred, and transgressions may be literally punished by death.
For a majority of people (for now anyway), gender and sex match up. Personally, I’m biologically male, I like football (soccer!), and I sport facial hair. But the match is never perfect. I wear skirts and would wear more if they were readily available. Lasting images for my generation of people pushing at gender norms are Boy George singing “Karma Chameleon” or the heterosexual Robert Smith of the Cure skewering the cliché that “Boys Don’t Cry,” and singing the words with lipstick smeared all over his face.
For some people, though, the mismatch is much more acute. In these cases it is diagnosed as “gender dysphoria,” the condition when one’s gender does not match the sex one was assigned at birth. For example, a person with a penis may deeply understand herself to be a woman, and may feel painfully uncomfortable living as a man. This isn’t a slight variation from gender roles but a painful, often traumatic, mismatch between gender identity and sex. As a result, she may seek hormonal or surgical interventions to enable her body to affirm her gender identity — or she may simply present herself as a woman to the world.
Such people have always existed in history — Joan of Arc may have been one — but are now known as transgender. The prefix cis- is the opposite of trans-, so the term “cisgender” refers to people, like me, whose sex and gender happen to correspond.
But the spectrum of gender is more complex than a simple binary of male and female. Over the past few years an increasing number of people have opted out of a binary system of gender that does not reflect how they feel. For them, this whole system of categorization where you either behave as one or the other — masculine/feminine, “boys do this and girls do that” — doesn’t reflect their psychological reality. As a result, they may identify as “non-binary,” which simply indicates their lack of conformity to a system which doesn’t reflect who they are.
There are many ways non-binary identity might be expressed: physical appearance, fashion, and, yes, pronouns, which in our society indicate how one is to be categorized according to gender. Many non-binary people clearly don’t want to use existing gendered pronouns like he/him or she/her, so they use a variety of different pronouns, like te/ter, ze/zir, or simply they/them, in a singular form — just as it’s been used in English since 1375.
And since you can’t tell someone’s gender by looking, it’s now become customary to state one’s gender pronouns in email signatures, Zoom handles, or wherever else it may be helpful. I too, in those places, note that my preferred pronouns are he/him, to show that I don’t take my cisgender identity for granted.
Once again, this can seem radically new, intrusive or even offensive, to people who may not know trans or non-binary people personally, or who, like me, didn’t grow up with any of this (and, on the contrary, were raised in a sexist, homophobic, and gender-conforming society). Of course, by the same token, to someone born in the 1870s instead of the 1970s, allowing Jews to own land or encouraging women to hold professional jobs might also seem radically new and offensive.
Other people’s identity choices might not seem to have an existential stake like climate change, the Covid pandemic, or the rampant autocracy and disinformation that threatens our society but, just like racism, it’s a fairly basic measure of how our society deals with difference. And also like racism, there’s a continuum from mildly offensive comments (or refusals to use requested pronouns) to harmful prejudice (like discrimination against trans girls in athletics) to physical violence. For example, more than one in four trans people have faced a bias-driven assault.
So, while the request from friends, family students, colleagues or acquaintances to refer to them by new or repurposed pronouns may seem trivial, annoying or indulgent it’s actually a request for personal respect. It’s a note to avoid the tip of the intolerance iceberg — and it’s an easy one to honor.
As a professional editor and someone who hates change, I am temperamentally opposed to these innovations. And I’m personally a champion of broad definitions of gender — the “He” of God, for me has always been ineffably non-binary, and limiting what “women” can do or can be has always seemed like a blatantly prejudiced act.
But it’s really not up to me. If you come to know non-binary or trans people personally — or even if you can imagine knowing someone like that — you’ll understand what this is about: basic respect. It’s common courtesy, but it’s also more than that, because — even if you don’t see it — gender binaries and hierarchies are enforced by violence.
So, at the very least, until the choice to step out of traditional, constrictive prejudices is not accompanied with the threat of violence, I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to call people by the pronouns they request. It’s the minimum respect we can show to people of all sex, gender and sexuality; it’s part of our growth as a society; and it’s part of being a decent human being.
Special thanks to Jay Michaelson for helping me think through some of this language.
Dan’s Last Marathon — To Save the Earth!
I’m doing the NYC Marathon again, on November 7, 2021. The training for it is not particularly healthy so, though I may do some triathlons, I intend this to be my last marathon. BUT I’m doing it to raise money for the climate action organization, Dayenu (whose fiscal sponsors are the Social Good Fund).
GIVE! You can give here at my my Facebook fundraising page (they can be good when they want to be). If you don’t want to go to Facebook, you can go to Dayenu at https://dayenu.org/donate and make a donation in my name.
DON’T GIVE! If you have sponsored me recently, don't feel the need to give again. Just share my Facebook fundraising page or “like” the Dayenu Facebook page. My run is intended to raise the issues they are championing as much as to raise money.