Validation comes in many forms – some more likely, some less likely – but I can’t say I recommend snarky reddit forums to calm a gender crisis.
It had been an eternity since I first felt the sting of she/her pronouns. I was seventeen and home for the holidays, viciously googling the discrepancy between womanhood and myself, desperate to find a sentiment that would tether me to the female identity I’d carefully fabricated over the years. But no amount of feminist literature or Fleetwood Mac songs could sway me. It was no use; the answer was staring me in the face: my pronouns were wrong.
The irony was not lost on me, either. In the midst of recording a series of compositions centering around the oppression that women face across their lifetimes, across centuries, I realized I am not a woman. I tried to explain away my identity, the inherent wrongness so evident in the deepest parts of myself and hide it all under the guise of an identity constrained by simple, eternal, unshakeable misogyny. The invalidation was real, the homophobia was real, and the sexism was very real, although my womanhood was paper-thin.
But where did the motivation for the aforementioned mistreatment end? How much of it can be attributed to my actual identity, in the form of dysphoria, and how much belongs to the perception of me as a woman? I am knee-deep in feminist poetry at this point – how does my perception as a cis woman intersect with my identity as nonbinary? And how do I redesign my rhetoric? Where do I even begin? Especially considering I had struggled to find my place within the Sapphic community for years, solidifying my places as a bisexual woman; perhaps I wasn’t a lesbian, but I was (and am) definitively attracted to women.
My first searches for alternative pronouns landed me in a few places, most of them hardly academic: grammarian blogs, small LGBT+ resource centers, more than a couple contentious news articles, and reddit threads among them. The last, although not representative of nearly the level of authority of the former sources, hurt the most. It’s easy to ignore the voices of the great, anonymous voice, fear it, but live on as myself within personal circles. But the voices of my peers will always ring louder and longer than theirs. If I am not to be myself around those I love, I doubt I will ever let myself be loved as I am.
Becoming fluent in my own pronouns wasn’t easy – as with acceptance, its naturalization took time. I became my own personal narrator until xe/xem/xyr rolled off my tongue. It was as if I had known the words myself my entire life and had never been known as anything else. For the first time, referring to myself in the third person felt natural, easy even. There was none of that usual mental pushback, the eternal refusal to be named.
What do I tell my exes and future partners? My friends? Who will leave me, love me, know me as a xe instead of a she?
I am still struggling with the need to apologize for who I am, even as the same charts, screenshotted over and over again, fall further back in my camera roll. Adopting an entirely new term, along with its grammatical cases, is a difficult task for anybody, and I am more than lenient. Still, I wonder, sometimes, if I should err on the side of firm and correct people more often than I do.
There is also the question of comfort, of course. For me, personally, I think most everyone that has ever known me well has caught onto my gender identity, at least to a small extent. I have been told by the people that know me best, even those completely ignorant of gender theory, that there is no box that can define me. I consider this an instinctual, if rather subconscious, recognition of my being agender. However, as I encountered in my deep-dive into the Internet’s perception of singular, gender-neutral pronouns, there is still a strong pro-binary sentiment among many English speakers.
I can admit that xe/xem/xyr will most likely feel uncomfortable on the tongue for a good while. That said, I truly believe that understanding and subsequently respecting neopronouns almost always follows the confidence of a good friend, who, in revealing xyr pronouns, plants the seed of doubt and the motivation to practice that leads to greater linguistic change. The singular “they” is still disputed as an acceptable gender-neutral singular pronoun (although it has beyond proven itself by now), and it takes time and practice to learn, but it is easily and often subconsciously done. It’s not as if the need for such a pronoun is new, either.
There is a long history of gender-neutral pronouns in the English language, dating as far back as the middle ages. “Ou” and “oue” eventually merged and evolved into the article “a”, lacking the gendered connotations found in many other world languages. Aside from natural merging and evolution within language, there is also a history of grammatical conventions changing with intention. Pronouns like “thon” were not quite successful in their pursuit, whereas the term “one”, commonly adopted scholastically in the 18th century, one that you, dear reader, surely recognize. The assertion that conscious thought dares not take part in the process of shaping language to changing needs and norms is ridiculous – take, for example, the existence of the Modern Language Organization.
If we begin to change how we think about xe/xem/xyr and other neopronouns, if we say them out loud, carefully, in context, we can begin to change the way we think about them, rendering them no less valid in colloquial or scholastic usage than any other term. I prefer xe as opposed to other pronouns in the chart above for its reflection of the gender-neutral Mx., a well-established gender-neutral honorific. The introduction of x into a pre-existing term is not unique to the 21st century, either, “womxn” having been introduced as a form of feminist subversion of women’s status as being in any way dependent on men. The concepts are vastly different, but the ultimate intention is the same: to promote a necessary shift in the way we address gender.
Various gender-neutral pronouns have been around for a while. The history exists to justify them. Most importantly, gender nonconforming people exist and deserve to be respected for who they truly are. It becomes necessary, or at least valuable, to subvert norms within society, and there is no good reason not to do so consciously.
The way I understand it, the main obstacle we face in adapting our language to the non-binary concept of gender is the reluctance to overcome. If that truly is our only hurdle, don’t we owe it to each other to try?