Hello from Paris!
I did it. I got Pfizer dose #2. Zipping from waiting room to waiting room for registration and intake and jab, then yet another waiting area to see if I would suddenly drop dead. I’m pleased to announce that I didn’t, just got a magnificent pain in my arm that felt like somebody had stuck a dagger there and twisted it around a little. The problem was solved with paracetamol and Netflix and the occasional whinging, followed sometimes by giggles of joy, because it is miraculous, after all, how quickly this vaccine got into my arm, there at vaccination Center Olympe de Gouges.
The walls are peppered with quotes like this one. “Women, isn’t it about time we had our own revolution?”
Yes, yes it is.
Which returns me to my Gen X musings. This week about pronouns. Which may or may not be having a tiny revolution of their own thanks to The Kids These Days embracing the gender identity category of nonbinary and its cousin gender non-conforming.
For a long time I thought I was indifferent to these categories and their accompanying pronouns. I mean, I generally think people should express themselves however they like, and ask for what they need. People want to put pronouns in their bios? Fine. You want me to refer to you as they? No prob. But apparently I have limits.
A couple months pre-Covid I was stuck in a room with a bunch of unknown queers and somebody said we should go around the circle, say our names, something about ourselves, and what pronouns we preferred. And I had an overwhelming impulse to scream. “None! I hate them all.” Which is true. Partly because I have ideas about the limited usefulness of identities, and don’t want to be stuck with one more like a free tee shirt that doesn’t fit and takes up space in your drawer, but you can’t bring yourself to throw away. And also because this falls into the category of name tags, which I hate. Some stranger always comes up thinking they know something about you from an ugly piece of paper that ruins whatever outfit you have on. Fuck them. And gender labels, of all the things to be obligated to wear, like it’s the most important thing ever and we’d just die if someone gets it wrong.
Jesus fucking Christ. I’m a dyke and a fucking foreigner with a hard name to pronounce. Everybody gets everything wrong all the fucking time. And I don’t really care anymore. Just this weekend at the vaccine place I was Madame Gosgsvell. During my first injection a month ago, a lady got all freaked out in the bathroom when I went to pee, “Monsieur, monsieur,” she called after me. Though after I smiled at her, my eyes crinkling with amusement over my mask, she did a double-take, said, “Oh sorry,” and that was that. Maybe she thought I was a guy and would be embarrassed in the ladies’. Maybe she was policing my gender. Maybe she was afraid. Sometimes when women scream when I enter the bathroom I see the fear on their faces. And I don’t blame them. After all, men are the ones who rape women, who assault women. And we’re right to be wary when we’re alone and “a man” suddenly appears.
The only time I care is when the misgenderer has power over me and their embarrassment turns into shame and then anger—which they take out on me. Like the time some years ago when I had an appointment at the Prefecture de Police here in Paris to get my visa renewed, and the young woman came out, and, glancing at my first and middle name, Kelly Jean, which is also ambiguous, called for a Monsieur Cogswell. For a minute after meeting me, she continued monsieuring me, with a faint look of puzzlement on her face. But then the lightbulb went off, and you should have seen her embarrassed, angry, humiliated face when she realized I was a female, and a dyke, and switched to an aggressive, Madame. She picked apart my application. Accused me of all kinds of things. Sent me away without a visa, crying so hard in humiliation and rage and fear—what the hell was I going to do?— that I could barely see to walk.
Aside from people like her, who cares? I only wish that I didn’t frighten ladies in the bathroom, and that they recognized a kinship in me, a dykely variation on the theme female, on woman, and weren’t afraid. Especially, since I’m not all that butch, not most days. I’m just not a girly girl.
Of course, they aren’t the only ones misgendering.
I was at a party with some activist types a couple July Fourths ago, and this young lefty femmy lez nonconsensually “theyed” me. Because TKTD talk so much about choosing your pronouns, and how important it is to know how people identify before dropping a terrifyingly offensive pronoun, I was irritated. It was clear my identity (or lack of it) was irrelevant to them, and that the they was a referendum not just on how they perceived me, my body and my “identity,” but my politics. Which are apparently a package deal.
Because the woman who theyed me to her friend, expected me to smile approvingly when she went on to talk about how much she was looking forward to a trip to Cuba, blah blah blah, how much she admired the Cuban people [insert regurgitated propaganda here, ain’t Che great?] and was surprised when I went on to talk about the little matter of human rights abuses there, and did she know the glorious Che put queers in work camps? If I wasn’t some former Lesbian Avenger East Village dyke they probably wouldn’t have assumed. But thinking of it now raises the questions. Are pronouns a personal choice or not? And can they be?
