Transitions are about more than pronouns

Author’s note: Barb Rowlandson and Larry Till are two Medium writers and friends with a shared interest in equity, diversity and inclusion. You can read Barb’s companion piece here. (BTW Medium has helpfully now added instructions on how to include your own pronouns in your profile.)

At the ripe old age of 24 and fresh out of school, I was offered what could have been a dream job in Winnipeg, Manitoba (about 1,500 km from my home in Toronto). Shortly before I left, my great-uncle took me out for lunch. His sister, my grandmother, had lived in Winnipeg when she first came to Canada alone as a teenager from Poland.

I thought my great-uncle wanted to see me and wish me well, which he did. He also had something else in mind.

He proceeded to unravel a yarn about my grandmother’s first marriage — to someone other than my grandfather — and, in the process, shook my comfortable story about my tidy little family down to its roots. That was the first I knew that my grandfather wasn’t my grandmother’s first husband. Talk about your quarter-life crisis.

My grandmother had died about a year earlier. She was beloved by all of us — her children, grandchildren, married-in spouses, everyone. While she wasn’t a saint (because, really, who is?), she led a remarkable life and raised a loving, tight-knit family that still thrives to this day. Whatever her brother’s motivation for sharing this backstory, it didn’t change how I felt about either of them.

Flash forward about 15 years. My wife was on her way home from a work trip and called to tell me that her colleague’s partner was about to transition from male to female. We’d been at their wedding several years earlier. The news was every bit as shocking as my great-uncle’s revelation about my grandmother. When the time came for the transitioning partner to go abroad to seek gender confirmation surgery, she and her wife came to our place for dinner. I’d offered to lend her some CDs for the trip. (That tells you how long ago it was.)

Our younger daughter, who was about four years old at the time, has always had a lot of questions. Unabashedly, she asked our friend, “Why do you look like a girl and sound like a boy?” Clearly prepared for the moment (they had kids of their own, about the same ages), our friend calmly explained that while it’s easy to change how you look, changing how you talk takes more work. My four-year-old was satisfied with the response and returned to whatever had been occupying her previously.

It was at that moment that I realized that my four-year-old might have more wisdom than I did. I was struggling with our friend’s transition, not out of some sense of misplaced morality or judgement, more so because I didn’t have the vocabulary — or frankly, the experience — to deal with it.

Our friend was in her 40s when she transitioned. She kept a blog about her experience, and I recall one particularly poignant post where she talked about the higher rates of suicide and suicidal ideation among trans people. It’s not always that they feel oppressed, although they often are; she wrote with gorgeous clarity that many trans people reach a point where they have no energy left to fight. That reality has stayed with me ever since.

In her profoundly insightful book Caste, Isabel Wilkerson writes a fictional passage about two groups of people, the “talls” and the “shorts.” Being closer to the ground and equipped with better armaments, the shorts enslave the talls and take them to the new world.

“They told themselves that the talls deserved no better, that they were uncultured, backwards, inferior, and had not made use of their strengths and resources. They were an all-together different species, born to serve the conquerors, deserving of their debasement” (pages 62–63).

You can see where this is going. Classifying people on the basis of something as arbitrary as their height — over which they have no more control than their skin colour or, say, their sexuality or gender identity — is a preposterous proposition. And yet we continue to categorize people, to judge them, to treat them as less than simply because of their perceived differences.

I tell my students that I include my pronouns in my screen name and my email signature because it’s a question of inclusion. I want to send a silent, unobtrusive message that everyone — trans or otherwise — is safe with me. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

In teaching them about pronouns, I show them a picture of three or four non-binary people and ask them how many men and how many women they see. What I’m hoping they’ll say is, we don’t know unless we ask.

I had one student recently who was from a country where homosexuality is a capital crime. He struggled in the beginning — as I had with our trans friend — to come to terms with this brand-new idea. By the end of the semester, I noticed that he’d quietly changed his pronouns, as well. I talked to him about it, and he admitted it had been a tough thing for him to do. These ideas are deeply rooted in our psychology and our cultural values.

The words we use are a reflection of those values and the ideas behind them. A generation ago, the idea of same-sex (or equal) marriage was still unthinkable in much of the world. Today, in Canada, at least, it’s so common as to be unremarkable in most cases. I have to hope that for my grandchildren, or even their children, the idea that people shouldn’t have the right to identify themselves as they are will be equally unthinkable.

Postscript: One of my current students uses they/them pronouns. I still have to stop myself every time to remember to gender them properly. So clearly, I’m among those who still have some work to do.