Back in the Dark Ages…
Grammar likes rules, determining even how you break them. And before Facebook was a glitter in some undergrad’s eye, pronouns used to reflect the public consensus of the natal sex we were—not your gender. Males were he, though swishier ones got called she sometimes, lovingly or cattily by their swishy friends and hatefully by their enemies. Females likewise could be butch, femme, or sexily or blobbily androgynous, and still get called she.
It matters that natal sex is a fixed, external factor, which we all understood and perceived in very similar ways. Even if, by the time I dipped a toe in the LGBT community in the 1990s, most of us referred to trans(sexual) people by the pronouns of their adopted sex. This wasn’t a big deal because their choices, too, were largely fixed, and evident. We could literally see them. Though bigoted assholes of the homophobic or transphobic sort continued to deliberately misgender people, purposely calling dykes like me, or your generic trans woman, he, when our biological or chosen sex was clearly obvious.
This is important because when we talk about pronoun choices we’re usually referring to third person singular and plural. That person over there. Or next to us at a party but whose name we have forgotten (the reason I got theyed at that party). They are words others use for you, not ones you choose yourself. Before, they reflected fixed, externally visible categories. (As an aside, it’s interesting that none of the languages I know, Spanish, French, English, a smattering of German, have a gendered “I”. It is authoritatively sexless, raceless, neutral, impassive in the face of ability or class.)
But to get back to my point, about how pronouns usually work—in English anyway. I concede words change meaning all the time, but here, we’re not talking about a single word, but the pronoun, a part of speech, a building block of syntax. Is it flexible enough to radically shift from a thing dependent on fixed, external elements, to a personal choice dependent on a continually changing signified?
One visibly androgynous bi female might reject they, a second androgynous one— seemingly indistinguishable from the first—might embrace it one day, and change their mind the next. Even more confusing is that they might be divorced from external cues entirely, being used by people, including straight ones, who clearly fall into the ultra-binary camp, but are on linguistic strike because of their individual gender identity, or just as a matter of cantankerousness, and refuse the he or the she that would ordinarily apply in favor of they. The only way to know the difference is to ask. All the time.
And people won’t. As I learned, they will still make assumptions, just based on something else. And they will get it wrong. This makes me wonder if the whole emphasis on pronouns as a way to reflect individual identity and be free of the sex binary is just a diversion, a glittery linguistic will-o’-the-wisp that TKTD are chasing maybe because, as the first social media generations, they believe that carving out a name for a thing, finding the perfect pronoun, the most apt hashtag, will create a real personal, cultural or political space. It certainly seems logical that more precise words will somehow communicate better. Achieve something more than tinier niches for niche marketers.
Of course, there are some problems, besides how you feel about identity, and sex and gender, including the assumption this push for pronouns seems to be based on, ie. that the gender neutral they is actually neutral in the first place and not male default.
There’s also the perennial quandary, that solutions often have unintended consequences, and create two new problems for every one that they solve…
In Other News
The Guardian reports that At least 10 US states have siphoned millions of dollars from federal block grants meant to provide aid to their neediest families, to pay for the operations of ideological anti-abortion clinics.
The same “progressive” people who (tepidly) denounce attacks on Asian Americans in the U.S., are silent about the attacks on Jews.
If you haven’t read this piece already, you should.
Over the past few weeks, people have been attacking Jews in American streets for being Jewish, as well as vandalizing synagogues and other Jewish sites. No, I’m not talking about the scuffles at protests; I’m talking about the premeditated attacks on random people who look Jewish — sucker-punching, shooting fireworks, pulling people up from seats at restaurants, screaming threats.
…
ironically, my Muslim American friends have been my strongest allies this week. And yes, most of them are passionate critics of Israel whose social accounts have been absolutely ablaze on behalf of Palestine.
…
They understand that “Stop beating up Jews” is in no way a pro-Israel statement (I can’t believe I have to say that). It’s a decent, human, progressive statement.
Something cheerful: Japanese suffragettes.
And… because sometimes synchronicity kicks in on my twitterfeed in a way that brings joy to my cold dark disgruntled heart…
That’s it for this week,
Vaccinatedly yours,
P.S. Feel free to change to a paid subscription anytime. No one will hold it against you.